About

2024-03-02

​​I’m Mike Butler, a doctorial candidate at Purdue University studying innovation and leadership. I’m particularly interested in the effects of cognitive biases on innovation and creative problem solving. I’ve spent the last 18 years working with data in financial services and thinking about how we can use data to solve all kinds of problems. I was recently the Chief Technology Innovation Officer at a public financial company working on Enterprise Architecture, Data Strategy/Engineering, Software Engineering, and Delivery Frameworks (Agile). I moved into consulting for a little over a year with CSpring as the Chief Data Officer and Executive Director of Delivery. Today, I’m a Sr. Director of Data Delivery with OneAmerica.

About the Blog: I’ll post ideas, tutorials, links, and other information that I feel can be helpful for those looking for a hitchhiker’s guide to working with data. I will likely joke around a lot, life’s too short not to laugh.

Why The Data Hitchhiker? I needed an outlet to work on the things I want to work on. That and I really do feel like working with data these days has a lot of paths you can travel. There are numerous books and websites on the topic. Part of the fun is hearing other pespectives on the routes we can travel. There’s not one right one either and sometimes you need to bum a ride to figure out what to do next.