s3e15 Getting the Right Data Into the Hands of the People that Need It When They Need It with Donald MacCormick & Joshua Tapley

Episode Summary

Welcome to Limitless B.I., a show that interviews real world, innovative business leaders who strive to see beyond the data to produce tangible results in their organizations using business intelligence. Today, Donald MacCormick, Chief Strategy Officer at Squirel365, and Joshua Tapley, Senior Director of Data Visualization at Comcast, join the show to share their experiences with Data Literacy, Self-Service, and Data Visualization. Joshua speaks to the importance of creating data interfaces that are both highly intuitive and fun. Donald provides his outlook on why terms like data literacy can mean incredibly different things to different individuals. Finally, Donald and Joshua share final thoughts on the need to get data into the hands of people who need it when they need it.

Key Takeaways

00:44 – Joshua Tapley joins the show to share his background in data visualization and his role at Comcast

06:31 – Donald and Joshua share their thoughts on self-service

10:36 – Creating data interfaces that are both intuitive and fun

14:07 – Sankey templates

16:57 – Joshua speaks to some of his recent successes with self-service visualization solutions

20:43 – Donald explains why terms like data literacy, self-service and data visualization mean different things to different people

27:26 – Parting words of wisdom from Donald and Joshua

Tweetable Quotes

“Just as a young child can pick up an iPad and use it without instruction, our users should find everything we produce intuitive. The ability to understand intuitively is the easiest way to bridge data literacy.” (07:29) (Donald)

“I think it’s really important to have good, meaningful data that is useable for people to return. We talk about ongoing user engagement, adoption of the data assets that we build. We can spend all this time and then nobody wants to use it when they get done because it wasn’t the right solution. So we spend a lot more time making sure it’s the right thing.” (11:45) (Joshua)

“We live in a world online whereby if you go to a website that looks really nice, you’ll stay. There’s something about it that draws you in.” (13:22) (Donald)

“Most of what people are looking for, I think, is greater transparency. So, what we’re trying to do now is tie multiple elements of the data together.” (17:34) (Joshua)

“Those three topics, data literacy, self-service, and data visualization, mean incredibly different things to different people. So, data literacy to an executive is about understanding where the data comes from and understanding what they’re seeing. To an analyst, it means statistics. It means making sure that they have enough of a sample size in order to make a forecast that then their executives can trust. They’re very, very different things.” (21:04) (Donald)

Resources Mentioned

Limitless BI Website – https://limitlessbi.com/

Joshua’s Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-tapley/

Donald’s LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/donaldmaccormick/?originalSubdomain=uk

Squirrel365 Website – https://squirrel365.io/