Today, in 2012, there are still only a handful of graduate and undergraduate programs focused on analytics. Some companies, like EMC, have found the talent shortage so severe that they have created their own programs to train and certify analysts. Given the high demand for these skills, why are universities so far behind?
Needless to say, there can be no analytics project without data. A project starts by identifying data, cleansing it, performing analytics, and then conveying the results or solutions. The rule of thumb is that 70 to 80 percent of the total timeframe for an analytics project is spent on data preparation and a much smaller portion to actually conducting the analytics.
There are many reasons why analytics software projects routinely miss deadlines and overrun the budget, in particular regarding the data preparation phase where leaders kick these projects off without nailing the prerequisites.
Fortune 500 companies are big enough, and have enough resources, to assemble and run their own internal analytics teams. In today’s environment, it is becoming impossible for a large corporation to succeed without employing analytics. The situation is completely different if we make a step down to small and medium business (SMBs), which are typically [...]
