Data Driven Solutions

Data Driven Solutions
Looker Dashboard created that leverages integrations with Google, Big Query and ETL pipeline with DBT.

Be Curious, Be Data Driven

Being able to make decisions based on data instills a sense of confidence and soundness in your ability to lead the company and measure outcomes. Early in my career, I had the opportunity to leverage data from our maintenance tracking software, which provided details on 85% of our aircraft fleet regarding upcoming scheduled maintenance. This allowed our marketing team, for the first time, to generate campaigns based on where the customer was in the lifecycle of their product. This experience inspired me to always be curious about what opportunities like this exist at each company I work for. If I hadn't been curious, we would never have leveraged this data.

Before leaving Gulfstream to pursue a career in software development full-time, I helped launch the Gulfstream G650 into service. This ushered in a new era of data availability from the aircraft, including over 10,000 data points that could be transmitted in real-time for Priority 1 (P1) messages, enabling service support to spring into action to address impending problems with the aircraft

This photo was taken over Lake Powell during my time at Gulfstream Aerospace. The G150 was smallest aircraft in the fleet and it was built with our partners at IAI in Tel Aviv, Israel.

From Silos to Data Lakes to the Data Warehouse and setting the stage for AI

Most recently I found myself thrust into a high growth organization that just finished an acquisition that increased our employees from 41 to 200 overnight along with two new lines of businesses including managing 30 business jets for discerning individuals. Our customer data existed in many places and our marketing data did as well. The marketing team updated a spreadsheet once a week and the IT department would use that to feed Microsoft's BI tool for my peers and others to have a weekly dashboard. My goal was to eliminate those manual processes initially and then continue to set the stage for a Customer Data Platform.

Bringing data from systems that recognized the revenue together with marketing and customer interaction data for the first time was transformative for decision making that we could leverage as a leadership team. Initially I needed to use some off the shelf tools to get data from our CRM however ran into limitations because of the amount of custom fields we used.

I discovered a wonderful community at Meltano with over 600 connectors I could leverage to pull data from various sources across our enterprise. They did not have a connector for SugarCRM unfortunately however, I was able to follow the documentation and within a few days have a working "tap" that allowed me to pull data from Sugar CRM.

I found another amazing tool, called DBT and was able to leverage my experience writing SQL to transform my data into materialized views in Big Query to leverage the speed efficiency with Looker/BigQuery being used together. Up to this point I only new ETL, but discovered ELT. DBT allowed me to create workflows essentially to by loading my data directly into BigQuery in the raw format and then transforming it and loading back into a new table in BigQuery. This was ELT to ETL.

Key Technologies I use for Data Driven Decisions

  • BigQuery, Redhat, Snowflake,Athena, Postgres, DuckDB
  • Looker, Microsoft BI, Amazon Quick Sight
  • DBT, SQL, Python
  • Meltano
  • Excel of course!
  • Easy Data Transform (Amazing tool for quick analysis)