E45 - Rick Hall - Riding the Waves of Technology Changes Over the Decades

This episode is really special because we have with us Rick Hall, CEO of Aginity, who has almost four decades of experience in technology, business intelligence, and data science.

He has taken over a dozen software products and two technology companies to a successful sale.

After spending 20 years in technology services focused on business applications and analytics, Rick founded G4 Analytics in 2001. G4 Analytics was a software company focused on analytics for the consumer goods industry. The solutions focused on providing analytics support around sales, marketing, and supply chain.

Rick moved to Nielsen after the company acquired G4 Analytics in 2013.

Nielsen (NYSE: NLSN) is a global measurement and data analytics company that provides comprehensive and trusted insights and analysis into consumers and markets worldwide. At Nielsen, Rick led the Sales Effectiveness practices globally.

Most recently in 2018, Rick co-founded Kairn Corporation that helps businesses plan and implement intelligent products and systems. As part of its investment plan, Kairn Corporation acquired Aginity in 2020. Since then, Rick has been performing as Aginity’s CEO to drive its transformation.

Aginity is a software company that offers complete analytics management solutions. The company was named as the Most Trusted Big Data Technology Company by the CIO Techie magazine.

In this exclusive interview, Rick offers us in-depth insights into many important aspects of data science and the industry.

• The differences and similarities between the BI adoption in 1980 and the data science adoption of today.
  
• How the landscape has changed from being centralized analytics to distributed analytics.
  
• Philosophy of building a successful software company and startup.
  
• How closing the gap between tech and non-tech workforce is essential to help organisations to fully utilise the power of analytics.
  
• Guidelines for young analytic professionals for career growth.
  
• Importance of learning the business as analytics professionals.
  
• Implementation of collaborative analytics where all the fronts of the business get to use the full power of analytics
  
• How agility is tackling the lack of data scientists in the industry by analytics process wizardisation.
  
• The full analytical lifecycle – ingest, cleanse, integrate, calculate, analyse, and provision -- for non-engineers.
  
• The secrets to building and getting into the market as a software company.
  
• The iterative approach to product development.

If you are working in the analytics or the IT department -- a really important takeaway is how you can make it easier for your non-tech workforce to better use analytics to make decisions and solve problems.

#BusinessAnalytics #DataScience #BusinessIntelligence #Entrepreneurship #CustomerExperience