Ep. 8: Cate Long - Data Visualization

Contact Cate Long:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cate-long-9649412/


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT


Music: (00:00)


 


Mitch: (00:04)


Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA’s podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. I am your host, Mitch
Roshong and with me is my cohost Adam Larson. Today we are going
to hear from a former vice president of services for a fortune
500 software company about all things technology and analytics
related. Adam, can you tell us a little more about Cate long and
what your conversation was all about? 


 


Adam: (00:29)


Thanks Mitch. Absolutely. Cate was also a controller for a
mid-sized manufacturing company and is now an investor for
various startups. We talked about data visualization, data
governance and information systems and how all the different
technologies can influence strategy. Let's go to the
conversation.


 


Music: (00:51)


 


Adam: (00:54)


So let's talk a little bit about your background and how you use
data visualization to strategically impact organizational
decision making. 


 


Cate: (01:02)


Hey, that's a great question. Hey, you know, data visualization
never really came to mind to me when I first thought about and
entered into my accounting career. I didn't think of that as a
strategic thing, but it is top of mind. It's very top strategic
tool that you have. It's been a key driver to help me get a point
across to show data in an explainable, understandable fashion
that really helps point out areas of concern or kudos that were
doing something really well to any audience from talking to and
when I was in a controller for manufactured people on the floor
or leaders of specific departments up to board meetings where I
had to really understand and explain any changes in our variables
to that group. just any audience that needs the information to
drive company strategy, which is to your question which is more
the types of questions that I would be and data that I would be
showing to management leadership or to board leaders. A couple of
examples come to mind that really helped me help employees. One
of them was really helping to enhance employee morale, morale
that I'll get into that example. And then another one was a
strategy on what we should be looking at as far as winning or
losing customers. So the first example I worked as a controller
for a manufacturing company that was privately held and we had
just gone through a remodel of the office. So employees saw a lot
of artwork and new furniture and a new video room where I was
giving presentations and they were wondering really how that was
going to affect their profit sharing plan and we started hearing
rumors about it. People were griping about the remodel, which
actually the remodel brought in a lot of value bringing in
customers or whatnot and making it more comfortable for
everybody. But what I was able to do is I generally showed
financial information on a quarterly basis to leaders in
different, various leaders within the organization. And so I
really broke down visually. I'm not just talking about profits
and losses and, and our productivity, but pointing out what
EBIDTA was or earnings before interests depreciation, Texas and
amortization. Because the profit sharing plan was based on
sharing, you know, buying equipment artwork and, and furniture
design didn't come into play there. So was able to show them
that, no, that doesn't affect your profit margin or your profit
sharing plan. So don't worry about that. So that was a kind of a
unique example for that company. But something else that comes up
a lot is how you're going to explain your KPIs and in looking at
that and, and too in how businesses change over time, one of the
big numbers that software companies look at is their customer
retention. So typically software companies can start out selling
to smaller companies or they can start up selling to fortune
500's, which is what the company that I worked for did. So they
had a pretty higher customer retention, right? These large
companies do not change softwares very frequently, so they always
had a very high customer retention rate. But as we, as the years
went on and we got more competition and we started getting into
the middle and small market that number, although still very
high, I could start to see some erosion and I made sure that in
our data systems that we had fields where we were capturing
whether this the company was a small middle or large market
customer. And then also that we had reason codes that we were
capturing about why customers left. Because the smaller companies
of course there's more of those companies fold or they can get
out of a contract or they, they changed softwares more frequently
than a larger company. So by dividing that data and visually you
know, showing it to the board that this is what's happening, then
we were able to set new KPIs for those different sizes of
companies. So thinking ahead, that's the kind of thing that you
wanna think about as your visual, as you're creating your
presentations and you're going to talk to different people,
especially those top decision makers, you don't want to give them
just one number for something and because that could go up or
down and cause alarm, you want to make sure that they understand
maybe some breakdowns in that information without overloading
them with too much information. But showing that within these
groups, that these are the goals that we want to look at or this
is maybe even making suggestions about how you want to change
your key KPIs 


 


Adam: (07:06)


In terms of goals and KPIs. Many times we automatically think of
data analytics and data governance. So how does data
visualization fit in with these when it comes to understanding
data? 


 


Cate: (07:20)


Fantastic question because data governance data and analytics and
visualization are all very intertwined and need to be thought
about really as a whole when you're preparing presentations and
also designing or having input into information systems. If you
can visualize how you're going to present data, when you first
think about where you'll get that data, how much detail is
available, and how your reporting is formatted and what data is
required. that's really getting into the analytics side of things
because that's about, you know, how the data is designed what's
out there for you. That also gets into spreadsheets and
calculating ratios at the basic level, moving into design,
reporting and forecasting. And all of those things are things
that you probably have to visualize at some point with the data.
So you gotta have the analytics behind it. And then with, with
governance, it's really how that data is being captured. If it's
being required to be captured, is there some kind of procedure
that makes sure that it's getting captured the same way across
the board by different divisions or different groups? If it's
accurate, if it's contained securely, and if it's got integrity.
I know you've probably all worked at places where sometimes you
pull information from one system and it's a little bit different
than from another system of your systems aren't the same. and
that is something that, that you have to make sure that you're
grabbing the data that is correct. and that it matches between
systems. So visualization really a is something that, you know,
you would think that's last. You're presenting all this data
that's in your systems that you've designed, but you really have
to thin...