Simon Arkell

My latest in Information Management: “‘Sexy'” Data Science is a Team Sport”

January 6, 2014 by Ted Cuzzillo

The word got out last year: data scientist is the “sexiest job,” a late-2012 declaration by the renowned Tom Davenport of “Competing on Analytics” fame. Trouble is, “sexy” goes bad faster than fish.

“Data scientist,” still fresh, is my word of the year. In 2013, the data analysis industry discovered it, many loved or hated it, but most of all, we repeated it. Google Trends shows the mention of it soaring like the 1990s Dow Jones Industrial Average — and you know what happens next.

Alert as data scientists are to patterns, I wonder if many don’t shudder at the “sexy” label. If so, they might have had some comfort from a discussion around the big table at the Pacific Northwest BI Summit. There, calm conversation displaced the industry’s noise around the topic for nearly two hours last summer.

Read the rest of it here, on the Information Management site.

What goes on at the Weasku Inn

May 25, 2012 by Ted Cuzzillo

If you’re out for networking in the BI industry and keeping score in sheer numbers, you still attend TDWI or Strata. But to go deep with smaller numbers, you try to get into the tiny Pacific Northwest BI Summit, held every July in remote southern Oregon. There’s room for about two dozen people, including press.

It sprang from publicity consultant Scott Humphrey’s file of clients and friends 11 years ago. Then year after year, almost all of his attendees returned. Once you have a seat, you don’t give it up. It’s turned into the BI industry’s Bohemian Grove.