Sexy skills of data geeks

http://dataspora.com/blog/sexy-data-geeks/

by coderdude • 16 years ago

2 1 16 years ago

sciboy• 16 years ago

Knowledge is valuable. Everyone knows it. But very few are actually delivering knowledge. Take a look at the "web dashboard" on dataspora's page. Does that "deliver knowledge" or is it a bunch of charts that the people on the ground won't use?

The key to a good analysis is new understanding & actionable recommendations with associated risk, not "big data" or visualisations. Unfortunately they are the easy part - the hard part is turning these into knowledge for your client. I've never seen this even attempted in a dashboard like this (not picking on them, it's industry wide), and I rarely see it in outsourced analysis because usually the analysts don't have the domain knowledge required. I've seen the results of many mid-6 figure analysis projects and they weren't pretty.

When probed to be truthful, many of the companies in these spaces struggle to provide any real value for the client. I challenge anyone to give me an example where their company has provided true value. There are two requirements in my experience to this:

1) A concrete example with a real monetary gain greater than the cost of the project 2) The company increased spend for another project and got similar results. If you are really that good, customers find more money and more projects.

I hate to be a skeptic about this as I am a trained statistician and this is my area, but from what I have seen this is typical of the industry. </rant> :)

Sexy skills of data geeks

Related Stories