Category: podcast

Episode 8 of my  podcast series, The BaDFun Podcast, is now live. Turning our attention to financial services, the title of this episode is “Changing Everything Without Breaking Anything, with Ken Chou”. Here’s the blurb:

“Welcome to Episode 8 of the BaDFun podcast. This week our guest is Ken Chou, a senior technology executive who began his career on the academic side, with a Ph.D. in digital signal processing from MIT, then was drawn to industry, where his roles included CTO for an internal startup within the global finserv giant Wells Fargo. Ken shared key takeaways from decades of technology innovation and leadership, including

• How selecting the right architecture, oriented around loose coupling, can enable some technology functions to innovate quickly even though others need to change more slowly;
• Why trust is the product in banking, and how that drives data classification, data quality, security, privacy, and the regulatory environment; and,
• How both commercial and regulatory incentives drive  banks to innovate.”

Please check it out and let me know what you think. And subscribe if you want to hear more.

Episode 6 of my  podcast series, The BaDFun Podcast, is now live. Changing the focus to  Enterprise-scale organizations, the title of this episode is “An agile approach to kick-starting data transformations, with Aaron Reich”. Here’s the blurb:

“Our guest for episode 6 of the BaDFun podcast is Aaron Reich, global lead for emerging technology at the global technology consulting firm Avanade. Tasked with guiding Avanade’s research and development 3-5 years into the future, while drawing from lessons learned by many of the largest companies in the world, Aaron is uniquely placed to understand the challenges Enterprises face when attempting to bring data solutions into production.”

“Aaron talks about stages of organizational readiness, overcoming the inertia of existing culture and methods, and an agile approach to kickstarting internal data platforms. He shares inspiring stories of spectacular early stage client successes on their roads to data transformation. He also dives deep into ongoing business and academic efforts to develop voluntary data ethics standards, and, gives us an overview of the principles and structures Avanade is developing as part of its own internal data ethics initiative.”

Please check it out and let me know what you think. And subscribe if you want to hear more.

Episode 5 of my podcast series, The BaDFun Podcast, is now live. This time we focus on how business can use data to improve their customer connections. The title is “Finding the right business problems to solve using data, with Alex Brooks”. Here’s the blurb:

“In episode 5 of the BaDFun podcast we speak with Alex Brooks. Alex is founder, leader, and rainmaker at Entreprov, a Seattle-based team of two engineers, a data scientist and a back end developer who are using data to efficiently solve the kinds of problems many small to medium sized businesses are facing, like customer segmentation tools for marketing and engagement.”

“Alex speaks about the hurdle businesses face in finding not only the right mix of technology to solve business problems, but in finding the right mix of business problems to solve, while avoiding investing in products or services that are just passing fads—unless of course the plan is to cash-out after a trend dies.”

“We talk with Alex about the minimum quantity and quality of data necessary to deliver a solution like a recommendation engine for retailers, and the expertise gap many businesses are confronted with when the opportunity for using data and AI first arises. We also talk about why businesses should start now having a conversation with their customers about privacy and ethics, including what data they’re collecting, and what they plan to do with it, in order to set reasonable boundaries for customer data, “give the customer room”, and avoid creeping customers out.”

Please check it out and let me know what you think. And subscribe if you want to hear more.

Episode 4 of my podcast series, The BaDFun Podcast, is now live. Moving to the entrepreneurial end of the spectrum this time, the title is “Democratizing Property Buying on a Startup Budget, with Ricardo Barrera”. Here’s the blurb:

“Our guest this week is startup founder Ricardo Barrera, a former Microsoft manager and experienced data scientist who at one time was responsible for optimizing the exabyte-scale data backbone of the world’s largest technology company. Now Ricardo is trying to democratize the way that real estate is purchased by automating many aspects of the property evaluation process. His approach raises the bar on traditional real estate valuation techniques by combining typical real estate data with photography and proprietary models that reveal explainable insights about properties, thereby enabling potential purchasers to make their own educated decisions, without relying on brokers.”

“During the course of our conversation Ricardo focuses on the challenges of creating a data-first direct-to-consumer business on a startup budget, including data access and quality issues, building a minimum viable team, rapidly prototyping potential products, and how to build trust in data models.”

Please check it out and let me know what you think. And subscribe if you want to hear more.

Episode 2 of my new podcast series, The BaDFun Podcast, is now live. The title is “Transforming to a Data-Centric Culture, with Rebecca Goehner”. Here’s the blurb:

“This week our guest is Rebecca Goehner, a management consultant in the Pacific Northwest, with degrees in neuroscience and economics, who focuses on strategic development. Rebecca speaks about how native processes develop and grow within organizations, and how data can be used to augment and change the direction of these processes to make them more efficient and effective. She dives into details with an example of how data can be used to simplify and accelerate sales pipelines across all sales channels. She advocates for starting small and moving one step at a time, and for the power of a growth mindset. A recurring theme is the importance of educating leadership about data’s potential to drive innovation, not only by adding net-new processes but by improving established processes as well.”

Please check it out and let me know what you think. And subscribe if you want to hear more.

I started a new podcast! My co-host, the talented Ben Rogojan, and I are interviewing people who are figuring out how to use data in business, so that we can share what they are learning.

Here’s the official description:

“The BaDFun “Business and Data Fundamentals” podcast is hosted by Ben Rogojan, a data guy focused on business, and Bruce Wilson, a business guy focused on data. In each episode we interview someone making data actionable in their organization, getting an inside look at some of the strategies, successes, and false starts of working with data in business. Our goal is to discover and share the steps organizations are taking to use data more effectively in analytics, operations, products, and services, ranging across finance, retail, manufacturing, technology, healthcare, agriculture, the public sector, and beyond.”

Episode 1 is live now, featuring my friend Joe Heck (a serial entrepreneur who is now a Director at EMC because they bought his startup)—check it out. And subscribe if you like the concept.