Top 4 Data Science Sessions of 2020: Part 3 of Take30’s One-Year Anniversary

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Ironside’s Take30 with a Data Scientist series was typically targeted towards business leaders, with topics focused on strategy, including use-case development advice, de-risking AI with Data Science-as-a-Service, and ways to overcome common barriers to AI adoption. We also covered technical concepts like Model Evaluation and Feature Store Development. On top of that, we took several deep dives into technology partners including IBM Watson Auto AI, AWS Sagemaker Studio, Snowflake and DataRobot. Finally, we had a couple industry spotlights where we explored common use cases in Higher Education and Insurance.

Several attendees have shared that these sessions bridge the gap between the technical world of Machine Learning and that of their business, which in turn has helped them to know how to bridge that gap within their own organizations. For technicians, it has helped them to understand how to talk to the business and draw out use cases and help the business adopt solutions. For the business leaders, it’s helped them know what to ask of the data science team or what to look for in building a team. 

Overcoming the Most Common Barriers to AI Adoption (2/25/21)

Because so many organizations are in the early stages of AI Adoption, this is likely the most important topic to CIOs and business leaders in the Data Science series. This session discusses the challenges with people, infrastructure, and data that every organization faces and offers sound advice on how to overcome them.

Is Data Science-as-a-Service Right for your Organization? (5/19/20)

AscendAI, Ironside’s Data Science-as-a-Service, provides many benefits to organizations that are in the early or mid-stages of AI Adoption. Learn more about Ironside’s offering and how it could reduce your time to ROI to as little as 12 weeks.

How Snowflake Breaks the Chains Holding Your Data Science Team Back (9/10/20)

We hosted a number of Technology related secession with Partners such as Snowflake. This session dove a bit deeper than Data Science Best Practices: Feature Stores. Other Technology related sessions include Watson Studio, AWS Sagemaker, and a data enrichment session with Precisely, titled More Data, More Insight: The Value of Data Enrichment for Analytics.

Data Science work requires infrastructure that is scalable, cost-effective, and with easy access to multiple data sources. Snowflake provides this and much more to a data science tech stack. It also integrates easily with other machine learning platforms like DataRobot, AWS, and Azure. Snowflake is particularly valuable for data sharing with external data sources.

Leveraging Data for Predicting Outcomes in Higher Ed (6/30/20)


We hosted an industry-related session sharing how Higher Education is leveraging machine learning in very creative ways; this ended up being one of our top attended sessions for the Take30 series. In this webinar, we reviewed some of the ways that higher ed is using machine learning such as enrollment management, space planning and student retention. We also discussed some of the use cases that are helping universities cope with the challenges and nuance of COVID-19. We also hosted another industry specific session on Insurance.

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As we continue our Take30 with a Data Scientist series, we’ll continue to partner with experts in Machine Learning technology to offer demos and successful solutions as well as strategic sessions for business leaders. We also hope to spotlight some of our clients this year and the exciting AI driven applications we are developing for them in Retail, Insurance, Higher Ed, and Manufacturing. Coming up on May 20th, we will be hosting an industry focus for Banking. 

We’d love to have 1-on-1 conversations to discuss any challenges you may be facing with AI adoption. Please feel free to sign up for a spot with Pam Askar, our Director of Data Science.

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Top 5 BI Expert Sessions of 2020: Part 2 of Take30’s One-Year Anniversary

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Looking back now that we’ve reached the one year anniversary of the Take30, we appreciated the opportunity to share our perspective on a range of Business Intelligence (BI) topics with a wide and diverse audience.  

The topics we covered ranged from the strategic and thought provoking, to the deep technical and “how-to” with a consistent focus on how to improve the analytics experience for you and your user community.

Over the course of the year we hosted 28 sessions focused on BI, most were either focused on a specific technology (Amazon QuickSight, IBM Cognos, Microsoft Power BI or Tableau) or a comparison on how these technologies addressed a capability such as Natural Language Query (NLQ), Embedded Analytics or Cloud BI.

Many of our sessions focused on our heritage as the go-to Cognos experts including deep dives into the modern BI features in Cognos Analytics including Data Modules, Data Sets and Explorations.  In one of our most highly anticipated (and highly attended) sessions, Rachel Su from IBM Offering Management joined Ironside to lead an overview of Cognos Analytics 11.1.7 – a role she reprised last month for Cognos Analytics 11.2).

In a number of other sessions, we explored Tableau new features, touched on many of the enterprise capabilities of Power BI and introduced Amazon QuickSight to our audience. 

Creating a Centralized Metadata Model in Power BI (4/16/20)

In our first session of the Take30 series, we explored the concept of shared datasets in Power BI and offered our point of view that, for many organizations who are maturing their Power BI capabilities, shared datasets mapped well to the “traditional” approaches of centralized (and governed) metadata, yet offered a degree of flexibility for decentralized teams to move at their own pace.  (Checkout this Playlist for Power BI)

Cloud BI: A Comparison of Leading Technologies (6/25/20)

As a majority of organizations see Cloud-based analytics as critical to their current and future analytics strategies, we thought it an opportune moment to take our audience through a review of the leading BI tools we work with on a daily basis.  

We reviewed the benefits of Cloud BI, including serverless and subscription-based licensing, then provided a comparison of vendors including Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, IBM Cognos and Amazon QuickSight.  

Amazon QuickSight – New Features (10/1/20)

While relatively new to the BI marketplace, we were excited to continue our focus on Amazon QuickSight and the significant progress the AWS team is making toward a solid enterprise featureset.  

Since that time, the roadmap and feature releases have become even more aligned to the enterprise reporting use case, especially in consideration of the compelling licensing story and scalable serverless architecture on which it is based.  (you may also want to check out this intro to QuickSight session  Introduction to Amazon QuickSight (5/7/20))

Enterprise Reporting: Assessment, Simplification and Migration (2/18/21)

Lastly, we wanted to address a topic that is of increasing prominence in our day to day conversations with clients – that of enterprise reporting migrations.  

In this session, we provided our point of view on the reasons why organizations migrate from their legacy tools, offered perspectives on approaches to migrations and the important pitfalls and lessons learned when considering such an initiative. 

We touched on tooling and accelerators we’ve developed to help those who have embarked on this journey reach their destination more quickly.

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Throughout 2020, the Take30 webinar series gave our BI Experts a new way to connect with our clients and prospects in what was otherwise a challenging year. We confirmed that our participants are not only interested in diving deep into tool functionality, they are looking for guidance in managing multiple BI tools at enterprise scale, and understanding how cloud BI can enhance their analytics capabilities without breaking enterprise reports and functionality which are critical to their business operation.

Looking forward, we are going to explore those and other questions with you as we continue to share our knowledge and provide a mix of content; from the tactical to the strategic, across all the tools we help our clients with on a daily basis.