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Q4. GPS: After DigiMine, you founded DMX Group which was providing consulting services. What were some of the lessons you learned from DMX Group and the process of consulting?

Usama Fayyad: The biggest lesson I learned from DMX Group is that I love the consulting business -- which surprised me because I always thought of myself as a product guy. If you are a specialist in an area that is needed by your clients, and if you are delivering value, then there is no business that can teach you as much as the consulting business can. One of the hardest and most valuable lessons I learned was how to say no quickly, and how to carefully choose projects.

As a consulting company, you have to be careful not to take on too many projects, and you have to be very careful choosing your employees: the team IS the business. Recovering from one bad hire can ruin many other seemingly independent projects because when you have to recover, you have to draw on resources that are dedicated to other projects, and that is the start of the death spiral ...

I probably learned more from my time as President & CEO of DMX Group than I did in any other position I held before. The variety of projects and looking for common threads among what appear to be wildly differing client businesses is one of the most challenging and exciting pattern recognition problems I came across. What I learned from that experience is:

• much of what is done in the marketplace as one-off consulting work can actually be automated and productized.
  The problem is that most consultants don't know how to think in terms of product and most product companies don't know enough consulting to get smart about what is needed!

• The market is ready for true data strategy consulting, but very few people out there truly understand what that means and how to provide it.

GPS: the interview will be continiued in the next issue of KDnuggets News.