I like your vision, and I believe it is truly the right one, the one which is in the best interests of business. What’s more, as an analyst, I believe you are describing the most influential and satisfying image of the analyst role.

The “data scientist” vision doesn’t sound much like this to me. So much emphasis on programming, data access and data manipulation skills. So much talk about Big Data, so little about what is the right data for the question. With so much time spent manipulating data, where’s the time to think abut what it all means?

Currently, we see that the lines of IT and Business are more gray than ever, and we do see both functional groups duking out who owns analytics – right or wrong – but it’s a natural chaos that must occur while we shift generations and skillsets. At bare minimum, companies that do well to incent knowledge sharing, encourage tolerance across cultures (& generations), and effectively enable communication will do well —- regardless of whether IT or the Business “owns” analytics.

Most interesting is this new tech generation entering the workforce who have been brought up with IT acumen and technical intution from kindergarten… so regardless of the functional career they choose, they will bring a tech-savvy mindset and will likely bridge the IT / Biz divide by nature of who they are and what they enjoy. Not only that, but they are already in-tune with social sharing, remote communication, distance learning, and diversity tolerance, which are key attributes needed to blend our functional and global knowledge sets effectively.

Give them time to enter positions where they affect change, and we’ll see a change in how our organizations are structured and the methodologies used to run them. I suspect we will see blurry teams comprised of a miriad of knowledge sets with less functional walls become normal. I bet – 10 years from now – we’ll not hear an employee say, “I work for the IT department”, since the technical responsibilities will be blended throughout and the commodity-like activities outsourced.

I’d like to add another reason why – job requirements for analysts have become laden down with technical items that don’t help the answer the “what happened” questions. Requirements like “Expert knowledge of SQL” are IT driven, not analytics driven. The push for IT competency steers managers away from hiring expert data analysts and toward expert data manipulators. There’s a world of difference between the two.

Examples

– An analyst spends a good portion of her time creating weekly/bi-weekly reports that no one uses. The analyst here thought they were often used and no one ever told her otherwise

– Approval processes that are always rubber stamped. This happens a great deal and often it creates a different set of problems within the culture. The additional problems can be additional controls being put in place which are equally ignored, or people ignoring the reason the controls were put in place to begin with.

– A hiring process that takes 45+ days because of redundant or unnecessary policies and procedures. By the time the candidate is approved, the candidate has already taken another job and the process must start over.

– Tech support scripts that don’t allow the technician to use judgment first. Making the customer follow each step in the diagnostic process the same way, when the the first few steps have already been ruled out.

And I could go on and on…

Timely, as Gordon Gecko is hitting the silver screen again. I actually think the problem exists with shareholders and the system. Shareholders need to pay more attention to the details. We are to blame if we allow it to happen. Also the system is flawed in that board members are made up of other CEOs. It is a conflict of interest for CEOs to set other CEO pay structure.

Systematically, we need to think of a better way to pay executives for long term performance. Clearly our system has done great things, but with all things…there is a time for improvement.