Today, we’re excited to welcome the dynamic duo from Cisco, Kevin Taylor and Gregory Lewandowski, to discuss the topic of data visualization communities. Kevin spent 15 years working with business intelligence and now specializes in most of the major Enterprise BI tools and packages. Gregory has worked for Cisco for 15 years, and he is the (now former) Senior Manager of their Analytics Center of Excellence. Like Kevin, Gregory’s career has been focused on the business intelligence and analytics field.
We invited Gregory and Kevin to the Analytics on Fire podcast to share a fascinating story about data visualization and the community that they’ve created around it. The duo share the details of the process of building and growing Cisco’s very own internal data visualization community, as well as the successes and challenges they’ve encountered on their journey.
We also discuss how Kevin and Gregory’s community, a one-stop shop for gaining foundation in what people do with business intelligence and data visualization, has impacted Cisco and the effect that it had on the credibility of their Analytics Center of Excellence. If you ever thought of building a BI community for your organization, you’re in for a treat! Listen in for some game-changing tips that are sure to help you get started with your journey of creating a highly-successful community!
In this episode, you'll learn:
-
The importance of data visualization and what led to creating their community.
- How their data visualization community is structured and the types of media that it hosts.
- How to keep a data visualization community fresh and attractive to people.
- How to promote and grow that community.
- How Kevin and Gregory’s community is currently helping Cisco and it’s Analytics Center of Excellence.
- Kevin and Gregory’s goals for the future of the community.
- The hurdles they overcame to build the community and the lessons they learned along the way.
- How long it took them to reach “critical mass.”
- Kevin and Gregory’s tips for creating your own community.
- And much more!
Links and Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Connect with Kevin: Twitter | LinkedIn
- Connect with Gregory: Twitter | LinkedIn
- Hashtags to follow: #dataviz, #datavisualization, #visualization
- Cisco
- Cisco WebEx Social
- Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger
- Stephen Few
- Functional Art by Alberto Cairo
- Ben Jones
- Andy Kriebel
- Tableau blog
- Lee Feinberg
- Edward Tufte
- Paper.li - DataViz
Enjoyed the Show?
- Don't miss an episode, subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher or RSS.
- Also, reviews on iTunes are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! We read each and every one of them!
- Join the conversation by leaving a comment below!
