Data Analytics is like Rubik's Cube

I find that Rubik’s Cube is a good metaphor for data analytics. Rubik’s Cube is recognized by most people in the world. Likewise, “data analytics” is recognized by business world everywhere though people’s attitude toward it (much like toward the Rubik’s Cube) is different. I can identify four main groups.

The first group are the people who heard about Rubik’s Cube and though they have not seriously tried to solve it (or play with it, really) they do not consider it engaging and had already decided that it’s too complex for them to handle. They can tell if the cube was solved, but they cannot help with the solution, nor do they care to understand the mechanics behind the cube manipulations.  

In business world this is a group of people that relies on analysts to produce report. They focus instead on KPIs. They can tell if the performance meets the KPIs but they do not really understand what goes into KPI creation, nor do they understand fully how changes will affect underlying reports.

The second group had played with Rubik’s Cube a bit. They can even put one or two sides fully, but they have never actually gone through the process of putting the full Rubik’s Cube together, as there was never a significant drive to learn how to do it.

In the world of analytics these are the people that can create a pivot table, use some of Excel formulas, or put a dashboard together. Generally, they use whatever raw data is available and the finalized report generally is not very detailed, and might have missing, or incorrectly summarized data, depending on the structure of the underlying raw data.

The third group knows how to put Rubik’s cube because they studied (formally, or on their own) the ways to do it. There is method to their actions and they get to the full solution by following the appropriate steps correctly.  

Those are your data people who work with raw data. There is method to their actions, they understand many-to-many relationships. They de-dup the data as necessary, and generally understand rules and methods used to manipulate data and to produce results. They cannot generally predict the outcome from the raw data, but once the work is completed, the results can be relied upon.

The fourth group “feels” the dynamics of the Rubik’s Cube. It was proven by brute-force computer analysis that any Rubik’s Cube position can be solved in 20 rotations or less, and people from this group can come close to a perfect solution by understanding how each colored squares will fall into place in a desired picture.

In a world of data, these the people who can look at raw data and have a genuine feel for what to expect from the data, what irregularities it might have and are able to connect the data in unexpected ways to produce a new insight. The data magicians.

So, how are your Rubik's Cube skills? :)