Moving Beyond Spreadsheets

💭FREE Charter Engage: Know IT Podcast Series – Moving Beyond Spreadsheets

In today's complex world, valuable insights require data. Spreadsheets have limitations in scalability, security, and analytics. New tools and platforms are needed for modern analytics beyond spreadsheets, allowing businesses to gain deeper insights and make more informed decisions while protecting sensitive data. 

This podcast will hear from our guests, including Yogi Schulz – Principal with Corvelle Consulting; Roland Plett - Global Lead of the Energy and Mining Industry Solutions Group for Cisco; Wade Crick, the Principal Business Architect, Ronnie Scott, the Chief Technology Officer, and Mark George, the Director - Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets for our company as they discuss compelling reasons to move beyond spreadsheets; how organizations can leverage new data types and drive innovation and efficiency; and Charter and Cisco’s innovative solutions to help businesses get started.

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Transcript

Charter Engage: Know IT – Podcast – Moving Beyond Spreadsheets

[Recorded in Calgary, AB]

2023.May.26

[0:06] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Well, welcome everyone to the latest episode of Charter’s ongoing podcast series, called “Charter Engage – Know IT.” I'm your host, Mark George, the Director of Energy, Resource, and Industrial Markets. 

For over 25 years, Charter has built a very successful business as a reseller of networking, IT, security, and collaboration products and services. Last year, we made the strategic decision to invest in building a much broader Systems Integration business, focused initially on companies in the Energy, Mining, and Manufacturing markets.  To do this, Charter will take responsibility for customers achieving business outcomes, leveraging best-in-class technology and a comprehensive portfolio of professional services to help them integrate and optimize across the traditional IT and OT infrastructures. To put these comprehensive solutions together, Charter will partner with third parties to help our clients achieve their digital transformation and business objectives.

The world we live in is characterized today by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), [1] making it necessary to have data to provide the best insights possible. Now, while many businesses currently use spreadsheets to analyze historical and real-time data, the convergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the IT traditional world opens up new data and data types that require new tools and platforms. Although spreadsheets have powerful features for organizing and analyzing data, they are not well-suited for this new, converged OT and IT environment. There are many compelling reasons to move beyond spreadsheets as their functionality, data integrity, collaboration, scalability, reporting and analytics, and ultimately, security are limited compared to modern analytical tools.

As you'll hear from our guests today, the need for data is growing exponentially and spreadsheets may become too cumbersome to manage. Furthermore, spreadsheets are prone to errors and data inconsistencies, making them unsuitable for complex calculations, data analysis, and automation. Spreadsheets are static and there is a need to collect data in real-time to make decisions quicker, to be agile, and automate industrial and business processes. Spreadsheets can be easily shared and accessed by anyone, which can pose security risks for sensitive data. Specialized software provides more advanced reporting and analytical capabilities, allowing businesses to gain deeper insights into their operations and make more informed decisions, while protecting sensitive data. 

Today's program has three parts: i) First, we'll look at some of the tools and platforms that people are using today – more [specifically,] the theory behind the topic today. ii) Second, we’ll discuss the compelling reasons to move beyond spreadsheets to start to leverage the new data and data types (which we are going to describe today as text, voice, image, audio, and real-time.) And together, they can all be analyzed to gain new insights to drive business innovation and more efficiency. iii) In the third segment, we’ll provide some advice on how to get started and the role that Charter and Cisco play together in providing innovative solutions that help businesses get to the power of real-time data.

It's my pleasure, today, to welcome four industry executives to our podcast discussion:

·       First of all, I want to introduce Yogi Schulz. Yogi's the Principal with Corvelle Consulting and a 40-year veteran of the IT industry. He writes regularly for ITWorldCanada and other trade publications on a broad range of topics, including IT strategy, digital transformation, and systems project management.

·       Secondly, Mr. Roland Plett. Roland is the Global Lead of the Energy and Mining Industry Solution Group for Cisco and has worked with us on previous podcasts. And we welcome you back to the table, Roland. 

·       Wade Crick is the Principal Business Architect for Charter. Thanks for joining us.

·       And last, but certainly not least, Ronnie Scott, the Chief Technology Officer (CFO) for Charter. And again, in all of our podcast series so far, does an amazing job contributing to the role that Charter can play in helping our clients further assess and deal with the topics that we've introduced in our podcast series.

Now, all four of our participants today have worked extensively across the globe helping companies become more innovative designers with an outward-looking customer-centric focus that fundamentally helps them speed up their business transformation efforts. So, let's get started. 

[4:57] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator 

Yogi, as our industry guest today you get the first question to kick off our discussion. You've recently written an article called “Engineers are World Leaders in Misusing Excel”[2] - kind of an eye-opening topic. Can you walk us through some of the points you called out as misuses of Excel? 

[5:16] Yogi Schulz, Corvelle Consulting, Principal

Thank you, Mark. I appreciate the opportunity to join you and our fellow podcasters here, this morning - and I hope I can contribute from my experiences in the use, and misuse, of Excel. 

What I find is that Excel is an extraordinarily powerful and useful tool for many situations. But, whenever someone strikes of success with the use of Excel, it expands, it grows, it becomes more sophisticated, it becomes more complicated. And as you already mentioned, the risks now go up. The risks of inadvertent errors. The risks of misunderstanding the data. The risk of miscalculations and misunderstanding starts to go up. As we try to manage more data (what, in effect, should be a database but isn't) through Excel, we try to build a formal application through Excel, when Excel is about informal applications. 

So, I'm not against the use of Excel and against the misuse of Excel. And the minute Excel starts to be used on a team basis or, even worse, on a departmental basis, or, heaven forbid, on an enterprise basis, that's beyond what anyone ever envisioned - who designed Excel or its competitors. Focus Excel on its strong points and avoid the misuses, and you and your organization will be happier and deliver more business value.

[6:39] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Well, let's maybe broaden the discussion because we're not here to beat up on Excel. Clearly there's other tools, other technologies that people are using for data analytics, business intelligence tools, lots of different various vendors. Maybe, let's just talk a little bit about that and, maybe, some of the pros and cons as we’re introducing this topic to the audience. Who would like to start? 

[7:00] Roland Plett, Cisco, Global Lead for Energy and Mining

Well, maybe I'll just expand into some of the changes that have happened with the way we use data. I think in the past, a lot of the data has been kind of manually sourced, where you have people walking around operational facilities and writing down numbers or writing down observations that they see doing their rounds. And, structured and unstructured data kind of makes its way into informal reporting, informal trend analysis - similar to what we would associate with Excel. But now what we're starting to see is that there are a lot of other stakeholders that are interested in that same information. 

And so, data has become much more central to just the full operating picture. So, it's not just being used for someone’s personal analysis and personal production processes. So, it really becomes important to have a strategy or a system for housing that data with good integrity and good security, and making sure that the right people are accessing it in the right ways. They’ll be able to leverage the powerful tools, like our spreadsheets, to maybe do the simple, personalized analysis of data and be able, still, to leverage those things without compromising some of the, I guess, trapping the data in peoples’ laptops, per se. 

[8:15] Wade Crick, Charter, Principal Business Architect

Roland, maybe I can just follow into your comments. If you go back to about ’85. That's really when spreadsheets became available, right? And that's a real trip down memory lane. But even more recently, probably about 12 years ago, there was this whole concept that emerged around big data. And everybody was about trying to do things with this unstructured data, like emails and various things like that - that have no real fit into a row-and-columns kind of structure. And there was an explosion of interest in trying to do something because companies now realized that 80 percent of what they had is unstructured. And that still is true today. 

There's a vast amount of business intelligence and analytics that you gain from looking and doing things with that unstructured data set. And of course, the tools now have emerged, and are widely available now, to go and do things with those data types that have been hard to deal with in the past. Insert, NEO, Microsoft, and many other companies now how great tool sets available. I mean, Microsoft’s Build Conference[4] is running this week. And there was a whole new data fabric they introduced, which allows you to even go and do things more easily with that. 

And Ronnie, I know you've had experience with us doing that internally with a bunch of data sets we’ve had – that we’ve never got any insights out of before. And maybe over to you for some of your comments on that?

[9:30] Ronnie Scott, Charter, Chief Technology Officer

Thanks, Wade. And thank you again, Mark, for inviting me back. It’s always fun to be here. 

Inside Charter, we've been talking a lot about this idea of how we use our data better. And Excel has been a tool that we've lived on for many, many years. I still would suggest it's a wonderful presentation layer. It's a great tool for massaging data and presenting it. But it's very static. We began to ask our questions, “What if that data could be real-time, instantly available, always up-to-date, and not just manually grabbing data from multiple sources, but putting all that data together in one place, and then pulling out the information we want - at a given moment?” And so, that's what we did. We built our own, let’s call it a data lake, or a data store, or whatever you want to call it. And we then applied new tools to grab out and analyze that data in real-time. 

But a couple of the presentations we want still look like spreadsheets. The way in which they can format and present that data, and allow us to expand out, is still useful. But we don't have to do all the manual work upfront. We can instantly, always have all that data up to date. And by being able to use that real-time data and still present it in a way that we're still comfortable with, and understand, we've been able to leapfrog our visibility of our organization from when we used Excel spreadsheets. And again, not diminishing the value. And of a certain fact, Excel specialists who are still responsible for turning that data and presenting it in these new tools that are often low code and no code - in presenting that in a way that we're comfortable with, but using new up to date, always-on technologies. 

[11:08] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

And when we introduced the first question, we want to talk about some of the other tools and platforms that are being used in the market. What other things are customers talking to you about? I know obviously the Microsoft tools like Power BI,[4] Power Apps,[5] and Power Automate[6] come up in our daily conversations, Wade. Are there some other things out there that you're seeing?

[11:31] Wade Crick, Charter, Principal Business Architect

I guess, Mark. Certainly, I think a lot of customers that you and I meet with, they are using Excel because it's just so quick and easy to do things. And in terms of the tools they are looking at, most of the customers are using the Microsoft Suite for Office, Microsoft 365,[7] and of course, Microsoft has a very strong capability with Power Platform, which has now become their data fabric. They’re really consolidating all their tools into very easy-to-use format - which makes it very easy now to go and take and store all sorts of data, (which is structured, semi-structured, unstructured, and the real-time data), and do analytics on it. Because, I mean, at the end-of-the-day Ronnie, you mentioned the insights we are getting now. Every business wants that. Every business, Mark, that you and I meet with, they all want better insights and want to predict things, and, of course, doing that with Excel limits your opportunity for that. 

[12:18] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

And so, I'm sure some of those drivers were what led you to create your new series of articles that you're getting ready to roll out, Yogi, right?

[12:30] Yogi Schulz, Corvelle Consulting, Principal

Thank you, Mark. Yes, indeed. So, to build on the applications that people are moving towards or the tool sets - Wade has described what's happening in the Microsoft orbit, but there are other orbits as well. 

So, for example, the vendors that are closer to the data gathering end (and I'm thinking of the SCADA vendors,[8] be they GE, Honeywell, whatever) they all have tool sets that do a very good job of managing that IoT data. You can get into a discussion of how well they manage the non-IoT data because that's important to integrate that, with the IoT data. 

And then, if you just look at the Cisco website,[9] there is a whole pile of partner vendors that offer various software tools that work very well with those streams of data that are shooting at you from the Cisco gear. 

And we just had Ronnie mention low code. There is a whole ecosystem of people who have various low-code tools that, I think, represent a major step above what Excel capabilities are - if you want to be risk-averse in the use of Excel, which is presumably what we're trying to discuss here. So those low-code tools are worth using. 

Wade mentioned Power BI as an example of a data-visualization tool - it is widely regarded. But if, for whatever reason, you want to go beyond that, there are other tools as well. TIBCO Spotfire®[10] is an example of a tool used in the oil and gas industry, and Tableau[11] is also available to you. So, there is a whole range of products that can help you improve what you're doing in data management, data analytics, and data presentation, that go well beyond what Excel is comfortable with or should be comfortably used, and not abused.

[14:13] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

So, Roland, obviously, as we were thinking about the topic for today, “Moving Beyond Spreadsheets,” the tools that are out there today (kind of moving into the second part of our discussion) are not ideal for the converged OT and IT environments. Maybe share some of the experiences you've had working with some of the Cisco clients and trying to help them think through what the next steps are that clearly they need to start to incorporate into their planning process to deal with this converged edge that's being created for them.

[14:46] Roland Plett, Cisco, Global Lead for Energy and Mining

With this transition, I guess, from the more traditional way of collecting data, where you're walking around with a clipboard and reading gauges, to a much more real-time process of pulling data together - now you have to think about how is that data moving around and how do you secure it and keep it / guarantee some kind of integrity - which now you can do if you're doing a systematic way of collecting data. In the past, a lot of that reference point has come from the control-system world, where there was a very, very structured system put out in the Purdue model and the IEC standards around moving data from one operational level to another.[12]  And honestly, it made it, actually, kind of hard to pull data out of that world. If you did design the system to do it, it was, actually, fairly expensive to do. 

And so, what I'm actually seeing a lot of organizations do is define a whole instrumentation environment that manages that industrial IoT data differently. Whether it's visual camera data, when it's audio data, there's all kinds of different sorts of data that aren't used in the control environment, so we can actually treat it differently from a security perspective and from a data gathering perspective. That opens up a whole other set of application opportunities too, because there are so many starting application vendors out there that are building their product in the cloud - Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and other operational systems that know how to work with this data and provide you with good operational insights. And actually, doing that in a fairly focused and small way, so it makes it easy for mid-size companies to actually dive into these pretty powerful tools that are focused on their specific industry.

So, we talked about the large-scale, horizontal options around Tableau and Microsoft. If you're dealing with operational data, you can actually get into some of these small, upstart application providers that do everything in the cloud. And we’re able to securely feed that information into the cloud and get those insights back. And there's a whole plethora of different application providers, so you do need to do a little bit of looking around, but from an analytics perspective, there are a lot of different things going on that are really exciting.

[16:52] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

So, Wade, maybe build on that? Because clearly, some of our clients are reaching out to us and saying “Look, I want to create this new line of business. I see the opportunity to leverage the data that's out there.” And all of a sudden, you've got a new revenue source, new bottom-line profitability, in a brand-new industry, potentially. Maybe share with their audience today some of the things you see in that space - to build on what Roland was talking about?

[17:19] Wade Crick, Charter, Principal Business Architect

Certainly. Thanks, Mark. And you know you’re absolutely right. As we meet with customers, you know, the mid-market customers are starting to realize that, to use the term that’s bandied around the industry, “Data is the new oil,” where it's a very valuable asset. It’s a corporate asset. So, therefore, these valuable assets shouldn't live in individual spreadsheets, because then it’s trapped - it’s no longer providing value to the overall corporation. Because every corporation wants to have that master data record for the customer. There shouldn’t be twenty different records and twenty different PCs for the customer. There should be one gold record for the customer. And there should be data of various types that they can start to do analytics against. 

So, Ronnie talked about some of the work we are doing at Charter, taking our various data types and putting them into that concept of the Data Lake. And it’s evolved to where it’s called a Lakehouse,[13] and so on, which gives you structured and unstructured data storage, and also the opportunity to do analytics on it, very easily. I mean, this concept of no-code, low-code is driving to a head rapidly. And certainly, all of the major software vendors, like an SAP,[14] Oracle,[15] go down the list of everybody, Salesforce,[16] are the ones that built out tools, now, that help customers take advantage of the unstructured data. And they are all very much aware that customers have the Industrial IoT data sets they want and can just do analytics on. So, the tool sets have never been better. 

I think, Yogi, in one of your presentations at the Data Management Association,[17] you brought up a really good point. And the point was, you just really kind of do a little bit of stealth work to go and see how many things are done with paper, or just Excel spreadsheets. Just, actually, do a little bit of a survey of the organization. And that’s an opportunity. Because you discovered there’s a lot of critical business functions being done on paper, still, or in Excel spreadsheets. That's an opportunity to now transform that data and get brand-new insights.

[19:04] Yogi Schulz, Corvelle Consulting, Principal

Absolutely, Wade. There are lots of opportunities in many organizations to advance the digital transformation and to replace the Excel. Now, you mentioned these small to medium businesses. Some of them are large enough to get involved with data warehouses. And that was a very scary experience because it was a multi-year, multimillion-dollar adventure with not-that-exciting benefits. So, I appreciate that we’re emphasizing a new generation of capability. And we've mentioned the low code, which is a part of that; you've mentioned the Data Lakehouse, which is a part of that; and we've mentioned the real-time capability. And the entry point is a lot lower for all of that than the previous generation of products - which produced pretty scary investment dollars before you perceived any benefit dollars. 

So, I’m echoing your encouragement to organizations to revisit this topic and see what's available. Like you said, there's these upstarts - I think you meant start-up vendors - that are thinking very creatively and using these new toolsets to enable new insights, new applications, [and] new integrations. 

[20:16] Wade Crick, Charter, Principal Business Architect

And I think, maybe, to you Ronnie, I mean, in your personal experience with Charter with taking, I think you mentioned we had six different data sets that we wanted to consolidate and get better insights out of. What was the time-to-value to do that? 

[20:30] Ronnie Scott, Charter, Chief Technology Officer

Yes, Wade. We’re still developing the time-to-value, to be honest. And we have got a lot more value to extract out of the data that we’ve put together. The interesting part was we were already doing interesting things in 48 hours. And, it was amazing how quickly we could aggregate data and, as Yogi was just talking about, at a totally different cost point by firing this into a cloud-based infrastructure, where we could then develop from. 

I actually want to go back a little bit further. My first encounter of this was a long time ago, when I worked at Cisco and did a little SE project around Cloud and IoT, and so on. And we had little project, where we took some FitBits[18] and we just started using an API[19] to extract that into AWS,[19] in that particular instance. And then we used an off-the-shelf Kafka[21]  message bus, and then we dumped that straight into an internal database, which was off-prem. (We were actually demonstrating hybrid cloud, there.) But what was amazing was that we were able to build this overlay network to grab, and manage, and then massage that data for almost no effort. And the costs were extremely low compared to building out off-the-shelf tools, on-premise, that could do those same things. Now, I'm not diminishing the value of true, purpose-built, off-the-shelf tools, but what we have now is a totally different world where you can truly build an application in very short amounts of timeframe - that deliver real-world visibility you could have no other way. 

And, I think we have to recognize that this is a sea change. And to totally reflect what Yogi just said, it's time to revisit that. Because we're not talking about going to some very large database vendor and building out a project alongside a huge consulting organization - which might be multiple zeros on the end of the check. So, I'm very excited about what we can do, but I will reflect, also, on Roland's point of governance, and policy, and security is critical. And so you want to think about it. You don't want to be silly. But if you can build that governance and model around the solution you need to achieve, you can reach pretty astonishing levels very rapidly.

[22:38] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Well, one of the fundamental premises to our podcast today, “Moving Beyond Spreadsheets,” is security, Ronnie. That ultimately, Excel spreadsheets can easily be shared and accessed by anyone. That obviously presents a risk for, especially, sensitive data. And that, ultimately, by the work that Cisco's been doing in the market, Charter’s been doing in the market that is absolutely built into almost all the products each of our companies brings into the marketplace. Roland, do you want to build on that a little bit more, for the audience, on the security side, or some of the other things you're saying - maybe even on collaboration? Because, obviously, there's this point that you reach in the analysis of data that you can't continue to do, or maybe shouldn't continue to do, in the traditional spreadsheet way.

[23:26] Roland Plett, Cisco, Global Lead for Energy and Mining

Yeah, this is one of the things that's a delicate balance. I mean whenever we have a security discussion, one of the first things that tends to come up is “You're just making things complicated.” And I think that applies here, a little bit, too. One of the reasons why spreadsheets are so popular is that they're just really simple, to move your mouse up to the file menu and hit “New spreadsheet,” and start putting numbers in. And pretty soon, you're getting insights. And I think to put that into a system and then apply security policy to it does make it a little bit more complex for this ad hoc behavior to happen. And so, that's, I think, something that you really want to think through as you’re systematizing this, as you're applying security policy. Because a lot of this is organizational policy is “How easy are you making it for your creative engineering types to be able to access the data, that they can actually do something useful with (and do some pretty creative insight generation) without making them jump through too many hoops?” And so, I think that's a consideration that needs to be thought through. 

[24:30] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

So, Ronnie, companies are listening to our podcasts and people are listening to our podcasts. Ultimately, they've got to figure out “All right, I want to move beyond spreadsheets. How do I do that? What's the role of Charter and Cisco working together in the market?” How might we work together to help answer that question, for a company that's thinking about how do I move beyond spreadsheets? 

[24:53] Ronnie Scott, Charter, Chief Technology Officer

I've been working on some stories around that. We're going to be doing a presentation at the Global Energy Show[22] in a couple of weeks and that’s the heart and soul of the presentation I'm talking about. And I'm trying to get that to being a simple story. And we keep coming back to this and this in the broadcasts - start small. Don't overcomplicate things. But we can begin to build foundations that are scalable, manageable, secure, and so on. 

So, the process is quite simple: you've got to collect the data, and then you've got to centralize the data, then you can analyze the data. But all of that has to be wrapped in the security bubble. And so we asked very simple questions about “Where are we getting the data? Where are we allowed to store the data? And who’s allowed to see it?” We start off with those very fundamental governance questions. And they don't have to be complicated. They don’t have to have ISO[23] terms, and all these things, unless you’re an organization that needs that. Once we centralized it, we bring it into a place that we trust, it's very easy to capture that data – it’s 48 hours of work to link to a few databases and start importing that data and keeping it up to date. And then we begin to build the analysis phase. 

So, again, we're not talking about rocket science. We’re talking about taking your people, who are already the spreadsheet geniuses, and now applying them to a new tool that looks very similar. It has very similar capabilities and outcomes, but you're then building something that allows them to present data in real time. It doesn't need them, every day, to go back and re-import that data. Once you’ve built a template, the process application tool once, everyone can then access that in real-time. 

So, these are tools that we can walk customers through, right now. These are tools that we can then hook into.  We use this ourselves. We hook into Cisco’s databases so that we can help our customers understand when their network equipment needs updating, and we can watch and trace when devices have been shipped, and we get insights that can help our customers by being able to work together and bring those data sets together. 

[24:46] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

That’s a very practical approach. Yogi, you work with a lot of different companies in the market, lots of different industries, but primarily the oil and gas industry. Can you see that approach being successful? Can you see how it starts to, by us working together with our clients in the marketplace, start to help them move beyond spreadsheets and ultimately, reduce the risk that many of the organizations don't even see today, relating back to some of the compelling reasons to move beyond spreadsheets?

[27:15] Yogi Schulz, Corvelle Consulting, Principal

Absolutely, Mark. I heard quite a reasonable way to start, that Ronnie outlined. Often you can get value from just one data store. But the minute you put two, and I don't mean 200, I mean two together, you get more than the value of two independent data stores. And over time, you will find that the business is driving you, as an IT professional, to increase the number of data stores that you bring together, in a reasonably integrated fashion. 

And, as Roland said, security doesn't have to be an impediment and, therefore, should be ignored. You can have reasonable security without making access onerous for any of your end-user community. The scary utterance, that I've heard about security is “Well you know, accessing our data is so complicated, there's no way a bad guy can do that, so we're good.” That's ridiculous, and that's dangerous. I think there are good tools that allow you to administer, and define, and then operate your security environment that doesn't have to become a huge impediment to your end users, who feel constrained by that.

[28:21] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Well, and Wade, I think this, ultimately, ties back to this whole concept that, you know, you're certainly in your Business Architecture role at Charter, helping our clients understand - if they start to use data more effectively across their IT and OT worlds, it will be one of the foundational components in digital transformation. 

[28:41] Wade Crick, Charter, Principal Business Architect

That’s absolutely correct, Mark. And I would add to Ronnie’s approach about “Starting Simple” and the framework Ronnie laid out. Another approach, something that compliments that, is actually sitting down with the lines of businesspeople and just asking them what kind of dashboards or reports they need. Like, start from the outcome they need and working backwards from that. Because then you can pretty easily discover that there are datasets available that could be used to produce apportioned dashboards. Like, in Ronnie’s example, they were getting dashboards and reports after, like, 48 hours of work, Ronnie. I mean, that’s an amazing story. 

So, the outcome is achieved very quickly. But you have to, kind of, understand the outcome you need and then work backwards from that. And the tools and the techniques to do that have never been better. I mean, they improve every month, literally. You know, the ability to take data sets and do something with them, to drive those outcomes customers need.

I guess, you know, in conclusion, we don't want our audience to go away feeling that Excel is not an important tool. Because they clearly are. They provide immense value. They certainly are very powerful for doing add-hock analysis on data that fits well into a row-or-column structure. It turns out, though, that eighty percent of the world’s data doesn't actually fit into an nice row-and-column structure.[24]  It's very unstructured. So, it could be emails, it could be audio files, it could be video, it could be pictures. 80% of the world’s data is in that format. And, of course, there’s immense business value that can be extracted from that. And the tools today make it very easy to go and start to do that. And Roland, maybe you can add some comments to that too?

[30:12] Roland Plett, Cisco, Global Lead for Energy and Mining

Yeah, I would say from an infrastructure perspective you want to think about what that data does to your infrastructure, too. Because as soon as you move past numbers, which are, you know, ultimately, relatively easy to move around – you know numbers don't take up a whole lot of space in the network. But when you start to move video, and images, and really volumetric data around, in large quantities, you need to start thinking about what impact does it have on the infrastructure - not just on acquisition, but also on movement, and storage. 

So maybe image is a great example. So video, if you have a video camera capturing a particular environment, if your primary purpose in having that video camera there is just to count people and see how many people are in that area, then why would you move the whole video up into your data store? Why would you not just do that analytics locally, on the camera, and then put the count upstream to your data centre?

So those are things you want to think through. And, I think, you can't always assume that you have to store everything, and you might need to get something else out of that data. (There’s probably some people that that would make them a little nervous.) I don’t know if you’ve got some perspectives on that, Yogi?

[31:21] Yogi Schulz, Corvelle Consulting, Principal

Thank you, Roland. We all struggle to make the decision to delete data because we’re all worried that a year, or even a decade, later that someone says “Hey, wouldn’t it be neat if we could have …?” That scares people to make the decision. On the other hand, not making that decision is costing organizations 10s of thousands, millions, in rare cases even, billions of dollars. I think of NSA[25] as an example of wasting billions of dollars because they can't make that decision. Because they don't know the day the White House will phone and they’ll have to say “Sorry, President, we threw that data away a decade ago.” Nobody wants to be in that conversation. 

And that conversation comes up in the industries we care about, here, in terms of either oil and gas, where this comes up in the seismic data, and in mining, where it comes up in, maybe it's the creeping data, or maybe it’s the site understanding data. So, we are reluctant to make that decision, although I think organizations should think about the resources they are wasting when they don’t make that decision. 

[32:26] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Even if you're in the public sector and you have a GIS application,[26] clearly, there's got to be a lot of thought given to what the data strategy is. Isn’t that right, Yogi?

[32:37] Yogi Schulz, Corvelle Consulting, Principal

Absolutely. And it's not just in the public sector, although that has a lot of GIS applications, it's also in oil and gas and mining - our audiences here today. GIS data is not in the IoT data stream, at all. However, to produce useful products from that data – often there’s a GIS component. So, as you consider the design of your Data Lakehouse, you have to have an entity for geographic information associated with all of your sensors and larger areas within your organization, so that you can integrate that data onto a map or onto a 3D display.  

[33:15] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

Ronnie, this seems overwhelming. Earlier, you shared with our audience “Starting Small” and the approaches that they must take. As you, kind of, listened to Wade, and Roland, and Yogi talk about some of these critical aspects, there's got to be some way we can help a client deal with this. 

[33:31] Ronnie Scott, Charter, Chief Technology Officer

Absolutely. We’ve heard about it today. The whole idea about understanding what data I’m collecting, and what I’m doing with it, and when I keep it - these are all questions that can sound very complicated. But, by setting the rules up front, you position yourself much more strongly than coming back, and looking at all my data, and then saying “Ooh, what am I going to pull out of here are throw away?” 

And we’ve seen, particularly in Europe, where they’ve got GDPR,[27] and people have the right to be forgotten. It is a really important part of how organizations in Europe are now structuring their data. Because they need to know if somebody says, “I want to be forgotten,” “How do we forget?” “How do I work out where that person was?” “What piece of them can be forgotten?” And this is a fair question that can be applied to anything. It’s about saying, “OK, where is that data? How is it structured?” And, if I decide that this data really isn't useful (or it might actually compromise me by keeping it) it might make, you know, if somebody got hold of that data, it might make me more vulnerable if I lost that data. “If somebody managed to get a hold of that data, would it compromise me? Would it compromise my customers?” Reciprocally, “If I have too much of this data, do I have to manage those costs?” as Yogi was talking about.

So, if we can begin at the beginning, and as we are starting small and start to collect that data, sort of say “Is this data I need for a short term, or a long term? Is this data that I want to partition off over here, so it’s clear that this data is a limited life partition?” These are all things that our governance questions ask, and why we have an entire governance (GRC) practice,[28] here at Charter. Because whilst it can be daunting, there is actually a process to doing this. There are GRC specialists, like we have on out team, who walk through exactly those types of questions. “What do I have to keep? What aren’t I allowed to keep? How long should I keep it? Where should I keep it?” Those are all questions that can be understood. And we’re certainly happy to walk through those questions with customers and help them make those decisions wisely. 

[35:27] Mark George, Charter, Director – Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets, moderator

I want to thank Roland, Wade, Ronnie, and Yogi for all your contributions to this podcast, and for the tremendous insights you’ve provided to our audience. Our call to action is very simple. Please reach out to one of us (our contact info is at the end of the podcast) so that we can begin a conversation on potential services we can provide related to infrastructure design across your business, cybersecurity assessments, and different bundling product-and-service options that we can create - that allow you to leverage OpEx dollars instead of their traditional CapEx dollars as you start to think about how to integrate data into your IoT- and IT-team needs. 

The foundation of any of our discussions, with Cisco and with Charter, will always be the Business Transformation Roadmap,[29] so that we can better understand the goals, where you could make the highest impact, and how do you achieve the best outcomes. 

We hope today's podcast has been valuable and we want to thank you for investing the time to listen to our program. More information on today's podcast can be found in our “Moving Beyond Spreadsheets” whitepaper[30] and Wade’s blog. Plus, for those of you in the Vancouver area, Charter and Cisco are hosting a “Lunch and Learn” on this exact topic at a very special event on Thursday, June 22nd. Check out our website for additional details on how you can participate.[31] For folks that are attending the Global Energy Show, in June, we invite you to swing by the Cisco booth 1522 and the Charter booth 1526 to engage our teams on this subject, plus other topics we've featured in previous podcasts, such as: Secure Connected Workers[32] and Design Thinking.[33] Be sure to also allocate time to listen to the technical presentations that Ronnie and Roland[34] will be delivering with the audience on Wednesday, June 14th.  Please check the schedule for presentation times and locations at the BMO Conference Centre, in Calgary.[35]

Together, Charter’s next-generation IT/IOT-services practice and Cisco's leading-edge products combine to create an integrated solution that can greatly improve your decision-making, accelerate your growth, and help transform your business. When properly aggregated and analyzed, the operational, real-time data that's collected from the transformed digital infrastructure helps to optimize operations, increase profitability, enhance customer experience and loyalty, improve workforce experience and safety, and create new revenue streams. By working together Cisco and Charter will help you move beyond Spreadsheets. Thank you.

Contributors:

 |  Yogi Schulz Principal Corvelle Consulting | Yogi Schulz, Principal of Corvelle Consulting specializes in project and IT-related management consulting for the upstream oil & gas industry, working with companies such as BP, Cenovus, and Imperial Oil. He has experience in selecting and implementing various software packages for geotechnical, field operations, production revenue accounting, financial, and land & contracts systems and has led major projects for the ERCB and the Ministry of the Economy, and previously worked as a senior consultant with DMR Group Inc. He holds a B. Comm. from The University of Calgary, is a member of CIPS, and has presented at many oil & gas and IT conferences. Yogi's specialties include software package and custom software development management, IT strategy development, and oil & gas industry information systems. [ bit.ly/3oMPWA3 ]  
 

|   Roland Plett, Cisco, Global Leader for Energy & Mining   |  Roland leads the Oil & Gas and Mining solutions practice at Cisco Systems. In that role, he brings together the products of Cisco and its partners in the Oil & Gas and Mining industries. He loves moving valuable business data from the dirtiest and most hazardous environments on earth to the operator screens and applications of Cisco customers. Over the last 25 years, Roland has been an active part of the data networking industry including 8 years at Bell Canada and 13 years at Cisco Systems. [bit.ly/3S0dICK ]


 |   Wade Crick, Charter, Principal Business Architect |  As the Principal Business Architect for Charter, Wade is responsible for leading the business architecture practice and enabling digital transformation for Charter and its customers. Wade combines his knowledge of technology, industry, and business trends to accelerate digital innovation for the Energy, Resources, and Industrial Markets. [] Wade has four decades of experience with IT hardware, software, programming, consulting, operations, and design. Prior to joining Charter, he held positions at Cisco, PCL Construction, Bay Networks/Nortel, SHL Systemhouse and Digital Equipment Corporation. A lifelong learner, Wade is a certified Enterprise Architect, Business Architect and recently completed his certification in Industry 4.0: How to Revolutionize your Business. [bit.ly/41KUTqZ ]   


 |   Ronnie Scott, Charter, Chief Technology Officer   |  Ronnie Scott has over 35 years of broad IT experience, including programming, and network architecture, as well as senior consultative roles for Financial Services, Internet Service Providers, ILEC Carrier Networks, and large enterprise customers across New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. Ronnie is currently the CTO at Charter Telecom Inc, a Value-Added Reseller specializing in IT service delivery. As CTO, Ronnie brings his extensive technological background with a strong Business and Service Delivery lens to Enterprise IT Infrastructure solutions. [ bit.ly/3E9QdBk ]


 |   Mark George, Charter, Director - Energy, Resources & Industrial Markets |  Mark George is a proven business leader with global experience across multiple industries. He currently serves as the Director – Energy, Resources and Industrial Markets for Charter. Prior to that, he worked for five years as Managing Partner and Founder of EdgeMark Capital and Advisory Services Inc., a capital markets and financial advisory services firm.  Mark’s in-depth energy markets experience developed through leadership roles with Environmental Refueling Systems Inc. and with PricewaterhouseCoopers.  From 2000 to 2010, he served as the Founder and President of the Cielo group of companies, a fully integrated residential and commercial construction and real estate development company in Arizona. Mark has an intense interest in emerging technologies, having spent 15 years with Nortel, Bay Networks, DEC, and Honeywell in progressive sales, management, and executive roles throughout the Americas and Asia Pacific. Mark proudly serves on the boards of several privately held companies and not-for-profit organizations. [ bit.ly/40T7GrH ]  

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