Qlik and Accenture; The Netflix Data Challenge

[Anonymous]

For several months now myself along with colleagues from the Academic Program and our industry partners Accenture, have been working to build a Data Challenge; a Hackathon if you will but with a focus on students who aren't specifically from Computer Science backgrounds.

In conjuncture with the University of Bath, we arranged to run a two day session looking to provide students skills on key topics in Data Analytics and get hands on with some real world data. Invitations to the event were sent to the Business Analytics and MBA students, with around 40 students in attendance with teams of 3-4.

What was the challenge?

Participants were to use data provided by Qlik from the moviedatabase.com, along with the wealth of resources and data available on the internet around Netflix's catalogue, to design a schedule of releases for next year based on what the students decided would be popular films from the data. Finally they were to come up with an original content idea as this is where Netflix make the most margin from their investments.

Day 1

The first day consisted of introductions from Qlik and Accenture, covering topics around industry use of BI tools and techniques, customer case studies and finally a workshop using Qlik Sense. The workshop was designed to show participants features of Qlik including;

- Data loading

- Data modelling

- Data visualisation.

Day 2

Day 2 was the main day, a 6 hour data challenge to bring together the students new knowledge in Qlik Sense and use the movie database and other resources available to them online to answer the brief. The students were scored out of 10 on 5 different areas;

1. Quality of Dashboard

2. Data Model structure

3. Presentation structure and content

4. Has the team answered the question?

5. Original Netflix content idea

Outcome

It was an opportunity for everyone involved to try something that we hadn't explored before. The University of Bath was for them a chance to improve students knowledge of data analytics, team work and the real world data challenges.

Accenture were provided an opportunity to show themselves as a major future player in the analytics space and hopefully to persuade some students to come and work with them.

For Qlik, a chance to help students in their career paths and for me to understand the complexities in organising a data challenge and ultimately to provide a group of students a small insight the future data economy and improve their data literacy.

A huge thanks must go out to those that helped me organise this, Deniz Kog, Aylar Charyyarova and Jian Yi Oh from Accenture. Martin Royds from Qlik and finally Gunes Erdogen from The University of Bath, who made this event possible.