A Great Day for Data

Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting at the Nashville Analytics Summit and attending the DSC Collide Conference in Atlanta. The week concluded by attending a Data Governance Conference of one of my company's competitors.

The bottom line: It is a great day for data. Yes, I have co-opted the great line from Badger Bob Johnson, former college and NHL hockey coach who raised his boys around the corner from my Grandmother and who I was able to see his sons play hockey at Madison Memorial, win an NCAA title for the Badgers, and beat the Russians and win the Gold at Lake Placid in 1980's miracle on ice.

I have a real passion for data, and have seen so much progress in the last 35+ years. In Nashville, I shared some of those experiences, and also my disdain for the infographic of the week but my affinity for companies that use data for good.

Outside of presenting my content, including a great Q&A session, we had some equally beneficial conversations in the Music City.

Data Summit Areas of Interest

The three key themes that came up during the Data Summit were:

1. People are at the core of any data program, regardless of how you name their role. Having a group of data professionals working together for a common cause is rewarding. We need to get beyond the idea of data heroes and strive for cohesive groups of folks that work together for good.
2. Executive Committees are a vital to share progress, align needs, and get guidance. You can be successful without having an Executive Data Committee, but by leveraging existing committees for similar initiatives like digital transformation. Setting up a dedicated data committee might make sense, but as you can intertwine other initiatives that bring people together, it will build rapport and drive success. The key is getting executives to talk about data and consider its benefits. The more they look to data, the greater benefits that will be achieved. With executive support comes greatness.
3. Roadmaps & State of Data. Having everyone marching to the beat of the same drum makes all the difference. Having a roadmap that focuses on critical disciplines and initiatives helps to move forward. Also, having a standard set of slides (a few) that share the current state, next steps, etc., as a 'State of Data' that can educate, celebrate, and help with alignment brings everyone forward.

AI and Data

During the middle of the week, I attended DSC Collide in Atlanta. This was an AI-Data Conference. It was the first conference I have been at in some time where I was just there to learn. I didn't have to attend any customer meetings, present content, or do booth duty. Overall, it was a good conference with one exceptional high point.

Caroline Dickey, Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Slack, presented "From Key Words to Concepts: Bringing Native AI to Search at Slack". Caroline in twenty minutes introduced the audience to a variety of topics: (1) Privacy is Paramount in AI; (2) Recall vs. Discovery; (3) Search Ranking - Candidate Selection; (4) Semantic vs. Keyword Search; (5) Extracting Meaning; (6) Semantic Re-Ranking vs. Semantic Search; (7) Bi-Encoding vs. Cross-Encoding; (8) Merging Semantic RE-Ranking with Result Summarization; (9) Use of Apache Solr; (10) Use of LLM (Large Language Models). It's important to note that you could spend an hour or more on these topics, but it was a great introduction.

The bottom line was that in a twenty minute session, Caroline did a great job introducing a set of topics that are the rage while sharing the challenges Slack is working through to get more value out of AI and provide more value to us, Slack's customers.

Data Governance Software - Need to lead forward

At the end of the week, I participated in a user conference for a firm that deems itself a data governance software vendor, and well, it was a bit disappointing. I won't say much about the specifics, but if you are going to talk about data governance, talk about data governance. If you can't do the job, don't try to paint it as something else. Businesses are up against a wide range of challenges. We just don't have time to deal with distractions. Data is a huge part of success in organizations today, be it for digital transformation, AI, or just running successful businesses. Firms cannot be distracted but must believe in each other and their business partners to make a difference with a solid vision, excellent stewardship, and working together.

Summary

It was a great week meeting, sharing, and growing through the interaction with data professionals. It shows the level of growth we can make by sharing challenges, successes, and theories about what is next. Clearly, it was "A Great Week for Data."