Introducing: The Village Data Quest

We have been planning the Village Data Quest, a BI puzzle to talent spot the upcoming talent in business intelligence. Under our Data Quest Moto 'Habeo Omnes Oves' (if you don't speak Latin, Google it, I had to), we are planning a day of solving a data puzzle. 

We are looking for four key talents, in graduates, for our BI practice. 

• The ability to wrangle data, using SQL, MDX, R, whatever 
• The ability to communicate the meaning of the data in a way that inspires change in companies. 
• The listening, analysis and business skills to understand what business managers want to know. 
• The gravitas to ensure that when one of our BI people speaks at a meeting, people listen. 

Similar but subtly different skills than we want for our software applications practice. Students are not necessarily trained for this type of skill so it is difficult for us and them to work out if they like it and whether they are good at it. 

Business intelligence and data science are, seemingly, in high demand, we have been partnering with various BI vendors looking at, Thoughtspot, Microsoft, ZAPBI and SAGE SDMA applications, and delivering BI and reporting solutions to various clients. But we can only continue to do this if we, and the industry, can talent spot the people who want to do this.  

If someone is interested enough to turn up and spend a day trawling through data looking for the Sheep or Iron that we have placed in there. And can come up with explanations and graphs, these are people we are interested in. If that seems like a waste of a day to them well probably not a career they should be going into. 

So we hope that there will be a pool of interested, computer science, maths, business or similar students anyone who can wield a spreadsheet or python or SQL or similar in anger prepared to rise to the challenge.  

I don't want to give too much away about the task itself prior to the off, so we will come back and discuss how to create BI games later. We have taken inspiration from American company Atomic Object who have run application development games for students for a few years and are trying to take that concept into the business intelligence world. 

For more information and sign up form head on to http://villagesoftware.co.uk/data-quest