It seems fitting for the week of Saint Patrick’s Day to include some Shamrocks. This week, we welcome to the show, Jeff Lingen from Shamrock Foods Company. Boasting 15+ years of data management and BI development, Jeff is the Director of Business Intelligence and Analytics and a coder of DAX from way back. Today Jeff gives us the inside scoop on his data origin story of escaping the data drudgery behind finance and moving into the analytics field and beyond.

Like all carriers of the data gene, there was a moment of realization for Jeff that non-mainstream ideas could enable and empower business users to be more self-sufficient. Naturally, this new age thinking created some friction with the OS I.T. but Jeff persisted until he proved to himself and others that Power Pivot and its successor, Power BI, could enable sophisticated modeling and analytics. Even though this road was more difficult, Jeff was determined to give his users the tools to find joy in data. Through extensive use of the P3 Adaptive Blog, Jeff moved away from flat reporting to Power BI to push his self-service message and further his career. As an exciting plot twist, Jeff even talks through his experience of briefly defecting from Power BI to Tableau before returning to the Microsoft fold. You won’t want to miss this episode.

Also on this episode:

The Great Football Project

Bilbo Baggins Back again

Edward Tufte

Calvin and Hobbs time machine

Eisenhower Matrix

Communication Breakdown

Baker’s Dozen

Kimball data warehouse style

Reddit Bananas

Entropy and the Arrow of time

Roller hockey

Kohlrabi juice