Metadata
- Author: Benn Stancil
- Full Title:: Disband the Analytics Team
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://benn.substack.com/p/disband-the-analytics-team
- Finished date:: 2024-03-22
Highlights
If my life savings were on the line, my answer is that our hope is a mistake, and most analysts will never escape their current lot. As we’ve talked about many times before, analytics might be an inherently flawed enterprise. Data is fundamentally messy and fundamentally biased. Turning this data into useful information requires rare analytical skills; turning information into better business results requires courage and a knack for persuasion. Unless we can teach these skills at scale, which we probably cannot, there will be little demand for the everyday analytics team’s work, and little advantage for the everyday company to invest in analytics. (View Highlight)
The average company may never be able to make better decisions by hiring a team of average analysts. We can make dashboards and be operational accountants. But the fun, exploratory, “valuable” work may always be an indulgent, empty dessert, and never the entrée we want it to be. (View Highlight)
One obvious answer is to stop doing the Ponzi scheme. Dissolve the analytics team. Trade in our big promises for something smaller. Instead of getting fired, take a reduced sentence: Twenty years to life of building reports and maintaining operational infrastructure. Become more like IT or HR—invaluable components in the corporate machinery, but with fewer delusions of grandeur (View Highlight)