Gilligan on Data by Tim Wilson

I’ve been working in the world of data since 2001, starting out in web analytics, which remains the type of data about which I’m most interested, but broadening out to business intelligence and data warehousing. I am currently Director, Measurement and Analytics at Resource Interactive.  This blog has thoughts, musings, and, hopefully, not too many redundancies on the world of business data. If you missed the irony in the previous sentence, you may struggle with my writing style. Read on for more…

My Background

If you want my resume, my LinkedIn profile is the best place to go. If you’d prefer a slightly more colorful prose narrative, read on!

I attended a high-powered engineering school…and got a degree in Art and Design in the early 1990s. It was an architecture degree, actually, but the school did not / could not call it such due to the fact that it was a four-year school, and the American Institute of Architects required accredited schools to make their Bachelor’s programs five-year deals. Or, at least, that’s the story as we understood it. As it is, I am part of a very small group that has a Bachelor of Science…in Art (and Design)!

Architecture appealed to me because I though it would be a good way to combine both my technical snap with my creative side. I realized half-way through the program that I’m not all that creative! Design-wise, at least. But, I stuck it out, and even got a couple of jobs in the field after I graduated. This allowed me to play with LANs, CAD, and the Internet (a relatively new deal mainstream-wise) — confirming that I was indeed fairly technical. And also confirming that I have very little actual creative design skill.

I jumped from architecture to technical writing, landing at a company that allowed me to do both classic technical writing in the form of printed product documentation, as well as some marketing work, including learning the basics of HTML and designing, developing, and maintaining the corporate web site (heavy, heavy, heavy brochureware that was hideous even for the standards of 1996-97). After a couple of years there, I moved to a larger company — National Instruments — as a technical writer. National Instruments provided me my “real” education in many ways. While a technical writer — both online and print documentation — I got to do a teensy bit of software development, and I got to quadruple my HTML knowledge by getting involved with the company’s intranet.

By then, I’d learned enough about how to organize content to make it valuable to a target audience that I wound up moving into a newly created role to oversee the intranet for the Engineering/R&D department at the company. In that role, which I was in for less than a year, I also got pulled into metrics reporting for the organization (mind-numbing data sucking), as well as more IT-like development by getting down and dirty with Lotus Notes (<shudder>).

A position opened up to jump over into Marketing. But, Marketing in a fairly technical way. National Instruments was in the early days of rolling out an online community, which has continued to flourish since. The company really got it right, in that they focussed on providing deep, valuable content to their audience from the get-go, and my role was to help get that content out on the web. At the same time I was in that role, I was pursuing an MBA at The University of Texas at Austin, which I completed in 2002.

Since the community area of the site was starting to really take off, and since the content management system (CMS) we were using was a set of 7 Lotus Notes database duct-taped together in a tenuous way, I got tasked with driving an initiative to find and deploy a CMS for the entire site. This was a great project! I, unfortunately, was only on it through requirements gathering, development of the RFP, and the first round of actual vendor selection. That project turned into a multi-year deal — still going on in some ways today — but I like to think that my upfront work helped lay a solid foundation for what has been done with great success ever since.

At that time, I also took on business ownership of our web analytics tool — NetGenesis. NetGenesis was a leading platform when we had initially purchased it, but, for a variety of reasons, it was already dying (and is now effectively dead). That was my entry into web analytics, which wasn’t a bad way to learn.

Due to some personnel shifts a year or so later, I moved into more of a marketing communications role by moving to manage the Web Content Group. This group was, effectively, a small team of account managers for our internal web design agency. My team sat between product marketing managers and other groups who needed content up on the web site, and our internal design and development group. We scoped and managed those projects, and we were super-users of many of the myriad CMSs that were in place. To be clear, we were a tiny part of the overall web team — we were end-users and stakeholders for many of the actual system development projects that went on.

This was the most miserable 18 months in my career, if truth be told. But, it didn’t kill me, and it was a helluva education. The problem was that I’d gotten closer to the creative side of things, and I’d gotten farther away from the technical side of things. I had an awesome team, and we did some great stuff, but I was thrilled when the opportunity opened up for me to move into Business Intelligence. The reasoning was that I needed to move my web analytics responsibilities to that group, and the group had a Reporting Manager position open. I jumped at it, without realizing to what extent I would enjoy the work.

After 1.5 years as the Reporting Manager — and a fire hydrant-like education in data warehousing, Oracle CRM, BI tools, and data management (while also finally getting us off of NetGenesis and on to WebTrends) — I moved into the BI Manager role. And continued to have fun. I still spent a chunk of time on web analytics, and still enjoyed that immensely. But, by then, I had formed some pretty strong opinions about good data usage and bad data usage.

The only reason I left that job, and the company, was for personal reasons — my wife and I decided we’d like to relocate from Austin to be closer to her family in Ohio. That’s me in a nutshell!