On our second day of coverage at the recently concluded O’Reilly Fluent conference, we landed an interview Ann Spencer, Editor for O’Reilly’s Strata Practice Media. We’re delighted to have a chat with her because SiliconAngle has been to every single one of Strata’s conferences, and Spencer is responsible not only for those events but the entire Strata ecosystem under the slogan of ‘”Making the Data Work” and  “Changing the World with Data.”

In the earliest part of the interview, Spencer explained her role in Strata. First of all, Strata is a rich community of tech people playing different types — data analysts, data scientists, data engineers etc. What she does is identify the common pain points that these professionals have when they are working with data because people don’t just want to know data, they want to know what to do with it and what the best practices are.

“…we’re really at a point where people just don’t want to know what data is, they want to figure out ‘Ok, I know what to do with the data, but what are some of the best practices? You know, when I’m cleaning and preparing and moving and doing the analysis, how can I grab that analysis that’s really going to create an impact?’” Spencer said.

Strata is a confluence of different vectors including analytics, Big Data technology, commercial off-the-shelf software, people issue, design issue, and visualization. Regardless of which vector you fall in, there are some of the same problems that come up. Spencer and Strata do a whole lot of listening to pull out insights and best practices to great impact.

“…what are the problems that we’re trying to solve for? We’re bringing everyone together, we’re pulling these different components together. This is how we can create an impact with data from all these different worlds.”

Strata currently have some huge franchise including Aussie International and healthcare-centric Boston Strata RX. Strata Hadoop World 2013 is also set to kick off on October in NYC.

See Spencer’s entire segment below.