This blog post is Human-Centered Content: Written by humans for humans.
Every year, all of InterWorks US descends on Oklahoma for a company-wide get together. We like to start the year with a fresh start by doing a brief recap of the prior year and then dive into the vision and plans for the coming year. It’s an opportunity for everyone to get on the same page, spend quality time together and learn and collaborate around key initiatives.
InterWorks has had both in-person and remote workforces prior to COVID, and a core value of the company is that nothing can ultimately replace in-person connection when we have the chance. It invigorates me to see people in person; this year will be my 10th(!) year at InterWorks, and it truly warms my heart to see folks that I have worked with throughout the year(s) via zoom.
Hands-On Training with Sigma Computing
At this year’s InterWorks’ company kickoff we were excited to invite our partners at Sigma to join us. If you haven’t heard about Sigma before, Sigma is part of a new wave of tools paving a vastly different future in the analytics space. It’s is a cloud-based tool with robust analytics and data modeling features combined into one platform, and takes things a step even further with the ability to easily create business applications to capture business workflows — powered by data and your cloud data warehouse.
The Sigma partner team ran a training session for around 30 of our consultants to get hands-on experience directly in the tool. While some of our consultants have already been diving headfirst into Sigma by way of Sigma’s Architecture certification, working with various clients’ Sigma deployments and tinkering with fun side projects in Sigma, it was great to get everyone in the same room learning together.
Above: Ryan Callahan asking questions during sessions at the InterWorks kickoff.
What I Loved About the Sigma Training
I was absolutely thrilled with the opportunity to have a chance to be hands on keyboard with Sigma alongside our consulting staff. Like many people, my professional journey to BI/Analytics started with spreadsheets as a person who is analytical by nature. I grew a passion for data visualization and telling stories, which segued into learning Tableau. After almost a decade at InterWorks, I’ve helped many clients with their Tableau deployments, content creation and governance of their Tableau environments.
In my current role as Services Director at InterWorks, I manage our teams of consultants in the US. While I’m not as hands-on with the many toolsets that we work with, I need to constantly have my finger on the pulse in terms of how and what our consultants need to learn and grow to meet the changing needs of our clients and our industry. Getting a chance to sit down with this platform and hear directly from their team is a rare opportunity, and I was blown away. In an afternoon, our partner team walked us through data models, reviewed Sigma’s architecture, highlighted visual design features and we built an AI app.
Above: Haleigh Schwartz at work during sessions.
My mind was racing in terms of the ideas with Sigma. I’d describe the AI App features as nothing short of game-changing. As someone who leads workforce planning efforts, I’m excited to migrate some of my existing processes around skills tracking and capacity/scenario planning into AI Apps. The ease of building user-friendly interfaces also means that it’ll make it a breeze for me to collaborate for our other business users in our organization, like our Operations team, who needs tools that speed up their workflows and lowers barriers to collaborative information capture. Speaking of workflows…
What’s Next for InterWorks and Sigma?
Sigma is having their first user conference called Workflow on March 5 and we will be there! We are absolutely thrilled to be partnering closely with Sigma and are all in on its potential. Our team is full speed ahead with developing new Sigma projects and apps. If you’re planning on attending, we’d love to connect with you there! If you’re otherwise new to Sigma or are curious about evaluating it, please get in touch below.
