Work has kept me busy this week and my three year-old is having Exorcist-style night terrors upstairs so I’m going to make this a quick recap of the terrific DAMA Day Iowa presentations. I’ll just list the fantastic presentation topics, the company that presented each, and a few of my observations. Ready? Set. GO!
Data Lakes (Sogeti USA)
MY dear former employer delivered a sturdy, wide-ranging and detailed examination of data lakes: what they are, how they are constructed, and how they benefit modern corporations. I learned many great things from this presentation including:
- Data Lakes not only free up data to serve multiple department in multiple ways, but they allow a ready cross referencing of old-school batched data with real-time input from IoT stuff- sensors, GPS, you name it.
- A terrific quote regarding the necessity of speed and flexibility in modern business: “Alibaba doesn’t own any goods. Uber doesn’t own cars. AirBnB owns no property. Business is changing.”
- When the speaker asked who in the audience had Azure or Amazon Web Service experience literally only two or three out of 36 people raised their hands. Methinks that represents an opportunity.
Mobile BI Application Development (Principal)
Principal had four terrific speakers team up to talk about how their team conceptualized, designed, and implemented a mobile BI dashboard.
- The senior data analyst on the team stressed that “storytelling is key” in mobile development. It isn’t enough to throw a bunch of graphs up on a page- visualizations have to flow logically from one view to another.
- They only developed for iOS. Sorry Android nerds.
Self-Serve Analytics (Nationwide)
Nationwide’s presenter gave a strong, lively, and interactive presentation about his adventures in becoming the face of Tableau within his company. He told frank and enlightening anecdotes about his successes and challenges over the past 2 or 3 years.
- Don’t be afraid to start small. In the beginning he only ported two or three reports to Tableau.
- Successes build on one another. His first report took a couple of weeks. Now similar reports take him a day or two.
- When rolling out a new reporting technology, be clear about the chain of support. When users have trouble with Tableau they tend to reach out to the IT Support department even though those support analysts have no Tableau experience!
So there’s my quick summary.
Data Believer 