March 5, 2014

Analytics for everybody!

For quite some time, one of the most frequent marketing pitches I’ve heard is “Analytics made easy for everybody!”, where by “quite some time” I mean “over 30 years”. “Uniquely easy analytics” is a claim that I meet with the greatest of skepticism.*  Further confusing matters, these claims are usually about what amounts to business intelligence tools, but vendors increasingly say “Our stuff is better than the BI that came before, so we don’t want you to call it ‘BI’ as well.”

*That’s even if your slide deck doesn’t contain a picture of a pyramid of user kinds; if there actually is such a drawing, then the chance that I believe you is effectively nil.

All those caveats notwithstanding, there are indeed at least three forms of widespread analytics:

It would be nice to say that the first two bullet points represent a fairly clean operational/investigative BI split, but that would be wrong; human real-time dashboards can at once be standalone and operational.

Often, the message “Our BI is easy to use by everybody, unlike every other BI offering in the past 40 years” is unsupported by facts; vendors just offer me-too BI technology and falsely claim it’s something special. But sometimes there is actual substance, usually in one or more aspects of time-to-answer. For example:

One items I’m leaving off the list is the capability to easily design charts, graphs or whole dashboards. When BI vendors add that functionality, they often present it as an industry innovation; but it’s been years since I saw something in that vein beyond the me-too.

Comments

One Response to “Analytics for everybody!”

  1. “Freeing business analysts from IT” | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on March 1st, 2015 1:43 am

    […] Analytics for everybody! (March, 2014) […]

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