The Point,
the whole point, and nothing but the point of Analytics is simple: supporting people in understanding the information contained in the data that matters to them.
Everything else flows from this. Absent this, nothing else matters.
Analytics That Works: Keeping Analytics’ Promises
Help people access, see, analyze, and understand the information captured in the data that matters to them.
Help people communicate interesting and valuable information and insights to others.
Support the organization’s obligations to ensure data and analytics timeliness, reliability, and security.
Do so quickly, effectively, efficiently, and economically with a minimum of technical intervention, fuss, and bother.
The Good News
It’s possible to honour Analytics’ promises.
It’s actually pretty straightforward, if a few simple principles are understood, adopted, and diligently applied.
Straightforward does not mean simple or magical. In any realistic real world organization Analytics spans the spectrum from atomic and local to highly complex and enterprise-spanning.
Analytics That Works (ATW) is a time-tested approach that works across the multiple dimensions of data-analytical contexts, from the intimate and local point of data contact where people are primarily interested in knowing what their data has to say in their local context, to enterprise-wide where data needs to be conformed and managed to address the highest-level strategic information needs.
ATW focuses on the primary need to analyze data where it lives. This is the foundation upon which all successful Analytics efforts rests.
ATW is highly opinionated.
There’s a good, clear path to success that was blazed decades ago, has been expanded, well traveled, and smoothed out since, and has been the foundation upon which many successful analytics efforts have been based, delivering results for innumerable people in a multitude of organizations.
Following the path will ensure, as much as anything people do can, that things will turn out well; people will gain the information and insights they need, and organizational interests will be accommodated.
The Ungood News
Far too many Analytics initiatives fall short of achieving anything resembling real success.
There are forces in the world that, when allowed to dictate how Analytics is conceived and conducted, will derail even the best-intended efforts leaving people without the information they need and are entitled to.
These forces frame analytics in a complex web of assumptions, concepts, ideas, policies, practices, and implementation schemes that, taken together form the conventional Analytics paradigm (CAP) that’s at the heart of many, if not most Analytics failures. And Analytics has a very long inglorious history of systemic failure.
There are many, many, many ungood ways to go about analytics. All too often the good path is not taken, particularly within the context of Enterprise Analytics, and when not taken, whether passively or actively, naively, benignly or maliciously, or for some other reasons, fails to deliver upon its obligations. We aim to change that.