About my Blog
The areas of analytics and business intelligence (BI) that interest me are the alignment of analytics and BI with business strategy, technical- and information architectures – especially modern analytics platforms, data visualisation and other forms of information exploitation as well as the use of advanced analytics to further advance the value of analytics and BI to the business – as applied to conventional structured and to unstructured (big) data. As the analytics and BI strategy lead for our organisation, it is also imperative for me to keep up with the latest developments in the industry.
In this blog I will bring you the insights I have gained gained from consulting to many clients in many stages of amalytics and BI maturity, in vastly different countries, cultures and industries, and using a wide variety of technologies. It is my belief that there isn’t a single golden analytics or BI solution, but that each situation requires a technology set and implementation approach that has to fit with the business strategy, the IT roadmap and most importantly with the business strategy and the users’ requirements.
My objective with this blog is not to merely repeat good content – my aim is to only publish content when I can add value through original commentary. (I list good posts that I have discovered on my Blog Roll page.)
About me
I have consulted on analytics, advanced analytics, business intelligence and data warehouse projects as team lead, solution architect, business analyst, data modeller, data analyst and data scientist since 1990. As my employer are product-independent service providers, this has been done on a wide variety of technologies; mostly in the healthcare, telecommunications, insurance, retail and banking industries.
I have presented papers at many conferences and user groups, amongst others Enterprise IQ (Sydney), ARK Group (Melbourne), SAS Forum (Geneva), Mimer conference (London), DB User Groups (Nice and Sydney) and CA World and Software Development conferences (USA). I was a contributing editor to DBMS Magazine for three years and have written feature articles for numerous international IT journals.
I hold a M.Sc degree (cum laude) on distributed databases, and have attended various Ralph Kimball and TDWI workshops and courses. A keen follower and doer of data visualisation, I have attended Stephen Few’s course. I lecture in La Trobe University and Deakin University’s Master of Business Analytics program.
Originally from Cape Town, South Africa, I have relocated to Melbourne, Australia in March 2011. I am currently the Chief Data Scientist at PBT Australia.
Other interests
My other interests are:
- Family and children,
- Surfing (member of Torquay Boardriders and 2016 Victoria short board state champion >55 division),
- Organic bio-dynamic sustainable gardening,
- Music (Latin, Salsa, Jazz, Funk, Rock, guitar), and
- Go Cats!
Comments / Suggestions
If you have any general comments on my blog, or would like me to cover any specific topics, please fill in the comments below.
