Baby Faced Stratans and Graybeard BI’s

Posted onJanuary 11, 2012 Edit on by Christopher Berry

Steve Miller wrote of Data Science Maturity yesterday. It’s a very good post.

To summarize:

  • He attended both Strata, a Data Science (DS) event, and Enzee, a Business Intelligence (BI) event, and  noted just how young all the DS kids are, and how old all the BI adults are.
  • The DS kids come out of university armed with open source tools, the BI graybeards are all settled on enterprise tools.
  • He predicts that DS will merge with BI, largely as BI analytic data structures are unified under the BI banner and come to dominate organizations.

Editorial:

  • BI defines itself by tools whereas DS defines itself by methods and ends.
  • Many DS’ers will find some of their peers co-opted by tools, as it’s far easier to be religious about the merits of a tool over another one than it is to exert any sort of real leadership or independent thought.
  • DS stands a chance of not becoming co-opted by tools because they’re aware of what happened to BI and Web Analytics in previous generations – the real test will come.

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I’m Christopher Berry.
I tweet about analytics @cjpberry
I write at christopherberry.ca