Data Talks, Episode 11
Data Talks is Exago’s podcast on all-things business intelligence, analytics, and application software. This month, we disambiguate some common BI buzzwords with entrepreneur and c-suite data analyst Lillian Taylor. Together with co-host Travis McGrath, we hack through forests of jargon using a machete of specificity and nerd out over pop culture and emerging tech.
Timestamps
Segment 1: BI Buzzwords
(1:00) Meet Lillian, a “complete spaz” with a loyal LinkedIn following.
(7:14) How companies end up buying tech that doesn’t do what they thought it did.
(10:50) How a BI solution is not the same thing as a visualization tool.
(12:00) “Data scientist” vs “data analyst.”
(15:03) Importance of predictive analytics in BI.
(16:04) “Data analytics”
(16:25) “Self-service BI”
(17:22) “Analytics” vs. “BI”
(18:00) “Embedded BI”
(22:29) “User experience” and “user adoption”
(26:00) “Data analyst”
(27:23) “Data engineer”
(29:00) “Data science” and “unstructured data”
(31:03) Who shouldn’t use BI?
Segment 2: What We Are Nerding Out About
(37:41) Lilian: Campfire phone chargers and image recognition tech that is poised to save lives, one skin lesion at a time.
(44:50) Nicole: The Peter James Thomas blog and “Fact-based Decision-making” in particular.
(46:23) Travis: Two Rooms and a Boom board game, along with game theory concepts like the Nash equilibrium.
Resources
- This data science roles venn diagram via Vincent Granville.
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Narrated by Stephen Fry.
- Exemplifying the importance of domain knowledge, the film Sully.
- Freakonomics.
Featured Guest
Lillian Taylor is a data analyst by trade supporting C-level decision makers, but has been in the software solutions space for over twenty years, working within the Microsoft and IBM ecosystems, most notably a predictive analytics solutions consultant in the healthcare, government, and education sectors and, later, as a big data, data science, and analytics specialist servicing Starbucks, Costco, and XPO Logistics. Today, she manages accounts at N3, a company that drives sales growth through analytics. Lillian spends lazy Sunday evenings watching The Princess Bride, camping, and touring dams across three states.
