You may wonder – now who or what are all these creatures? Who do they represent? What are they doing?
Well, meet the team! Then it will fall in place what they are doing…
Advanced analytics modeller
Brightest of the brightest, double cum laude computer science Ph.D. in machine learning and natural language processing. She has a laptop bag on wheels – wheels serious ThinkPad power around, with SAS, SPSS and R running on their own virtual machines, with enough memory to have each running against its own SAP HANA instance. Her motto – analytics at the speed of light. She’ll segment any data and fit a good prediction model on it too.
Multi-lingual and well-travelled, having created analytical models across tens of industries over five continents, she is quick to grasp the essence of any business problem and can choose the most significant contributing variables by gut feel even before SAS, SPSS or R could have thought about calculating it.
Agile Scrummaster
Now if ever you’ve seen an Energiser bunny around the office, she is it. Fever-pitch activity the whole time. Want to get something done thoroughly, in record time, under pressure? No problem, she’s your girl. Ex project manager, Uni and PMBOK over-qualified. Grabbed the agile approach with both hands when it appeared – a walking doing preacher ever since. Great project management and inter-personal skills. Makes the toughest assignments sound like an exciting race. Did I mention energy?
Raises two kids, does spinning class every morning, runs ultra marathons. Does triathlon and Tough Mudder for excitement. Vibrant, fun, can tell you everything that’s happened on every reality show, plus in detail what’s on the news. Trivia queen – put her on your team. I’m sure she cooks in agile style too, while doing the washing and the kids’ reading in parallel. I wonder if they do stand-up breakfasts?
BI Analyst
This is our budding BI analyst. He left technical IT training midway through his second year because the pace of learning was too slow. Sponge learner – he has full certifications on the IBM, Oracle, SAP, SAS, Microstrategy, Microsoft and Informatica stacks, and plays with Ab Initio in his spare time to optimise parallel ETL processes. He can put an interactive dashboard together in any of ten technologies.
Nerd supreme, a big fan of the Big Bang. Trivia king this one – you need this guy on your trivia team too. His speciality – music (all genres), drama, comedy, TV shows, throw in a bit of common history too. All round good guy. Plays the guitar, very well. Loves a pizza and a beer.
Big Data Scientist
In the old days we would have called him a cowboy, or maybe a jack of all trades… but now he has become super-valuable. From ETL to Hadoop, from Pearl scripts NoSQL, from large volume storage to real-time analytics – he knows it all. A deep understanding of data, and an on-the-feet solution crafter. Make sense of a video stream, get sentiment out of emails or a multi-lingual twitter feed – that’s his food. But don’t ask him to stick to procedures and guidelines…
Quite the interesting character – extreme skateboards in his spare time, comes to work with the odd scar… tries the odd mountain bike downhill race. No fear. Many tattoos, the odd stud. Very widely read, only watches extreme sports on television. You’d never say it – red wine connoisseur. Scores excellent in blind tastings. Analytical mind. Speaks in fast short abrupt monotone phrases. Full sentences a waste of effort.
CDO
A recent appointee – our CDO used to be a business analyst, got so interested in data that she self-promoted herself into the role of data steward, and when the organisation realised that data was important and needs to be managed, voila! she got her position on the board. Fast movement up the ladder due to her dedication and focus on data. She knows every data attribute in the business, where it comes from, what it should look like and where it is used. Data quality and data governance are her interests – she’s very active on those LinkedIn groups.
Missy is a little perfectionist – her apartment is spotless and decked out in the latest eco-friendly minimalistic creations. She only eats organic and sugar-free and please, no GMO foods anywhere near her. In her spare time she grows her own organic vegetables in neat little categorised rows.
CIO
As the IT sponsor of all BI initiatives, our CIO wears two hats – one to represent the interests of the business, the other to ensure his BI team is productive, efficient, delivers what the business requires, and to a reasonable extent that its members are happy in what they’re doing.
An (ex-)techie in his heart of hearts, but he stopped coding ages ago. A SQL-92 standard book still gathers dust on his shelf. But he can design any style of data model – in fact, he enjoys doing the odd dimensional model. But of late his interest has shifted more onto the organisation’s business strategy and how his favourite little BI team can deliver better BI to align closer to that strategy.
Data Warehouse Architect
There isn’t a formal or informal BI architecture this guy hasn’t studied, read about, created himself, or adapted for a particular industry. He knows the tools and their capabilities. He’ll never admit it, but he can even tell you where to tune your Oracle data warehouse DBMS server. Absorbs conference presentations like cereal, sucks the architectural and design gems out of them. He’s any presenter’s dream or nightmare – he asks that really difficult insightful question, that either leads to a highly dynamic and interesting debate, or leaves a poor novice presenter gulping for air… And don’t dare use a great diagram style – he’s got it in his next diagram!
Wrong side of 40, you often find him griping ever so slightly about the undisciplined youth. Plays a mean golf swing. In fact, don’t try and arrange an architecture review meeting early on a Wednesday morning – he plays his nine holes come sunshine, gail force wind, rain or snow. Only hail stops him.
Governance officer
Ex-military, ex-government – we think he took the job solely because the title had “officer” in, for sure as fact, it doesn’t look like he likes his job. Throws the rule book and the statutes at everything, and if there aren’t any rules, he writes the rule book himself.
But behind the grumpy facade, there’s a true gentlemen. Sacrifices his saturdays refereeing sports at his grandkids’ school – through winter ice and blazing summer sun, never misses a match. Loves to go on the odd fishing trip. You should see his lures box – highly organised, neatly packed in type/colour groups, from left to right in weight order.
Visualisation Analyst
Meet our young and talented visualisation analyst. Fresh out of Uni, she was schooled in gaming theory, new graphical interfaces, mobile technologies, and as a closet statistician she loved doing heaps and heaps of statistics.
An avid Stephen Few and Edward Tufte fan, she needs to display everything graphically. In fact, she even plotted the variations on her tenpin bowling scores per bowling alley using box and whisker plots… A perpetual academic, she took part-time graphics design and psychology courses to ensure she knew her colour pallets and their impact on the human brain. Dresses impeccably – always. A bit of a dreamer and a story teller, she runs her own blog on suburban myths.
This is a dynamic little team – watch this space for new developments…
