The idea was planted years ago when I was working on creating a data platform team.
Data platforms were not a well known thing outside of big tech world. I was working at the time in a large asset management firm that was still on-premise with outdated tooling to handle their ETL - we were using Informatica PowerCenter at the time with Oracle Exadata. These tools were already a big improvement over my previous SQL Server + SSIS stack. But nevertheless, the issue still remained - taking a user’s idea to providing some sort of insight in the form of a report, dashboard, or summary took well over 6 months to deliver from start to getting the first cut.
Why did it take so long? Why does it involve so many people and across so many teams? Why does it have to be this way?
These were the questions that I pondered long and hard on a rainy night. There must be a better way to do this.
This is what I wanted to set out to explain as a blog. To share my experience and insight to the other data practitioners and leaders to help them change the trajectory of their data journey.
Idea to Insight was created to focus on that key concept to enabling a data-driven culture by accelerating a team/organization’s ability to deliver insights in days or hours, not months. I was obsessed with time-to-insight as the key metric to optimize for. If we can deliver insights in days or hours, what sort of innovations could be fostered? What sort of transformations could occur in an organization? Can this transform an organization’s culture, through data?
If this resonates with you, feel free to subscribe to my blog as I’ll be posting content like this in more detail to help others learn and grow to enable you to drive innovation and transformation in your organization or team.
“A journey of a thousand miles begin with one step” - Lao Tzu