AM8: Superpower your Data Warehouse and Analytics Team with Agile Analytic Operations

Do you cringe when you hear this at the water cooler? “Your group is too slow.” “Why does it take so long to add a data set?” “We cannot seem to get anything out the door.” Are you being forced to choose either fast-and-fragile or slow-and-solid? If so, this workshop can help you become more agile.

Our goal is to teach analytic teams how to deliver business value quickly, with high quality using the tools they love. We will illustrate how to apply agile processes to your department. However, process is not enough. We will also walk through the Seven Shocking Steps to create a technical environment to enable speed and quality - to support DataOps.

This workshop covers six major topics:

Agile Landscape: A quick tour of what makes Analytics particularly challenging.
Introduction to DataOps: How people, tools, code, and process interact.
Agile Process: A review of Agile principles and practices created for software development and how to apply them to Data and Analytics
Seven Steps to DataOps: We will outline the seven Shocking Steps needed to implement DataOps, i.e. add data and logic tests, use a version control system, branch and merge, use multiple environments, reuse & containerize, parameterize your processing, use simple
How to Measure: Learn various metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your operation.
How to Categorize: Learn how to bucket your data into: Analytic Assets, Enterprise Assets, and Non-Essential Assets to gain speed and save work.

This session will be interactive with group exercises, and you'll get to know other participants.

Gil Benghiat is one of three founders of DataKitchen, a company on a mission to enable analytic teams to deliver value quickly and with high quality. Gil’s career has always been data oriented, starting with collecting and displaying network data at AT&T Bell Laboratories (now Alcatel-Lucent), managing data at Sybase (purchased by SAP), collecting and cleaning clinical trial data at PhaseForward (IPO then purchased by Oracle), integrating pharmaceutical sales data at LeapFrogRx (purchased by Model N), and liberating data at Solid Oak Consulting.

Gil has a Master of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics/Biology from Brown University. He completed hiking all 48 of New Hampshire’s 4,000 peaks and is now working on the New England's 67.

Christopher Bergh is Founder and Head Chef at DataKitchen. Chris has more than 25 years of research, engineering, analytics, and executive management experience. Previously, Chris was Regional Vice President at Model N. Before Model N, Chris was COO of LeapFrogRx, a descriptive and predictive analytics software and service provider. Prior to LeapFrogRx, Chris was CTO and VP of Product Management of MarketSoft (now part of IBM). Prior to that, Chris developed Microsoft Passport, the predecessor to Windows Live ID, a distributed authentication system used by 100s of Millions of users today.

Chris began his career at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and NASA Ames Research Center. Chris served as a Peace Corps Volunteer Math Teacher in Botswana, Africa. Chris has an M.S. from Columbia University and a B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an avid cyclist, hiker, reader, and father of two teenagers.