What if its not a matter of everyone becoming an analyst but instead, the mission is to restore the ability of analysis to people who used to do it?
What are shift managers doing when they set schedules? Analysis
What are teachers doing when they create lesson plans? Analysis
What does any of do when we make plans to purposefully fill needs? Analysis
I think where we've gotten confused is conflating technical analysis with business analysis. Its not that your typical customer manager doesn't do analysis. Its that the complexity of our businesses and the volume of our measurement have grown so great that we need deep technical skills to just to make simple decisions. Also, as a society, we've gotten really uncomfortable with uncertainty, and that's expensive.
Consider the simple task of navigating somewhere. I once drove 500 miles to my grandmother's place with a half page of scribbling for directions. 7 turns. These days, I don't back out of my driveway without being plugged into a massive cloud compute infrastructure and a to the minute estimate of arrival time. Have I allowed absurd expectations to rob me of analytics self-sufficiency?
On one hand, I agree - we all do analysis is lots of ways we don't formally recognize it. Choosing a restaurant, buying a flight, planning a route through a city...it's all a type of analysis. There's this passage at the beginning of "Everybody Lies" where the author's grandmother tells him who he should date based on his past girlfriends...as he says, also analysis).
But, on the other hand, the trend I'm describing is different. It's that people are actually becoming a form of technical analyst too. That's pretty unexpected to me. And while I don't think it's necessarily ideal, people's willingness to do it is a pretty strong signal of how much demand for it there must be.
Yeah, I think we're on the same page. Its really a matter of degrees, right? It goes to the fit between technology and problem. Taking food for example, I might want some waffles. If frozen waffles fits the bill, I can grab one and pop it in the toaster oven. Tech level "easy". But if I want me some fancy yeast raised Sunday Brunch waffles (got a great recipe), the required tech mastery level is much much higher.
Guess what I am saying is this is cyclical. The movement for people becoming more technical is because the existing solutions don't full meet the need. People are filling the gap to get their work done.
#1 - where I'm from, you absolutely could drive your swamp buggy down 85 to get to the mudhole. You might not like your life very much, while you do it, but no one would stop you!
#2 There are no other people I'd rather hang out with to talk data than Gordon and Benn! :)
What if its not a matter of everyone becoming an analyst but instead, the mission is to restore the ability of analysis to people who used to do it?
What are shift managers doing when they set schedules? Analysis
What are teachers doing when they create lesson plans? Analysis
What does any of do when we make plans to purposefully fill needs? Analysis
I think where we've gotten confused is conflating technical analysis with business analysis. Its not that your typical customer manager doesn't do analysis. Its that the complexity of our businesses and the volume of our measurement have grown so great that we need deep technical skills to just to make simple decisions. Also, as a society, we've gotten really uncomfortable with uncertainty, and that's expensive.
Consider the simple task of navigating somewhere. I once drove 500 miles to my grandmother's place with a half page of scribbling for directions. 7 turns. These days, I don't back out of my driveway without being plugged into a massive cloud compute infrastructure and a to the minute estimate of arrival time. Have I allowed absurd expectations to rob me of analytics self-sufficiency?
On one hand, I agree - we all do analysis is lots of ways we don't formally recognize it. Choosing a restaurant, buying a flight, planning a route through a city...it's all a type of analysis. There's this passage at the beginning of "Everybody Lies" where the author's grandmother tells him who he should date based on his past girlfriends...as he says, also analysis).
But, on the other hand, the trend I'm describing is different. It's that people are actually becoming a form of technical analyst too. That's pretty unexpected to me. And while I don't think it's necessarily ideal, people's willingness to do it is a pretty strong signal of how much demand for it there must be.
Yeah, I think we're on the same page. Its really a matter of degrees, right? It goes to the fit between technology and problem. Taking food for example, I might want some waffles. If frozen waffles fits the bill, I can grab one and pop it in the toaster oven. Tech level "easy". But if I want me some fancy yeast raised Sunday Brunch waffles (got a great recipe), the required tech mastery level is much much higher.
Guess what I am saying is this is cyclical. The movement for people becoming more technical is because the existing solutions don't full meet the need. People are filling the gap to get their work done.
#1 - where I'm from, you absolutely could drive your swamp buggy down 85 to get to the mudhole. You might not like your life very much, while you do it, but no one would stop you!
#2 There are no other people I'd rather hang out with to talk data than Gordon and Benn! :)
Very fair. I'm seem tractors going down 85 before, so swamp buggies might even be an upgrade.