Last month, Centric Consulting’s Chicago Data & Analytics team held our fourth community of interest meeting in Rosemont. The community is for high-level leaders in the D&A space and business executives with a passion for the power of data. Here’s a recap from the gathering.
April 19, 2023, Rosemont, IL — Our Centric Consulting Chicago Team created a local community for data-minded leaders to collaborate around creating business value through information that gathers in person once each quarter. On April 19, the growing group hosted its fourth in-person event where Data & Analytics executives gathered at Crust Brewing in Rosemont, Illinois.
At the end of each meeting, members ideate topics they want to discuss at future events. This session was more technology-focused than previous ones, with three members presenting a data toolkit show-and-tell. Zach Bannor, Data Engineering Manager from a leading global mass media company, presented on the globalization of datasets using Databricks Unity Catalog and Delta Sharing.
Hillary Mohs, a Product Management Director from First Stop Health, followed and discussed their journey with Heap Analytics. To conclude the show-and-tell presentations, Jeremy Gruenwald from Centric discussed the design and implementation of modern cloud analytics platforms using an insurance client as a real-world example.
For each topic, group discussions and questions ranged widely, but three themes overlapped:
- “Do, or do not. There is no try.” Actually, no – try things, experiment. Leverage cloud agility to hypothesize and evolve quickly. Not fail fast per se, but you don’t have to be all-in to find value and know if you want to go forward.
- “You’re so money, and you don’t even know it.” Know that what you are doing is good, and be ready for success. When you start succeeding, more people will recognize your value and want more from you. Be careful about what is coming and how you will deal with it. You’ll start to engage less common data consumers as your success fuels and feeds a company-wide hunger for information.
- “Is it safe?” Think about how you will initially control access, security and privacy. Think about it from people, process and technology perspectives at all layers of your architecture.
Our Chicago Data & Analytics Team will continue to co-host D&A Community of Interest events throughout the year. Our next session in July 2023 will be an interactive roundtable focused on generative AI and large language models (LLM).
Are you a director-level or higher business leader in the Chicago area? Interested in getting involved in our D&A Community of Interest? Check out this link to learn more.
