s3e19 Developing Business Intelligence Applications for Sustainability with Gareth Cosker

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 Gareth Cosker, Surface Commercial Executive at Microsoft, joins the show to share his background in IT and how he was able to develop a sustainability-focused application using Low-Code No-Code tools. Gareth speaks to the tool Squirrel365 and praises its ease of use and simplicity. Gareth also shares some of the results he was able to yield and speculates on the future of business intelligence applications.

Key Takeaways

01:03 – Gareth Cosker joins the show to talk about his IT background and how his career path led him to a unique role at Microsoft

05:07 – Sustainability and a recent application Gareth developed using Low-Code No-Code tools

09:01 – Learning how to use Squirrel

13:27 – Gareth speaks to some of the results of his application and what’s next

17:39 – Why Gareth chose Squirrel365

19:45 – Gareth speculates on the future of dashboard applications

22:48 – Microsoft’s growth mindset

Tweetable Quotes

“Now I still operate within the public sector, which is where my heart is and where I think technology can drive the biggest impact, whether that’s in hospitals, front line workers, counsels, those sort of establishments.” (03:25) (Gareth)

“I’ve always said about business intelligence that the aim should be for people to get in, get what they need, get out, and get on with their job.” (11:06) (Donald)

“For me I had a very specific use case. I wanted to present to a customer - which we would traditionally fdo via PowerPoint - and I needed a tool that integrated into that. So, I reached out to colleagues at Microsoft to establish if we have this. There were various creative ways that we would be able to import that into there, but it kinda didn’t give me that visual representation that I needed. Squirrel was purely down to ease of use and how simple for me to keep that kind of backend app going. And the plug-in feature in PowerPoint is really, really simple.” (18:39) (Gareth)

“Wouldn’t it be great if you were on a slide and you could just talk to that slide and it would update that data?” (21:16) (Gareth)

Resources Mentioned

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

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

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

Squirrel365 Website – https://squirrel365.io/