Oftentimes, young people come and ask me what they should learn about Big Data technologies or Tableau or Python; these are the mechanisms to get the data to enable Analytics. But the actual analytics is in answering the business questions. Just as I said, the business questions have not changed or evolved much; good analysts are those who are actually able to bridge the gap between the business question and the outcome that is needed to the data and the technology that can manage the data and answer that question.
So when people start off by saying, let us get into analytics, they always have to get to know the tools. Once the tools are known, all you need to do is expand the horizon and get into the data and understand the data, like, what is the data talking about? Then start asking business questions like why do you need this, what is the name, what is your question, and then combine all of them together.
There was a time when there used to be a business person, a business analyst, a technical analyst, and a developer, and they all played different roles making everything a long and hard process; that is a very layered model and is rarely seen now. Therefore, I always tell everyone this is an era of specialization. This is an era of a technologically savvy business person. Being technologically sound is not enough; you have to push yourself from becoming an Analyst to a Data Scientist, from an Analytics person to a Business Analytics person; only then will you find that you are truly adding value to your customers.
With no offense to being an MBA, the last 10 years were an era for MBAs, but now there is an era of PhDs and technological geeks who can also make sense of the business. I hope we all can change and evolve ourselves and use all our skills together to become that persona that I'm talking about. We should be technologically focused and be a geek in Analytics who also knows the business. In brief, you have to be a Superman, so all of us can go in that direction. Best of luck to everyone!
