Benjamin Alamar has had a long career of success building and leading data and analytics teams across multiple industries. He served as the Director of Basketball Analytics and Research at the Oklahoma City Thunder for five years before moving to become the Senior Analytics and Data Consultant for the Cleveland Cavaliers. He spent four years as the Director of Sports Analytics at ESPN, then StubHub as Head of Business Analytics. Ben has been helping to run the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference since its inception.
In this episode of the Winning With Data podcast, Jake talks with Benjamin Alamar about how data can empower organizations when they can ask the right questions and organize it efficiently. Benjamin remarks that getting to know how the data will be used, what the stakeholders of an organization need, and what kind of data aggregates to pull for each team vastly increases its usefulness. With the increase of data loads from new tracking data sources, understanding exactly what kind of information stakeholders need is paramount. He stresses the importance of embracing debate, ideas, iteration, and innovation by having humans create hypotheses and using analytics to test those hypotheses to find the best solutions.