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Latrece Miller’s passion for logic and problem-solving precedes the establishment of the Data & Analytics field in which she now excels. With 12 years of combined experience in Microsoft Business Intelligence, Azure, Data Analytics, and .Net Development, as well as 10 years of leadership & management experience, Latrece is a skilled Data Architect with a craft that enables customers to unlock key insights and improve business processes. Whether she’s traveling the world or developing quality software, Latrece is a master of her craft.

Latrece, tell us a bit about your role at Cloudreach and what are your responsibilities?

I am a Cloud Data Architect (CDA). Currently, I am on a project where I’m finding solutions in Azure or doing tasks needed to create Azure pipelines and Storage for Azure Data engineering.

As a CDA, I architect solutions and make sure that the customer requirements are fully understood and that their needs are addressed even when they don’t know all their needs. I am the role that sits between the customer and the technical team to ensure that solutions and code are of the best quality.

What part about your role do you find most exciting?

Azure Data platforms are changing daily and there is always a new challenge or solution.

What types of projects do you find most interesting and do you see having the biggest impact?

All data projects are interesting to me as they help customers gain insights into their business. They also all have a great impact on every area of the business. A good example of this would be the financial and advertisement industries. There is so much information that can be gained from customer buying habits and what types of advertising different demographics respond to.

How does one make sure that data-driven insights are impactful and create business value?

The value comes from the effective utilization of those insights. But first,

  • You must have the right data to analyze, catalogue and organize correctly.
  • You must have an effective solution to gather, store and analyze the data.
  • You need to be able to pull that data into visualizations designed and presented in a way that allows its consumers to assimilate large amounts of data in a small amount of time and in a way that is easy to understand.

Then to ensure effective utilization of those insights, you must partner with those departments or business units that you are creating insights for to make sure they see and understand the patterns that exist and the story that is being told by that data. This also means knowing your audience, you may present your data and information to a marketing creative team differently than you do a finance team.

What recommendations do you have for creating a data-driven culture in an organization?

From the viewpoint of getting buy in for the new culture:

  • Start the conversations and make sure they include more than just top leadership. Buy in for a solution rests just as much if not more in the acceptance from the employees closest to it and most affect it by it as it does the Top executives. Articulate to them the purpose and the benefits of the work and changes that will be coming. Explain to them the intangible values of the solution that benefit them.
  • Create initiatives to begin understanding what data is valuable and important to the different business units. Start showing the varying units how the elimination of siloed data can allow access to more data that can improve their individual departments.
  • Implement initiatives to create data literacy.

How has the Data & Analytics space changed throughout your career?

In the beginning of my career there wasn’t a field called Data and Analytics. When I started even Business Intelligence tools were considered .Net Development. It eventually split off into its own space called Business Intelligence and then soon after Analytics. Business Intelligence was used to tell companies about their current operations and business. Analytics created the opportunity to to predict into the future and to plan for future needs or the business and its customers.

What are your Data specialties and super skills?

My data specialties are Microsoft data products and Tools. My super skill transcends all technology spaces, it is Logic. My super skill is my ability to create logic.

Tell us a bit about your workspace and how you strike a work/life balance.

I used to have my desk/office on the other side of my bedroom in the area that is supposed to be the sitting room. But when working from home, this is not an equation for having appropriate work/life Balance. So I decided to take the area I least used in the house which is the front sitting area to convert into an office for myself. By it not being in my room, I step away sooner and more often.  Behind my desk are shelves holding many of the art and souvenirs I have acquired during my travels. It reminds me of the things I get to do and see because of my career.

Latrece workspace

What are you passionate about outside of work?

Travel, I love to travel. I have been to 20+ countries at this point. My Favorite trip to date is the one to Egypt.

Give our readers a TSR (“ten second recommendation”).

I recommend that people travel outside of the country*. It opens up your mind and exposes you to a lot of things that will change your perspective. *When it’s safe to travel again given the current Covid-19 situation.

Thanks Latrece!

Our Data experts help businesses support their smartest people with advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities to find verifiable answers to hard, important questions. We do this by building powerful, fast, cloud-native data platforms optimized for efficient, massive-scale data analytics. Cloudreach is now hiring Data professionals – check it out!