An interview with…Zach Gemignani

As announced some time ago, there will be interviews to professionals to better understand the infovis world from the voice of people living in

We start our new section with an interview to Zach, from Juice Analytics.

1 - When, how and why have you decided to start up a company focusing on infovis ?

A year and a half ago, my brother Chris and I started Juice Analytics the goal of Juice Analytics is to help businesses deal with that customer data and find ways to make life better for ordinary businessfolk. We had ideas about how business analytics can deliver value and we didn’t see many consulting companies providing this service.

2 - What are your education backgrounds and previous epxeriences before creating Juice Analytics?

I graduated from Haverford College with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. I also earned a MBA from The Darden School at the University of Virginia. I have worked as a management consultant at a number of companies including Booz Allen & Hamilton and DiamondCluster. Most recently I was Senior Manager of Metrics and Analysis at AOL.

Chris is a graduate of Williams College with a degree in Computer Science and Economics. He earned a Master’s degree in Economics from Washington University in Saint Louis. He has professional experience developing high-volume credit risk systems and scoring systems for Bank One and Citibank.

3 - Which is the best results your customers got using your infovis services and/or products ?

Here are a few areas where we’ve had success with our clients:
* Using Google Earth as a platform to map customer and business data to help our clients make location-based decisions
* Creating visual representations of customer behavior to identify both common patterns and anomalies.
* Analyzing the drivers of retention and designing strategies to improve loyalty
* Designing an application interface for presentation of real-time performance data

4 - Which is, to you, the most interesting project you have worked on and why ?

One thing we enjoy doing is build bottoms-up views of customer behavior by pulling raw data across all of a business’ systems. We then integrate it and build sparkline graphics at the customer level to show how customer’s are using the service. We then scan by eye to find unexpected behaviors then build pattern recognition algorithms to try to capture those behaviors. This is pretty different from traditional analytics, but we get good results.

5 - On what themes are you working now ?

* Developing lightweight analytics applications that are targeted to answer specific business issue
* Emphasizing the importance of Excel as a busines intelligence tool and finding ways to show people how to use it better.

6 - How do you think infovis solutions market will evolve in USA for next years ?

We are hoping that the business analytics/intelligence market will become more human-focused in the future. We believe it should move
beyond simply consolidating data in large data warehouses toward better analytics tools to understand the data.

7 - If you should suggest an education programme to a student interested in InfoVis, which University Course do you suggest him/her ?

For the most part, my college education helped build general skills. English classes help me learn how to write and communicate. Economics classes emphasized analytical thinking. In business school, I took Decision Analysis classes that provided rudimentary analytical skills.
I would suggest Universities offer classes that teach students to deal effectively with large data sets, analyze data in Excel, and present data in simple and compelling ways.