On June 6th, 2018 we had the privilege to speak at a Cloudera Sessions event, held in the Edward M. Kennedy Institute located on Columbia Point on the University of Massachusetts Boston campus.  The room is a replica of the United States Senate Chamber in Washington, D.C., and it was an ideal settings for us to describe what we do and how we do it.

Above the room’s three doors there are Latin inscriptions:

• Novus ordo seclorum – A new order of the ages
• Annuit coeptis – Favor our undertakings
• E pluribus unum – Out of many, one

Each of these sayings is germane to our business in different, yet meaningful ways.

Novus ordo seclorum. A new order of the ages. We make no secret of the fact that we think the traditional approaches to making data available within organizations is broken.  While they have their places, data warehouses, extract-transform-load (ETL) systems, and a rigid and onerous hierarchy of data owners makes the path to companies being “data-driven” an uphill effort.  New technologies combined with robust security mechanisms and dirt-cheap storage costs means that those who need it now can access the original, unformatted data assets. Cleansing and standardizing does not have to be a centralized and costly function.  The new order for the ages puts security at the forefront of all efforts while still enabling the workforce to use their basic technical and business acumen to get data quickly and correctly.

Annuit coeptis. Favor our undertakings. Businesses do not move at the speed of their IT departments, and management rightly sees the importance and competitive advantage of getting the data into the hands of the right people at the right time.  With right comes might, so the saying goes, but in this paradigm the accretive power of data is known to the decision makers. Leaders favor decisions based on fact, and these leaders encourage the undertaking of safely and securely extending data across an enterprise.

E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. Whether you call it a 360 degree view, single source of the truth, or a holistic thingamajig, a successful analytics environment needs to have the capacity to not only contain all data, but also to process it.  Take for example marketing data – at its core you cannot create attribution without holding all of the inputs. These include the raw transactional pieces, the sales data, and the spend data. To churn all of this data into insights takes storage / compute capacity, a standardized data model, and human interpretation.  Out of many, one.

Sentier is upending the old order of how analytics get done within enterprises.  Join us in our journey. Happy (Data) Independence Day.