First Annual Data Jawn

I went to a data event last night called the Data Jawn, presented by RJMetrics, and wanted to share a write up of the event – it was pretty cool and sparked some really good ideas.

One idea I really liked – Predicting who will call in/have an issue and proactively reaching out to them… Sounds like a game changer to me. I could then trigger alerts when we see that activity or make a list for reaching out via phone, email, text… whatever. The possibilities of this seem pretty big.

There was also a lot of tweeting going on under the hashtag #datajawn.

Here’s some notes/takeaways from each speaker:

1. Bob Moore – RJMetrics CEO

• Motto of RJMetrics: “Inspire and enpower data driven people”

2. Jake Stein – RJMetrics cofounder

• “Be data driven”
• Steps to all problem solving: + Collect Data + Analyze + Present Results

3. Madelyn Fitzgerald – RJMetrics

• “Need to be problem focused, not solution focused” + This means that you need to ask a question of your data before building out the answer + Having KPIs is awesome… but they need to be built to answer a question
• The most common problem people make with data is diving into the data before asking a question

4. Kim Siejak – Independence Blue Cross

• IBX invested in hadoop last year
• Doing a number of predictive models and machine learning + Predicting what people who will go to the hospital before they go + Predicting different diseases based on health history + Predicting who will call in before they complain

5. David Wallace – RJMetrics

• Every Important SaaS Metric in a Single Infographic
• Document how every KPI is derived and make sure everyone understands it
• “If you’re not experimenting, you’re not learning. If you’re not learning, you’re not growing.”

6. Lauren Anacona/Christopher Tufts

• Did a sentiment analysis on tweets with emojis
• Pulled all the location based tweets from the Philadelphia area and visualized them on a map using CartoDB and torque.js (really cool visualizations!)
• Lots of people use emojis!
• https://github.com/laurenancona/twimoji

7. Jim Multari - Comcast

• “Dashboards are no good for senior leaders”
• Only have 10 seconds to get your message across when talking to executives
• Alerting on KPI changes
• Four things needed to make a data driven org: + Right data & insights + Right data & systems + Right people + Right culture

8. Ben Garvey – RJMetrics

• Pie charts are evil - you can estimate linear distance much easier than angular distance
• “Data visualization gives you confidence in state and trend without effort”
• You can tell the story much easier with the right visualization.

9. Stacey Mosley – Data Services Manager for the City of Philadelphia

• Gave a talk about how they improved the use of court time for L&I
• She didn’t share a lot about her processes or what data she used to do this…

There were a few other speakers to end the talk with nice messages, but by that point I was fully tweeting and stuck checking out what everyone else thought of the event.

I hope that there continue to be opportunities like this locally to learn more about Data Analytics!