Samuel Roberts: My headphones working this time? . Can you hear me? Oh, what was going on last time? Just decided they didn’t it. Uttam Kumaran: But I went . Samuel Roberts: , I wasn’t what the plan was with that other code. That was why I was a little, … I knew it was the other shop, but I wasn’t , . If they were getting it, and it seemed there’s a combination of some of the stuff is coming, and some of the stuff is… , that’ll be trying to figure out. Uttam Kumaran: , I agree. Katherine Bayless: Hello, hello, hello! Sorry. Samuel Roberts: Zoom was weird when I opened it. It was, , fussing at me about authentication, I don’t… Uttam Kumaran: Strange thing. How’s everything? How’s everything? Samuel Roberts: It was alright. , it’s been one hell of a Monday. I’m … Uttam Kumaran: , sorry, we’re catching you at the tail end. It’ll be loaded. Samuel Roberts: Really, because it gave me, , a, , I got one more call, I gotta go. Katherine Bayless: . , what about you guys? How are you? Uttam Kumaran: Good, it’s also heavy Monday. We’re… , we try to talk about every client every day, which is sometimes hard. Katherine Bayless: Good problem to have. Uttam Kumaran: I don’t know, we’re just doing , and, , I’m pumped to kick off this project. I was telling Sam all about it last week, too, and … , I’m just, . I’m just, , ready to… to start on stuff, I’m excited for tomorrow’s meeting. And , maybe, Sam, I’ll let you give a brief introduction before I… Start blobbing away. I’m just having my second coffee, I’m just gonna, … Samuel Roberts: , hi, I’m Sam. I’ve been at Brainforger since the summer, doing, a lot of AI automation side of things. But, learning a lot about data as , because we do a lot of that. And my background is more, startup stuff, product stuff, I’ve been, , doing web development that for years, and , excited to work on this. Katherine Bayless: , , it makes sense, the AI angle, because I know I’ve talked a lot about how I’m , we’re behind, we could, , leapfrog some of the stuff, ? , why would I sit around and make a bunch of dashboards when we could just have talking to our data? Uttam Kumaran: I feel really… I feel really similar. And that’s why it’s, , been fun working with a lot of data people and AI full-stack people who are, , also learning a lot of the data stuff, but they’re able to, , question, , oh, we could totally do this faster. That’s been great, a lot of our clients are benefiting because we’re just… we’re able to move much faster. And then also, we’re doing a spike for another client this week, which we’ll totally share with you, which is, , chat with data, , systems. And . Katherine Bayless: you mentioned, , , we’re… Uttam Kumaran: We’re evaluating, , … we did this, , maybe 6 months ago, but we’re, , evaluating the market of options. , we’ve done POCs with Omni and a few other tools, but we also want to demo Snowflake’s, , latest, and just get our opinion about, , what works, given, , how we architect things. That should also be really, really helpful for this, … Katherine Bayless: , it’s funny, I was just talking to, Jay, the VP of IT, about, , , data and the AI apocalypse and all the things, and I was , honestly, I was , my job’s not going anywhere. It’s just gonna change from, , data engineer pipeline builder to, , digital librarian, , I will curate. Uttam Kumaran: Knowledge, meaning. Katherine Bayless: content that the robots can use to answer your questions, ? , and also clean up all the stuff he breaks. He is pushed into the wild west of MCP in a way that I’m , , buddy, have fun. ? And he’s , I’ve got one that can edit our DNS records. And I’m , I don’t think that you should build that. , . , speaking of, Jay, … I wasn’t who all should get access to which thing, I gave him your email address to add to AWS, at least, but then, Samuel, now that you’re here, and then I know I spoke with, . Robert? , I was , I’m, , not trusting myself, because, , wait, your last name is Robert, am I. Uttam Kumaran: I just tried to log into Okta. OnePassword auto-filled a password, but then it didn’t save it, I may need him to reset my account. Katherine Bayless: Does it do that thing, , 1Password, where you can, , see, , most recently generated passwords? Uttam Kumaran: I don’t know, although I will… Samuel Roberts: Somewhere. Uttam Kumaran: Because this happens, , But I didn’t say… it didn’t save, it, , autofilled, and then… I would, , went to go edit and put in the vault, and then it, , the extension, , short-circuited, and then… it logged in anyways, and I was … Katherine Bayless: I’ve had the same, , , , I’ll watch it, , autofill, , your super secure, delightful password, and then you’re , oh, wait, , come back. Uttam Kumaran: , I don’t know. Let me see… , you’re looking at. Katherine Bayless: way, you can. Samuel Roberts: , there’s a history, it looks . Uttam Kumaran: Where is that? Samuel Roberts: If you go to the… the key that says password generator. You should see at the bottom, password generator history. Uttam Kumaran: Oh, there it is, wow! Samuel Roberts: Oh , , , whether or not it’s even used, . Uttam Kumaran: What UI is this? , who… Clicking on the key button. Katherine Bayless: . I’ve been clicking on his… alright, great. Uttam Kumaran: Cool, let me just… let me just confirm that that works. Thank goodness. Katherine Bayless: Because if it. Uttam Kumaran: It just, , changed everything. how much time I’ve wasted? Katherine Bayless: , I just saved my ass a few times. Uttam Kumaran: , awesome. , never mind, then I’m fine there. Katherine Bayless: , , I’m curious, though, because he and I, admittedly, there are few users in the AWS stuff, we couldn’t remember if… he gave you, , admin access on the account. When you go into it, do you see the playground as as the root account, or do I need to still, . pull you the last step of the way to the actual Data Playground account. Uttam Kumaran: , let me… let’s… we can… let’s find out together. , I don’t have… In Okta, it doesn’t look I have AWS. search for it. Oh, oh , I can… it says I can add it. I added it. Katherine Bayless: Oh, you can add it? . Uttam Kumaran: Oh, but then it says, set up access, enter your username and password for the AWS console, password sign-in. Katherine Bayless: Oh, recently. Uttam Kumaran: contact, you… . Katherine Bayless: , , it’s, , this happened with the other consulting team, too. There’s, , we add you to the thing, and you do have access, but getting the tile to show up on your Okta dashboard is, , a different thing. I sent you the link in Slack, I don’t know if you see if maybe you can… Uttam Kumaran: , , , let me try. Katherine Bayless: Our Okta… Isn’t messing. It is a problem. It is broken. Uttam Kumaran: We just did the migration from Active Directory to Entra over the weekend, apparently, hopefully we’re getting a little better. Katherine Bayless: If you’ve got anybody over there that’s good at Okta, it might not be a bad idea to send a proposal over. Uttam Kumaran: , oh, signing with Okta FastPass, let’s see. , , it might be smart enough to still… Katherine Bayless: , not let you through. Uttam Kumaran: A user is not assigned to this application. Katherine Bayless: , , , . I will let . Mondays, Mondays, Mondays. Uttam Kumaran: let me see where we left off. the last time. we were just starting to talk about Identity stitching stuff… Let me just take a look at my… , we wanted to set up Slack, we have the SDG meeting tomorrow, we’re gonna… and then… , I was gonna ask you about Asana, or if you care if we do stuff in linear. Katherine Bayless: , we have Asana, same thing, I can have Jay add you to that one. Admittedly, we have not really built anything out, my team at least. , the previous data team that we inherited the, at least the budget headcount from, they had a pretty robust Asana board that they had built out with a whole bunch of stuff, and then the data engineer that was on my team briefly , translated it. I’m very content to start fresh. Asana is the project management tool that we have here, , , I will try to build it in Asana, but I’m more than happy to, , , marry the structure that you guys use in linear, or… take, , advice. I tend to take a very light touch with Agile, ? I’m , I don’t do the draconian writing of user stories. Honestly, MAC is usually more useful to me, ? , tell me how you will know it is done. Uttam Kumaran: , we’re the same way. I just mainly do it as, , let’s just start building a backlog, and then… That way, it just makes it easy. If anyone’s out, anyone, , has stuff, they can, there’s a redundancy. we’re… we’re also not too heavy. We do, we do, , what it takes to get the job done. I would it, I would love to have everything have, , perfect tickets , but it’s , , it’s… It’s a lot of work. Katherine Bayless: It is, it really is. , , at my last place, we had a much, , we had a… , we had a pretty nice setup. Oh, great, . It was, , , it took a lot of work. It was , , two people that were almost, , full-time, just to, , keeping that pipeline together. But , , we had it all the way through from… What did we use? Zendesk? Zendesk, and then we used Target Process, was our agile, , software, which is a weird platform, and then we had it tied through to GitHub, that, , you would tie the Target Process story to the Zendesk ticket, to the pull request. , , , . It was nice. I don’t intend to rebuild that, because I know better than to think I will maintain it. But , in terms of project management, , Asana, we do need to set up. Ticketing system just generally, we do need. , that is part of the… annoyance with the, , account provisioning stuff is, , I’m just, , sending Jay an email, being , hey, can you add this person? But there isn’t, . Uttam Kumaran: , if you’d , , we could also… we could… I could set up a sauna, , we don’t… we have, , a an opinionated on swim lanes, but most of it is, . we have some stuff for backlog. For me, the main thing I usually want to see is, , what’s, , ready? What do we… what are we doing next week? And then, , what are we focusing on this week? that’s, , the main thing, that way you have a little bit of scheduling, even… not everything’s sitting in backlog, also not everything sitting in, , the spring just rolls and rolls and rolls. , that way we start Monday, we’re , what are we doing, and then… in terms of in progress, , we have, , in progress block, then we do, , internal review, client review, and then done. And then that’s… that’s usually it. I’m happy to set that up in Asana, and then ideally, I could think about some way where if we can mirror linear and Asana, that’s fine, or we can log in there, that’s also fine. But I’m happy to set that up and just, , start to throw stuff in there. Yep. Please. Katherine Bayless: , . , , , that would be good. I’m, , looking over here, because I’m , I do have, , stuff on the wall that I had put up that is probably things I should translate into an Asana board. Uttam Kumaran: , and we were gonna also start on, , a Gantt chart, of stuff. We started using this really nice tool called Instagant. I don’t have, , an example up, but it’s just, , it’s just been great to, , to use that, for client examples. , I’ll just start to put in things that we see, that way we have, , a good view of, , the future. And I’m more than happy to do that as . Katherine Bayless: , , . , start with Asana, but… But , I do, I do love a Gantt chart. Uttam Kumaran: , and then , , one thing we didn’t get to last time was talking through… , , what needs to happen for the identity resolution? Katherine Bayless: We talked about snowflake setup. Uttam Kumaran: I know we… we have our docs, and I could share that with you, but how we typically set up. what we could do is, if we set up Asana and we have tickets for, , dbt initialization, GitHub, I can link those , our docs on how we typically do that, and that way we can have a discussion before executing those. But the DBT setup. Probably, , a week or two of work. Snowflake, , , a week or two of work, and then… Once we have those set up, we can set up version control and some type of CICD for models. But that’s, , all on the, , the setup side. . And then tomorrow, we’ll inform a little bit of, probably about Power BI stuff. Katherine Bayless: , about that, , on Friday afternoon. I did talk to the SDG team, because I was , … this is more just where it’s my little chaos monkey brain, , trying to play in structured brains. And they’re a very traditional consulting shop, totally fine, part of why I wanted them on board as , ? , I know they’ll give us the nice buttoned-up, , things that I can put in front of executives’ noses, but… they’re also , we want to do stakeholder interviews, and I’m , people will cry if I ask them to give you even 5 minutes of their time now. It is bonkers here now, ? And , , the Power BI stuff, I’m , , maybe… . Maybe I’m moving them away from that. They’re still gonna do the prototypes . Uttam Kumaran: But I was just , , I need you guys to not go down the rabbit hole of, , trying to understand all the Power BI things. I meant more just, , look at it and see if there’s anything useful. Katherine Bayless: they are going to reprioritize a little bit and focus on some of the API integrations to the data lake, because that’s something that does not need stakeholders, and frankly, is probably a little bit more relevant. they’re going to start with Cvent and Marketing Cloud, and EventPoint, which is the system that we use for our, , speaker management for CES, And then there’s another one. Oh, Shopify. Shopify, I need to ask them if they can do that one, too. But anyway, they’re gonna start that direction. … the Power BI stuff is less timely, but I know we also have the Snowflake blocker on this end. Jay did get the support from Snowflake to reach out and schedule a time for us to get back into the Bricked account. we probably, , at the very least, need to pursue that that we can shut it down if we don’t want to use it, but I, I wasn’t if the consensus was, do we want to wait and set up the Snowflake instance, , once AWS ProServe is on and we have the new accounts, or do we want to build and figure if we’re doing a CICD and infrastructure as code, then, , when we get the new accounts with AWS, we’ll just Recreate things over there. Uttam Kumaran: , I would say we can go ahead and start, , if I could just go ahead and once we’re in Asana, I can create the tickets, and it would give me the , and then, , we can go ahead and do that. It’ll just be running great databases . the biggest thing is, , I didn’t know if I asked… On Friday, about, , if you’re planning on… there already is an ETL tool, or, , how you’re thinking about , landing some of that data from Shopify or these other providers. Another vendor that you’re making a decision on? Katherine Bayless: , , open to suggestions. I’m trying to keep as much as I can inside the walls of AWS. I used Glue at my last place. , it’s a love-hate relationship, but, , Glue is probably my thought for the direction we’re going, just because then it’s all in AWS, and we’re , , consolidated billing, and finance sees that as, , the infrastructure spend, , thing, ? I wasn’t thinking about pursuing, , a Databricks or, , a Matillion or something, , , as a, , ETL platform as a service, but if you feel strongly about recommending one, I will entertain proposals. Uttam Kumaran: , , probably the only reason, , one, we could see if there’s existing AWS glue for, , some of the common providers. It’s just… … Katherine Bayless: , , , totally. Uttam Kumaran: Totally. It’s just, , one click turn on, and then it’s, , managed infre for ETL. I… there are, , the common… characters, there also are some other providers that we’ve used that are great, happy to… Even do a proof of concept, and … In particular, , I used to implement a lot of Fivetran for most of my career, and then recently we switched to using this company called Polytomic. Just, , met the CEO, and the team was really great, and we have, , 4 or 5 clients that are using them, and we have a direct line to him via Slack. He’s built a lot of connectors… their team’s built a lot of connectors directly for us. They power, , the NFL, they power Okta, , a bunch of big brands. They just do marketing, which is, , a complete shame, because they’re priced really , and their support is great, but all their resources go to that. , I, , could be worth considering. Katherine Bayless: , and it’s a good point about the speed, to be honest. some of it is my, , association baggage, , where I’m just used to those connector as a platform, or, , connections as a service platforms being, , , maybe, , 3 out of your 50 systems are in there, a thing. We have 54 systems, by the way. But here, there might be more things that are maybe connectable. Cvent, I would be surprised, because they’re… they still only have a set of soap. I don’t think they have REST endpoints. And Salesforce Marketing Cloud, I have learned, is weirdly often not an out-of-the-box connector, because the data model is screwy and can be individualized on the back end, which is surprising to me, but… , , I could go back through the list. Uttam Kumaran: If we do a mapping of the… if we do a mapping of the sources, then what we can do is we can look at, , what exists. again, for example, for Shopify, my… Katherine Bayless: , , that one, definitely. Uttam Kumaran: Definitely, , go with the vendor, because… It’s a really standard model, and a lot… we have a lot of boilerplate Shopify code built on both Fivetran and Polyatomic landed schema, it would just help us speed up really fast. And then for stuff Cvent, again, if there are public or private-facing APIs, the reason we these guys, they’re just… they’ll go build it. , , I just put it on them, and it’s not … they don’t… they don’t, , charge more. In fact, all of their connectors, they’ve built for customers, and they’re good. , I don’t know, , Fivetran now… Fivetran has a… has a large swath of connectors, , really mature, but, , most expensive option. Katherine Bayless: , I was trying to see… I know I have this list of the systems somewhere here… Oh , here we go. Systemsidentified.nd. Uttam Kumaran: 43 on this list. . Katherine Bayless: Alright, let’s see. I’ll just, for the moment, totally just gonna drop in the Zoom chat. Uttam Kumaran: , , not a bad orientation, too, ? , … , , let me, let me just, , let me write, let me just put this in something, and then let’s just talk through it. Katherine Bayless: . The big call-out, really, on this list is… you see Salesforce at the top, it is… it is not… it is… it is not the, starting point that you would want it to be. The admin for that system has built a Rube Goldbergie and, . automation thing, mostly with a personal Zapier account. And most processes in Salesforce are manual now, and none of the integrations are working, and I’m gonna meet with her Tomorrow, and continue the conversation. . But , , not the easy one, that I thought it would be when I was , oh, great, we have Salesforce. Then Marketing Cloud, they do have APIs, , and I’ve… , I’ve got, , the tiniest proof-of-concept type code running for some of the things. That is one that I would the SDG folks to build out. Impexium, that is also remembers, is what they, , rebranded to, that’s our association management system. These are the people that we have the Snowflake data share agreement with that are continuing to pretend that Snowflake has a limitation of only being able to be deployed in one place, and I was . Expocad, this is another interesting one. we had, before this, , I had a meeting with this team. This is our, , show floor management platform, ? how we sell exhibit space, receptions, all the things, It is also probably the most hated piece of software at this organization. It is based on a form of CAD that, , is out of support. there’s a lot to unpack on ExpoCAD. it’s mostly just gonna be, , a we’ll get there later. now, I’m trying to do , , a needs assessment around the platform to figure out, , , are there ways that we could maybe make this a little bit less draconian to deal with in the interim? It’s just a… it’s a bit of a mess. We could do a whole call on that one. Map Your Show is the same functionality, but with a little bit more feature added to it, and we clone ExpoCAD into Map Your Show that we can use some other features. It’s great. Cadmium has been replaced by OpenWater since the writing of this list. Open Water is, a peer review platform, if you will, it’s, , used for a lot of, , awards, grants, speaker submissions, that stuff. It’s the ability for, , , you solicit applications, hold onto them in the platform, and then solicit judges and have them, , do their whole thing and evaluate things against a rubric, etc, etc. We use it for our innovation awards, It was a bit of a disaster this year. Eventpoint, that’s the speaker management CMS. This system seems nice. I’m interested in, , not immediately, and not that I will say it out loud and scare my coworkers. But I’m curious if EventPoint could do a lot more than we currently have it doing. just not entirely , but it looks a way better system in terms of being a potential CRM for CES than some of the other tools that we’ve got at play, , Eyes on EventPoint. Uttam Kumaran: . Merits is the registration system for CES, , , everybody who registers. Katherine Bayless: Asterisk goes through merits. Technically, speakers go through EventPoint, and exhibitors go through Map Your Show. Everything does eventually get back into merits, but it, it’s mostly, , general attendee registrations that happen there. It takes 29 minutes and 36 seconds on average to complete registration. oh, also, Map Your Show makes all of our vendors sign a form saying they won’t ping the API more than, , many times an hour. , . It’s a really brittle little daisy chain between map your show… it’s ExpoCAD to map your show to EventPoint and Mer… , , EventPoint, I don’t know if it’s integrated at all, to Merits. Uttam Kumaran: And while you’re going through this also, if there are internal owners. I can note on their names. Katherine Bayless: , I can, I can… … Uttam Kumaran: after the fact, , to give you context, for all of our clients, we just spin up a little bit of, , a documentation hub. Katherine Bayless: Start to take. Uttam Kumaran: notes are, . metrics or data tools, and I’ll just take notes here, and I can tag you here to just list the owners. . That way, once we start ingesting, it’s clear, , how it’s coming in, durations, and then all this… , ideally, we can either move this into wherever docs are easiest, or keep this in the repo, or keep this here. Katherine Bayless: I it. what I was gonna say was with the owners, , I… I have a table in our, little data warehouse where I’ve been tracking program owners for some of these things. the… this is more a question of preference. I always end up tying myself in knots, , do I list the person or the team, ? … Uttam Kumaran: I would probably list both. I could not answer, but, . Because the person can leave, and then you’re , , what is a functional team that’s relevant for this? something I’ve done in the past. usually, I put in… there’s, , , I have, , a, another table here that’s, , stakeholders, and … It’s, , that’s the relative… it pulls from this list, which is, , who are the people, and then what are their teams, , … Katherine Bayless: Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. , , , teams are probably more relevant at this point, but… . , in that case, then, , , Salesforce… That’s… obviously, it’s the sales team. there isn’t… , because it’s, , there’s, , multiple people that would be the point of contact, depending on the system component in question, ? , , the international team uses Salesforce, that’s a different point of contact than the sales team uses Salesforce. I don’t know, . Anyway, I’ll stay out of the nuts. Marketing Club. Uttam Kumaran: Worst case, I’ll just put the team down, and if there’s not, , a one person that’s, , the best person, that’s fine. Katherine Bayless: , that’s fair. Impexium is membership. Anna Rutter is, for the most part, the admin for that, but again, shared responsibility, depending on what corner you’re in. Expocad definitely has a person, his name is Tom Moshello. M-O-S-C-H-E-L-L-O. Map your show? , , , , now it gets funny, because… , I’ll do open water, and then I’ll put map your show. Open Water currently doesn’t have a point of contact, but it is the operations team that manages the awards program. The person who was managing the awards this year has departed, and the position is open, if anybody who’s interested. , that’s the ops team. , event point, map your show, merits, decision point. I feel there’s… I’m missing one or two. There’s event base, . And Titan, who’s the security, . Titan might just be on here, , later. , it is, . and pointer, , . Anyway, , , these systems, they form the CES tech stack, which does not currently really have an owner, , , the person that owns Map Your Show is the guy that works there, to a certain extent. ? , there isn’t really a team or point of… we’re trying to figure this out, , who should this. Uttam Kumaran: That’s ex… that’s including ExpoCAF? Katherine Bayless: , Expo Guide is Tom, but Map Your Show… Uttam Kumaran: Cadmium, Event Point, Merits, Decision Point. Katherine Bayless: , Open Water will be internal, we’re just recruiting for that one, but map your show, Event Point, Merits, Decision Point, and then some of the ones that are further in the list, Event Base, Titan, Pointer, Glean In, Turn Out Now, Mix Halo. Event co-pilot, which we have added. as a vendor since this list was created. Those are all the, , CES tech stack things. And it’s mostly the vendors that are the point of contact on them. , . Those are the Thursday calls that I want to get you guys on at some point. Cvent, since this list was created, we have 3 sites. we have one for our GLA team, one for our events team, and then we have one that our international team uses for, Unveiled. Interestingly, even though Merits is the registration for CES, people sign up for tracks, , session tracks via EventPoint, but then they also, would sign up for, , receptions and lunches and forums that, typically through individually configured Cvent sites. , I’m helping our digital health team now build out their Cvent registration site for events at CES, and it’s , the systems aren’t integrated. You have to be registered for CES to go to these things, but now, they just assume people will do the thing. And I’m , Have you met people? Uttam Kumaran: There’s gate, there’s , , gating, it’s just, , Or, it’s a URL, technically, but you can’t really… it’s not, , indexed anywhere. Katherine Bayless: , , you can gate it in Cvent, where what they do is, , you set it up to be, , an invitation-only or contactless-only event, and , , the person’s email address has to be manually allow listed in Cvent before they can get into the site, ? , the pain. But there is a lot of interesting data in Cvent, potentially. Zoom, obviously, is our meetings platform. We do also do webinars that, , , a little bit of analytics around those things. Formstack has rebranded to IntelliStack, web forms, though, . We have, , 600 or 700 of them, or something that. We use Formstack a lot, as, , a makeshift CRM, its APIs are pretty good. I’ve built out, , a couple little webhooks just to make my life easier, , , it’s pretty easy to interact with the platform. It’s just one of those, , , any survey tool, ? It’s, , a little too powerful, be dangerous. Neverbounce, not Unbounce, we don’t longer use them. That’s just email validation, ? , check this email address, is it a spam drop? , . That also, easy to automate. I have that piece done. Uttam Kumaran: Are you guys use… you’re using that with… through the sign-up flow, or which… through marketing? Katherine Bayless: , now, the little… , let’s not… oversell it and make it sound glamorous, but the little automation that I’ve built for the CES registration process ingests lists from a bunch of these different platforms, swirls them all together, checks for email addresses, runs them out to NeverBounce, brings the results back, and eventually puts together the 5 files that finally go into Marketing Cloud. Uttam Kumaran: Where is that getting executed now, the automation? Katherine Bayless: … Different places, because… I built it piece by piece. the webhook from Formstack to S3 is in Lambda, which I’m not proud of. And then some of the processing is happening in a SQL file that Glue calls and runs on a database, because I’m not proud of that either. And then, the last mile of the automation, I admit, I have not really solved for yet, because the Salesforce Marketing Cloud option for uploading these files is an FTP server, and… I know how to hit those, ? But I also am , I don’t really want to deal with this now. I’m hoping that I can just start using the APIs to send the data to Marketing Cloud and just eliminate the FTP rather than adding it to the automation. I only have to survive until January this year, ? , . , there’s a lot of. Uttam Kumaran: , it’s just helpful for me to list these automations, too, because this is, of course. something that you’ll want to get sourced from Martz, and then the reverse ETL or whatever happens at that point. , I’m just gonna… I’m just noting those down. Katherine Bayless: , , and , , the automation that I have built, it can all be torn down after we get through CES this year. The salient piece of it that will matter to a certain extent is the hierarchy of the assignments for the groups, because there are, it’s, , 28 or 30 different types of registration for CES, and they’re, , some are invites, some are GenPop, that thing. And we have to make that everybody gets invited once into the, , highest attendee tier, . That part, not bad, but the rest of it is duct tape and boxfill sticks. I’m better than this. Forstra, we don’t use anymore, but we have some old survey data in, Quorum is… I don’t know if you guys ever come across it in the wild, but it’s a… it’s a CRME thing, but it’s specifically intended for, , lobbying firms, and one of their, , value adds is that they’ll bring in, , the publicly available, , government data, ? , who’s in what district, and what’s their staffer’s email, ? , that stuff. it’s funny, they are also a startup from DC that I used to run into at, , startup circles things when I was working with Lineup, and I can’t stand their people, I can’t stand their product, it’s garbage. And when I found out CTA has it, I was , dang it. But it’s fine, I can get over myself. That seems pretty self-sufficient, the government affairs team. However, we are currently in just, , a dizzying array of name changes and nonsense with the government reopening, and, , all the LIT invites are just a mess now, but we’ll get there. Uttam Kumaran: , also maybe even, , one question I have, , overarching, you mentioned, you mentioned… GLA, events, international, , what are the core org structures. That, that exists within, CTA. Katherine Bayless: That’s a good question. we are primarily organized around … , those are probably the big buckets. there’s the sales team, which sells the exhibit space and receptions and sponsorships stuff at CES. Then there is the membership team, and they do the, , follow-on, , also, if you’re a member, you get a discount, ? ? there’s two different sales processes and teams, those two. Then there is also the CES operations team. Which is, , the logistics and all of the actual magic that makes it happen. Then, outside of that, , GLA, lobbying. We have a pretty extensive tech and standards team that I admit I have not had a ton of engagement with, but they’re the people that do, , the cyber trust mark. And the… , we’re getting another Emmy, apparently. , they’re pretty cool, that team. They use the system that’s on this list called Causeway, which is currently not playing nice with Impexium, and I have offered to help at some point. Causeway might not even be on this list, . , add Causeway to the list. , there’s tech and standards, there’s the business intelligence team, which is mostly research, forecasting. We do some work with NASDAQ on some ETFs. As of course, , finance, admin, internal operations team, ? It. that’s everybody? Marketing, obviously. Oh, and we have a library team. We have a physical library with stacks. Uttam Kumaran: Oh, great! Wow. I feel , , for, , just, , tech-related, consumer tech-related, , what… . Katherine Bayless: , , we … , truthfully, even though the site is a little funny at first, we have, … , we’ve been around 100 years, ? And , , we have, , some of the only copies of, , certain things from, , long ago, ? , from an archival standpoint, we are important, it’s just… ? You’re , is this… is this library books? ? . Uttam Kumaran: , cool. that helps to just get a sense of… of those. And , , in… from… from your side, I assume it’s, , sales, memberships, marketing… Or support, or tell me, , where your… where your head is in terms of core priority. Katherine Bayless: , initially, , when I started, it was, , , sales, membership, marketing. It was , , those are the three legs of the stool that I can pursue that make the most sense. I’ve not ended up doing a ton of work with the sales team this year. probably after CES will be a chance to help, see how I can help in that world. Truthfully, my thought is that knowing that we have two teams prospecting the same audience, I’m , , that’s my in, ? , that data needs to be synchronized. … sales I haven’t worked with as much. Marketing, I’ve worked with really extensively. Membership is really eager to work with us, we’re just waiting on this data share thing. But beyond that, I would say the CES, , ops team, , the event logistics, getting registrations through all that stuff, , . Also, our own finance and admin team could really use my help and love and assistance, but they are not the top of the, , pile, and I’m , I’m sorry, guys, I promise I’ll get to you, though. Oh, and we have a foundation, I should mention that, too. He would to work with us as at some point, but same thing, not top of the pile. Uttam Kumaran: , , great, that’s all. , cool. Maybe back to… to sources. … Maybe let’s go to a couple that I do recognize. Katherine Bayless: . You also have SurveyMonkey? We don’t use SurveyMonkey anymore, some of these we have data in, , . Uttam Kumaran: And that’s for us to get out and store, . , perfect. Katherine Bayless: , Qualtrics is who we’re currently using for surveying, . Our surveys get, , a less than 1% response rate. That team is very interested in working with me. Uttam Kumaran: Is that in… is that sales, or is that, there’s a variety of people that probably use surveys, but . Katherine Bayless: , all surveying does go through the business intelligence team. Uttam Kumaran: , , great. Katherine Bayless: , massive opportunity to figure out how to engage that audience, because it’s. Got nothing. . Uttam Kumaran: I don’t hearing low numbers, but I also hearing that, because there’s also much we could do, , should go look at, , all how surveys have been done, and there’s definitely, , a quick analysis that we can turn around. , . , SurveyMonkey, and then Qualtrics is on here somewhere. Katherine Bayless: , middle-ish. Uttam Kumaran: I know Okta is used for, , auth. Katherine Bayless: One thing that’s worth calling out with Okta is we do use it for, , staff, but also for all of our external audience. , , in order to register for CGAS, you have to have an Okta account. And I don’t think that any of us. Uttam Kumaran: It’s gotta be an expensive contract. , . But very secure. … Katherine Bayless: , to a fault, ? Because obviously, , you register for an event once a year, and nobody remembers that password, and it just creates more headaches than it solves. Uttam Kumaran: … Oh, alright. Katherine Bayless: 4J, , he’s got, , layers and layers and layers in his Okta setup that he’s just trying to unpack, and I’m , dude, , we probably just shouldn’t have used this for all 1 million. Uttam Kumaran: Oh, but, , even again, , what can the data team help with? , I’m he could go disable people that haven’t ever registered, or, , your. Probably a bunch of low-hanging fruit there, too. Katherine Bayless: It’s just … Uttam Kumaran: The normal business suite of tools. Katherine Bayless: , with the asterisk, , that SharePoint is still our document management platform. . Jay’s open to moving to Vox and piloting next year. I’ve been aggressive in my campaign. Uttam Kumaran: I remember, after you mentioned it, now I kept… I told a bunch of people, I’m , , apparently Box is, , not what you think it is. Katherine Bayless: It’s cool! It’s really cool. But , M365 is, , just Office software, but SharePoint-heavy here. Uttam Kumaran: And then Concur is, what, for travel, , expense management? Katherine Bayless: , Concur… , in fact, specifically, Ironclad and Concur are what the finance team would me to help them integrate at some point. , Ironclad is our contracting tool. I don’t know if any of the emails that you’ve got… , , , , . , now… , I’ll use you guys as an example. When you eventually wind up submitting an invoice for payment, it will go into Concur. But those two systems aren’t integrated, the finance team has to go manually find the contract in Ironclad to link it across, , , the whole thing. they want to use… purchase orders, the functionality in Concur to do this, even though they wouldn’t be purchase orders? I don’t know, they’ve got this whole thing , , imagined that I’m , I’m gonna have a lot of questions before we do anything. Uttam Kumaran: , we’re… , we… we do this in our business all the time, very familiar with this problem. , , great. , cool, there’ll be something there. SmartBrief? Katherine Bayless: , you can ignore that one. … I thought it was a system, because it used to be, but it isn’t anymore, but I feel every time I bring it up, I get a different answer, I stopped asking. I don’t think it’s a system, as far as I can tell. Uttam Kumaran: Alright, I’ll just put maybe ignore a question. Zapier… is there… is Zapier just, , plat… everybody in the company’s using it for stuff? Is there any, … Katherine Bayless: , it is just the one person on the… . . , great. Awesome. , and we are trying to figure out how to gently Indiana Jones the account, because it’s on her personal. Uttam Kumaran: Cool, and then… I know Gleene, , the new company, Gleene. Katherine Bayless: , , the AI, , corporate knowledge tool, . Uttam Kumaran: Still working for you guys? I just, I was on the phone with somebody two weeks ago, and they’re . Have you heard about Glean recently? I was , , but there were the Rays for a while, and then he was , , it’s not… nope, it’s not worked at all. But they, , go through PSCs, and it… And, , , , that sucks. Katherine Bayless: . I would love to see… Uttam Kumaran: How… how it doesn’t work at some point, but . Katherine Bayless: Truthfully, , the one thing that Glean decided that just drives me personally crazy is they call their, , their equivalent of, , a custom GPT, they call it an agent. Uttam Kumaran: And it drives me insane, because it means I have to talk to all of my coworkers about agents that are not agents, ? Katherine Bayless: They are scripted conversations with AI over our garbage, , SharePoint deployment, ? And truthfully, that is why, , I’m, , I’m pushing hard with Box, because, , what that company is trying to do is figure out, , , what is the actual semantic, ontological relationship of your information that we can use it? Whereas Lean is just , what if you could ask a question of every version? Uttam Kumaran: , out of the box? Katherine Bayless: I’m sorry? Uttam Kumaran: Does Box have MCPs, , out of the box, , they provide, or… Katherine Bayless: They do… … don’t quote me off the top of my head, but I do think that they did that , , annoying thing where they, , invented a new super enterprise tier, if you want MCP or something, because I feel I’ve had a few friends complain about, , we… turned out we didn’t have the box we thought we did, thing. Uttam Kumaran: , we have a similar thing, , I always go back and forth. At this point, , I’m almost at the point, and Sam knows this, where I’m , let’s just have everything in GitHub, and as much as we can, MCP’d into my linear… into my cursor. Because then that’s, , the route. Katherine Bayless: I watching Sam sit back as you said that. Samuel Roberts: . , I was , oh boy, oh ! Uttam Kumaran: Because I, , I just, , I know too much, because I’m also an engineer. Do all these business things all day, and… painful. that, , I have to write, , I have to write raw in a Google Doc, and I’m . Finding all these ways of getting around that. But truly, , a cursor interface on, , whatever I’m… , you… people should be using cursor more often for writing, , even in this example, , if it’s just us that are gonna access this docs, I’m gonna move this to… to our repo. And I will make tables and markdown, and you can interact with those. , for some clients, , that’s never gonna happen, they’re never gonna get there, we have to, . these docs that may or may not end up stale, but I want everything in a… to be accessed where our logic is, because that’s all the context, ? … , that’s what , and then… and then the more people that are using Cursor to write docs, or you can then ask questions and… over the repo, that is a lot better, , … Katherine Bayless: , , I would love to figure out, , doc classification in, , a streaming context. , everything you touch all the time is just being autosaved into. And it’s deciding, in the moment, what’s in the document. Uttam Kumaran: , we use Notion for a lot of stuff, and… I don’t know, I’m starting to, , regret the decision, but I also don’t know what the alternative is, … not everyone in the company is, , technical enough to use, , Obsidian. And, , we have to do a lot of external sharing. But, , if it was up to me, , the whole company, I would run on… I would just run out of repos, and I’d be … I would just mix… we… I would just say you can only use… mainly, for the most part, until recently, we were using Google Drive just for, , PDFs and contracts. , we never use Google Docs, but Notion is, , tough to get stuff out. it’s nice, it’s all marked down, but it’s, , they don’t… the APIs suck, we’re using some, , off-market API for stuff. Katherine Bayless: That’s funny, one of the guys in the car gang works for Notion. Uttam Kumaran: Oh, great. Katherine Bayless: Shit. I’m , I didn’t realize they don’t have great APIs. I would have assumed. Uttam Kumaran: , the API stuff, you can tell them. It took them years to release offline, before you open your laptop and you couldn’t… Product, , on a plane. That’s, , a use case for writing, and… . They’ve just, , been really slow, and their AI product is another, , 20, 30 bucks a user on top of their additional… 20, 30 bucks a user, and … , Glean is… who is… who owns that? Katherine Bayless: , Glean, in that case, there is an owner in terms of, , administering it as a platform. There is definitely ownership of the thing it sits on top of, ? But, Jay from IT, ? he, owns and administers Glean, . . And , I should say now, too, on this list, it’s not present, but we do also have Enterprise, ChatGPT, and then Anthropic Claude, … he… technically, I’m kinda sorta the owner for Claude, but mostly just because I was the one who put in the budget request, but… he’s at least the admin for the OpenAI side, and increasingly, probably, we’ll take over, . provisioning of users that for Claude. Uttam Kumaran: , great. Any reason you have both, just to, , add different models? Katherine Bayless: , , honestly, it’s mostly just because I’m a brat, because when I got here and tried Glean, I was , this is not gonna work for me. And they were , , we have ChatGPT, and I was , , I Claude better, though, because I’m a developer type. Uttam Kumaran: We have everything. I… we just ended up centralizing a lot, because we’re… we… we ended up with a bunch of Azure credits, I’m , , everything’s GPT. Katherine Bayless: , , . And , truthfully, I was telling our AWS account rep, when I talked to him a week or ago, I was , that’s really just to disintermediate the platforms, ? , . , I have a Wi-Fi. Uttam Kumaran: , I said, we’re not gonna be married, because who knows, and , I don’t really care who wins. . I want us to win. Whoever we… whoever’s the flavor of the month this month, we can be easily swappable, ? Katherine Bayless: , . And , I’ve done a little wiring of it up in Bedrock, but… Time is the enemy. Uttam Kumaran: , Decipher? Katherine Bayless: Another former survey tool, not currently in use. Uttam Kumaran: , I’ll just go… Umbraco? Umbraco? Katherine Bayless: that’s our web, instead of, , Drupal, , or Sitefinity, whatever, , we’re on an Umbraco platform. This has been an absolute nightmare this year, that I’m, , a couple degrees removed from, fortunately. Apparently, our hosting vendor, not great. Web support, we don’t really have somebody on staff to do it, and , , we’ve got a web dev… on the IT team who handles, , code updates, but I’m , I don’t, , what code updates are we making on our website on a day-to-day basis? I have a lot of questions that I don’t ask about the website, but I also apparently am made to understand that Umbraco made it very difficult for us to find vendors that would work with us, because it is one of the, , closed-source platforms, and people don’t those. . Litness? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I wrote that one down, but I don’t have any recollection of where I picked that one up. Uttam Kumaran: I assume GA is just on the site itself for analytics? Katherine Bayless: , we have a pretty dope Google Analytics deployment. we work with this firm called Orange Spark, and they’ve set up BigQuery and Looker Studio for our dashboards, and, , it’s nice. It’s a nice setup in there. Where we fall short is, most companies, the same thing, , we just don’t really use the information a lot. folks here don’t really understand how to connect. , I’m… I’m , I will help, I will help bring them along on this journey. But the setup’s pretty nice. at the moment, and this… I take some of the blame, because I should have known better, the person who was the owner of the Google Analytics and BigQuery accounts, she has left. And, I didn’t realize I have, , data editor admin access, but not admin admin, and I can’t manage users. And I am trying to convince Google Cloud to, , Give her account back. , I’m not proud of myself on that one. Uttam Kumaran: , we talked… , Presto and Event Base. Katherine Bayless: Presto is. Uttam Kumaran: That’s what I’m thinking about? Katherine Bayless: It’s , oh, it’s not press… Uttam Kumaran: Got it. It’s not AWS, presto. Katherine Bayless: , it’s not… , , it’s not that one. It’s , it’s a, a news service, a thing. And it’s our library team uses it for, , press releases, but not outbound… Let me see if I can… Uttam Kumaran: Presto, oh. Katherine Bayless: I don’t know. I’d have to… Uttam Kumaran: We can find out. Katherine Bayless: , because it’s not one of the systems that… here we go. Oh, what, , maybe it is the AWS thing, now that I’m saying this. Hey, here, I’ll share my screen. Uttam Kumaran: It’s just … Katherine Bayless: It’s whatever this is. Today might be presto. the database. But , it’s , news archiving. Uttam Kumaran: Oh, it looks some type of, , PR Newswire type thing, maybe? Katherine Bayless: , , and , , it’s funny, I was assuming that it is a product that we have purchased, but my inability to Google the thing and find out anything about it tells me that it maybe is something we had built? I don’t know. Uttam Kumaran: Oh, it looks a CTA, it looks a CTA thing. , … Alright, there’s nothing. Katherine Bayless: Alright, now I have questions, but . Uttam Kumaran: , that’s what Presto is. maybe it is the AWS thing. . Katherine Bayless: Eventbase is our mobile app, they are, not anybody’s, , favorite favorite, but they’re decent, and everybody’s, , , willing to put up with Written in ColdFusion, in case you’re curious. Great. Sonic was gonna help us add AI to CES, and when I told their AI lead that we use a cold fusion backend for our mobile app, she laughed at me, and I was , that’s the response. That’s the response. Uttam Kumaran: , very interesting. Oh, wait, I just googled it, they said Cold Fusion Builder End of Life. Katherine Bayless: she’s , have you heard of Flutter? And I was , I have definitely heard of Flutter, . , … Fedbase might be on a two-year contract at present, , , we might be stuck with them for a little longer, but the. Samuel Roberts: I don’t know. Katherine Bayless: there’s a lot of willingness to go to Flutter. There’s also something squirrely with our Apple developer account that I don’t understand. , we have, , a shitty tier of it or ? I don’t know. That’s a question for Jay. Uttam Kumaran: Do you guys have analytics on the app? Katherine Bayless: Not that I know of. I haven’t seen any. . I’m they’re somewhere, maybe? Uttam Kumaran: And then what is Shopify use for just checkout? Katherine Bayless: Shopify, as far as I understand, we brought it on to replace… Impexium, remembers, has, , a store component, members can purchase, , research and that stuff. the idea was that that interface was not great, and also we sometimes want people who are not members to be able to buy stuff, but not give them the annoyance of creating the Impexium account, and we brought Shopify in. I am unclear on whether or not Shopify is essentially, , just front-ending for the Impexium store, but I see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of failed API calls a day on Impexium’s side, looking up products, and I’m , , we don’t even use your store, … in defense, the team that, manages Shopify has been begging me to help them, and I’m just , I just haven’t had a chance yet. But , there’s something… something funky with our Shopify, and we also have a challenge where, , people can check out, but then the downloads aren’t always working. I don’t know. Uttam Kumaran: I’m curious if Shopify… I’ll use that for BI, then? that owns Shopify. Katherine Bayless: finance, kinda, sorta, and then IT, kinda, sorta, and then membership, kinda, sorta. Uttam Kumaran: We do a lot of Shopify work. Katherine Bayless: , , there’s BI coming out of it. , the finance team, , has nothing, but I also don’t think we do a lot of sales, ? it’s , it’s not the thing to, , go towards, , first first, ? , it needs the attention, but it’s … Great, here’s your sales report on 120 million that we need this year, ? curious if we could expand how we use Shopify. You have a lot of external data sharing, and, , part of me is , hmm… I wonder if that platform would be an interesting way to handle that, versus now, Catherine Mills a SharePoint site. Uttam Kumaran: And then Zoom is for, , are you guys billing or running webinars through Zoom, or you mentioned in the beginning of the call. Katherine Bayless: , it’s mostly internal meetings, to be honest. we do do some webinars. To my knowledge, I don’t think we charge for them, and if we do, we probably do it stupidly and charge somewhere else, honestly. What I’m very interested in, to a certain extent with Zoom, is our teams use it for, , sales calls, prospecting that. And , now, there’s visibility into the unstructured data of all those sales notes, I would to fix that fast, but also, , those Zoom calls, ? At least transcripts, if not, , recording, stuff that, ? , . Also, I know it is 5.30, I’m totally fine to keep going, but I don’t want to, , trap you guys if you got stuff. Uttam Kumaran: Dan, what do you think? I’m down to get going. Samuel Roberts: , I’d probably go a little longer. Uttam Kumaran: , we probably have, , 6 or 7, let’s talk about Leopatra. Cleopatra Profix… and Great Plains. Katherine Bayless: , Cleopatra, I forget what that one is, similar to Presto. Uttam Kumaran: That’s fine. We’re… this is a lot. , these are, , this is a lot of stuff, … , . Katherine Bayless: Profix, though, that is our budget system. We started using it, , last year was the first year, this year was the second. I will say, based on my experience, trying to use it as an end user putting in their budget, I do not look forward to trying to consume that data, because that is an interesting, awful platform. Either that, or maybe we’ve, , configured it poorly? I’m unclear. But , it’s budgeting software, and it sucks. And then we were on Great Plains, we just completed in September the move to Sage, that’s our, what do you call it? , dynamics? And then Microsoft Forms, sadly, finance and HR tend to be the primary users of Microsoft Forms. , I know, , . Those eyebrows say that. , ? , they asked me to do my, , 6-month, , , employee check-in in a Microsoft Form. I was , I’m just tired of putting my data in places it shouldn’t be. , , . And then Whitfly is an accounting firm? But they also do some, , connector-type work, and we are using Wipley maybe for accounting services, but also for the connector… I’m not , honestly, what things they are connectoring. But something in the finance department is connected via Whipley. Uttam Kumaran: Some type of managed software service or something, but… Katherine Bayless: , , it might be that Whipley is connecting Sage to Concur, and that’s why they’re , they can’t get Ironclad to concur, is that, , next mile step. . Uttam Kumaran: , we’ve gone through… I don’t miss any? I’m just, , looking through our list. I feel I’m looking through everything. Leadership Connect. Katherine Bayless: Leadership Connect is cool. That’s our library team that uses it. They… it’s , It’s LinkedIn-y, but meets ZoomInfo-y, meets, , publicly available information, it’s a little creepy, but it’ll tell you that, . such and such board member at Facebook used to be a junior senator from Nebraska, or vice versa, ? Whatever. And it’s the, , politics to big tech connection, and I’m , there’s something interesting in here. Uttam Kumaran: Nice, that’s cool. And , we’ve done a lot of work with all the major enrichment providers. Katherine Bayless: , I do think… sorry, I was just seeing if there’s anything else written on my board that isn’t on here. Causeway is the only one. Causeway’s the only one. , the enrichment stuff, I know we talked about it a little bit on Friday, too, but, , definitely an area of opportunity, , for us. the cost is going to be the limiting factor in that case. Uttam Kumaran: , you’d be surprised, , the… what we found is that there’s starting to be, , a plateauing of, , quality across, because they’re all sourcing from a lot of the same places. Instead, what’s… what we’re finding the differences are is , , the uniqueness of the signals. , can you look at, , sales team growth, or job changes, , interesting signals that, versus just, . Katherine Bayless: . …or can work at this company, and for how long, … Uttam Kumaran: , we can… and then also this, , consolidation. And the last piece is also, , do you have, , , a go-to-market, , automation tool? , for example, we’ve done a lot of work with clay, , we use clay internally. People build, , waterfall enrichments. And it takes a lot of load off, , what you would typically have to build in dbt. You can have your sales team leverage it there, and then write it back to, , the CRM. there’s some interesting new players in go-to-market automation. Katherine Bayless: , what is a go-to-market automation? Uttam Kumaran: go-to-market automation, you can think of it , Zapier, but very focused on, , sales and marketing-related outcomes. Zapier is, , connected, and this is really focused on… and I can share some examples. , , a good example is, , it’s , it’s a workbook, an Excel workbook. And each column is, , a step in a workflow. you can have, , waterfall enrichment, you can have a prompt take an input from one cell and output another, you can have external-facing HTTP requests. connect to other integrations, but the… the theme of why Clay became big is, , it’s all… it’s what Airtable failed to do, which is, , build something that is not just, , Google Sheets, where you can call externally in each cell. And , it’s just really nice, and it’s a nice, , user interface for folks that are used to, , that environment, but you can, . do really common sales or marketing-related workflows. Enrichment is one, copy generation is another, lead scoring is another. You can call things Unbounce or NeverBounce, directly in there. That way you can … you don’t need to go to Glue and to several other tools to build that, and it’s something that, , someone in sales and marketing can build. , there’s a couple of those tools. Katherine Bayless: now, if sales wants to send an email, they export a CSV from Salesforce, and then somebody chops it into 6 other CSVs, and then those 6 people get together and make that their data doesn’t overlap, which is very funny to me. And then they take those 6 CSVs and they upload them via the FTP into Marketing Cloud. And then they send an email out. We started using Journeys this year. We have one email, Journeys. a journey that’s , you exist, here’s an email, we’re done. Uttam Kumaran: That’s crazy. There should be some more drip, some more, , some gold marketing. It’s funny, because we have… we have some clients that are, . advanced in the email signals, they’re , the moment this activity happens, the fourth step of this thing takes them down a tree, and, , we’ve done analysis where, . , you need to send emails, , at this hour and, , this thing to get them to, , do this activity, which increases their LTV, and it’s , we just probably should just send more emails in general. Katherine Bayless: , we had an 8% opt-out on one of our emails a week or ago, , , . , it really… it’s , there’s much room, and the people are lovely, there’s all the potential, but it is sometimes I’m just , really, guys? Uttam Kumaran: also, , , this is a good point to, , tell me, , how you’re… , how are you finding focus across all of these? … , are you seeing… are you seeing yourself more as, , , I’m gonna make… I’m gonna land all the data, and then enable, , more of an automation or action layer that is sourced from someplace? Do you find that you’ll eventually be the owner of, , the activation of this data as ? , how are you thinking about things? Katherine Bayless: , , fabulous question, because, , , , all of my usual bag of tricks, , coming into a new place, just, , I have an ocean to boil, ? And I turned to… I’m a big fan of Rommelt and his, , few points on strategy, and , , the whole idea, , is, , what is the problem? what are the ins and outs of bounds, and then what are we going to do about it, ? And , my diagnosis of the organization, insofar as my data lane is concerned, is that the siloing of information is preventing people from having the knowledge they need to do their jobs, and do their jobs better, ? , , we just… people can’t come up with a better way to do stuff, because by the time you’ve talked to 8 people to get your spreadsheet that you can do the thing, you’re exhausted, ? And , my first pass at this is unblock knowledge. I don’t know how much you guys can see my whiteboard behind me, but… it’s the, , classic, data-to-wisdom continuum, ? But envisioned as, , an actual system, ? And I’m , , we have a lot of data in this stock, , but it’s not going anywhere. It’s not becoming information or knowledge, let alone wisdom, ? And I’m , I want to prioritize anything that accelerates the conversion from data to knowledge. I want to just get this information into the hands of my colleagues that they can start using it. I do think I will need to be the activation layer in a lot of cases, and I also think we’ll probably, hopefully quickly run out of the, , , low-hanging fruit stuff. , as soon as people can start answering all of the basic questions, I’m hoping they will have really deep. difficult ones, ? And at that point, then we get to finally be data people and be , aha, let me push my glasses up and make you a model, or, , whatever, ? But, , now, it’s just, , it’s a knowledge gap. That’s the biggest thing that we’re dealing with. Uttam Kumaran: Cool. , makes sense. . , the next step, , we have our call… … Or we’re still doing the call tomorrow with SCG. Katherine Bayless: , I need to… I was thinking about this earlier. I was , I need to make that everybody’s on the same page for that. it might wind up being a Wednesday thing, because I might have forgotten to close a loop with Greta, which is totally my fault. We can still meet tomorrow, if you want, even if I have failed to secure the SVG, folks. , this is, , totally my bad habit of, , , but they’re… they’re… they’re here for whatever I need them for, if I tell them there’s a call in 10 minutes, can’t they just join it? And, , that’s not nice. That’s not how we treat humans, Catherine. Uttam Kumaran: , but , I don’t know, I feel … work for you, we’ll be there. I don’t… Katherine Bayless: I’ll do better. Uttam Kumaran: Or if I can’t be there, someone from Frame Forge will be there. , , , , , maybe, , if not tomorrow, we probably need at least a day. A couple things that I want to do, is one, I want to start, Sam, we’ve done this before, is I just want to start Building a visual diagram of the data platform. the first place we’ll start all the way on the left is, , map these sources. Some of these are legacy, mainly we’re getting stale data, landed. We’re also looking at some active. I want to start to organize and just be , cool, this is the… this is the state of, , data ingestion. At that point. We can then start discussing, , how to ingest. if you want, , we can go ahead and start Snowflake, , if you think the risk is… is, , hey, it’s gonna… , I don’t know what’s gonna happen with AWS. The nice thing is, , … if it’s… we’ll just make it’s on the AWS cluster, and then… we’ll have to see when they… maybe when we talk to them what they want to do eventually, but I would to have that going, and then… whatever happens, we can send data to the next place, set it up again if needed. It’s not, , tons of work, … And for a short term is just to get a snowflake up and running and going, then start there. Katherine Bayless: , , I’m totally on board with that. … if we were move… if there was more, , stuff already, then I’d be , , , let’s not just create a bunch of tech debt out the gate, but in this case, it is worth the, , moving fast, even if we do have to repeat some of the steps when we get the new AWS accounts. There is also still the chance that we wind up just keeping this one, … , we were , , we could either set up an entirely new landing zone control tower, all the things, then just cut over, or, , migrate these in as legacy accounts and slowly transition, , , all the options. But… I have qualms with, , , getting started, rather than waiting to see when that comes through. Uttam Kumaran: . , the other piece is, , we can also hedge a little bit by landing everything in S3 first. Katherine Bayless: That’s where it is now, . . , the Snowflake account that Jay bricked, which maybe we will get back into, maybe we won’t, either way, , what I had done was I took the old marketing SQL Server data warehouse, , and dumped it into CSV and Parquet files in S3, and then I connected the S3 stage to Snowflake. that I could query against it. That was about as far as I got, but it was all… Pretty easy to do, honestly. Uttam Kumaran: that’ll all be provisioned through that… Console access. Katherine Bayless: since the Snowflake got bricked as part of setting up the SAML and SCIM, in theory, it should… If we fix it, then… it would flow through. I honestly, part of me is , we should probably just open another instance, ? Uttam Kumaran: , that’s what the sales guy’s gonna probably tell you, too, because he’s gonna be . support won’t get back to us, or whatever, … , . , I set it all up in the console. I did create a CloudFormation template, but then I ended up doing it in console. There was some wrinkle I ran into where it was getting annoying, or it was annoying to set up the… annoying steps on, I forgot, , what part it, … some passkey or something. It’s, , a little bit annoying. Katherine Bayless: , , there was some part of setting up the role, and the trust policy, and the permit. , there’s always, , some IAM permission that you need that you’re , why would I need that one, though? And how was I supposed to know? Uttam Kumaran: , it’s , you have to do, , a storage integration, and then a share, , a… And then, if you wanted to have a recurring sink, then you need to do snowpipe. , … , , this week, I would love, maybe we can make a dent into that, I assume for that, we’ll just create it using our… Should I just, , how would you want to handle it? Should we just go ahead and create it? with our Brainforge domain, or do you think it’s best to try to get provisioned. Katherine Bayless: , , we can… I’ll ask Jay if he can add the AWS app to your Okta thing you can get into it, but once you’re in there, we can just open a new account via the marketplace, , , . I assume that since there’s already one… instance open, it wouldn’t prevent you from opening another one through the marketplace? Let me just go take a look. Uttam Kumaran: , we’ll find out. , then, , we’ll start… we’ll start on that. We’ll… once we have all the… sources listed, we can then… you could give us the, , let’s go after these first, and then we’ll take those off. , , also, now that we have these listed, this could help us understand shop around on, , what we want to do on ETL. , of course, it’s going to be a little bit volume-dependent, but also, if we have the priority ones, , if there’s, , 5 to 10 that are the priority. If member attendance and, , CRM are the priority, then we just select those, and… we can go get some quotes, and also look at what it would take for us to build it. Because again, if it’s… if it is a single endpoint, and it’s , call it and move the data. I don’t, , not worried about that, but in situations Shopify, where there’s, , almost 15 or 20 different objects. Katherine Bayless: And it’s a lot of data. Uttam Kumaran: it’s, , an adult project for us to build just that, that’s where push should be, , we should consider. … Katherine Bayless: , and , it’s funny, because , registration, definitely one of the core sources. , Impexium, if we can get this Snowflake data share, that’ll make it way easier than writing the API calls for that. , I definitely don’t want to get into there. Salesforce Marketing Cloud, those are the two, , , biggest ones. Merits does not have APIs. , they do, but not really, , and they won’t let us use them because they’re not resilient enough for me to ping them in addition to the other vendors, which is fascinating. Merits, we are now on an FTP with them as , but , sucks. the event point data is another one to focus on, though, because it’s just, it’s a good, , platform, and then this event thing, which, , crappy, but… , Impexium Marketing Cloud… Cvent. , Formstack I’ve already done, but it wouldn’t hurt to do better. Uttam Kumaran: And then I just want to probably get a one-time sync of all the other data from all the sources that are longer, and land all. , that’s… that’s how… if we… once, , probably by Thursday, I feel we’ll have all these sources mapped, and then we can start to map out what to go after. that’s , , my objective for… for this week. Katherine Bayless: , , then probably, too, what we’ll want to do is maybe add a column or a note to, , which tools, . do we have access to… , , , , the Qualtrics stuff, , I don’t have access to Qualtrics, and I don’t have access to any of the historical survey information that was collected. I’m hoping that we can encourage our colleagues to share, but they have their own set of 12 SQL servers that they are using. Uttam Kumaran: , my question would be… It’s , do you have access? And… If not, do you think it’s worth going after now? I’m just gonna write those as I said it, and you can go ahead and check which one. , perfect. I’ll just put, does, does Kay have access? Katherine Bayless: , because, , a lot of the stuff that’s on the business intelligence team, I’m hoping that they, , that I can entice them with Snowflake. Uttam Kumaran: Totally, I know, I totally see where you… what the game… I know what the game is, you… Katherine Bayless: , . Oh, , also, I don’t think I mentioned this on Friday, if I’m repeating myself, then at least Sam gets some information. they’ve hired the guy who will be the Senior Director of Business Intelligence. It was very interesting being in those interviews, because the candidate was , wait, your title is my title. I’m , , technically this organization thinks we do different things. But he’s this guy who had, , a startup that MasterCard acquired 20 years ago, and he’s been at MasterCard ever since, and then he was , , burnt out, and he was , I’m gonna consult, and he’s , consulting sucks. Uttam Kumaran: I need somebody else to be in charge of my payroll. And he’s coming on board here. I don’t know when he starts, but, , he’s… Katherine Bayless: He’s an interesting, , force. Uttam Kumaran: . And I’m hoping that, , he’ll be a good ally and partner and, . Katherine Bayless: a lot of the questions he had for me in the interviews, he was talking about, , , , what are your tools? And I was , Excel and SharePoint. And I’m , if by the time he starts, I’m , now it is, ? Uttam Kumaran: , awesome. Katherine Bayless: , a social engineer, in addition. It’s terrible. Uttam Kumaran: And then, if it’s easy to… if you want to include Jay in that Slack, also feel free to. Katherine Bayless: I will. you guys would honestly really get along, and , I him a lot. He just… he’s , . Uttam Kumaran: , I love IT people, I , , we’re also… we do a lot of that type of work, we just want to be a friend to him and take these… Takes a lot of his plate. Katherine Bayless: And he’s been here, , 20 years, and he’s got a lot of institutional knowledge, , he knows where all the bodies are buried. Uttam Kumaran: , , I would him to validate stuff, and… , the next 2 weeks is gonna be a lot of access. . … For us, we think a lot about, , how do we just make the friends? , anything else? we didn’t really get to talk a lot about, , the end state. I briefed Sam a lot about, , what we talked about in terms of consolidated member lists, and identity resolution. I don’t know, I don’t think it’s worth spending more time on that now until we even have some landed data, because then we can start to stitch and then append to that. But the real thing I’m driving for is, instead of Snowflake is… oh, the other question is, , if you guys are on GitHub already. Katherine Bayless: , I need to invite you, or, , have Jay invite you, , , . But , I have a repo set up where I’ve been putting my stuff. , , be gentle, be gentle on me. Uttam Kumaran: we, , we’ll just set up dbt Core and at least start, and then you can decide if you want to end up doing dbt Cloud. Katherine Bayless: , , I… , based on my, , looking into it, , I feel core looks good to me, , the… Say the cloud doesn’t have interesting features, but . Uttam Kumaran: , , everybody on our team uses Cursor for stuff, the main reason is some people, they find it easy to orchestrate stuff there, but we orchestrate stuff directly as GitHub Actions, or we can set up functions in AWS, that’s fine. Katherine Bayless: , I do have the little bit of GitHub action set up that, , , one push, it’ll copy everything up to S3 and package my Lambda functions for me and, , just some of those bits, but, happy to expand that, and do more. And Jay’s interested in Terraform, which I was . . I’ve worked with Terraform in the past, it’s fine. Uttam Kumaran: , but for, for, , setting up apps ? Katherine Bayless: , I don’t know. he wants to use it for setting up, , Okta rules and deploying them. Uttam Kumaran: Interesting. I also… I’m gonna start… I’m gonna do some research on a lot of these event platforms, too, and talk to a couple friends I know in the event world about some of these. Do what they think, but. Katherine Bayless: , , I… , , any… I’m doing the same with my network, because there’s this open question now of, , who should own these things? And I’m , if it’s just a cat herding job of vendor management, then, , dear God, don’t give it to me, I will just get. I am not good at that work, ? But if it’s , how do we want to deliver a digital experience to 150,000 people for four days in Las Vegas? . I’ll take that. I’ll take that. Uttam Kumaran: Awesome. , , now that we have Slack, I feel just get us if you need anything, , , let me know if tomorrow’s gonna end up happening. Otherwise, , , maybe we’ll… I’ll plan… we can aim for Thursday. If we make progress by Wednesday, we end up doing Wednesday. And we’ll just try to stream… livestream as we start to… to do some damage. And then I’ll send a summary of, , the immediate next, , access request directly in Slack, … Katherine Bayless: , . And once you have the dbt stuff set up, too, , even though I haven’t got it much, I’ve never used it, a little training and tour. Uttam Kumaran: Oh, , 100%, , we’ll make , and also now, again, , we’ll put all the docs and, , how we set up projects, profiles, naming conventions, everything, we’ll leave in there as . Katherine Bayless: , , I should share that file… , it’s in the repo, too, but I do have, , a naming conventions, , file, , that I found very helpful with Claude Code, ? Instead of it giving me whatever it thinks I should call stuff, ? It’s , here are my naming conventions. Uttam Kumaran: , we set up an agent’s MD file and the cursor rule, we’ll just, . Do all that. Katherine Bayless: Nice, nice, awesome. Uttam Kumaran: , awesome. I love this. This is, , this is just, , the kickoff to, , a lot of stuff, … , it’s great. Katherine Bayless: I’m genuinely, I’m really excited. It’s overwhelming, and increasingly the people here are just, , freaking out all the time, but… Uttam Kumaran: . , we’re gonna… that’s why I want to drive towards a win that you can usually… can definitely use to build more… Cloud with internally, , … You can do that. Katherine Bayless: , if people can start asking the basic questions way more easily, it’ll be a big win. And then, , the other day, my boss was asking me if it was possible to, . we… our attendance numbers were very down, and we moved a bunch of paid marketing up, which meant we got more free registrants, because it was before the deadline for free reg, and she was , is it possible to have a model that could have helped us make that decision? I was , ! Uttam Kumaran: . It is. That’s… it is, at some point. Katherine Bayless: The goal is decision-making support. needs decision support. Have you seen Ontopia? , I haven’t yet either. My homework is to play with it tonight before I have a conversation with a friend tomorrow, but it’s a… it’s a… a semantic modeling. Uttam Kumaran: Oh, interesting. I feel , Sam, you would Octopia. Samuel Roberts: . , , taxonomy. Uttam Kumaran: And what’s the… , I feel we, we talk, we talk a lot about it. , it’s a shame none of our clients really care. We try to do a lot of great naming convention and, , taxonomy work. Katherine Bayless: , it really matters, ? And especially with, , the, the way that, , the semantic model is totally the make-or-break piece of a rag layer, … … . Uttam Kumaran: , I’m gonna look at Ontopia, too. Katherine Bayless: I am gonna go turn my brain off and sit on the bed. Thank you guys much, and I’m sorry we didn’t get you access all the way, but I’ll… Uttam Kumaran: , , this is just the start, it’ll happen in due time. , alright, thank you both. Katherine Bayless: Alright, see you. Samuel Roberts: Scrumity, bye. Katherine Bayless: Nice to meet you, too.