When Chris Smith joined Ticketmaster as vice president of data science, the 40-year-old event ticketing business was facing unique challenges in its data-science program.
“We had tech debt that was older than most of the companies I’d worked at,” he says.
Ticketmaster had achieved early data-science successes through custom data integrations with its various IT systems — and there were plenty of those. After 40 years of acquisitions and internal software development, the company had around 300 IT systems, each on its own island of data.