Ben Jones

Ben Jones is the founder and CEO of Data Literacy, LLC, a training and education company that’s on a mission to help people learn the language of data. Ben is a highly experienced and passionate instructor, having taught data to thousands in a corporate training environment as well as in academic classroom settings (University of Washington). He is also a published author (Communicating Data With Tableau, O’Reilly, 2014), a talented public speaker, and a recognized thought-leader in the data world. To balance out the digital side of life, Ben enjoys hiking and backpacking with his family in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Ben is currently working on his second book, Avoiding Data Pitfalls (Wiley), due out in 2019.

Professional Recognition

Ben is an award-winning data visualization designer, having won first place in the 2012 Tableau Iron Viz Sports Contest as well as Crowd Favorite in the 2012 Iron Viz Biz Viz Contest.

Ben led the global marketing effort for the award-winning Tableau Public platform from 2013 to 2018, driving 20X growth in monthly active users over that time period. Tableau Public is routinely named as one of the top data visualization platforms in the world.

From 2014 to 2018, Ben co-chaired the Tapestry Data Storytelling conference, a conference that was named one of the “7 Must-Attend Visualization Conferences of 2014”

Ben is also an award winning continuous improvement project leader and mentor, winning the 2007 Medtronic Star of Excellence and training and mentor teams that won the award in 2009 and 2010.

While completing his MBA, Ben took first place in the 2011 California Lutheran University Festival of Scholars for his submission titled “The Phaedrus Effect: Team-based decision making using analytics and intuition”.

Published Works

Ben’s first book, Communicating Data With Tableau was published by O’Reilly Media in 2014.

More recently, Ben published the 17 Key Traits of Data Literacy, and he is currently working on Avoiding Data Pitfalls, due out by Wiley & Sons in 2019.

Education

Ben holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from UCLA (2000) and an MBA with a specialization in Entrepreneurship from California Lutheran University (2011). Ben also completed a Supply Chain Executive Leadership program at Penn State University (2010).

Other Experience

While at Medtronic, the world’s largest medical device company, Ben earned his Black Belt and then his Master Black Belt certifications in Lean Six Sigma. During that phase of his career, Ben led project teams that booked over $2.5M in savings over a 2 year period, and then moved on to training and mentoring other award-winning project leaders at the company.

Ben has delivered presentations and keynotes on data in the US, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Japan and the UK.

Ben loves hiking and backpacking in the Pacific Northwest, and also runs an amateur outdoor photography Instagram account PNWTreks.