November 2, 2014
Analytics for lots and lots of business users
A common marketing theme in the 2010s decade has been to claim that you make analytics available to many business users, as opposed to your competition, who only make analytics available to (pick one):
- Specialists (with “PhD”s).
- Fewer business users (a thinner part of the horizontally segmented pyramid — perhaps inverted — on your marketing slide, not to be confused with the horizontally segmented pyramids — perhaps inverted — on your competition’s marketing slides).
Versions of this claim were also common in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.
Some of that is real. In particular:
- Early adoption of analytic technology is often in line-of-business departments.
- Business users on average really do get more numerate over time, my three favorite examples of that being:
- Statistics is taught much more in business schools than it used to be.
- Statistics is taught much more in high schools than it used to be.
- Many people use Excel.
Even so, for most analytic tools, power users tend to be:
- People with titles or roles like “business analyst”.
- More junior folks pulling things together for their bosses.
- A hardcore minority who fall into neither of the first two categories.
Asserting otherwise is rarely more than marketing hype.
Related link
- “Freeing business analysts from IT” (August, 2014)
Categories: Predictive modeling and advanced analytics
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3 Responses to “Analytics for lots and lots of business users”
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Back in 1999, there was a startup (who shall remain nameless) that went around to banks pitching a tool that would enable them to “fire all of their SAS users.”
What they didn’t seem to realize was that every person in the room was a SAS user.
Regards,
Thomas
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