Alexis
Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Talk Tech with Data Dave. I am Alexis and well, today I’m not here with Data Dave because this is another summer Talk Tech Takeover. All summer long, we’re giving Dave a little bit of extra rest and relaxation, and frankly, time to do his real job. And I’m bringing in some experts to answer some of our listener questions.
So, today I have with me, Earin. You guys have seen her before on the pod. She talked to us about Master Data Management once before, but I brought her in to answer a question that’s very near and dear to me. But before we get there, I want to introduce Earin.
Hi Earin. Hello. Welcome to the podcast again.
Earin Persson
Thank you, Alexis. Great to be back.
Alexis
So, I said it before, let me say it again. Earin is the Director of our Data Engineering team. She’s also like our number one salesperson. She’s also the queen of everything. I don’t know. Earin, tell the listeners, talk to us a little bit about what you do, how you roll.
Earin Persson
Oh, I tell Dave all the time I’m the gap filler. I just go back, clean the toilets, clean showers, make sure things happen, whatever is needed just to keep the business running. But yeah, I’ve been in data space several decades now, so we’ll just keep the number to myself.
Been really in professional services my whole career. So I haven’t worked with a lot of product companies, but I’ve been on the professional services side, delivering services consulting to a variety of different industries, domestic, international, small, big, you name it. And just happy to be here and talk about data.
Alexis
Today, we’re not super going to talk about data, because, like I said, we’ve got a question that’s really near and dear to me. Mostly because it came from my mom. And it’s really easy for me to do an impression of my mom because I sound just like her.
Without fail, every time I see her – we live like maybe 100 miles apart, so I only see her once a month, every other month or so – every time I see her, she’s like, “Honey, what does D3Clarity do again?”
And so, every month I try to explain it to her, and every month I fail just because, like, I don’t really have the right language to use to explain it to her, especially in a way that she understands. To give you some context, Earin, my mother is a retired respiratory therapist. She lives in the back hills of West Virginia, and she is a loving and wonderful woman who sounds a lot like me, who raised a fabulous daughter. But every time I use the words “cloud migration” or “data analytics”, she’s like, “Ummmmmmm…”
So, I decided I would ask the question on the pod, and I felt like you were a good person to ask it to because you could bring it down to a level that hopefully anybody who listens to the podcast can understand. So, here’s the question again, and I’m going to call you Honey. “Honey, what does D3Clarity do again?”
So let us know, fill it in.
Earin Persson
I get this question from my parents, my friends and family. In a nutshell, really at D3Clarity, we are not a product company. We are purely consulting professional services company. We go in to try to help customers make a solution for any problem they’re having that centers around data. So, it doesn’t matter what your problem is. If it centers around data, we can probably assist you.
I typically try to explain this to my parents and stuff with stories or examples because they’re not going to understand all the different technologies and stuff, and nor should they. So, if we think about a bakery, right, we started a bakery. We’ve got one cash register, one recipe book, and one customer list. Life is good. We’ve got our bakery. We’re starting up, okay, now fast forward. We are expanded. We’re online. We’ve got multiple suppliers, distributors, customer list owners, all that kind of stuff. If you look at what we do, they’ve got data all over the place now.
They’ve got spreadsheets, applications, emails, online systems, all this kind of stuff. They’ve got multiple people, whether it’s customers, suppliers, distributors, whatever, that they’ve got to integrate. They’ve got platforms. Where does all this stuff live? Does it live in my PC, my laptop here? Is it on this mystical thing called the cloud? I hear about AI, but does that help them? Anything?
So really, I’ve got this bakery now that’s grown and is a great problem to have. That’s where we come in. Because every engagement we do starts with the data. What is the answer to the question you’re asking usually starts somewhere in the world of data. If we’re going back with our bakery – okay, let’s try to wrangle this in. So, you know, is Katherine P the person who put an order in for glazed donuts the same one who walked into the store that’s called Katherine Persson- which happens to be my mom since, we’re talking about moms. I don’t know.
Alexis
Shout out to Earin’s mom.
Earin Persson
Yes, that’s my shameless plug.
So, we look at what is our definition of a customer? Is it somebody who bought something? Do they have to buy? What if they just called and wanted to know how much my prices are for making some fancy wedding cake? That’s where we start. And you can ask those questions all over the place.
Okay, well, I have data. It’s all over the place. How do I get it from A to B?
We’ve got mechanisms in there as D3Clarity. I might partner with a product companies to help me do that. But basically, I need to know where’s my data, what data do I have and how do they map. So, I literally just got off a call with someone, and we’re talking about “shipment date”. What’s “shipment date”? Is it the day something leaves my office? Is it the day something leaves the post office?
If I’m global or international, is it going through customs? By the way, in system A, I call it “shipment date”. In system C, I call it “ship date”. Are those the same? Don’t know.
So that’s kind of where we come in to do… it’s really forensics if you think about it. There’s a lot of research getting involved, explaining it to the customer, walking it through, sometimes they ask questions, they just don’t have the data to support it. That can be an issue in itself.
Alexis
Yeah.
Earin Persson
If I start looking at what rules- go back to our bakery. If I have a customer, should every customer give me his phone number? Okay, if that’s something we want to implement again, we can do some automation, or we can put in some processes, like governance, to kind of help you enforce that so, that the person taking the order always asks you for your phone number. Or ordering online? That’s a mandatory field. Right? There’s ways we can do it, but it’s still about consulting. It’s not about the tools because the tools will help you show what you want to do. But it’s really about consulting on that data and getting that insight from it. So, we try to make all this messy data stuff really useful and interactive.
And then by the way, if you want to make it secure, we can help you. If it’s on the cloud, we can absolutely implement whatever you want on the cloud. Make it secure, put monitoring around it so you have alerts, and then help you build out and go with whatever else you want to do. Does that help explain it?
Alexis
Yeah. So, everything starts with the data, i.e. Data Dave, i.e. data being one of our three Ds of D3Clarity.
So, everything starts there. We had a takeover episode with Sergio a couple of weeks ago. And even then, when we were talking specifically about Amazon Connect, he said one of the reasons we do Connect so well is because we are a consulting company that knows how to work with data. And at the end of the day, like, Connect works better when you have the data behind it. And so having a consultancy company that has, like, that mindset for data is really the place to start.
All right. Everything starts with the data. And then we are a professional services, a consulting company. I’m trying to think of an easy way to explain that as well.
Earin Persson
So we’re not products. We are consultants. Like, counselors help you with your problems. Bartenders listen to your problems, we get your questions, what are you trying to solve? And then we will go and attempt to solve that based on the data you have.
Alexis
There you go. Reference a bartender. That was the way to do it. There we go.
Okay. So we’re kind of like bartenders. We listen to your problems, and then we help you solve them. Very good. Okay. And so that’s mostly what we’re focused on. That’s kind of how we do it. And then our focus is around data. Things that can happen on the cloud, things that can happen with AI, and then how we can map all those things together. Right?
Earin Persson
Right, and they don’t all have to be in the same realm. It may be a slice of any one of those three that we’re doing at any one time.
Alexis
So, can you give me an example, and again, let’s keep it at a lower level, but can you give me an example, if you’ve got one on your head, of where we mixed all three of those together for one of our clients?
Earin Persson
Sure. Let’s say there’s a large rental car business.
Alexis
Okay.
Earin Persson
It’s rental cars. Righ?. So as a consumer, you and I, we go online, we book whatever we want to do. What size car, the rate we want, the time. Yeah. All that kind of stuff that goes into the system for the rental car place. They’ve got to make sure their inventory is good, the car is clean, if you’re a nonsmoker, all that kind of stuff, and have it ready, you pick it up, all of that. It started with data.
We help them centralize a lot of their data aspects of their car. What is a car? What goes into it? All of that kind of stuff around the rental agreement. Okay, they wanted it hosted on the cloud; not a problem. They happen to have a cloud, but we put it in their cloud, and we manage it. And when I say manage it, that means if something goes wrong, [like] you run out of space. You were just talking about your computer blue screen. Well, that happens with servers too, right? So, if something crashes, if a process gets hung up- think of it like your email queue. If it gets backed up and it’s to a certain threshold, we can put monitoring on that. So, it’s all about managing, monitoring, alerting. So, we did that on the cloud for this rental company with the data problem they’re trying to solve, and then we put enforcements and processes behind it so that they know how to maintain it going forward.
Alexis
So, it was definitely the marriage of helping them understand their data, work with their data, but then also making sure that they were able to manage it and work with it on the cloud in a safe and secure manner.
Earin Persson
Yes. Because at the end of the day, all they care about is that they have a customer paying for a car. So that’s data, that’s a customer, that’s car, and everything in between. How it happens? They have very strict processes because you want to have it secure and all that. But that’s how we married everything together. Because the end user, you and I, shouldn’t have to know all that.
Alexis
Right. And I don’t think my mom wants to know all that either, which is why I always, like, I try to answer the question and then I always end it with, “But I don’t do any of that. I host a podcast.”
I also do some other things, but, like, that’s always my running joke with my family. I’m like, “Oh, I don’t do any of that stuff. There’s really smart people to handle that stuff. I’m good.”
Earin Persson
Yeah. Little do they know that you run a whole operations division. So, you keep us running.
Alexis
They’re fine. They’re fine.
But you’re right, as an end user, like, I don’t need to know all the little intricacies. And even to some extent, like, it’s probably kind of nice for that rental car company to be like, “Here, experts. You guys handle that.” And it sounds like. And I know it because I know what client you’re talking about. I know what contract we’re on with them. But we talked to Preston a couple weeks ago and answered the question, “What is staff augmentation?” And it sounds like the situation that you’re describing. We also did a staff augmentation contract with them where we were the experts in the situation. And so, we came in and we were the experts for them to help them. And we worked through their problems, and we became part of their support staff.
Earin Persson
So, it is. I mean, if we’re talking about pure commercial services. So, by the definition of staff augmentation is really, we’re augmenting an organization staff with expertise or with availability because they may have the expertise, but they literally don’t have the time to take on anything new because they’ve got their day job to do, or vice versa. They want to take on something new and they need somebody else to take takeover. So, it’s really just augmenting without deliverables, without worrying about any of that. On some other projects, this is what we’re doing. We have to deliver these five things in these three months. And it’s not a staff aug. It’s going there. It’s almost like a higher gun. You go in there, get it done, get it out.
Alexis
Yeah. We do a lot of different contract versions of that, but there’s sometimes, and I think about a customer that I know you deal with a lot. We do a nice blend of both very specific, deliverable, driven project work and a little bit of staff augmentation here and a little bit of staff augmentation there. And so, for us, mom, it’s easily a little bit of everything in the consulting world.
Earin Persson
Yeah. However you want to hire us, we can make it happen.
Alexis
Yeah.
Earin Persson
And we have the skills to go up or down on that flex model and deliver a very successful solution to whatever your question is.
Alexis
And as far as, like, excellent projects are concerned, that were kind of the blends of the different aspects of things that we do, the different aspects of the type of services that we sell. Any other good examples that you want to share with the listeners or that would be helpful for my mom to help her understand the organization before we end the podcast?
Earin Persson
I mean, there are lots of examples. It really just goes back to questions. What do you want to know?
And we’ve had some very serious questions. If you think about economic security, terrorists. We’ve done stuff with the child trafficking, human trafficking. Right? So, there’s some serious stuff. But then there’s also the comical questions. And again, it’s all data. It’s, “Hey, I am a CEO of this major corporation that happens to do kitchen and bathroom works. I want to send a Christmas card to my top 25 customers.” Okay, great. That takes five months to get pulled together, because it depends on who you ask. It’s almost like asking your mom, “Who’s your favorite child?” Right.
What day are you talking about? What rules are we talking about? My favorite son? My favorite daughter? In this case, are we talking about my favorite customers that buy bathroom versus kitchen versus home appliances? So, it’s really kind of looking at that, and it changes every day by every customer, by every question that gets asked. And so, it’s really just starting with the question and going into data to find out what happens. And some of that can be very entertaining, and lots of negotiations happen, and some of it’s pretty serious and impacts the world we live in.
Alexis
Dave has used that example before on the pod, and it makes me laugh every time I think about it, because the data was so different from all of their different segments in that organization. The way they were tracking it was so different. They couldn’t figure out who their top customer was because there was no way for them to compare apples to oranges.
Earin Persson
Exactly.
Alexis
And so that’s why it took five months to get their Christmas card list together.
Earin Persson
Yeah. So it’s kind of goes back to my shipment date. Right? Am I talking? What am I talking about here? And it just….
Consulting is always fun because you never know what you’re gonna get. But at the end of the day, there’s always a solution. It may just involve a process, sometimes technology, and sometimes just thinking out of the box. And how about we go out this way?
Alexis
Yeah.
Earin Persson
And then I hear. I was in a conference last year. We partner with DATAVERSITY, as you know, and we have lots of conferences. One of the things they always stress is that it really helps organizations to have an outside person come in, and if that person has an accent, they will almost 90% of the time go with the person who has an accent. I was like, since Data Dave has been on your podcast, we have one of those.
So we check that box.
Alexis
I always forget that Dave has an accent. I never even think about him anymore. I’m just like, oh, yeah, it’s Dave.
Earin Persson
Yes, yes. As he says, it’s very East Texan.
Alexis
Yeah, he has a very far East, East Texan accent. That’s 100% it. I didn’t know that that was a statistic, but I guess it makes sense, especially in America. Yeah.
Earin Persson
Yeah. I had never heard that before. I thought it was interesting. I was like, “Great, Good to know. We got one. Check.”
Alexis
Okay. Well, Mom, I hope that answered your question. If it didn’t, we’ll try again. I’ll be happy to. I’ll show you this video at my brother’s wedding in a couple of weeks, and you can tell me if this answers your question or not. But shout out to my brother. That can be my shameless plug. Happy wedding Carl and Rissa. Yeah. My brother gets married at the end of next week. So super exciting there. I was gonna make my mom record a video that I was gonna post in here, but she’s gonna be a little stressed at the wedding so I’m not gonna make her record a video. Yeah, I was like, it’s okay. We’re gonna let you be not stressed, and I’m going to ask the question for you and it’ll be great.
Again, thank you so much, listeners out there. If you have a question for Data Dave or a question for Earin or any of our Summer Takeover series guests, please reach out to us at talktech@d3clarity.com or you can connect with Dave or myself or D3Clarity on LinkedIn and then you can always catch us on the D3Clarity website as well.
Again, Earin, really appreciate your time and happy summer everyone.
Earin Persson
Thanks.
