Many years ago, I was working for a software company and managed a team of developers that customized our product for select customers. As part of our custom solution, we extracted data into a database so that we could run reports. (I had not heard of business intelligence at that time.) While doing some research to train my staff, I discovered a publication that described cubes and I was intrigued. I was able to convince upper management that we should explore this technology and was put in charge of a new department to do research and development on adding business intelligence into our product offering. The company didn’t fare well in the long run as they got caught up in the dot-com boom-to-bust problems in 2000, but the R&D experience for a year and building out my first data warehouse set me up nicely for a career in consulting and I have been dedicated to business intelligence ever since.
You have been involved with the PASS organization for over 10 years and have spoken at many PASS events. What do you see as the most significant changes in the data industry over the last few years? And what advice would you give to fellow data professionals who are looking to stay ahead of those changes?
There are so many things that have changed, but the most significant changes in the work that I do is the power of the analytical tools for users and how quickly we can now create new solutions. When I was just starting in the field, we had to do so much work just to stand up an environment before we could begin to try out ideas, but now it’s easy to get something pulled together as a prototype to see if it’s worth building out for production. As another example, I have a relatively small client who does not have a lot of budget to put towards analytical tools. For years, we got by with a simple cube combined with some very complex reports to support his analytical requirements. Now we can use Power BI to do some very interesting analysis and experiment quickly and easily with different ways to look at the data. It’s hugely valuable to be able to try out ideas quickly.
You’ll be presenting “Getting Your Story Straight with Data Visualizations” at the conference, what are the top two things attendees will learn in your session?
The most important things that attendees will learn is how the choice of a visualization enhances or obscures the meaning of the underlying data and how to avoid common mistakes.
What are three interesting facts attendees may not know about you?
1. I must have always been destined to be an author. I won a storytelling contest when I was in the third grade.
2. I must have always been destined to teach. During summer vacation when I was around nine or 10, I would gather up the kids in the neighborhood (both older and younger) and teach math.
3. Perhaps I’m destined to go into space some day. I grew up in the midst of the space industry in Houston and went to school with astronauts’ kids, my best friend lived next door to Sally Ride, and my dad wrote the program that landed the Space Shuttle.
Stacia and her husband, Dean, love to travel and explore the great outdoors together.
Here they are at Horseshoe Bend in Page, AZ.
I travelled a lot when I was younger (as most Aussies do) and found myself in London during the booming 90s. Arriving with a finance degree and not much experience, I worked my way up in investment banking and found that Excel modeling was a critical skill to have as an analyst in that environment (although we didn’t really call it “financial modeling” back then). On my return to Australia I continued on my finance career whilst completing an MBA and eventually founded Plum Solutions to specialize in using Excel for the purpose of modeling and analysis.
Can you tell us a bit about your book, “Using Excel for Business Analysis”, and why you wrote it?
I wrote the first edition of “Using Excel for Business Analysis” to act as a companion for my workshops and online training course. It is aimed at finance staff who are mid-level Excel users and I wanted to showcase for them what plain, vanilla Excel can do, without the need for add-ins or expensive third-party software. The second edition was revised for Excel 2013 and released last year.
You’ll be presenting two sessions at the conference, what are the top two things attendees will learn in each of your sessions?
Present Meaningful and Appealing Business and Financial Analytics
- How to “sell” your idea, budget or project to senior management by presenting the necessary detailed financial data to support your argument. Display key financial concepts in a way that can be easily comprehended and digested by time-poor executives.
- Instill confidence in the data being presented by using best-practice design and layout in reports and presentations.
Performing Scenarios, Sensitivities and What-if Analysis in Excel
- The importance of highlighting and identifying input assumptions in any kind of data modeling, particularly when displaying the output of the model.
- How we can perform scenario analysis on any kind of model that contains inputs and outputs using the simple methods already built into standard Excel.
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to the Australian Outback. |
What are three interesting facts attendees may not know about you?
- I live in Sydney, Australia with my architect husband and two children. With my finance background, I’ve always been a very analytical person but since we’ve been married, being exposed to the creativity of architecture and design has helped me to see the importance of presentation and visualization in every discipline, including finance, and I’ll touch on this during one of my sessions.
- I think Sydney is one of the most beautiful cities in the world but I do love to travel! I am often invited to run seminars and workshops around Australia, Asia, and the Middle East, and I’m very much looking forward to visiting California.
- My Dad was an opal miner when I was growing up and we lived in the mining town of Coober Pedy in Central Australia. Because it’s a desert environment, the locals mostly live in underground homes called “dugouts” to escape the heat and dust. As a child, I thought it was perfectly normal to live in a cave under the ground!
We’re happy to have Jordan Goldmeier join us again this year. Jordan will be presenting “Data Disasters: How Data Visualization and Complexity Lead Us Astray”.
Can you share with us what attracted you to a career in data visualization?
I simply find the field fascinating. Data visualization feels new, but it’s not. Early humans drew crude maps to capture and share the data they saw around them. In this way, they were the first to distill complexity into visual simplicity. They were the first to model their world through points and patterns.
In fact, not much has changed about us if we think about it. To solve our biggest data problems, we should look to what’s worked in the past instead of relying on that new, shiny vendor product that says it can analyze data better than we have in the past.
In your recent book, Dashboards for Excel, you discuss common pitfalls in dashboards. What would you say is the most common mistake you see?
The most common mistake is what I call the “data dump.” Data dumping is when you place everything on the dashboard because you don’t exactly know what the audience will want to see, or because giving everyone what they want will avoid political and organizational conflicts. So you try to have something for everyone. But dashboards that are everything to everyone are actually nothing to anyone. When you do this, you are treating your work like tea leaves for the audience to interpret as they see fit. And this is really the exact opposite of what data visualization exists to do.
What are the top three things that attendees can look forward to learning at your session?
First, I think we focus so much on the great things we can do with data visualization, we often miss how it can lead us astray. It can only be useful to the extent we use it correctly. So attendees can look forward to learning about how governments, businesses, and regular people often hilariously and unintentionally misunderstand and misrepresent data.
Second, attendees will learn how our internal biases contribute to these mistakes.
And, third, attendees will walk away with the tools to avoid bias and make better decisions.
What’s an interesting fact that people may not know about you?
I have interesting facts. First, I have a twin sister; she’s a lawyer. Second, this fact is more about my wife—she failed her college Excel “pre-course” three times before they decided she could just pass. She’s a theologian.
Join Jordan and other analytics experts at the PASS BA Conference!
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Jordan enjoying an authentic Guinness in Dublin.
]]>I have degrees in mathematics and business and work-wise, have always been drawn to roles where these two disciplines intersect: using numbers to understand something and make better decisions.
My career started in credit risk management. For me, playing with how to show the data was a way to inject creativity into the process. Over time, I found that when I took time to visualize data in a thoughtful way, people paid more attention to it, thus reinforcing my desire and commitment to spend time on the visual design of the information.
Eventually, I joined the People Analytics team at Google. At one point, we were developing an internal training program and I was asked to build out coursework on data visualization. The course I created was eventually rolled out to all of Google and I travelled to offices all over the world to teach people how to effectively communicate with data.
In 2012, I left Google to pursue my emerging goal of ridding the world of ineffective graphs. Over the past few years, I’ve taught workshops to hundreds of teams across many different organizations and industries. One thing I’ve found interesting is that the foundational lessons of communicating well with data are universal; anyone can leverage these principles for greater impact. It was this realization (plus some prodding from my husband!) that eventually led me to write my book.
Can you tell us a little about your book?
“Storytelling with Data” codifies the lessons that I teach in my workshops. It also goes into much more depth, and has more in terms of examples and insight into my thought process around data visualization design. It’s written for anyone who needs to communicate with data.
I start off with a conversation about context and the importance of having a really clear understanding of who your audience is and what you want them to know—before you spend much time visualizing data or creating content. I introduce different types of common displays of data and discuss examples, and use cases for each. I talk about clutter: what it is, how to recognize it, and the importance of eliminating unnecessary elements from your visual displays. From there, I discuss how your audience sees and how you can use things like color, size, and position to direct your audience’s attention. I bring in concepts of traditional design and discuss implications on the design of data visualizations. There is a whole chapter devoted to storytelling (this one is my favorite!) and how you can use this powerful tool when communicating with data. Overall, the book is packed with practical tips and examples that can be put to use immediately when communicating with data.
What are the top three things attendees will learn in your session?
1. How to identify and eliminate the clutter that can cloud your message
2. How to draw your audience’s attention where you want them to look
3. The importance of story when communicating with data
What are three interesting facts attendees may not know about you?
1. My husband is also a former-Googler and he sat in the first row the very first time I taught the data visualization course at Google (we didn’t officially meet until a month later!)
2. I am the proud mother of two beautiful little boys and baby #3 is on the way (this latter part you’d probably figure out by looking at me!)
3. I am fluent in German
Cole lives in San Francisco, California with her husband and kids.
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In this full-day session, Rob Collie and Avi Singh of PowerPivotPro put that ecosystem through its paces for your benefit. Better yet, they have selected 10 real-world examples from their many years of experience, and will cover these patterns in their entirety so you can return to work and apply them immediately. All attendees will be provided with these examples in electronic format, complete with inline explanations and tips on adapting these patterns to your own needs, including:
• variance from target/budget
• outlier detection
• multi-level performance improvement
• Opportunity Gap Analysis
• accumulation trending
• geo targeting
• customer retention
• inventory burndown
• multi-channel customer satisfaction
• entity summaries
Rob and Avi will treat this as a friendly competition as to who will provide you with the clearest real-world impact. Attendees will also receive a full-color copy of Rob and Avi’s new book, “Power Pivot and Power BI, 2nd Edn.”, as well as eight laminated reference cards.
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• how to create a simple four-part visual storyboard on paper in minutes, not weeks
• why visual storytelling is more effective than traditional reporting
• the one element 98% of data visualizations are missing and how it is negatively affecting user adoption
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We'll start the morning with the core ideas of data science, including an overview of statistics and machine learning, and focus on your key role in visualization and feature selection. By lunchtime, we'll move into a deeper understanding of data and predictions.
In the afternoon, we'll examine data-driven what-if models, and how to maximise decision trees, Monte Carlo simulations, and/or optimization to find the best choices, for business plans and processes with many future scenarios, and individual decisions.
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- Stacia Varga
- Othniel Denis
- Alex Hambelton
- Wes Springbob
- Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
- Rick Grantham
- Danielle Stein Fairhurst
- Ken Raetz
Don’t miss this learning opportunity! Register now
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- Data Storytelling with R and Power BI
- Taking the Analytics Reins: An Oregon Lottery Case Study
- Getting Your Story Straight with Data Visualizations
- Spatial Analysis Jumpstart: Beyond Bubble Charts
- GoDaddy: Big Data = Big Changes for BI
Take a look, and start planning your Analyst’s Journey!
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