Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Economic Crisis to Analytics

Economic Crisis has hit the World. Now it is not only the US Crisis but a Global One and like never before all the World Governments are doing their best to minimize its effect. Financial Institutions are worst hit followed by Real Estate. This has drilled down to other industries, and now from Telecom to Retail every sector is affected. What has been the effect on Analytics Industry?

Analytics as an industry seems to have got boost. I see a lot of Job Vacancies for Marketing Analytics and Risk Management everyday in all medias, be it in Web (Naukri.com, LinkedIn etc.) or Newspaper (I read Times of India and Economic Times). Even more surprising is to see many Analytics and Business Intelligence start-up companies coming up.
I am not sure if this is the trend everywhere or just in India. But it is really surprising (yet true) that Analytics Jobs are everywhere wherever you see.

Does this mean when Economics fall, people realize the importance of Analytics?? I have no answer but I wont be surprised if someone proves it.

Long back I had read a comparison of importance of Three Major Professionals -- Engineers, Doctors and MBAs with Economists and Sociologists. Let me share with you guys here.

When a country is poor and is having lots of social and economic issues, the people who earn the highest are the Doctors (e.g. most Africa, Asian LDCs) followed by Engineers and MBAs. In these Economies, Economists and Sociologists hardly have any role to play.

When country starts growing the importance of Engineers rise, and their salaries too. They overcome the Doctors and at later stage MBAs overcome all (e.g. in India, China etc). Till this stage Economists and Sociologists role is very limited. (I hardly see any economist making a news in India!! Surprised? Well, don't be. Its the reality)

Now comes the developed World. People hardly want to study Technical subjects (got to know from my friends; but not first hand knowledge). And most Technicians are from Underdeveloped and Developing Nations who serve these economies. This is so normal as Doctors and Engineers have very limited role to play here. Infrastructures are there, and system is there. Here managers rule, and Economists and Socialists rule more. Because this is the time when the society needs values with value creaters, and thoughts with philosophers.

When I remember all these stuffs and I see the increased activity of Analytics Industry in the Crisis Time, I feel its the Analysts Time. The time has come, and we have got this rare opportunity and we should capitalize on it.
By the time Crisis ends, Analytics should establish itself as an Important Business Function on the line of Marketing, IT, and Operations. This would mean every big organization having a CAO (Chief Analytics Officer) along the lines of COO and CMO.

Is this possible? I feel, yes. With the Software Biggies (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM) bringing BI Solutions and many specialized BI and Analytics companies bringing great EDM products this is coming to becoming a reality. Not to forget is the contribution of smaller Analytics Consulting Companies that actually uses (and helps clients to use) these tools to bring efficiency to Business.

What is your take on it? Are you with me? Or against me? Please share your feedback and comments here.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with your comments that analytics' time has come. But I feel that analytics and business decisions must move down the corporate ladder to the front line ( i.e. business users). Today, your description of business decisions coming exclusively from the 'top' is correct. A person with the highest title or largest paycheck exclusively make all the decisions which are largely based on a mound of data that is aggregated up in a traditional BI report. As evidenced by crisis after crisis, this 'top down' method isn't working. From my days of derivatives trading I realize that often times, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. So, inform and empower the enterprise. By delivering manageable and relevant sets of business data to decision makers spread across the institution then more informed (i.e. better) decisions can be made. The idea is to have an interactive BI tool that is pervasive. And two key tenets of pervasive software are 1) ease of use and 2) extensibility. Today's big 4 BI providers don't meet these requirements. What's needed is a BI tool with a flexible data model, highly configurable framework and it must be interoperable with other key business systems. Additional requirements in this new paradigm of BI include: interactive visualizations, monitoring, in-memory analytics, CEP (or alerts) and the ability to seamlessly embed any or all of these features in a firm's current systems architecture. You are right, BI must change to empower business users but I would make that 'all' business users. And yes, I'm biased in which platform I would use. :)

chaitanya said...

I dont think in reality there is much boom for analytics in India.

I myself work as a business analyst and trying hard to enter web analytics stream but not able to find r8 break.

Chaitanya.

Bhupendra said...

Brian, Agree to you. Thats definitely the right approach, and the goal is to reach the intelligence to all level of business users.

And! I can understand your biasness, but thats fair enough. You have a fantastic company and I am excited to explore it. Name, Panopticon, is simply great,and seems there is lot to learn from your site. Will find sometime to go into details.
Thanks for the comment.

Chaitanya, It is understandable that Web Analytics jobs is rare in India. India is not matured both in Analytics and Web, so a specialized area like Web Analytics is no way booming. But if you look at Analytics in general, there's a huge buzz!!

--Bhupendra

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