For lots of us our career paths or paths in life for that matter, are not straight forward. They are full of fork in the road moments, revelations, regrets and sometimes indecision. My path to data analytics, business intelligence and data science was a combination of  my time as an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee leading the Psycho-Social Lab and my time working for a Child and Family Wellbeing agency doing social work.

I realized how important business intelligence could be to other industries that are not revenue driven such social work as well as looking at the analytics involved in the services and outcomes. Yes, it was a non-profit, a government program not impacted by sales but by services, but these were real problems in people’s lives that had an underlined opportunity to be impacted by analytics.  And unlike industries like insurance, banking and supply chains, the impact I believed data science could have on how people who became involved these programs, (whether voluntarily or involuntarily) and received services could have a real sustained impact.

Before going to grad school, I waxed and waned over what is now a deep held conviction and belief about analytics’ ability to impact policy and people. Could it effect real change in policies, small or large? In the end, I obviously decided to go for it and have never looked back. I have spent time using various tools from ETL, surveys, interviews, statistical modeling and many others to drive strategy and policy change in the last 7 years. I firmly believe to effect real change, disruption must happen on a micro, meso and macro level. I believe that tomorrow’s analyst will always need to consider other factors outside the ones he or she is accustomed to in order to have disruptive change. At Black Orchid we consider geographical, social and political factors just as much as we do demographics and what I call the typical data science cluster. Tomorrow’s analyst is looking to affect positive change in the world through revelations from data. Black Orchid is the home to do it.