It’s been over two years since I started Lake Data Insights and I’m overdue for an update.
Long story short… I’ve been busy. And blogging tends to fall to the wayside when that happens. But now it a good time to reflect on what I expected and what has transpired over my first two years of “independent-ing” (or solopreneur-ing, if you want the more in-vogue term). I’ll also discuss how this flexibility has enabled me to work on projects that have personal meaning for me.
This post will focus on the Lake Data Insights (LDI) half of my work world. Running the Capstone program and teaching at NDSU continues to be an important part of my life, but not the focus here. This post will talk about the LDI business in general.
There were a couple of places where I expected my analytics focused business to find opportunities. The first place was the most obvious after nearly 20 years at Microsoft – the Dynamics ecosystem. Thanks to some help from my friends at Stoneridge Software, my most interesting data science focused project has been doing demand forecasting for a Dynamics customer. This project involved supercharging the out of the box, R based, univariate time series forecasting in Dynamics SCM with a multi-variate approach using Auto ML in Azure Machine Learning. The business domain for this particularly company is very interesting and this has been a fun project.
Also in the Dynamics world, I’ve also done some advising work for an ISV in the ecosystem to help them get started with market basket analysis. Recently, I put together and delivered a custom training program for a partner that brings the fundamentals of data engineering to the approach that Microsoft is taking with Synapse Link and Fabric.
So Dynamics has continued to be a factor in my work life, although not as much as expected. And, while I go back over 20 years working on Microsoft and Dynamics technologies, this isn’t the “old” that I’m referring to in the post title.
The second place where I expected business to come from was smaller, local companies that were just getting into the analytics world. In particular, I hoped to see some agriculture focused opportunities as I have strong ties to that industry. Fortunately, I was able to connect with the Big Data Pipeline Unit in the NDSU Agriculture group that encompasses academics, research, and extension. Like the rest of the ag industry, the NDSU group has a huge opportunity to leverage data to improve agriculture production.
As some of you know, I grew up on a farm about 40 miles from Fargo in Minnesota. My brother still runs the family farm, which has grown significantly since I was a kid. Being a kid was a long time ago, but we still haven’t gotten to the “old” in the post title.
A second smaller, local company and industry was unexpected. Through unrelated discussions with my local electric coop, Lake Region Electric, I learned that they wanted to make better use of the data available to them and had even budgeted some funding for resources to do so in 2022. The timing was ideal and I’ve been consistently doing analytics work for them since January 2022.
The electric coop world is a great place to leverage data and advanced analytics. The coop’s mission is to provide reliable, high quality, and cost-effective service to its members. To do this, they need to understand how they are serving tens of thousands of members over thousands of power lines. They have to figure out appropriate rate structures to fairly charge their community and come up with innovative programs to minimize their overall costs. The coop’s mission hasn’t changed since they started in the 1930’s, but it has become more interesting with the advent of climate challenges and renewable energy.
And the great thing about the coop world when it comes to analytics is that they have a lot of data! From meter data collected regularly to a myriad of information about equipment to usage and billing information in their ERP system, there’s a ton of opportunity to pull data together, create new metrics, or leverage ML to help the coop make better decisions for its members.
My grandfather played a big role in the startup of Lake Region Electric in the late 1930’s and 1940’s. He served as Chairman of the Board for the coop from 1948-1975. One of my uncles followed him on the Lake Region board of directors from 1975-1990. Another uncle was the Executive Director for Government Relations of the National Rural Electric Coop Association in Washington DC in the 80’s and 90’s. This family legacy in the electric coop world started with a simple desire to get electricity to rural areas, like my grandpa’s farm.
If you’ve read this far (thank you!), you now understand what is truly “old” about the work I’m doing. I didn’t truly appreciate the importance of the work that my grandpa and uncles did to create something that I take for granted everyday – expecting a light to come on when I flip a switch.
Applying data analytics to help coops address a changing world is the “new” part of the post title. It means a lot to me to play a role in helping Lake Region Electric move forward in ways that best serve its membership. There are tremendous opportunities for analytics to advance what is happening in utilities and I’ve had a couple of other related contracts in this space.
Overall, the consulting side of my new world has been very good – interesting projects with good variety, excellent partners, and significant flexibility. While not exactly how I expected it to play out, the direction has been rewarding.
I’ll wrap this long post up here. Thanks for reading about what I’ve been up to over the last couple of years.
Photo: Lake Superior Sunrise
Photo credit: Dawn Froslie