

Sexy skills of data geeks - coderdude
http://dataspora.com/blog/sexy-data-geeks/

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sciboy
Knowledge is valuable. Everyone knows it. But very few are actually delivering
knowledge. Take a look at the "web dashboard" on dataspora's page. Does that
"deliver knowledge" or is it a bunch of charts that the people on the ground
won't use?

The key to a good analysis is new understanding & actionable recommendations
with associated risk, not "big data" or visualisations. Unfortunately they are
the easy part - the hard part is turning these into knowledge for your client.
I've _never_ seen this even attempted in a dashboard like this (not picking on
them, it's industry wide), and I rarely see it in outsourced analysis because
usually the analysts don't have the domain knowledge required. I've seen the
results of many mid-6 figure analysis projects and they weren't pretty.

When probed to be truthful, many of the companies in these spaces struggle to
provide any real value for the client. I challenge anyone to give me an
example where their company has provided true value. There are two
requirements in my experience to this:

1) A concrete example with a real monetary gain greater than the cost of the
project 2) The company increased spend for another project and got similar
results. If you are really that good, customers find more money and more
projects.

I hate to be a skeptic about this as I am a trained statistician and this is
my area, but from what I have seen this is typical of the industry. </rant> :)

