At Northwest Data Consulting we provide consulting services focused on data analytics, engineering, AI, and machine learning in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

Make the most of your data

Let’s be realistic: getting the most out of your data can be difficult. These days, even many small companies are dealing with volumes that would have been considered ‘big data’ just a few years ago. And it’s not just the volume of data which is proliferating, but the number of sources as well. You might have data for your application, HR, finance, customers, sales, project management, and more. The average small company (fewer than 500 employees) has 172 applications in their tech stack, spends $7.9m/year on tech, and adds 4.4 new applications per month. And if you’re a tech company, the data picture is even more complicated, because you’re probably using even more tools. Every time you add an application, the picture gets more complex because each one of those apps might require interfacing or integration with several others, so complexity grows non-linearly with the number of applications in your stack.

There are a number of reasons why research shows that most companies are not using data the right way. We’ve reached an inflection point where the enormous and rapidly growing number of tools available for working with your data can easily be a liability for companies that cannot properly navigate the data space. Every day we read stories of businesses that are achieving big wins with their cloud deployment, automation, AI, and so on. But for every one of these companies that have found a formula for transforming their business, many more are struggling to find the right formula for success, and that struggle is costly.

Sometimes you do need new and/or better tools (though newer isn’t always better). I’m continually astonished at the number of companies that conduct their analytics as if they were still operating in 2010 or 2000 (I’m not joking), blissfully (or more like agonizingly) unaware of those better tools which could dramatically improve their analytics operations. There are more companies who are aware that they need better tools, but struggle with the decision of which tools, in which combination, will work best for them. Even when they have identified their ideal stack, yet more companies have difficulty organizing their team efforts to make best use of those tools. The most important solutions are not always technical, or at least not primarily so. Sometimes those solutions are cultural and organizational. You can have the best individual team members, and the best tech stack, but if that team isn’t organized properly, you will still fall short in getting that critical insight that is so important to the success of your business.

Are you overwhelmed with data? Let us help you find the right technical and organization formula to make your data operations fire on all cylinders. Schedule a consultation with me on Square to get started with your data-driven transformation. Initial consultations are free.

Added Reading Section

Guy Cutting published on 2023-09-29

I have added a Reading section, beginning with a Papers sub-section with important AI / ML / data science / systems science papers. I will be gradually accumulating material here (books, papers, articles) as I go along.

Github Data Science Portfolio

Guy Cutting published on 2023-09-21 included in Portfolio

I’m beginning to post my data science portfolio on GitHub. Here’s the link: Data Science Project Portfolio I have a long list of projects accumulated over the years, and it’s time to make them more visible to the world. As both a creative and a data professional, working with data can be frustrating because it’s often hard to publish your work. Most of the time the data is proprietary, and companies are generally reluctant for their employees and consultants to publish either the data or the code used to analyze it (especially if new models and methods have been developed).

Is the Data Warehouse Dead?

Guy Cutting published on 2023-08-01 included in Data Architecture

Data Warehouses Are A Bad Investment For Most Companies In this article, Part 1 in a series on The Evolution Of Data Architectures, we’ll take a look at the data warehouse. Data warehouses have been around for decades, but in the last decade or so they have achieved widespread adoption across all industries, as cloud-based platforms like AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake have become available. Tens of thousands of companies use some form of a data warehouse architecture, and while there are newer architectures like the data lake and lakehouse (more on this in the rest of the series), and that isn’t going to change overnight.

Databricks Resources for Practicioners, Managers, and Decision-makers

Guy Cutting published on 2023-07-31 included in Data Architecture

Why DataBricks? There’s a lot to like about DataBricks, a platform that has taken the data world by storm in the last several years. One of the many things that I like about DataBricks is all the valuable product and training information they offer, information that often goes beyond the DataBricks products themselves and extends to Spark and the underlying technologies. DataBricks was founded by some of the creators of the Apache Spark project, which is one of the foundational tools in the data engineering / science / analytics space, so their training material focuses heavily on Spark since the two products are tied so closely together.

Chat AI Prompt Engineering - Part 1 (Intro and Spark Example)

Guy Cutting published on 2023-07-25 included in In Practice

This post is hopefully the first in a series on the topic of prompt engineering, which has become of topic of heavy discussion with the explosion of ChatGPT, Bard, and other (generally GPT-based) chat bots onto the AI scene. GPT Models Available ChatGPT has received most of the attention in the GPT space, but it’s certainly not the only competitor. I’d like to take a moment to discuss Google Bard, which has not received nearly the kind of press attention that ChatGPT has, but which should certainly be considered a worthy competitor.

Company Slack Channel

Guy Cutting published on 2023-07-24 included in News

The Northwest Data Consulting Slack channel is now active! Anyone is welcome to pop in and say hello. You should be able to join with this link: Join the Northwest Data Consulting Slack Channel Feel free to drop in if you have questions about data or want to schedule a more formal conversation, or if you just want to say hello.