Kelly Tedesco says It’s Tough to Argue with Data

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(US and Canada) Kelly Tedesco, Senior Director of Data Science, The Gorilla Glue Company, talks with Michael C. Fillios, Founder and CEO of IT Ally, about her passion for analytics.

Tedesco is an undergraduate and graduate in Decision Sciences and Quantitative Analysis, both of which are the application of statistics to operations and business. She started her career with Victoria’s Secret, building statistical models to determine who received catalogs. After about four years, Tedesco moved to Dunnhumby, USA, which is now 8451, the data science arm of Kroger. She spent over 13 years working with Kroger data and held various roles there. While at Kroger, she was in the merchandising section answering business questions about Kroger customers, usually regarding loyalty price and promotion response, and in-store behavior. Tedesco spent about three years building new capabilities around the Kroger pharmacy data, which was exciting because it was a new industry for her and allowed her to be creative with new types of analysis.

Next, she developed a measurement science center of excellence, an intense dive for her in statistical capability and developing software as a service. While those two roles were quite different from each other, they both provided opportunities for Tedesco to develop something new … something that would be used throughout the business for a time to come. And that’s what appealed to her about Gorilla Glue.

Tedesco joined Gorilla Glue as the first data scientist and developed the function. She looks forward to finding the value the company gets from the data and building something that will become integral to the business.

Tedesco deems herself fortunate to have found her passion for analytics during her undergraduate days at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Although decision science was not a typical degree at the time, Miami University offered it. Because Tedesco preferred math and numbers, she decided to give decision science a try. She also has a double major in finance.

Data science is the most fun, she says, with tasks varying from problem solving to coding visualizations, developing insights, and telling stories — all integral to businesses gleaning value from its data. Science doesn’t necessarily tell people the answer, Tedesco notes. But it provides a lot of evidence and decisions and, in most cases, it’s difficult to argue with the data.

[This content was originally published on cdomagazine.tech.]