One question I’m often asked is, “Who is ColdLight’s biggest competitor?” People love to hear about who you compete with so they can properly put you in a mental bucket of how alike you are to everything else in the world. In a sense, they’re asking how you conform to the current paradigm and differentiate yourself enough to be interesting. To me, conformity is simply not part of the plan.
I typically respond that our competition is the status quo. By status quo, I am referring to the traditional approach of hiring statisticians to sit in front of advanced software tools, building and studying complex analytic models trying to discover important insights in data. In my opinion, this process has not kept up with the onslaught of data and the demand for instant turnaround that businesses require. There simply is not enough time to build and refine models following the approach of the status quo.
Consider the business era of the 1950s pre-desktop computing. The age of the typing pool. The age of manual correction tape. The age of paper. Some of you are probably not even old enough to know what some of these things are. They are, more of less, extinct; they are a part of the retired fabric of a business world long since revolutionized by technology. They are extinct because breakthroughs in technology put the power of desktop publishing into the hands of every business person at an affordable price. The investment in teams of manual typists was replaced with more powerful and more cost effective desktop publishing software fully equipped with spellcheckers, grammar checkers and advanced layout tools. Technology challenged and usurped the status quo.
One could mourn the loss of the typing pool. One might argue that, for the good of our economy, it is important to create or at least maintain jobs. However, those people in the typing pool didn’t disappear. They found new ways to make the business more effective and more efficient. The shift from manual, rote, mundane activities to creative activities enables business people to search for new and innovative ways to beat their competition.
Let me bring you back to the world of data analysis. Do I think human data crunching automatons (aka data analysts) are headed for extinction? No, absolutely not… yet. Do I think that the role of the data analyst will change? It already has changed significantly over the past ten years and will continue to evolve rapidly. The tools available today enable analysts to build sophisticated models in record time, but that time savings is only significant when compared to the status quo: a human-intensive process. With a new paradigm of machine intelligence working on the intensive data crunching challenges, the role of the data analyst can be transformed into a master of creativity seeking out important questions to ask of machine intelligence-driven analysis in order to identify the best strategic course of action.
The data analyst will not disappear any time soon. The role - like all roles in business - will continue to adapt and evolve. Interaction with machine intelligence will become increasingly more integral to the process of data analysis. The machine intelligence will do the investigation and present back appropriate insights to the creative business person.
Tags: automated data analysis, data analysis, data mining, data modeling, data strategy, datas