HBS Community of Data Scientists: Q+A Victoria Prince and Matt Hazelton
by Shona Simkin ![]() Members of CoDA.
In the summer of 2022, staff within Harvard Business School’s (HBS) Research Computing Services (RCS) and Marketing and Communications (M&C) created a new group for people engaged in data science and analytics: Community of Data Analysts (CoDA). We talked with two lead organizers from each group, Victoria L. Prince, senior statistician / data scientist at RCS, and Matt Hazelton, assistant director, marketing analytics in M&C, about the formation, intent, and goals of this new group. Tell us about your individual roles at HBS. Hazelton: I’m in M&C’s digital marketing team, which is a centralized group offering services on things like email, web strategy, and marketing performance tracking and analytics. I help our partners across the School understand their marketing campaign performance and work with them on advertising campaigns, Facebook or Google, or general experiments on their website, helping to change their content and incrementally improve performance. How did the idea for CoDA come about? When I came to HBS, Paul DiBello (senior director of RCS) and I talked about the Analytics Staff Consortium (ASC), which is a community that I helped establish and co-led in Harvard Central Administration. We wanted to start something like that here, but then there was the pandemic—not an ideal time to start a new community. When Dean Srikant Datar was appointed, he launched a digital transformation initiative that focuses on this new integrated, collective way of working together. As staff and faculty started gradually returning to campus, it felt like a perfect timing for a launch, so we did a lot of prep work and had the first series of events in early summer. ![]() Infographic from Matt Siano’s data lake presentation at a CoDA event.
What are the overall goals and objectives of CoDA? How does CoDA fit in with the broader digital transformation goals at HBS? Our team of organizers connects regularly with the digital transformation core team to synchronize our goals and look for opportunities for mutual support. CoDA is a natural organic audience for digital transformation—we all deal with data and are very familiar with technology and eager to stay informed, so we are going to be early adopters and beta testers of any products, results, or outcomes of the Initiative. How did you get started and build the community? In addition to organizing the events, we have a CoDA website, community Teams channel, and we also send out regular communications to our members. It is very easy to join the community—just email us at coda@hbs.edu! Hazelton: At the same time as Victoria was working on ASC, Marcus Dandurand (director, Digital Marketing Strategy and Analytics) and I had established a marketing analytics community with a larger group of the partners we were working with to share what we were all working on. When the idea for CoDA came up in the fall, Paul and Marcus brought us all together and it was a natural progression from there. Has there been a favorite moment in these early days of CoDA? Prince: I agree, the level of enthusiasm—we were completely floored by the number of colleagues who continued to come to the events and wanted to stay engaged. I know the feeling of being a lone analyst longing for some connection with like-minded folks to geek out, so I can see why people keep coming! We’ve been getting very positive feedback; people are grateful and say things like how they loved meeting different amazing colleagues from all across HBS who also deal with data. Personally, I really enjoy turning on my creative side and brainstorm with other CoDA organizers what interesting event topics to explore next and what other initiatives to try out. We have a couple of very cool activities in the pipeline already. Where would you like to see CoDA go in the future? Hazelton: I enjoy implementing continuous improvement strategies for what we and our partners are doing. At every event I try to learn something that I can bring back and help our partners drive performance, so for me that’s important—getting that out of it and helping everyone evolve too. |
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