Understanding Analytics - Why It's Not For Everyone

Analytics has gained momentum over recent years. Analytics being the vehicle that enables organisations to extract invaluable insights to make factual-unbiased-data-driven-decisions, usually a role reserved for Business Analyst, Statisticians & Data Scientists.

Fortunately, modern day analytical tool advancements are allowing business users to become everyday 'Citizen Data Scientists'. So how do we determine who requires deeper level of understanding of data and who doesn’t? It's probably a good time to explore where slicing and dicing of data is required in a job role and when only the most relevant information needs to be provided to optimise an employee’s day to day tasks. 

Understanding Data VS Performing Analytics VS Interpreting Analytics

There will always be a group of individuals that understand the process of complex data within an organisation - how it's produced, what sources the data can come from and how to best manage it to enable the 'Performing of analytics'

As accessibility to data sources and data warehousing techniques improve, performing analytics has shifted away from just being Analyst’s role to becoming a universal skill required to optimise most departments. We are now able to quantify ROI with customer data within a Marketing department, or predict and prevent attrition using employee information and even understand the correlation between travel expenses against booked business. All powerful use cases and insights to improve from within but, this use of Analytics only makes up a small percentage of a workforce.

This leaves us with a majority of the workforce with little to no analytical data crunching capabilities and nor should they need this skill set. Interpreting Analytics should be simple to absorb information for the masses, much like driving a car and having traffic lights and signage appear when needed most, to make crucial decisions.

The goal is not to overwhelm consumers with the inner workings produced by Analytics but to simplify a process(es) and enable logical prescriptive business action.

In summary, Analytics is here to help simplify our lives. The success of Analytics within any organisation will be determined by how widely it is adopted and the value it provides to a user (UX).