Episode 186
| January 01, 2020
| 38 minutes
Analytics & Security: Find Pain Points, Make a Plan
2020 dawns a first for our podcast. This episode is dedicated entirely to a listener question. We’ve had questions before; however, this episode the team tackles two questions from longtime listener Trent Adams. The context of his questions surround the concepts of IT having the ability to provide new functionality to the business and the business appearing to be uninterested in moving forward. While we don’t know the entire situation, we discuss the best way to identify pain points and ways to introduce new technology without imposing new rules/processes on the business.
We would very much like to have more listener inspired episodes this year. If you have something you want to share with us, head over to sqldatapartners.com/podcast and submit your question and we’ll try to help you on the SQL Trail!
Episode Quotes
“When you understand what a debit memo and a credit memo is, when you understand what year-over-year growth is, when you have these words that mean something to the accounting portion of the business and the owners of the business, that makes it so much easier to implement analytics in a small business.”
“You start out with the things that are going to be most important to people, and it is critical that you find a champion on the business side, because IT-driven analytics projects tend to fail, if they’re trying to force a method onto the business people who don’t care about it.”
“A company will spend millions of dollars to clean up a problem, but they wouldn’t spend the $500 to prevent the problem. Treatment always gets more money than prevention.”
“Have those plans, have those relationships, start showing tangible benefits, and you’ll see more movement than if you just sit there and say, ‘I want to do this thing.’”
Listen to Learn
00:38 Intro to the team and topic
01:35 Compañero Shout-Outs
01:53 Compañero comments on episodes
04:12 Trent Adams has been told there is no need for analytics at his job
09:31 Analytics might not be exactly what your boss thinks it is
13:09 You need to understand what the business needs and what the pain points are
15:45 Pushback can also be about the cost of the necessary products
18:32 It might be harder to get growth to happen in some work environments
22:56 If you start with small projects, people will notice and want to do more
25:38 Why contact data may not need to be secured
27:50 When contact data should be secured, and at least encrypt your backups
31:11 Sometimes encrypting is going to affect others…but sometimes it’s not
33:49 It’s sad that sometimes money can only be made available when there is a breach
36:31 Closing Thoughts
When you understand what a debit memo and a credit memo is, when you understand what year-over-year growth is, when you have these words that mean something to the accounting portion of the business and the owners of the business, that makes it so much easier to implement analytics in a small business
Meet the Hosts
Carlos Chacon
With more than 10 years of working with SQL Server, Carlos helps businesses ensure their SQL Server environments meet their users’ expectations. He can provide insights on performance, migrations, and disaster recovery. He is also active in the SQL Server community and regularly speaks at user group meetings and conferences. He helps support the free database monitoring tool found at databasehealth.com and provides training through SQL Trail events.
Eugene Meidinger
Eugene works as an independent BI consultant and Pluralsight author, specializing in Power BI and the Azure Data Platform. He has been working with data for over 8 years and speaks regularly at user groups and conferences. He also helps run the GroupBy online conference.
Kevin Feasel
Kevin is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and proprietor of Catallaxy Services, LLC, where he specializes in T-SQL development, machine learning, and pulling rabbits out of hats on demand. He is the lead contributor to Curated SQL, president of the Triangle Area SQL Server Users Group, and author of the books PolyBase Revealed (Apress, 2020) and Finding Ghosts in Your Data: Anomaly Detection Techniques with Examples in Python (Apress, 2022). A resident of Durham, North Carolina, he can be found cycling the trails along the triangle whenever the weather's nice enough.
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