X Change 2014 Phoenician Resort Scottsdale, AZ

The X Change digital analytics conference is always a highlight of the year. In its 8th edition, the conference gathered a group of the top enterprise analytics practitioners from companies like Nike, Vanguard, Facebook and Adobe at the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. What continues to set X Change apart from other conferences is the intimate interactive huddle format. Between 10 and 20 attendees huddle up (football pads optional) on topics like: “Taking all the Credit: The Promise of Marketing Attribution Technology” and “Data Integration: The Good The Bad and The Ugly”. You can see a full list of the huddles here. A huddle leader is assigned to each group discussion, but that person’s role is to facilitate and guide the discussion, rather than speak at the participants. What follows is an honest discussion about what has worked as well as challenges and questions different organizations are facing. I’ve been lucky enough to attend X Change the last 6 years as a member of Semphonic and now the EY team and I want to share my top 3 takeaways from the X Change 2014 conference with a bonus takeaway at the end of the post.

Takeaway 1- Digital Analytics Professionals are Funny

It is always refreshing when people don’t take themselves too seriously. Here were 3 quotes from X Change that really stuck with me as being hilarious commentary on our digital analytics industry.

“You can do SQL and are good with Hadoop, so la di da.” – @garyangel

Written on a digital analytics practitioner’s grave: “Here lies Jane Doe, she had a great career based on bad data.”

“Approach every vendor promise of a simple one click or a single line of JavaScript integration like every vendor is lying and work backward from there.”

Takeaway 2- Data Integration and Big Data: Is everyone but me doing it?

If you don’t live under a rock you’ve been reading and hearing a lot about big data over the past few years. X Change was no different: there were some amazing examples of companies using personalized data to target content at individuals and companies warehousing online and offline customer data to predict a consumers next purchase. But even the cutting edge companies admit that they still have a long way to go with big data.

So what if you aren’t doing big data or what if you haven’t creating the all mighty enterprise data warehouse with all your data sources perfectly joined together in matrimony? You should do small data well first. Just start small with any data integration. Look at your digital analytics implementation: can you honestly say you are getting all the insights out of it that you can? Are there still questions about your website or your mobile app that you can’t answer? Start small and improve your implementation. Are you able to integrate all your marketing cost data with your site analytics data? Start small and upload your marketing cost data into your digital analytics tool. The road to big data success is paved with lots of small data wins.

Takeaway 3- Excel Dashboards are not Dead Yet

One of the sessions I attended at X Change renewed my faith in Excel dashboards. There has definitely been a move to data visualization tools like Tableau, but believe it or not, attendees from the session said Excel dashboards are not dead yet. Excel is still a tool that everyone at companies have installed on their computer and have used in some way before. With the recent release of Microsoft Office for iOS Excel is on iPhones and iPads. If you send a stakeholder an Excel dashboard you know they’ll be able to open it and be able to navigate through the report. The lack of flexibility in digital analytics tool dashboards and the ability to combine digital analytics data with other sources were cited as reasons to use Excel dashboards.

Tableau was the next most popular option to Excel in the session and some attendees even talked about building customized web based Tableau like interfaces using open sourced data visualization libraries like D3.js. Regardless of the tool attendees in the session felt dashboards seemed to serve two distinct purposes:

1) Provide a snap shot of KPIs at a point in time.
2) Generate insights and more questions from stakeholders and result in additional analysis.

Bonus Takeaway- Explore and See the Sights

The X Change Conference has taken us to some beautiful places over the years including: Monterey Bay, Laguna Niguel, and Coronado Island. One great piece of advice I was given at the beginning of my career is that when you travel for work make sure to get out and explore. Although there was no Pacific Ocean to jump into this year in Arizona, there was a great hike right behind the hotel.

Driving up to the Phoenician I noticed a mountain directly behind the resort popping right out of the middle of the flat desert and asked the cab driver if there were good hiking trails on the mountain. He told me about a hike right behind the resort up the east side of Cammelback Mountain on the Cholla trail. I dropped my bag in my room and made a quick decision to do the hike before the X Change reception kicked off. I thought it would be a great way to clear my mind before the whirlwind of huddles and receptions. It turned out to be a great choice, it was a steep hike covering 1,300 feet in 1.3 miles and had some challenging scrambling near the summit. The view of Scottsdale and Phoenix was amazing at the summit of Cammelback Mountain. It was a perfect opportunity for a summit selfie. I felt charged up for the huddles, receptions and networking to follow.

Camelback Mountain Summit Selfie

I’m already looking forward to X Change 2015 and hopefully I will see you there.

For more info on X Change please check out Gary Angel’s blog.

Unfortunately, XChange 2015 will not happen. Keep an eye out for XChange 2016 announcements.