Managing Guerrilla Analytics Teams: Principles and Practice

With data playing an ever-increasing role in the way our world works, data analytics professionals are under pressure to delivery data-driven solutions in shorter timeframes. In-house BI teams support internal clients across the organization with diverse demands. Data journalism analyses diverse data sources to drive and support news stories with daily publication deadlines. Forensic and financial services remediation projects process growing volumes of data under regulatory, legal and media scrutiny. Timelines are tight and client requirements are changing. Outputs may be subject to audit with an expectation of reproducibility. These 'guerrilla analytics' projects necessitate a versatile analytics team that can achieve quick wins against a large data challenge using whatever tools and data sources are available to them.

In this talk you will learn about:

Challenges and data and scenarios encountered in fast-paced analytics projects
The key Principles of Agile Analytics Development that address these challenges
Project structures and processes that support agile analytics development by the principles
Supporting case studies where the principles have been successful applied

Enda Ridge is a data analytics consultant who works with clients in fast paced environments, leading agile data analytics teams in providing auditable insights from diverse sources of enterprise data. Enda has worked in boutique and Big 4 consultancies for clients in the US, UK and Africa. His work has provided analytics to drive fraud investigations in large bankruptcies, management information to aid a government's remediation and data mining and integration for a bank's mis-selling of derivatives. He has also worked on training social network analysis data mining tools and integrating them into client systems in banking and insurance. Enda has a PhD from the University of York in the modelling and analysis of algorithm parameter tuning and performance. He is an internationally published author and has spoken at and organised international conferences. His current research interests include fuzzy matching techniques and the development of the principles and tools to support agile data analytics development.

Edward Curry investigates the impact and adoption trends of emerging technologies within industry. He is a Research Scientist at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), one of the leading international web science research organizations. His projects include studies of enterprise linked data, community-based data curation, energy data management, semantic data analytics, and semantic search. Edward has worked extensively with industry and government advising on the adoption patterns, practicalities, and benefits of new technologies. Edward has a PhD from the National University of Ireland, Galway, has published journal and book articles and has spoken at and organised international conferences and workshops. He was invited to speak at the 2010 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium to an audience of more than 600 CIOs and senior IT executives on the topic of Enterprise 3.0.