Interview with Alexandra Sudilovski, BI expert at AppsFlyer Engineering
Working with a large amount of data leads a company to a problem of making the right decisions on business development and serving clients better.
One of the most difficult points in this process is being able to intelligently analyze large data sets from multiple data sources. During IT Spring 2019, 8th IT business conference dedicated to building great products using best management practices, we will discuss different tools and metrics that help build products based on real customer needs.
The talk ‘From Big Data to Intelligent Insights’ by Alexandra Sudilovski at Product & Data Track will cover the ways to stay focused on operational metrics enabling you to take raw data to actionable information and eventually improve business processes and customer experience. We decided to organize a brief interview with Alexandra before IT Spring 2019 and asked her about her professional way in data analysis, work challenges that she had to accept daily and her vision of BI in product development.
Short Bio
Education: Graduated from Bar Ilan University, Israel with MA degree in Information Science.
Work experience: planning, designing, developing and troubleshooting BI solutions, design and develop ETL processes, configure, deploy and maintain database servers, develop reports and dashboards using various BI tools.
“My job now is to make sure all internal departments have access to all the data that they need for the day to day work, more for — it’s all in one place and they can analyze it”.
What inspired you to become a business intelligence analyst?
About 12 years ago, I worked for a mobile company. They bought another mobile company and started a merging process of the two and I was in charge of the migration processes of technical support departments and their data, so when I started to map all the data and reports that they had, I realized how much power all this information has. I immediately knew that I want to keep doing it.
What is a day packed with data and algorithms like?
It depends, each day could be different, and that’s what I like about this job. It could be full of meetings with a very tight schedule, or a lot of people are coming with questions to get advice, but sometimes it’s calmer — digging in data, writing some code or building reports.
The BI world is overwhelming male in terms of statistics. Do you agree? What makes BI and data mining a not so attractive career traditionally for women?
It’s not just the BI world, but programming and computers professions, in general, are considered more male professions. In the last few years it’s changing, and I hope one day that tradition will attract much more female to this world.
I think that attractive is very subjective. I personally have a lot of passion for BI and I love my job.
What do you find fascinating and challenging about business intelligence?
For me it’s simple — converting a completely meaningful raw data to information and getting insight from it.
The challenging part could be sometimes to translate the business needs to technical action items and to make sure the business users and the developers talk the same language.
What practicalities are you going to talk about at the IT Spring conference?
I’m going to share some practical tips from my experience of how to deal with really huge amounts of data, and many different sources to create the “one source of truth” for your business.
I.T. people typically underestimate Business Intelligence systems as ‘another database’ or some kind of ‘Reporting’. What do you think are the common misconceptions that people have about BI?
I partially agree with it — it could be just ‘another database’ or ‘reporting’, but I think in our data-driven age, the key is to take it to another level and show that information is one of the most powerful tools for any business.
Do you believe the “shift from BI to AI” has happened? Or there isn’t any fundamental difference?
I don’t think we’re there yet. The human brain is one of the most complicated things in the world… It’s hard to imitate it, although there is huge progress in this area.
What are some of the biggest challenges for BIs in the immediate future?
Continue support very large data scale, keep the high performance and keep moving forward with the technology. Also the business side is very important, as it’s changing as it’s growing and the data needs are different, so you have to be in focus on that.
Can you share some of the emerging trends in the BI and analytics market today?
The trend today is to move to a real-time cloud analytics platform and to self-service BI. The rapid growth of the digital world brought very rapid growth in data sizes, which required a new technology that could support such volumes.
In my opinion, from the one side, it’s opened a door to a large variety of open source code based platforms, but on the other hand, it forced a lot of BI specialists to learn and understand Python, Spark, Scala etc., since the known applications do not support large data scale any more.
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Photo credits: personal archive of Alexandra Sudilovski
