Data Strategy with Brian Prascak at Wawa

I love to help companies become smarter, faster with data and analytics. I worked at a number of different companies starting with JP Morgan, MasterCard, Diageo, and most recently as the Director – Advanced Analytics, Platform and Data Services at Wawa.

What’s interesting to me is what data we use to answer a question, and how answering those questions can help us to take action. That’s the impact that I’m looking to have. The idea of a data strategy is really the idea of what the data can do for us and the impact it can have.

A semantic layer is a way to define the data, virtually if you will, and to be able to automate the process of actually translating the data into the features and for the BI consumption layer.

At Wawa and other companies, the challenge is how can we automate that process which involves a lot of manual coding. When you have coding, you have maintenance. If I want to add a new feature or to add a new dataset, I need somebody to load that data and make it available. The idea of a semantic layer is incredibly important.