Engagement with Senior Leaders to Align Data Initiatives to Business Strategies
Misalignment with company objectives limits data impact. Broad and deep relationships with business leaders are essential to understanding where analytics will have impact and in influencing analytics roadmaps and project planning.
- I rebuilt working relationships with key constituencies at Raising Cane's, shifting from combative silos to a collaborative matrix structure by forming cross-functional teams, understanding challenges, driving alignment, and innovating solutions.
- At RenRe Insurance, I learned the insurance business quickly by meeting with Underwriting, Claims, and Actuarial, leading to a refocus of the development teams to improve data accessibility and utilization.
Delivering Business Analytics Which Guide Decision Making
Business acumen is critical in guiding analytics initiatives to enable data-driven decision making. Effective communication and technology architecture skills informed by two graduate degrees in business enable me to drive business insights via technological capabilities.
- I stabilized and optimized the data warehouse at Raising Cane's, then transformed analytics through development of sophisticated data sets, improved ad hoc data access, and compelling, action-driving Tableau visualizations.
- I operationalized insight into expanding order and service channels and their sales, traffic, and service speeds at Raising Cane's.
Maximize Team and Platform Capabilities and Optimize Resource Spend
Data analytics teams may need overhaul to optimize delivery. As infrastructure evolves to cloud platforms and tools, our teams must keep pace to support growth.
- I modernized the Enterprise Data Warehouse at Raising Cane's, rebuilt the team (including leveraging global resources), and reduced annual external spend by $200K while supporting 20% annual growth. We migrated our on-prem SQL Server EDW to Snowflake on AWS and modernized dashboards with Tableau.
- At RenRe, I restructured the development team to enable a one-third headcount reduction while improving delivery and supporting expansion to new lines and partners.
- Overhauled delivery of reporting and ad hoc analytics at Fannie Mae via a SharePoint-based reporting portal and centralized Credit Data repository.
Engineer Data Reliability and Performance
Data analysis performance and data integrity result from understanding business priorities and driving data engineering, data governance, and data infrastructure accordingly.
- Raising Cane's has grown from 300 to 800+ restaurants, and I ensured our BI team delivered reporting and analytics consistently through this growth, reducing daily reporting time-to-delivery by two hours.
- I improved weekly reporting on-time delivery at Javelin by a factor of ten while reducing weekly processing times by two-thirds by overhauling ETL processing, the data warehouse architecture, and the development team.
Address Competing Business Needs for Responsiveness and Precision
Balancing analytics agility and data curation is both necessary and achievable. This results when you:
- Centralize management of core transactional data
- Centralize ownership of core dimensional data (attributes of main organizational entities, organizational hierarchies, fiscal calendars, etc.)
- Enable analytics users to supplement centralized data with new and/or short-term-needed data
- Support analytics users in augmenting dimensional attributes to meet short-term and/or experimental needs
- Review and coordinate processes to institutionalize advances made by analytics teams into the centralized data repository
Provide Data Source Transparency and KPI Assurance
Clear data provenance and lineage are essential to ensure a single source of truth:
- Capture and manage data at highly granular levels
- Build reliable, efficient, and transparent data pipelines
- Ensure data quality through automation, including consistency checks at every stage along with active monitoring of exception reporting