Analysts
Are we dinosaurs?
There is an asteroid hurtling toward the old world and analysts are doomed. For over a decade, analysts have been warned of extinction. Driven by staggering investments in data stacks and AI platforms, day-to-day human intelligence will soon be obsolete. It's time to find new jobs.
Yet here we are, not just surviving the analyst apocalypse, but thriving. Look around. Every function is adding analysts and ops specialties – Sales, Marketing, Product, Customer, Finance, Operations, HR, and more. The BLS expects at least half-a-million new analyst jobs by 2030. Everyone needs analysts. So why were the doomsayers wrong?
We've known that the world is digitizing at a staggering pace. Business data alone will grow 300% over the decade. So armies of data engineers and data scientists have been building powerful tools to give businesses a new edge. The thinking went that these new tools would be so powerful and adaptable that the end is nigh for analysts.
This didn't happen. It turns out that these precision data tools, while powerful, don't solve every new business question on their own. Intelligent people, aided by the right tools, do that. Analysts do that. Digitization and technology have made analysts more valuable than ever before. And demand is exploding. Far from going extinct, analysts have become essential.
Making miracles
We analysts may be expected to conjure sagely insights, but that doesn’t mean we have the tools we need. Today, analysts are forced to be hackers, stringing together brute force tools, impossibly trying to balance speed and accuracy.
While these efforts are heroic, we quickly find ourselves spending more time on logistics than discovery. Rather than solving the next problem, we’re stuck wasting countless hours on stale, repetitive tasks.
A better way
Despite the importance of our work, analysts don’t have a home - a place where we get our work done and collaborate with others.
A home would be transformational for analysts in the same way CRM was for sales reps using rolodexes. Today we are hackers, tomorrow we'd be "full-stack analysts." We'd stop being the glue between our processes and tools. We'd move from the analog to the automated. We'd free our time. We'd create flurries of insights.
With the right home, we'd all graduate beyond hackers. The elusive full-stack analyst combines the traditional mandates of speed and flexibility with the values of scalability, automation, collaboration and governance.
Today, analysts try very hard to accomplish these things, but success is rare. Despite hard work, most analysts still remain hackers:
Suddenly, with a home, analysts would have all of these capabilities at our fingertips – not as a faint light down some dark tunnel. Now we'd be able to spend all of our time unlocking insights across multiplying datasets.
We'd stop building reports and dashboards that are forgotten in inboxes. Instead, we'd build responsive, data-driven applications that our colleagues on the front lines actually use.
We'd automate and scale our work and back it up with sophisticated monitoring and alerting. We'd manage the analytics life cycle with clean practices for CI/CD, version control, modularity and documentation.
We'd collaborate across teams and organizations, building even more powerful solutions. We could sell and discover analytic apps in a digital marketplace.
With a home, we'd be celebrated for what we create.
Welcome to Savant
Here at Savant, our mission is to create this home for analysts. Our platform brings analytics and automation together to fully empower analysts and ops. With Savant, we can: