{"id":12457,"date":"2015-03-09T15:26:13","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T14:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=7138"},"modified":"2021-08-16T18:24:54","modified_gmt":"2021-08-16T16:24:54","slug":"awesome-analytics-are-we-there-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2015\/03\/awesome-analytics-are-we-there-yet.html","title":{"rendered":"Awesome Analytics &#8212; Are We There Yet?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I prepared\u00a0for a\u00a0presentation at the Gartner BI conference in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, I thought I&#8217;d take a look at old research to how far we&#8217;ve come with Analytics in the last few decades.<\/p>\n<p>At first glance, the answers is &#8216;not very far.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>For example, in 1997, only 12% of executives reported basing their decisions on hard facts. By 2014, that had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/finance\/businessclub\/management-advice\/10874799\/Gut-feeling-still-king-in-business-decisions.html\">dropped to just 10%.<\/a><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_7141\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7141\" style=\"width: 1000px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-7141 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/analytics-now-and-then-gut-rules2.jpg?resize=1000%2C427&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"analytics now and then -- gut rules2\" width=\"1000\" height=\"427\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7141\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Despite decades of BI investment, executive reliance on gut feel has actually increased. (Why the worst-practice 3D shaded pie-charts? Just to troll the data viz purists \ud83d\ude42 ).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>A hot topic of Gartner BI research in the late 1990s was the increasingly large &#8216;fact gap,&#8217; whereby the amount of data available for decisions was rapidly outstripping the available analytic resources.<\/p>\n<p>With some minor modifications, such as changing &#8216;Terabytes&#8217; to &#8216;Petabyes&#8217; and &#8216;Analytic Personnel&#8217; to &#8216;Data Scientists,&#8217; the picture looks remarkably similar twenty years later.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_7143\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7143\" style=\"width: 1000px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-7143 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/fact-gap-update.jpg?resize=1000%2C441&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"fact gap update\" width=\"1000\" height=\"441\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7143\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">An update to Gartner research from 1996. Plus \u00e7a change&#8230;<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>It&#8217;s hard to compare perfectly, because of different research methodologies used over the years, but it also seems that the largest factors holding back\u00a0successful Business Intelligence also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.it-performs.com\/resources\/white-papers\/business-intelligence-strategy\/view?path=The_Fact_Gap_The_Disconnect_Between_Data_and_Decisions.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">haven&#8217;t changed very much<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The top three problems remain data quality, ease of use, and the difficulty of integrating different systems.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_7145\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7145\" style=\"width: 1000px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-7145 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/biggest-barriers-to-business-intelligence.jpg?resize=1000%2C506&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"biggest barriers to business intelligence\" width=\"1000\" height=\"506\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7145\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The top three barriers to business intelligence have remained largely unchanged for over a decade<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The reality is that today&#8217;s technology is much more powerful\u00a0and widely used than in the past &#8212; but what was hard then remains hard today.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7150\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/whats-still-not-awesome.jpg?resize=1000%2C505&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"what's still not awesome\" width=\"1000\" height=\"505\" \/><\/p>\n<p>What if we could take all of today&#8217;s technologies, and start again from scratch? That ended up being the theme of my presentation, and the subject of future posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Looking back at old research, how close have we come to the &#8220;awesome analytics&#8221; we hoped we&#8217;d have by now? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[100,160,204,333,342,344,346,521,524,1047],"class_list":["post-12457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-presentations","tag-analytics","tag-bi","tag-business-intelligence","tag-data-discovery","tag-data-quality","tag-data-science","tag-data-scientists","tag-gartner","tag-gartnerbi","tag-sydney"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/analytics-now-and-then-gut-rules2-2.jpg?fit=1000%2C427&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-3eV","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20546,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12457\/revisions\/20546"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}