AM8: Real World Agile Analytics: How to Superpower your Data Engineers, Analysts and Data Scientists without a Civil War!

Today a new generation of mixed role teams is delivering data, insight and analysis on an ongoing basis. They have inexpensive tools that allow them to integrated data, build visualizations and make predictions at their fingertips. These teams have business customers demanding answers at the same speed that Amazon can deliver a package to their doorstep. How do you get those mixed role team to support an agile analytic process without ending up in an IT vs. Data Engineer vs. Data Scientist vs. Governance war? How can you allow them to use the tool that is right for the job yet make sure the results are tested, trusted, governed, and reproducible? How do you empower all those smart people in your organization and not create you own version of “Captain America: Civil War” (opening in theaters near you on May 6th) in your organization?

Our session will focus on five major topics:

Agile Landscape: a quick tour of what makes Analytics particularly challenging.
Agile Team Process: a review of Agile principles and practices created for software development and how to apply them to Data and Analytics.
Seven Steps: We will outline the seven steps to create a technical environment for agile analytics including how to: add tests, modularize & containerize, do branching & merging, use multiple environments, empower your analyst, use simple storage, and support three workflows
How to Measure: Will will show to how to measure the effectiveness of Agile Analytics through key metrics including sprint burndown, team velocity, production issues, quality circle, SLA tracking, test inventory, test coverage, process control charts.
Categorize Your Data and Analytic Processes: Learn how to bucket your data into: Analytic Asset, Enterprise Asset, and NonEssential to gain speed and save work.
The discussion will span the entire analytic process from data acquisition to insight delivery in and show how to deliver more insight, faster, cheaper, and with higher quality. Our session will focus on practical, doable steps that can help you achieve Agile Analytics in your people and technical environment.
This presentation will show how a mixed role analytic teams can make fast changes to analytic deliverables with high quality and deliver twice the work in half the time. The speakers are founders of DataKitchen and have decades of hands on and executive management experience in data, analytics, and software development. They are current practitioners of Agile Analytics. The speakers believe in ‘Agile’ project processes. However they experienced that implementing an agile process is necessary but not sufficient to meet the needs of high quality, fast delivery timelines in empowered team. That sufficiency comes from changing your technical environment in seven specific ways.

Christopher Bergh is a Founder and Head Chef at DataKitchen where he is leading DataKitchen’s Agile Data initiative. Chris has more than 25 years of research, engineering, analytics, and executive management experience. Previously, Chris was Regional Vice President in the Revenue Management Intelligence group in Model N. Before Model N, Chris was COO of LeapFrogRx, a descriptive and predictive analytics software and service provider. Chris led the acquisition of LeapFrogRx by Model N in January 2012. Prior to LeapFrogRx Chris was CTO and VP of Product Management of MarketSoft (now part of IBM) an innovative Enterprise Marketing Management software vendor. 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. He was awarded a US Patents for his work on that project. Before joining Microsoft, he led the technical architecture and implementation of Firefly Passport, an early leader in Internet Personalization and Privacy. Microsoft subsequently acquired Firefly. Chris led the development of the first travelrelated ecommerce web site at NetMarket. Chris began his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory and NASA Ames Research Center. There he created software and algorithms that provided aircraft arrival optimization assistance to Air Traffic Controllers at several major airports in the United States. 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. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbergh

Gil Benghiat is a Founder and VP of Products at DataKitchen. At previous companies, 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 and then purchased by Oracle), integrating pharmaceutical sales data at LeapFrogRx (purchased by Model N), and liberating data at Solid Oak Consulting. He has a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University and Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics/Biology from Brown University. Gil enjoys coaching youth soccer and Destination Imagination (Odyssey of the Mind) where he has the kids run their project using a Kanban board. Last summer, he completed hiking all 48 of New Hampshire’s 4,000’ peaks and is the father of three teenage boys. https://www.linkedin.com/in/gilbertbenghiat