Blog #3 - Days 4 & 5

    These past two days at Vertical Knowledge have been quite interesting, not only because I am continuing to learn new things, but because I have witnessed how a small mishap in data collection can bring about considerable consequences for those involved.

   Vertical Knowledge recently became aware that two of their clients either did not receive the kind of data that they were paying for or they got it at the wrong frequency. The problem lay in the coding of the web crawlers (or as they call them, "spiders"), which collect the data from specific websites and export it on a particular day. This may not seem like a big deal, but when a company receives data that was not meant to go to them, it calls into question the entire process and whether they can trust that the data they are paying for is not being sent to other clients on accident. That would decrease the value of the information that they have purchased and therefore cause the client to lose money. 

    As a result of these issues, I have spent the last two days in several meetings. Most of them were with the other members of Ben's team, attempting to track down the source of the issue and proposing changes to the pipeline, so that problems like this don't happen again. On Day 5, I even sat in on a meeting with one of the unhappy clients and saw firsthand that in the real world, you don't get unlimited chances at something. You either resolve the issues on your end, or the client walks away, so it was really interesting to hear this conversation take place. 

    Additionally, on Day 5, I met a data scientist named Derek who described the situation like this: There is no denying that the world in which we live is a data-driven world, and it is astonishing how much power one holds if they are able to get their hands on that data. That is why Vertical Knowledge plays such an important role for so many clients in supplying that public data, as it opens the door to investment or other types of gains which would not have been otherwise possible. And when that supply chain is interrupted for one reason or another, it has the potential to prove detrimental to that particular client. 

   Apart from the meetings, I have spent the past two days continuing to learn the basics of Tableau, a data visualization platform. I have learned how to build a dashboard with multiple types of data visualizations, as well as how to perform calculations like the ones I carried out on Day 1 with Microsoft Excel. Pretty cool stuff!

A snip of the dashboard that I made on Tableau using data from RV Trader.

What Vertical Knowledge (the middle building) looks like from the outside. 

The view of beautiful downtown Chagrin Falls from my desk area.