David Walker

PATH is a global nonprofit working to improve public health and accelerate health equity so all people and communities can thrive. PATH advises and partners with public institutions, businesses, grassroots groups, and investors to solve the world’s most pressing health challenges. At PATH, David is responsible for PATH’s Health Insight Platform, hosted in Microsoft Azure which provides PATH and other nonprofit organizations with analytic platforms, including Tableau Server and Alteryx Server, as well as access to Azure services and infrastructure. David also provides data, analytics and visualization expertise to PATH projects.

Walker Analytics Consulting assists organizations in creating thriving self-service analytics cultures and communities with a FOCUS on PEOPLE combined with deep technical expertise in the deployment, administration and utilization of enterprise analytic platforms such as Tableau and Alteryx.

At Cargill, David Walker and Mitchell Grewer formed the SSA team with the goal of ensuring every Cargill employee could understand and use data. As co-leads for SSA, Mitchell led the coaching team which grew and fostered the community, while David led the platform team with responsibility for SSA platforms and technology (which now included Tableau, Alteryx and Power BI). David focused his team on ensuring that the SSA platforms were best of class and never failed to meet the community's growing needs. The success of SSA at Cargill has been phenomenal with a member of 35'000 employees (40% of Cargill's 85'000 knowledge workers) contributing to over 500MM USD in FY2019. Tableau has publicly recognized the SSA community at Cargill as a model for a successful data culture.

With the introduction of the Tableau platform in January of 2014, David Walker became the catalyst for Cargill's explosive grassroots self-service analytics movement which, within a year, was a 1'000 member community affecting positive change in their businesses. However, David recognized that, the community's impact was limited due to the difficulty the community was experiencing preparing their data for use in Tableau. In 2015, David added Alteryx to the community's portfolio providing a platform for fast and efficient, automated data preparation. David provided sole operational, administrative and product support as well as training for the Tableau and Alteryx platforms. With the SSA community surpassing 3'000 members, David struggled to maintain pace with the community's support and training needs. Without the option of additional IT headcount, David envisioned and implemented a crowd-sourced model which relied almost entirely on the community for support and education. This move successfully set the stage for subsequent phenomenal growth of the SSA community at Cargill.

Team and technical lead for the re-imagining and development of a software system critical to grain & oilseed trading activities in Cargill's World Trading business in Geneva, Switzerland. A successful effort increased revenue and opportunities for the trading business and significantly reduced operational and maintenance costs of the system.

Certified ScrumMaster. Evangelized scrum to IT leadership and led scrum teams at both Mercer and Cargill during this period.

Co-founded InterAnalytics, a Swiss startup with a core competency in Natural Language Understanding (NLU). InterAnalytics develops products that turn "Interaction Into Intelligence" using proprietary technology to provide advanced analytics of textual conversation. Utilized Tableau and SSRS to demonstrate the value of InterAnalytics NLU engine in applications such as Call Center Quality Assurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_understanding

Joined Heartland Payment Systems to assist in completion of a business-critical automated sales compensation product. Quickly learned the business model and rules and assumed technical lead responsibilities within 8 weeks. Successfully led the completion and implementation of the project and provided full support to the business for the initial executions.

Designed and developed Mercer’s next generation delivery platform for our software products. ASP.NET MVC, Windows Communication Foundation, Active Directory Federation Services, Windows Identity Foundation and SQL Server 2008 technologies combined with extensive customer usability studies are the foundations for this offering. Responsibilities included architectural design and implementation, .NET C# development, SQL Server 2008 database modeling and development, SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services development, and training related to the introduction of unit testing and related technologies and tools. This period included a three year secondment in Geneva, Switzerland. Responsibilities while on secondment also include working with our Global Mobility software group to improve product offerings, software processes and manage the transition of the current product set into our newest software delivery platform. Evaluated and evangelized the InRule business rules engine for use in our software solutions. Successfully implemented in multiple Mercer solutions, the InRule engine has significantly reduced software costs and reduced the time required to respond to changes in the business. Continue to provide ongoing vendor relationship support, architectural consulting and training for developers and business rules analysts. Member of our organization’s architecture team responsible for research and development, architectural vision and consulting as well as assisting in the selection and implementation of development processes and tools.

During 2007, an important benefits compensation software project became mired down in requirements analysis and was unable to gain traction toward its software development milestones. With extensive experience in project recovery, I was asked to assume project management of the project in mid-September. The project team consisted of a development group in Louisville, Kentucky, another in Pune, India, a product manager in Canada, and a project manager (myself) in Geneva, Switzerland. Significant challenges existed with geographical, communication and cultural issues. After introducing Scrum to the team and providing on-site training in Pune, a base system was dropped to QA within only 6 weeks. Thereafter, project goals were met and delivered every 4 weeks. By the end of the year, the project was back on target. Focus then shifted to retraining the previous project manager and training a newly-hired technical lead. At the end of Q1 2008, management transitioned back to the original team. Development manager of the Mercer Workforce Forecaster, a workforce trending, analysis and projection tool used by our Human Capital organization. Nominated to and participated in Mercer’s leadership mentoring program during 2008.

Technical lead for Mercer HRSuite: ePRISM, Workforce Forecaster, TalentSuite (retired) and BenefitsMonitor – Mercer’s web-based compensation, workforce projection, performance management and benefits analysis tools. Worked closely with product and project management to successfully create a product suite which outpaces the competition with its power, flexibility and ease of use while maintaining a competitive cost. Customers have affirmed that success by consistently purchasing Mercer HRSuite products over the competition’s offerings.

Web development for various business initiatives including: design and implementation of Education Tracking, an application monitoring Kindred’s compliance to it’s Corporate Integrity Agreement; participation in efforts to consolidate Kindred’s employee and facility data; and delivery of an XML/XSL-based internet site to dynamically support Kindred’s 300+ nursing centers.

Engineering lead for Intel’s eBG (eBusiness Group) Forward Engineering effort to progress Intel’s online Marketing capabilities. This project sought to consolidate Intel’s B2C customer profile data from disparate vertical Marketing systems into a core horizontal profiling service, and grow Intel’s relationship with visitors to the intel.com family of sites through products and services designed to improve Intel’s understanding of the customer.

Major: Computer Science Minor: Math Minor: Electrical Engineering