Technology Tools: Then and Now
Tracey Smith
Helping companies with inventory optimize stock levels, streamline operations, and boost margins through data-driven strategies and recommendations.
It's been 30 years of data analytics in my career and here's what I can share. The math is still the same as it was back then, but the tools have certainly changed.?
A few decades ago, I was handed a magazine which described the linear regression algorithm. My manager at the time asked me to write PASCAL code to execute that algorithm. User interfaces for debugging your code really did not exist, so the PRINT function was the best way to see what your code was doing!
Today, we click a button in our tool of choice to execute linear regression.
How people sell those tools has also changed. In the past, you could make a one-time purchase of an analysis tool and use it for as many years as you wished... or at least until your computer became obsolete and a new one was incompatible with your old software. It was not unusual for me to run Excel and Minitab for 10 years before upgrading. :-) Today, tools like these have moved to an annual subscription model so essentially you rent software and never actually buy it.
With these trends, my tool preferences have changed over the years. As a former mechanical engineer (predicting heat transfer and fluid flow of heat exchangers), I was always a hard core Minitab girl. In the past few years, I find myself leaning on the power of R and using RStudio as the interface. What used to be an iterative loop in PASCAL is now one statement in R. User interfaces today show you the values in your variables at any point in the code to make easier work of debugging scripts... but occasionally I still invoke the odd PRINT function. Old habits die hard.
For interactive dashboards, I lean mostly toward Power BI but still maintain my skills in Tableau to support existing clients.
How about you? What are your favourite tools?
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About Tracey Smith
Tracey Smith is the President of Numerical Insights LLC, a boutique analytics firm that helps businesses derive value from data and improve their bottom line. If you would like to learn more about how Numerical Insights LLC, please visit www.numericalinsights.com?or?contact Tracey Smith through LinkedIn.?
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