Data as seen and practised by Ned Stratton
Ned Stratton
ned@ucovi-data.com
I'm a London based data analyst with coming up to 10 years experience across finance, events, publishing, logistics and consultancy. I work in SQL, Excel, Power BI and Python and dabble in Powershell, C# and the web languages.
I believe that in the era of AI, human-driven judgement, innovation, decision-making and creativity will become more important, not less (which I think sounds profound and impressive, if a bit wanky.)
I occasionally give the odd talk at UK data conferences and exhibitions on how you can have fun with Python and Power BI, or how you can bore yourself and your audience rigid with mastering RegEx expressions in Powershell.
In summer 2019, I was waiting to order a drink in a pub after work. The queue was long (pre-pandemic of course), and I'd had a frustrating day of work. I was annoyed - a few months into a my second role as a data analyst - that their data architecture and reporting stack was as fragmented, tough to maintain, and generally messed up as that of my previous company.
As the wait to be served a pint dragged on, I engaged in grandiose and tipsy daydreams about a philosophical framework for small and medium companies to ground their data practices in, like some kind of BTEC AGILE. What crystallised from this was "Understand-Collect-Organise-Visualise-Interpret" (UCOVI). I thought that the 5 words covered everything that working with data is about, and liked the acronym.
So much so that I passed the boredom of COVID lockdowns building my data blog and website around it, with conceptual pages to expand on the theory. Sadly my dreams of building a data consultancy business around it never came to fruition, but this is why this data viz portfolio, blog, and website is called UCOVI and not something else generic like "Intelligent Analytics" or "Primary Key Insights".
Yeah I know, stupid right! Doesn't even look like a bar chart, formula, server, or 3-circle-stack database icon or anything. The story behind this is simple - after the beer-sozzled lightbulb moment I just described, I rushed home and looked at the "Tech" section of a free logo website. It came up on page two - five hexagons for the five letters of UCOVI. Sorted.
The most "useful" part of my website I guess is the London data meetups calendar and summary of the top blogs and data content on the web in Best of The Rest.
There's also the Blog section, where you can find some 30 and counting articles I've written since 2020 on pretty much anything I can think of that's related to data and the people who use it. Sometimes snarky, sometimes ranty (I hate no-code data blending tools), sometimes expansive (what if all employed data analysts had free roles?), and very, very, occasionally insightful I hope.
And of course, my data viz portfolio in Power BI (14 dashboards, mostly politics and publicly available social data), and a Games and Quizzes section which is a truly random smorgasboard of the coding languages I've dabbled in with mixed results. There's also an attempt at desktop software for password management as well. Enjoy.