It was the very last minute before two hundred and fifty people were to enter the conference room overlooking the river in Hamburg on April 4, 2014. I quickly gathered
Matthias Bettag,
Timm Peters and
Holger Tempel for an emergency session. I needed to know what we were going to call the newest chapter of the DAA and the slides needed to be updated
schnell!!
"We've already discussed this," said Matthias, wondering if jet lag had gotten the better of me. "It does not linguistically work to call it a Chapter. It's 'DAA Germany'."
"Yes, I know, but I've put it in my PowerPoint as 'DAA Deutschland' and I need to provide the example of how to pronounce it for branding purposes. Is it 'Dee Ay Ay Deutschland' or should I tell them it's 'Day Ahh Ahh Deutschland'?" using my very best German accent.
The three soon-to-be Co-Chairs looked at each other and agreed at once, "'Dee Ay Ay Germany' - we are part of an international association. That's why this entire conference is in English!"
One last change to the slides and the conference was ready to begin. The proceedings were brought to order by
Uwe Jens Neumann, Chairman of the cross-industry business network, Hamburg@work, and we were off and running. Timm acted as master of ceremonies, Matthias introduced me as the keynote and the day ended with Holger interviewing
Justin Cutroni on a Google Hangout from the Googleplex in Mountain View.
The
other speakers included our own
Geddy van Elburg who had come in from the Netherlands,
Siegfried Stepke, DAA Country Manager for Austria and
Aurélie Pols who came in from Madrid, bearing Pierre Marcolini chocolates!
The presentations included
From Spreadsheet to Report: Flexible Analysis at Jungheinrich by Jan Wunschick and
The 5 Myths of the Future of Digital Analytics by Frank Pörschmann,
Big Data as a Service: Data Supply Chains by Sascha Adamand and Yasan Budak.
We heard a
Report from Practice: Digital Analytics in the Academic Education in the Netherlands and Germany from Anna Denejnaja,
Customer-Journey-Analyses: Requirements and Opportunities of Implementation by Roland Markowski and Nicolas Diefenbach, and attorney Dr. Anna Zeiter from Stanford University (another long commute!) interviewed Aurelie Pols about privacy and data protection.
The audience was a mix of some very experienced people who have been in digital analytics for years and some who had been thinking about it but wanted to see if it was for them... and it was!
With the UBC/DAA Award of Achievement in Digital Analytics now being
offered in German, 15% of our Certified Web Analysts in Germany, and now this successful kick-off event, DAA Germany has a significant running start.
I was so very pleased to participate and feel the buzz first hand. Please join me in welcoming DAA Germany to the community!
(Justin Cutroni on Google Hangout; photo courtesy of Marcus Ficner @marcusficner)