Today, it’s the turn of Jim Cain, a man not afraid to say he’s afraid of clowns.

If you are new to the Silly Series, you have a lot of catching up to do!  It’s a plethora of people profiles, where I ask the questions no-one cares about and get answers for which few are ready.

Today, it’s the turn of Jim Cain, a man not afraid to say he’s afraid of clowns.

Who is James Cain?

James Cain is a famous American writer, known for creating the romain noir genre of hardboiled crime novels.

Jim Cain is the President of Napkyn Inc., a 7-person managed analysis services business in Ottawa Canada.

Kidding aside, I am struggling with writing a bio – everyone else seems to have a really cool one.  I have been in Digital Sales and Analysis since 2000, and for the last few years I have been building Napkyn Inc., home of the Analyst Program, some great analysts, and some amazing ‘virtual bosses’ in Retail, Publishing and business to business.

If you could only choose one for an 8-hour flight, would you choose 1) extra legroom, 2) free wireless connection or 3) back-to-back episodes of “The Real Housewives of Orange County”?

Wireless in a second.  I’m not a big guy, so I can curl up fairly easy, but with nothing to read I get pretty snarky – access to internet means I never run out of things to read. No feedback on the Housewives show, I only watch hockey games and cooking shows so I haven’t seen that one yet.

Why is Napkyn called Napkyn?  Why not call it Serviette?  If you’re the president, does that mean I can run for election to your job?

Whoa – that should count as three questions…but I will play along.

Napkyn is called Napkyn because I came up with the idea to start a managed analysis services business at the pub.  There was only one place to write down my ideas, and that’s what we ended up calling the company.  If you look at our logo you can even make a good guess at the kind of beer I was drinking at the time….  A friend of mine calls the company Servi@, and even created a fake logo – I like Napkyn just fine.

As for the President thing, you’ve touched a sensitive nerve  While I lead the charge at Napkyn around selling and delivering our suite of Analyst programs, I don’t fancy myself much of an executive.  I also don’t think a company comprised of 7 people and a bulldog needs a Chief Officer.  I ended up with President by default, and if you want to run for election you will win for sure – so run!

What is the most useless thing you’ve ever purchased?

Nintendo Powerglove.  To be fair, it was purchased for me.  The powerglove was my first true exposure to vapourware, and it was good to get that experience in my formative years – it got me prepared to deal with 75% of digital marketing software

When someone asks you what web analytics is, what definition do you use?

Nice Question, I had to speak about that the other day to a new member of our team.  Here’s the short version (I have a tendency to rant):

Data is Data.

Analytics is the analyst driven framework that turns data into information that can be used, digested by executives, and modeled into performance/predictive models.

Analysis is the totally separate, qualitative skill set around interpreting analytics to refine understanding, insight and opportunity.

In short, good analysis is the opposite of the Nintendo Powerglove.

If everyone has 15 minutes of fame, what would you like yours to be for?

To be honest I would much prefer to give that 15 minutes to my extended team (the group at Napkyn & my wife and 2 boys).  I might have come up with the model for delivering managed analysis, but I wasn’t the one who analyzed tens of millions of dollars of sales across 50+ websites in 12 businesses.  And without my family I would have quit a long time ago – starting a business in a recession is surprisingly difficult

Who is your superhero-sans-cape in the web analytics community and why?

That one is a toughie.  We wrote a blog post a few weeks ago about how every web analyst is either Robin or Alfred, and how every executive who wants to take advantage of good analysis is Batman (we make a lot of pop culture references at Napkyn Global Headquarters).

So I guess the best answer is that any executive who decides to support their great intuition with amazing analysis is a hero in my books. If it had to be a specific person, it would most likely be Rob Rose.  He’s not a web analyst per se, but he was the Chief Strategy Officer for Cognos when I saw him speak about the impact business intelligence can have on a company (this was 6 or 7 years ago).  It was his speech that turned me into an analyst.

What is your wish for the remainder of 2011?

I wear three hats – Family-man, Analyst and Business owner.  As a Husband/Dad, I wish that by the end of the year our new baby will sleep through the entire night – every night.  As an Analyst, I would like to see analytics tools do a much better job at multi-session analysis, especially around campaign attribution.  I would love to build a proper return on marketing spend model into our standard deliverables, but the tech just isn’t there yet for most companies.  To executives who aren’t sure about analysis, ROI is King (in French this is a literal statement…)  And as a business owner, I want to hit our targets for total companies using us as their web analysis department – give me those Glengarry leads!

You win a free dinner and can invite 3 people from the web analytics industry – who do you invite?

Another toughie.  To be honest I don’t think I can answer this one properly because there are so many people in the industry that I follow online that I would like to meet…I made a commitment that this year I would stop working long enough to start to get out to a few events and I am looking forward to meeting a ton of people when I speak at eMetrics in Toronto in a few weeks.  So let’s make it a buffet style event with you and the Team Evil Forces group, Stéphane Hamel (awesome/smart guy, we’re lucky to have him on our advisory board), Dennis Mortensen (really understands the role of technology in analytics), Alex Langshur (Founder of Cardinal Path, key part of the Ottawa analytics community) Bryan Eisenberg (the king of understanding that selling is the goal of analyzing) and Louis CK (comedian who knows nothing about WA, but would help keep things from getting too heavy). I could seriously make this list ten miles long…

You live in Canadia.  How frequently do you employ the phrase “It’s somewhere aboot the hoose”?

The Ottawa valley definitely has a strong dose of the hoser accent.  So, often.  The Ottawa-Gatineau region spans both Ontario and Quebec so we also have a lot of French accents too.

Ottawa was famously referred to once as the ‘city that fun forgot’, but as far as I’m concerned it’s the perfect blend of community, innovation and culture.  Where else can you spend the day talking about digital optimization and then go ‘oot’ to get a poutine?

What is your favourite kind of chart?

The best visualization is the one that the intended recipient wants to see…boring as pie charts are, some people eat them up (pun intended).  I am having performance dashboards built internally so I can get at a glance Napkyn performance. Below is a screenshot from something I half jokingly sent to one of our staff who is in charge of building a stoplight style performance dashboard for me:

Positive Performance – Show a picture of my cute kid in a green shirt.  This metric is positive!

No/Low Growth Performance – Show me a picture of the Napkyn office dog looking indifferent.

Negative Performance – Show me a picture of Pennywise the clown…he scares the crap out of me.

Tell me that dashboard wouldn’t be effective.

Check out the full list of interviews in the Silly Series here!