The ever-evolving field of analytics
This post originally appeared here.
Analytics is an ever-evolving field.
In the beginning, having any kind of data at all was an accomplishment. Veteran marketers remember the early days of server-based logs with tools such as AWStats and other CGI analytics tools. These were the days of descriptive analytics, the raw stuff itself.
Over time, tools have evolved from simply doing data dumps to helping us visualize data and begin to identify what happened. Today, most modern analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Tableau can help us understand what happened in clear, concise ways. This visualization let us determine what happened, and analytics became diagnostic.
The next generation of tools which are only beginning to be adopted now arepredictive in nature, helping us to not only understand what happened in the past, but what could happen in the future. Tools such as IBM’s Watson Analytics, Google’s Predictive API, and other cognitive computing facilities are just now allowing organizations and individuals to do valid, useful predictions from our data.
What of the generations after prediction? Gartner, Inc. posits that the final generation of analytics is prescriptive, analytics that tell you what to do. With enough machine learning, analytics tools can recommend courses of action based on targeted patterns of the past and predicted outcomes. Wouldn’t it be nice to load up your marketing analytics tool with data and see what your next month’s marketing plan should be? Given the rate of change and progress in software development, the horizon for prescriptive analytics is much closer than we think.
I believe there’s a generation after prescriptive. If the machines are smart enough to understand what to do, it should be a minimal lift for them to actually execute, to do some of the work on our behalf. We already have some of the technology necessary to do so, at least in the advertising technology world. Programmatic advertising – the bidding and buying of inventory and automatic triggering of ads – already exists and is quite successful. High-frequency trading on Wall Street makes millions of dollars per day for investment companies who can afford the technology. We are, years ahead of predictions, beginning to see autonomous vehicles on our streets.
The last generation of analytics is the proactive generation in which the machines don’t need us for the tactical execution of data-driven programs. They will simply do the work, leaving strategy and creativity for us. In the same way that automation removed a large portion of the manufacturing process that did not leverage humanity’s strengths, I expect automation to eliminate in analytics.
What does this mean for you, your career, your company? The evolution of analytics is already a battleground. Companies which are most agile, fastest to adopt, and most flexible will create and sustain serious competitive advantage over laggards.
What should you do about it? On a personal level, try out every analytics platform that you can reasonably test out. Become familiar with the offerings from companies like Google, IBM, Facebook, etc. Learn the tools and language of analytics, from serious academic packages like R and SPSS to marketing-specific products like Google Analytics. Once you’ve developed analytics skills, you’ll be able to confer strategic competitive advantage to any company or organization you work for that will be difficult to replicate, especially if you give your organization an early head start.
