Brief musings on the return of Decision Support
A long time ago...
It’s not just my aching bones and my inability to understand half of what my teenage children are saying to me that makes me feel old these days. This September will mark 23 years since I emerged from four years “studying” during the “Madchester” craze in Salford into my respectable career advising clients on how to make the most of their data. Those were great times; well the England football team was still dire, but “Saturday Night” by Whigfield was number 1 for god’s sake! Oh, now I feel really old!
But sometimes it’s good to reflect and take stock, and one thing that struck me about my career was the number of job titles that I have had, whilst essentially doing the same thing. I have been called many things during the last 23 years, “MI Consultant”, “BI Consultant”, “Analytics Consultant”, “Idiot”, but my first title was “Decision Support Consultant”.
Confused?
Today I speak to many clients who are looking to exploit their data and I can’t tell you how many times people get hung up on terminology, buzz words and the “latest thing”. We are finally starting to emerge from the vendor hype around “Big Data”, a phrase which is meaningless, but we continue to be submerged in Data Lakes, baffled by Data Science, concerned about Machine Learning, unsure about Predictive Analytics, and what on earth is Visual Business Analytics?
It might be that a Hadoop cluster containing petabytes of data is the answer - in most cases it isn't! You may need some PhD Statisticians to run some data mining models in R; or you might just need to be able to grab a table of data from a website or, dare I say it, a spreadsheet emailed to you by a colleague. You, and not a "Centre of Excellence" or "Report Factory" could then be empowered to find some great insight using a data visualisation tool such as Tableau, Qlik or Power BI.
I don't care!
Or maybe all of this is irrelevant to you. In all likelihood, the person asking the question doesn’t need to know or indeed care how it is done, they just want to know the answer - and fast (and they will probably have a different one tomorrow).
What is important is to be laser focused on understanding and defining the problem. Then find a trusted source of data that can help answer that problem and exploit whatever technology helps you make sense of that data.
Dust off the old business card
So my advice when being bombarded with the latest and greatest from vendors and industry analysts? Remember that the raison d'être for any tool, architecture or approach in the data space is to support you in making make better decisions. Have you got the data to do that? Will the tool do that? Do you have the right skills in place to exploit both the data and the tools? Wait a minute, you might need a “Decision Support Consultant” for that! Sometimes the old things really are the best (with the exception of Danish born, Italian-based Eurodance singers).