Data Culture
One of the books I frequently refer people to is Ralph Kimball’s Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit, in it he notes that a culture of analysis is critical to the success of any business intelligence project. I would suggest that a data culture is critical to the success of any business - where before wars have been lost because of poor intelligence, today it is market share and profit that are the casualties.
Another of those critical success factors in Kimball’s book is cooperation between IT and the business. It is something that is very true today and I would submit that ‘us’ data professionals need to be clearer on what the business priorities are. By the same token, business folks need to be a bit more tech savvy so that we can all collaborate to sharpen our businesses.
That’s pretty much the way I work; Amy (the data scientist on our team) and I have been having coffee with the marketing chaps who have been running our Data Culture series in order to ensure that we are meeting these aims when we start running the series again in the autumn. To be clear, we can’t fix all of this, but what we can do is split the event into to two days to make them more relevant. For business users, day one will focus on high level demos, real world scenarios and discussion about Return on Investment, compliance and so on. However, while we may also cover this on the new second day of the event, we’ll be running hands on sessions in four tracks…
| Track | Description |
Technologies |
|
Learn how to capture real time data from sensors to deliver insight across an IoT solution. Get hands onto sensors such as Raspberry Pi and Leverage Azure Event Hub and Stream Analytics to collect and process sensor data and visualise in PowerBI. | Azure Event Hub Azure Notification Hub Azure Stream Analytics PowerBI |
Big Data & Data Management |
Learn how to build a data lake and then leverage Hadoop or elastic data warehouse technologies to deliver your big data solutions. Learn how to leverage data source discovery and orchestrate and manage data transformations and movements to given you control of your data estate. | Azure Data Lake Azure SQL Data warehouse Azure HDInsight Azure Data Factory Azure Data Catalog |
| Machine Learning | Learn how to build a predictive model and deploy with ease with AzureML. Learn how to leverage R and Python to extend your models as well as leveraging Microsoft world class algorithms. | Azure ML Cortana Analytics Suite |
| Visualisation & Data Discovery | Learn how to bring your data to life with PowerBI by connecting and transforming your data into insight. Visually explore and create stunning interactive reports and see all your data through a single pane of glass with live dashboards. | PowerBI |
…which you can pick. Some of you may wish to come to a different track and come more than once; some may come as a team and spread out. These events will be run by ‘softies like Amy and I - and we’ll have MVP’s along to help as well, like Allan Mitchell on data integration and Andy Cross on big data.
As for the dates, so far we have 22nd/23rd September in London, and December 8th/9th in Birmingham.
We can’t teach you too much about the business you work in, but hopefully these events will be a good way to span the data conversation across the business and IT. Places will be limited, so don’t delay and register now on the Data Culture site!