Paula Davis is a leader in the InsightStudio, Deloitte’s digital studio for analytics, and a founding member of their global innovation centers. In these roles she is responsible for developing and creating Deloitte’s visualization talent, building a differentiated set of services to take to market, and driving accretive firm revenue by engaging clients in innovative offerings.
She interrupted her UGA undergrad years to serve in the U.S. Marines for five years, where she used knowledge gained in first-year management information systems courses to take certain Corps’ processes from labor intensive paper spreadsheets to automated tracking systems for deployment and more.
“As a Marine I discovered how much improvement needed to be done,” she says. “I expected that to be true in civilian commerce as well. Indeed it was.”
At Deloitte she founded the innovation center and created the InsightStudio, with a growing team of more than 100 people across broad geographies. Global clients come to Deloitte for ideation workshops, interactive data demonstrations and strategic visioning sessions led by Davis.
“Serving corporate, institutional and government clients, I help them discover insights through analytics, answer data-driven questions through visualization and gain perspective through design thinking,” she says. “I lead multidisciplinary teams to create over 300 analytical applications for clients around the world to help them discover and pursue opportunities.”
Her projects range in duration from two months to three years, and she now leads a cybersecurity project for a Deloitte marquis account, using data science to identify bad actors and prevent identity theft and fraud.
She notes “analytics” was not a widely used term until around 2010. “Prior to 2010 most of us spoke in terms of ‘executive information systems’ and ‘business intelligence’. The language of technology continually evolves.”