The Data Swamp

A day in the life of a consultant is always exciting. We talk about some of our favorite (and least favorite) experiences as consultants, and talk about some of the core ideas that stand behind our passion for data management and helping companies derive value out of their data.

Building subject matter expertise is an involved process. It requires you to do deep research and then to learn how to take the complex material you've studied and break it down into understandable bytes for your audience. If you plan on using your Subject Matter Expertise in marketing for you company, it can also require you developing an understanding of how to communicate your ideas in your brands voice. Kelly Ross joins us for his inaugural appearance on the data swamp to discuss this topic.

Requirements analysis is a difficult thing to get right. Even defining a requirement can be difficult. Often the business speaks a different language than IT, and building a common understanding around what makes an actionable requirement is challenging. We discuss this topic and some approaches in this episode.

Here is an awesome link that goes more in depth on some of the techniques we were discussing.
https://www.visual-paradigm.com/features/agile-user-story-mapping-tool/

It can be difficult to spearhead a new business intelligence effort. There's a lot involved, from building a BI roadmap, to forming a BI team, to integrating various data sources, and sometimes even building a data warehouse. We address all of these challenges in this episode, and try to share various approaches that can help you build a compelling BI solution for your business using the latest toolsets and technologies.

What makes a good data program? And how should you think about managing data and BI programs? We speak with Wayne Cantwell about a wide range of considerations, starting with how to recognize business gaps and then build a plan to overcome those business challenges. At the center is a mentality which strives to align around the customer and to continuously improve their experience.

In this episode of The Data Swamp, we talk about the process of analyzing data for insight. We discuss the entire process, including platform selection, definition of business use cases, definition of dashboards, and security in various UI contexts.

In this episode of the data swamp, we talk about the importance of dashboards, and how they help business analyze data and walk away with meaningful insights. We break the process of building a meaningful dashboards as well, and discuss topics as varied as defining the business use case, defining KPI's that should appear within your dashboard, as well as implementing security around your dashboards.

In this episode of The Data Swamp, I talk with Wayne Cantwell about a range of problems organizations experience when working with data including data quality, data governance, data scale, the speed of changing requirements, and lack of talent. We speak about potential solutions to these problems as well, and try to address best practices for managing your data.