My Interview with Donald Farmer at PASS Summit 2019

If you have been in the BI industry as long as I have, then you know of Donald Farmer. He happens to be one of my heroes as a leader in the business intelligence and analytics field for the past two decades.

As a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Donald played a key role in shaping the Microsoft BI toolset most of us use today during its infancy. He has a broad and unique industry perspective from time he’s spent outside of the Microsoft circle. As the Vice President of Innovation and Design at Qlik Technologies, he brought Qlick Sense to market. He’s currently the Principal of TreeHive Strategy.

I had the pleasure of sitting down to interview Donald at the 2019 PASS Summit this month. Some key points we discussed were:

• Route knowledge, a view of information at a micro level, vs survey knowledge, a view of information in the context of the bigger picture.
• How we should become shopkeepers rather than gatekeepers of information as a change in attitude to serve the needs of the modern Business Data Analyst.
• He talked about a pattern in the process and stages to provide actionable business information from data.

To read my complete blog and watch a video of my 10-minute interview with Donald Farmer, click here. I can assure you, it’s worth every second. I appreciated his time, as well as his valuable insights. I’m a huge fan of him and his work in the industry. If you don’t know him, you should; watch my interview and you’ll become a fan too.

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