This is a replay of an episode from the Make Sense podcast with Lindsay Tabas. In the 1990s, large enterprises typically bought software in a tops-down approach. IT teams would get get Oracle software or Microsoft Office and get their entire organization to use the software. Since these tools are the default IT “blessed” tools, people start putting…

When you’re organization is small, a centralized data team can take care of all the internal data tooling, reporting, and requests for all departments. As the team grows from 100 to thousands of people, a centralized data team simply cannot handle the number of requests and doesn’t have the domain knowledge of all the departments. Jean-Mathieu Sapo…

This is a replay of an episode from the Citizen Development Live podcast with Neil Miller. Citizen development is a relatively new term I learned about a year ago or so. To me, it’s using no-code tools at scale within a large enterprise. It’s a term that covers the population of people who are not developers, programmers, and software engineers by …

I wasn’t sure if this topic should be it’s own episode but it’s been on my mind ever since I came back from Atlassian Team ’24 (Atlassian’s annual conference). At the conference, I had the opportunity to meet with a few people who are just as interested in spreadsheets as I am. We talked specifically how Jira can best work with spreadsheets (Excel …

With an undergraduate degree in zoology and a master’s in public health, you wouldn’t expect Amanda Makulec to lead a successful career in data analytics and data visualization. As we’ve seen with multiple guests on the podcast, the path to a career in data analytics is windy and unexpected. It was the intersection of public health and data visuali…

Sometimes pop culture and data analysis meet and the result is something interesting, thought-provoking, and of course controversial. How can one use data to prove definitely which Taylor Swift songs are the most underrated? Isn’t this a question for your heart to answer? Andrew Firriolo sought to answer this question over the last few months and t…

We sometimes forget that a large organization is composed of groups and divisions. Within these groups, there are teams and individuals looking to advance their careers. Sometimes at the expense of others. When your advancement depends on the success of your project, the benefits of that project to your company may be suspect and the tools you use …

When you think of data journalism, you might think of The New York Times’ nifty data visualizations and the Times’ embrace of data literacy for all their journalists. Outside of The New York Times, I haven’t met anyone who does data journalism and data storytelling full-time until I spoke with Ben Wylie. Ben is the lead financial journalist at a fi…

There are only so many ways to make Excel “fun.” If you’ve been following this blog/podcast, stories about the financial modeling competition and spreadsheet errors that lead to catastrophic financial loss are stories that make a 1980s tool somewhat interesting to read and listen to. There are numerous tutorials and TikTok influencers who teach Exc…

One of the more popular courses you could take at my college to fulfill the finance major requirements was Behavioral Finance. The main “textbook” was Inefficient Markets and we learned about how there are qualitative ways to value a security beyond what the efficient market hypothesis purports. During the financial crisis of 2008, psychology profe…

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