Analystics International is a professional consulting firm.
Think of a law firm, or an architectural firm, rather than a traditional IT consulting company.
We deliver value immediately, often, and continuously throughout our relationships with our clients. This is a superior model to the traditional corporate IT-consulting models that emphasize predictable work schedules and revenue streams, resulting in work-leveling engagements and long lead times to delivery of complex platform-based "solutions."
Analystics' founder and Chief Omniheurist—Chris Gerrard—works with a professional network of collaborators to provide the suite of skills and services required to address our clients' needs with no added bulk. This flexible-association model permits the right people to work together in an agile, adaptable manner to achieve high quality, effective, economical outcomes that provide immediate and durable value for our clients.
Chris Gerrard
Founder, CEO, and Chief Onmineurist
Chris has been working with computer-assisted data analysis since the days of COBOL and punch cards.
During the 1980s and '90s he worked as a FOCUS consultant and Product Manger for Information Builders, Inc., the company that invented the original 4GLs enabling business people to do their own reporting instead of waiting weeks or for their data processing shops to deliver them.
Chris was an early adopter of Tableau—in 2006—recognizing its ability to support an intimate analytical relationship with the data he encountered in his Business Intelligence consulting work. Since then he's worked tirelessly to help clients realize the benefits that closing the gap between people and their data brings.
My Grand Ambition: Revolutionize Analytics
I aim to change the paradigm and practice of analytics, and in doing so help people understand the information available and valuable to them.
Why?
One may wonder: why do we need a revolution? Isn't everything peachy, aren't we doing perfectly well now?
No. We're not.
What I Know
Analytics, particularly and most visibly as commonly practiced in the form of conventional Business Intelligence, has grossly failed to deliver on its obligations.
BI is Broken
Business Intelligence, which began over twenty years ago as -a- way by which business people could glean useful information from the increasing volumes of undecipherable data the business's systems were generating, has suffered from a legacy of failure that would put to shame virtually every other serious human undertaking. BI was fundamentally flawed from the outset, in practice if not absolutely in principle, and yet became -the- default analytics paradigm.
Starting with real promise BI became ossified, enamoured with itself and its internal processes. Inflexible in practice, it has become the domain of technocrats who are primarily concerned with building elaborate factories to ingest, store, and, in due time, expose preconstructed artifacts—reports, dashboards, scorecards, etc., that are in turn made available to people for viewing, often with some limited configurability.
Business Intelligence has become the vortex where data goes to die.
Retire BI, Embrace Analytics
Given BI's current state it's unrealistic to think that it can be rescued from its self-inflicted wounds. Although there's no technical reason preventing BI's rehabilitation, in practice its sheer weight and inertia, and the degree to which its current popular practices have become embedded in their psyches as the One True Way for an entire generation of BI practitioners, BI will continue lumbering forward as long as people adopt it as the default when faced with the need to help people analyze and understand the information that matters to them.
Liberate Information
full advantage of the opportunities presented by effective, efficient analysis of the information
We challenge the commonplace, nearly universal, presumption that information is synonomous with data.
Information the essential element
Facilitate Analysis
Analytics International has its roots in the time when automated business data processing was emerging out of its COBOL report-generating origins. The invention of fourth generation languages enabled nontechnical business people to create their own reports and ushered in a new age, when business users could glean for themselves the information they needed from their data.
The original analytical heuristics are lessons learned helping these people with their data analysis, and their organizations recognize and realize the benefits of offloading analysis from the technical organization.
Analystic: People benefit when they can analyze their own data.
The World of Business Data Analysis
The traditional approach to analytics has the potential to deliver value, but the potential is often only partly recognized, and is realized even less.
For over two decades Enterprise Business Intelligence it dominated the mindscape of executives and senior managers charged with helping their organizations leverage their data assets. An examination of the factors that led to this is beyond the scope of this space. Suffice it to say that Enterprise BI has largely failed to deliver on its promises; the failure rate of big BI initiatives is well documented.
Next Steps...
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