I’m Stacia Misner Varga, and I’m passionate about using data to support business decisions. In fact, I was passionate about it before I ever knew the terms “business intelligence” and “data analytics.”

I started my career by installing computer systems at tractor dealerships across North America and teaching the staff at these dealerships how to work with these green-screen newfangled machines. Like most software applications in the ’80s, the application in this computer system had a lot of canned reports. Still, my clients often wanted to access the data inside the system in new ways, and thus began my first forays into business intelligence. In those days, you had to know the programming language or use report-writing tools with limited features. It wasn’t what we’d call user-friendly.

Much has changed since then, but a common thread throughout my career has been helping people find and use their business data, transforming it into information that helps them make decisions. It was such a common thread that it became my career officially in 1999.

Since then, I have created hundreds of business intelligence and analytics solutions for diverse clients. Now, I teach others how to create these solutions for themselves. That’s the purpose of this blog—to provide insight and inspiration for your own business intelligence and data analytics pursuits.