
Want a Job? Analytics is the Thing, Says IBM - mjfern
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/12/want_a_job_anal.html
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tom_b
Deep statistical analytics is fun. It's also pretty far down the road as a
need for most businesses.

My experience is that when people say analytics in the corporate world, what
they really mean are simple reports. The only reason it is remotely high
paying is that you get locked into a vendor (Microstrategy, Cognos, etc) and
have to use consultants with those specific skills.

It's a hard field to break into because people are _very_ hung up on specific
tools, eg "oh, you haven't used Informatics PowerCenter 29.4.3 for 6.4 years
along with Cognos Magic Report Web Engine 79.63.3 for 9 years? sorry . . . "

As an example of how simple what is mostly needed is: I spent some time
working at one of the biggest financial companies in the US. Specifically on a
project that was pulling data together from server monitoring (eg resource
load), web app use ( hits on each web app deployed by the company), and cost
info from the accounting teams.

There were two big goals - use some simple predictive models to understand
resource (server) capacity needs in the future and to tie cost per user per
app back to revenues generated per user. Amazingly - to me at least - this
wasn't being done at any but the grossest levels.

Nothing deep there from an analytics perspective at all. I'm not ignoring that
a few companies are doing crazy stuff with huge data warehouses, but most
(even very big) companies aren't anywhere close to needing petabyte data
analysis.

What is more challenging for most companies is building the capability to do
the simple reports. This often involves delicate negotiations with groups
reluctant to let you even have the data to build the report - it is a turf
thing, eg "No, all financial cost reports come from us" or "oh, that's highly
sensitive accounting info and can't be shared." You ignore this political
negotiation challenge of analytics at great peril to your project. It is an
order of magnitude bigger issue than actual analytics on the data.

~~~
conover
_You ignore this political negotiation challenge of analytics at great peril
to your project. It is an order of magnitude bigger issue than actual
analytics on the data._

This is absolutely true. For many projects, more time is spent negotiating
with various data providers and waiting for them to fulfill their end of the
bargain than actually doing something productive. And you are correct, it is
mostly due to the fiefdoms that have developed over a long period of time
which have then been codified in layers upon layers of politics.

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patio11
I like analytics as a field but I rather doubt I'd like IBM's conception of
analytics as a career. They're looking to provide analytics of middling
complexity -- one step above what any idiot can get out of the tool -- as an
outsourced service for the cheapest they can possibly get it. The cheapest
they can possibly get it is _not_ you. Sure, if you're a Google Analytics or
urchin jockey at the moment, you probably have a few years before India/China
catch up to the high-demand-low-required-skill opportunity, but once they
collectively do, you'll be in the bread line next to web designers who
primarily slice PSD into HTML.

If you wanted to do it as a career, I'd think less chart-creating-monkey and
more "analytics architect" or maybe "marketing manager with deep skills in
analytics to coax extra millions of performance out of our CPC/etc campaigns".

~~~
paraschopra
In India, these days there are tons of analytics companies. Mostly what they
end up doing is doing extremely simple number crunching mean, median, standard
deviation, etc. on survey numbers or other marketing data. The salaries are
not that high and as you say, I expect it to become a commodity in near
future.

What is sad about analytics is that they would teach you how to use tools
first: SPSS, Excel, SAS, etc. but there would be little or no fundamental
understanding of concepts. Sure, data mining is a buzzword. Load some data and
do a bunch of super cool analysis, but where is the insight? where is
understanding of what is really happening under the hood?

~~~
ovi256
You can teach tools in a month, but you cannot teach analytic skill.

~~~
gaius
You need one guy with the skill to write a bit of code and a hundred more to
do the legwork of plumbing it into the source data for each customer. The
latter is what you bill for, and it's commoditized (e.g. "FTP a CSV file from
here, run this program, FTP the resulting PDF to the webserver then email the
customer to say its done").

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Nekojoe
.../archives/2009/12/want_a_job_anal.html <\- That's the worst case of SEO
readable URL I've seen in a while.

I've e-mailed it to a few friends interested in this field and I've already
had to tell them ignore what the URL says, it's not what it looks like. And
just pray that it doesn't trip up some of their company filters.

~~~
PStamatiou
this is one case where using a url shortener for email links actually would be
advisable.

~~~
eru
They should have used an URL-lengthener. Just look what the shortening did to
`analytics'.

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xenophanes
Want to pay less for analysts? Convince a bunch of people to learn analytics.

~~~
gaius
In IBM's case they want to pay less for analysts (in their services decision)
_and_ flog other companies lots of new hardware and software for their own
(cheap) analysts to use. They did the same thing with COBOL back in the day,
then the same thing with Java, this is business as usual.

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thetable
Hal Varian has been making the same point for a while now:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/technology/06stats.html?_r...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/technology/06stats.html?_r=1)

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wglb
I am sure there is a need there, but I am always wary of vendors looking to
define fields of study. One extreme example was a school not far from here
that included CICS courses in their computer science (or did they call it
information science) curriculum. The problem with vendors (IBM, MS, Sun,
Oracle) is that their idea of a workforce is not necessarily one that
questions the underlying technology or career definition. Correct
implementation of floating point does not owe its genesis, but to thinkers
like Knuth and Dijkstra who loudly pointed out the obvious deficiencies.

And as is pointed out here in the thread, the vendor's motivation might be to
lower the cost of analytic talent. And wholesale renters of programming talent
are fine with this too--no enterprise is looking for programmers to tell them
that "you are doing it wrong".

Does anyone remember the advertising for COBOL, that it was nice and english
like and that now your accountants would be able to do your programming and
you wouldn't need to deal with those pesky goofy programmers?

Or <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CA-Telon>. I remember one enterprise that
finally decided that its paperless effort wasn't going to work, so it laid off
300 Telon programmers.

What I like about the world today is that programmers are seriously involved
in these decisions. Did Dennis Ritchie say something that 10 years after Unix,
that somehow marketing genius at AT&T decided that it was a good thing?

Wasn't VBASIC invented to make it easier for programmers with less training to
do programming? How has that worked out for us?

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gstar
We've built a business partly around automatic analytics - our approach is to
keep the headcount low and the value high.

I wonder if the demand for analysts is a symptom of business waking up to the
possibilities, while automated analytics is not mature.

~~~
maukdaddy
Yes, businesses are definitely waking up with regards to data. They are
suddenly realizing that their various systems are currently or are capable of
generating shit loads of valuable data that the business has no idea what to
do with. Executives and managers learn through conferences, industry events,
etc. that OTHER companies are using this awesome data to generate BILLIONS or
save BILLIONS etc.

When you see a company like IBM thrust itself into a field like this, you know
that the field is entering mainstream business. This is a perfect time to
position a firm as a "niche analytics firm" that focuses on high-end projects
where IBM just can't compete.

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rms
OK. I'll do analytics for $135/hour. Email in profile.

~~~
mahmud
I will do it for $134/hour, email also in the profile. In fact, I will do it
for max(N-1, 5) dollars, where N is the lowest amount anyone else is willing
to do, except for Fortune 500 companies, where I will do the work for free, or
sites with PageRank > 6, where I will happily take a backlink in exchange
(restaurants, hotels, airlines and strip clubs can also barter for my time.)

This is what happens to "hot" industries where the pay is far larger than the
training effort required. Anything that takes less than 1 year of training, or
where someone can BS their way in, is prone to "talent" saturation. Usually
the opportunists like myself underbid specialists like rms or drown their
voices out with big egos and self-promotion.

Let me add that no one should ever hire cheap foreign Analyticists. As soon as
my rates go below $50/hr you can count on me going on the offensive, writing
xenophobic articles for Nation's Pride, True Blue American and Kiss The Flag
magazines. And once there is momentum we will form a lobby to mandate
analytics usage throughout the government (a 30B industry, hopefully) and make
sure only people we have accredited, for $999/year, are able to work there.

In all seriousness, this is the script for every "hot" industry out there. It
starts with an opportunist out to make a buck, and it ends up being a matter
of national interest. Whenever crappy companies can no longer compete, they
appeal to government. First the U.S., then they start exporting those "vital
U.S. resources" overseas and sell it to other governments as well.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Despite the institutional difficulties that you rightfully present, I'd like
to see more analytics used in governing.

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patrickgzill
Note that Fordham is basically going to provide job training... basically IBM
is looking for a high tech version of a vo-tech to train people in the IBM
way.

And as soon as IBM can, they will ship the job over to the Philippines where
they will pay a decent wage of $500/month.

(When I was in Manila in August I saw multiple billboards advertising jobs at
IBM).

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aaronblohowiak
Does anyone have exposure or experience with stanford's Data Mining and
Applications graduate certificate? Details here: <http://tinyurl.com/stanford-
graduate-certs> my email is in my profile if you'd rather respond privately. I
am considering applying.

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c00p3r
IBM brought Cognos last year (while SAP acquired Business Objects) so, that is
just a promotion.

~~~
jlgosse
I was going to bring this up myself. Basically, they are hiring people who are
experts in BI in order to do consultations for other companies. That way, they
can hire 2500 people who already know Cognos BI (which IBM owns) through
education and then send them out to companies to do consultation work.

It's a brilliant idea, and they'll make a LOT of money.

