data analyst

Where data analysis is a nightmare

April 18, 2011

There are the dream organizations that deploy data analysts wisely. Then there are the nightmares, such as the I.R.S. as portrayed in David Foster Wallace’s last novel, The Pale King, reviewed yesterday in the New York Times. … In a universe of veiled and veiling numbers, the task of drawing the true [data] out into [...]

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Running through a data analyst’s mind late at night

March 31, 2011

From an email to me this week. Quoted with permission. I’ve been doing this ‘data analyst’ thing for almost a decade now and I’m not even sure I’m doing it right. Does anyone really know what a data analyst is? I’m a Microsoft Access guy that got lucky and learned SQL from a bunch of [...]

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Answering the real questions in data analysis

December 15, 2010

A guy walks into your cube and asks you to whip up an econometric model. You’re a statistician, after all, and you’ve got a Ph.D. in something or other. You do this for lunch, he figures. He “over-thought,” says the one whose cube such a guy walked into. Theresa Doyon has been routinely navigating datasets [...]

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Tableau rising

September 17, 2010

As Stephen Few delivered his keynote address at the recent Tableau customer conference in Seattle, he suddenly broke his rhythm to look at someone in the audience. “Is that Howard Dresner?” he wondered, surprised. It was. Howard is the man who as a Gartner analyst in 1989 revived the term “business intelligence,” and he’s one [...]

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Lyzasoft says “power to the people” with free version

May 3, 2010

It was International Workers’ Day on Saturday and the official release day of Lyzasoft’s latest product: its foray into “free.” It’s a good way to say “power to the people.” Some people associate that slogan with protests and even violence. But I think the best paths to power usually involve well-analyzed data, whether in public [...]

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Tableau Public launches visual analysis for the masses

February 22, 2010

I’m sorry to tell you serious types out there, but visual analysis is often a game — in fact, one of the best games in town with Tableau Software’s visual analysis tool. Now Tableau Public is going to bring it to the masses. In the same way that YouTube spawned a surge of new filmmakers, [...]

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Be a strategist, not a “geek”

December 22, 2009

Data analysts who simply explain the data and ignore managers’ real needs risk losing “strategist” status &mdash: and become just a “geek.”

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Denial of access explained

August 25, 2009

The week before last, I told about the young data analyst who got the door slammed in his data-seeking face, and I asked “why?” This week, a veteran of the data business answered.

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