Building High-Performing Analytics Teams with John Thompson at CSL BehrinG

A lot of people look at analytics teams and they’re like, oh, you know, it’s the data nerds, the math nerds. And, we are. I take that label and wear that proudly. The thing about an analytics team is that it’s a creative group. You’re not managing a bunch of IT professionals. I’m not being degrading about it, but they’re very cut and dry. In an analytics project, there’s failure. And we plan for failure. We plan for experimentation. We plan for trial and error. We want people to do things that are going to blow up in their face. And that happens when you’re doing creative kinds of things with data and algorithms and analytics. So, an analytics team is not an IT team. It is a creative team that is driving business value through synergistic and interesting ways to use data and math.

“I’ve been at it for 37 years now in data and analytics. I built many, many, data warehouses. I worked with Ralph Kimball and Bill Inmon – and many founding members of the data warehousing movement from the business intelligence realm into the advanced analytics world.

The enterprise data warehouse is where it’s all at. I think the future for technology is really bright. I believe that we’re on the cusp of explainable AI. I think that the days of black box neural net models are pretty much over. We’re going to be able to have utilities to use our best analytical technologies and have clear, transparent explainability.”

A lot of people look at analytics teams and they’re like, oh, you know, it’s the data nerds, the math nerds. And, we are. I take that label and wear that proudly. The thing about an analytics team is that it’s a creative group. You’re not managing a bunch of IT professionals. I’m not being degrading about it, but they’re very cut and dry. In an analytics project, there’s failure. And we plan for failure. We plan for experimentation. We plan for trial and error. We want people to do things that are going to blow up in their face. And that happens when you’re doing creative kinds of things with data and algorithms and analytics. So, an analytics team is not an IT team. It is a creative team that is driving business value through synergistic and interesting ways to use data and math.