One, two, three! It has officially been three ticks since Marcus Malden joined HICO-Group as the newest BI Consulting star. In his own words, “Time flies when you’re having fun”. Well, we can all agree on that! Even more so, we’re glad to see our HICO family happy. We asked Marcus what was so special about HICO:
Team greatness! We come from different geographic areas and we’re all still well connected. It is a pleasure to work with my colleagues, as well as our great customers. Before I joined HICO, I was actually a customer myself. Uniquely so, I had the opportunity to see how it is on the other side. Even then, I noticed the great people and teams working behind projects, and now that I am part of the team, I couldn’t be happier.
Well, we’re happy to hear that! And yes, it’s always good to see how the other side of the coin looks like. 🙂 So, how did you decide that BI consulting is just the right job for you?
I was always interested in computers and data. However, since I did my studies in business, I missed the days of coding, so I switched to the data department. There are new trends emerging every day and data is becoming more demanding. I really enjoy what I am doing now.
I like to adapt data transformations to meet the clients requirements . Sometimes, there are things BI consultants have to do that seem impossible, but I almost always find a way to make it work. The only thing not so fun is performance optimization as it depends on many factors, some of which you can’t really measure exactly..
Sounds challenging! Could you tell us a bit more about the “challenging” side of things, please? What does “hard-to-do” stuff look like for you?
Well, some things seem easy to implement when, in a multi-dimensional reality, they are quite the opposite. It is not always easy to deal with this and while the task may seem trivial to the undiscerning people, it can be a real challenge – for example, displaying the number of distinct products as a result of filtering a cube. It is always about the details and explaining the distinction between operational and analytical systems. Sometimes, this becomes one of those great challenges because this is such an easy question.
What challenges in the BI space do you see in the near future? Maybe some new developments or changes to the way we’re used to doing things?
I believe there will be changes in preparation models, and that Artificial Intelligence will become even more popular. I’m also guessing to see some positive development with speech input software. Cortana is already doing major advancements in this regard. Like, you could ask a computer a question and then the computer can preselect data and may also find some creative ways to find answers and certain anomalies – this would be very useful for us all.
Thank you for your answers, Marcus. Is there anything else about that would probably surprise your colleagues? 🙂
Hmmm, let’s see… There may be so many things. For example, my favorite movie is Run, Lola, Run. While not a perfect movie in many aspects, I really like stories with different outcomes depending on the decisions made. I deeply believe that what you decide influences your life.
My favorite TV show is Orphan Black, not only because of the opening episode – one of the greatest in every show I have seen so far – but also for the absolutely brilliant acting of Tatiana Maslany. In regards to the computer industry, I still think the Commodore 64 is the most exciting piece of technology for the time that it was built. This was a great machine that accomplished so much with so little.
Now for the less surprising things… My favorite color is orange, corresponding to the HICO color. And when we had cars booked for us, I got an orange car. It has truly brought me to many amazing people and places.
Thank you for this great conversation, Marcus! Orange (aren’t) you happy we did this?! 🧡 We wish you a great week ahead and many more successful years in your career!
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