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Today’s ACE spotlight is @SGolnik! Keep reading to learn more about Sarah and what makes her a unique Alteryx super user.
Tell us a bit about your professional background.
Early in my adult life, I was working in customer service to support my son and myself. For years, I was scared to step out of that role, but I took on every project and learned every new skill that I could. Finally, after almost a decade, I had an amazing leader who encouraged me to look at other roles. I landed a role on the service desk for the analytics and systems support teams at my company.
Quickly, I started spotting trends in the tickets and then decided to redesign our ticketing system to get better data. This started me on the path where I eventually moved onto an analytics team. This was all a process because I had no background in analytics. I learned everything on the job and on Saturday mornings through every free learning platform I could take trainings from.
Then, I was introduced to Alteryx, and I really started learning the concepts of data engineering and product development. My career took off from there! Over the last decade, I have worked as a data analyst, data engineer, and product developer, and now, I’m an Alteryx trainer.
What is your favorite Alteryx tool, and why?
I love the dynamic input from the developer tool pallet. I feel like this tool really provides the power for building a dynamic workflow. My favorite use for this tool is in an analytic app. I feed the responses from the interface tools into a text input, dynamically build SQL statements with the data, and then use a dynamic input to modify the where clause in a query.
My other favorite use is to use the directory tool to pull the contents of a folder, sort for the most recent file, and then use the dynamic input tool to open that file.
What has been your favorite Alteryx project? Can you tell us about the business problem you solved?
A week after discovering Alteryx, I was in a team meeting where a business analyst was talking about an unsolvable problem. Our company had been trying to figure out how to do self-service analytics for years. We were getting so many ad hoc requests in our analytics department that we couldn't actually do analytics—we were order takers. We had so many systems to get data from that we knew we would have to build something, but that would take time, resources, and money.
I realized that analytic apps from Alteryx could be the solution. Our business analyst had already looked through two years of ad hoc requests, so I started by building an app for our most requested request type. From there, I started building bigger apps that allowed our business users to pull their own ad hoc reports. In total, I had 7 apps organized into multiple collections based on the data needs and access requirements. These analytic apps ended up eliminating 80% of the ad hoc data requests we were receiving. Business users went from waiting 30 days on average for their data to having it in minutes or seconds, and leaders were able to make real-time data-driven decisions without delay.
Removing this work from our analytics team gave us over a million dollars in resource savings within 2 years and moved people to roles where they could start doing more advanced analytics.
What advice do you have for new community members?
Get involved in it!! The community really helped me gain the knowledge that I have today. Between all of the learning materials for every learning type and seeing the responses to all of the questions, you can figure out how to accomplish just about anything using Alteryx.
Hands down though, my favorite things are the weekly challenges and cloud quests. I love seeing all of the different ways people go about answering the same question!
What is your favorite way to engage as an ACE? Also, what area of the online community do you spend the most time in?
My favorite way to engage as an ACE is through speaking engagements. Public speaking is something that always makes me tremendously nervous, but when you have passion for the topic (Alteryx!) and you are speaking to others who share your passion, it creates an electrifying atmosphere and lively discussions.
As for my online presence, I have been spending the most time lately on LinkedIn, connecting with others and sharing my experiences.
What discussion topic(s) could Community members tag you in for help?
Analytic apps were the first workflows that I developed and are a passion of mine still today. If you need help in this area, feel free to ask me!
What is one fun thing about you that community members might not know?
I am an avid tinkerer of machines! I restore motorcycles and do my own work on my Jeep, which I use for rock crawling. Unlike analytics and software, this does not come easy to me, but I love challenging myself.
Look out for Sarah’s upcoming podcast episode on the Alter Everything feed to hear more about her story!
