Alteryx for Good Teams Up with University of Virginia to Support New Class: STAT 4559

I’d like to give a big “thanks” to Alteryx and DataMeaning for hosting Big Data & Self-Service Analytics at the Jack Rose Saloon in Washington D.C. I met a lot of great professionals, and learned a ton about the rise of self-service analytics. Before discussing the partnership, I would like to share some of my biggest takeaways from the event.

Takeaways from The Event

• Business intelligence players like Alteryx will win by collaborating with local small and midsize businesses that specialize in evangelizing and implementing their products. DataMeaning is doing this now to great effect with BI leaders like Alteryx, Tableau, and MicroStrategy.
• Alteryx is creating a fairly large ecosystem of products for data scientists. Alteryx Designer will continue to be the cornerstone, but it can now be plugged into all sorts of social, collaborative, and educational channels. The number of recipes available through the combination of Alteryx Gallery, Alteryx Connect, Alteryx for Good, and the user forum, is substantial.
• Ford Motor Company employs about 5,000 data analysts and 5,000 more data scientists. All of them are equipped with some sort of self-service analytics platform (Alteryx, in Ford’s case). If you work as a data scientist at a large enterprise, you will have access to and make use of these tools, regardless of your computer science skill.

Partnership with Alteryx for Good

As readers may know, Conlan Holdings has teamed up with University of Virginia’s Department of Statistics to teach a new class titled STAT 4559: Data Science Practicum. Given the relevance of self-service platforms in today’s data analytics positions, I knew I wanted to put tools like Alteryx Designer in the hands of my students. My primary goal was to speak to Alteryx’s marketing staff to arrange for a collaboration.

I ended up meeting many different members of the Alteryx team, including sales, development, and marketing personnel. After speaking with the event coordinator, I learned that Alteryx already had a program for precisely what I needed: Alteryx for Good. I left the event feeling good about the possibility of a collaboration.

After speaking with head of University Relations at Alteryx, I was fast-tracked to an Alteryx for Good partnership. Through our arrangement:

• I have received a temporary license to help me design an Alteryx-enabled curriculum
• My students will receive licenses to work on their data science projects
• Alteryx is working with me to book guest speakers from a variety of esteemed organizations including Deloitte, Interworks, and the Entomological Association of America

Alteryx and I see eye-to-eye on this collaboration. Our goal is to elevate the students, the statistics department, and our collaborators by supporting and connecting them.

Looking to The Future

I have a lot of time to prepare curriculum, resources, and speakers for STAT 4559 this Spring. I plan to keep beefing it up with great partnerships and ultimately deliver an extraordinary experience to my students.