Data Analytics

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with data analytics. On the one hand, I think there's a lot of value to be drawn out of analyzing data and looking for trends and patterns to assist in decision making. On the other hand, I think the process of analyzing the data is tedious and time consuming. I don't like crunching and poring over all the data. I'm all for collecting as many data points as possible but ideally I would have someone that analyzes the data for me and finds all the useful nuggets of knowledge.

I bring all this up because lately I've been doing a lot of data analysis in and out of work, and unfortunately right now I'm not in a position to have others do the analysis for me. So that means I've been crunching a lot of data lately. This actually hasn't been too bad because I've been focused on the results and the payoff that might come out of the data.

At work I have two data analytics tasks on my plate. Now normally I would not be too happy if my boss put me to work crunching data, but both of these tasks have come from my own initiatives and are part of the 'innovations' task force that I'm leading. Unfortunately the innovations budget only covers me right now so I have to provide the hard data to support my initiatives on my own and that means crunching rows of data. One of the tasks is to prepare quoting sales data that our system has been collecting for years and use this to improve our consumer profiling process. The other task is to analyze data from a project tracking system we've been using for the past year and look for opportunities to improve our project portfolio management process. I've found some solid actionable areas of improvement here and I'm now preparing a write-up to present my recommendations to management. (I'm actually using a lot of the ideas and concepts from my Technology Management class for this initiative. This whole MBA thing is paying off already!)

Outside of work I've been playing around with Twitter data and digging into the area of content curation. I've tested a lot of the Twitter clients out there and I haven't really found anything I like that presents my Twitter feed to me in a way that is manageable and still enables discovery of timely and relevant content. So I've been making my own Twitter curator that tries to organize my Twitter feed and shows me exactly what I want to see based on several different data points. Some of the points include friend quality, follower quality, post frequency, list memberships and link quality. It's not production ready by a long shot (and it may never be), but I'll try to post screens of my Twitter curator sometime in the near future.