Ahmed will dive into why self-service so frequently fails: it's a data modeling problem. The current approach of using a star schema as a data model fails to support adhoc questions because it requires predefined JOINS. Ahmed will present the activity schema, an alternative data model that requires no joins or foreign keys. A single 10-column table (with a single, standard structure) can model any data for analytics and answer any question. Narrator uses the Activity Schema to enable a new era of self-service where anyone can answer any question in under 10 minutes.
Ahmed is the founder and CEO of Narrator. Narrator enables companies to make better decisions by providing them with the ability to answer any question in under 10 minutes. Ahmed started his career building algorithms for self-driving cars and human-robot interaction. He then joined Raytheon to develop AI algorithms for missile defense, focusing on tracking and discrimination. In 2015, Ahmed joined WeWork as the first hire on their data team. He built their data engineering infrastructure and grew the team of data engineers and analysts. Recently, Ahmed was recognized as one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for 2021