建筑公司在压倒性的零碎海洋中游泳。为了削减刺耳声并确定哪些数据很重要，位于西雅图的设计和建筑管理公司OAC在今年夏天早些时候举行了有史以来的首次达塔森竞赛，灵感来自科技公司的黑客马拉松，程序员团队竞争创建创新的解决方案或创建创新的解决方案或原型。

同样，OAC的Datathon义务员工团队必须共同努力，使用可用数据的子集（或多个子集）提出一个音调，其中可能包括从不同地区的成本管理费到现金流到新员工的地理分配的任何内容。然后，五个团队在数周内提出了他们的想法，将数据纳入了将使公司受益的可用计划。

The process culminated with the groups formulating quick-fire presentations. Then, on a Saturday afternoon in July, the teams plus spectators assembled at the firm’s Seattle headquarters, many donning costumes or other flair to celebrate team spirit. Each group had just 10 minutes to present their ideas to our “Shark Tank”-style panel of judges, where I collaborated with OAC CEO Shawn Mahoney and others. Presentations were scored based on the intended value to the company, acumen of data analysis, data visualization and lessons learned.

Blair (center right) joined Mahoney (center left) and others to mull the business value of pitches.
图片由Arianna Kemis/OAC

Winning team Byte Size mined data from general contractor pay applications—a data set that is required on every project that OAC completes but has been underutilized for analysis—sorted by project type and size to provide leading and lagging indicators on trends such as cash flow predictions, rate of work put in place and schedule monitoring. While that may sound dry, Byte Size’s presentation was anything but—they donned chef’s outfits and cleverly themed their slides around a restaurant menu in a presentation titled "Test Kitchen With Market Fresh Data."

“在一个如此多的数据的世界中，干净的数据是关键，” OAC的字节大小团队负责人兼高级总监凯尔·理查森（Kyle Richardson）说。如果没有干净的数据，“可行的智能和结论很难得出。”

Mahoney说，除了演示文稿将由OAC战略规划团队进一步研究以实施可能实施的演讲外，该公司还确定了目前未收集但应该是的数据。

“获得的最重要的见解是，数据是我们行业中的价值创造者和差异化。数据有助于我们在整个公司中创造运营智慧，这是无价的。” Mahoney补充说。