9 Years After My First Workflow, I Finally Made it to the Inspire Conference!

When I heard that the Alteryx ? Inspire conference was coming to my city, I could not have been more overjoyed. I have been an Alteryx user for almost 9 years, whereas most of those that I met at the conference had been using the software for as little as six months to two years. I did not think that it was such a long time until maybe the fifth or sixth person that mentioned to me, “that is a long time to have been using Alteryx.”

Looking back, it certainly has been an adventure. I was first introduced to Alteryx in 2013 while I was working at USAA, however, it was not until 2015 that I became serious about creating workflows as I had moved back home and was working at Western Union. My first workflows were dedicated to early usage of the predictive suite, as I was using the Find Replace Tool to perform word association and then using a Logistic Regression Tool to model for usage of high-risk verbiage in complaints.

In other words, I was trying to determine what words were indicative of an irate customer. Spoiler alert, if someone says that they are calling their lawyer, you can take this with a grain of salt, but if they say that they are calling their attorney, watch out!

??????????However innovative I was back in 2015, the text analytics tools of the current Alteryx Intelligence Suite are so much easier to use! I would have done anything for a Topic Modeling tool.

?????????When people ask me what drew me to Alteryx and why I have become such a big fan or even an Alteryx Evangelist, I usually tell them that as someone that was transitioning from active-duty Navy to the civilian world, Alteryx’s lower code model was easier as I could deliver results much faster than if I had to write 100 lines of code. This was a time (in 2014) when SAS? was “the” language for anyone in Data Analytics. My first course in Data Modeling during my studies at Northwestern University featured SAS? programming that was changed to R programming in the follow-up course. I felt like 2014 was the watershed year in that the free, open source software really took off

A SAS? license was a quite expensive tool in 2014 that still required you to know a great deal of code. R and later Python with the introduction of Numpy and Pandas were free, but still required a great deal of code. Alteryx was really the “Happy Medium,” as it allowed me to make up for my lesser experience in coding, allowed for coding visualization and provided a community dedicated to innovative ideas.

The aforementioned high risk verbiage model was only about 8 tools whereas it would have been at least 200 lines of code. Using the new Topic Modeling Tool, we are down to 3 tools as we have come a long way since my improvised tool in 2014. Inspire 2022 was a great time as I am already looking forward to Inspire 2023 and potentially presenting some of my innovative workflows!