After our fourth collection of six great guests, it’s a wrap for Season Four of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter. Your host, master data storyteller Dr Sam Knowles, picks out common themes and chooses his highlights from a lively series of conversations – recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, between July and December 2023.

Thanks as ever to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

In Season Four, our guests included:

Tracey Brown, director of the charity, Sense About Science.

Mark Montgomery, Vice President and International Head of Integrated Insights at Novartis.

John McFall, military and civvy street logistics expert, and the founder of Supply Chain Wise.

Kieran Maguire, leading football finance academic from the University of Liverpool’s Management School, and co-host of The Price of Football podcast.

Ian Makgill, founder of Spend Network, a database keeping tabs on the worlds’ Governments’ $13tn spend.

And Mike Bell, data visualiser extraordinaire, who uses the iconography of the London Underground to tell the stories of bands, albums, films, and political careers at his eponymous business, Mike Bell Maps.

Data Malarkey will have its usual, between-season break for a couple of weeks. We’ll be back with Season Five on 8 May 2024, and there’s another glittering array of guests from an increasingly diverse set of professions. We’ll be hearing from women and men at the top of their game from the worlds of statistics, risk management, consumer goods, academic publishing, financial analysis, and autism research. Their common approaches to using data smarter have lessons for us all. And we start with the blockbuster guest, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, a man who had perhaps the best pandemic of any data storyteller in the public domain.

To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Mike Bell, the first data visualiser to feature in almost 30 episodes of the podcast. Mike is the Founder and Owner of a thriving new business called Mike Bell Maps which describes itself as “Tube maps of bands and other stuff”.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 13 December 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Mike’s had a long career in creating and running tours for bands, a blend of logistical and strategic planning to the power of Excel. “I see tours in Excel!” he told me when we first met. He moved from arena and stadium tours for bands to production of live events for corporates, staging major conferences and exhibitions right around the world.

A combination of the first COVID lockdown – not a good couple of years for anyone in the live entertainment and production business – and a diagnosis of Parkinson’s some years ago convinced Mike he had to “use it or lose it” when it came to his highly creative, data-driven brain. He started out by trying to represent the career of one of his favourite bands, The Fall, using the iconography, lines, and stations on the London Underground.

Once he’d got The Fall right – to the satisfaction of the brand’s vocal and perhaps a little pedantic fanbase online – Mike’s applied his unique and beautiful way of visualising the world of band line-ups and album contributors to many different spheres. These include films and film genres and even – in perhaps my favourite example – disgraced former Prime Minister Johnson’s political career, with a special line for all those lockdown-breaking parties.

Mike’s encouragement to keep mentally active from his neurologist has paid dividends. Though diagnosed several years ago, his “using it” strategy means he’s not yet been medicated for Parkinson’s. A tale almost as extraordinary as the beautiful manifestations of how he thinks that he now sells, both online and from a new shop in my hometown of Lewes, East Sussex.

Towards the end of our discussion, Mike gives one of the most lyrical and elegiac descriptions of his stock-in-trade, the humble spreadsheet. Once asked to describe them to his grandmother, he said: “They’re like boxes floating in the air that you can connect, tied together with data strings, that allow you to magically make things make sense.” Beautiful!

EXTERNAL LINKS

Mike Bell Maps – https://mikebellmaps.com

Mike’s experiential design business – https://www.freelancevisuals.co.uk

10,000 poems – Mike’s project to take him to 85, writing a poem a day – https://mikebellpoems.com

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Ian Makgill, the Founder of Spend Network. Ian and his company are on a mission to improve the global public sector procurement market. Spend Network’s website boldly claims that it can help users to “Unlock the $13 trillion global procurement market through the world’s leading tender, contract, spend and grant data”. That’s about 13% of the total global economy.

Throughout his career – building databases for 20 years and working with AI for six – Ian has been a passionate believer that data can shape our world for the better. While it often feels as if data is used to point at bad stuff that has happened or show where everyone is failing, Ian is committed to telling stories of how his organisation is using data to shape the future.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 29 November 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

As the driving force behind Spend Network, Ian’s ambition is to level the playing field of Government procurement – from “haircuts in Mexican prisons to airports in China”. As a consequence, every moment of his every working day is steeped in data. Unruly, different, misaligned, fundamentally different data that very definitely is not “apples with apples”. At least when the Spend Network team get their hands on it, bringing together more than 700 diverse sources each day.

“All data is bad; all data is dirty!” observes Ian, “though most of it can be made to be useful”. His sentiment echoing the maxim from the British statistician, George Box, that “All models are wrong; some are useful.” Ian also has elements of the forensic scientist about him, with his observation that “the absence of data is a data point in himself”, bringing to mind our 25 October guest, Professor Angela Gallop, and her encouragement to go looking “when the dogs DON’T bark”.

Spend Network has so far analysed, cleaned, augmented, validated, and verified 220m lines of spend data from hundreds of Government departments around the world. And he and his data wranglers don’t just apply data science smarts to their heavyweight data. They’ve been using AI since 2017.

For Ian, The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch – the paper’s Chief Data Reporter – is a hero of data storytelling and data visualisation, skills that he honed during the pandemic. Burn-Murdoch was the first to conceptualise and visualise excess mortality as the key indicator of Government success (and otherwise) in measures to tackle COVID. Jacob Rees-Mogg is his data devil, thanks to the politician’s imperial measures consultation that provided no option to object (reported here in The Guardian).

EXTERNAL LINKS

Ian’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianmakgill/

Spend Network – https://spendnetwork.com

OpenOpps – https://openopps.com

Spend Network on Twitter / X – https://twitter.com/SpendNetwork

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.