Disruptive Analytics: Charting Your Strategy for Next-Generation Business Analytics

© Thomas W. Dinsmore 2016

Thomas W. Dinsmore, Disruptive Analytics, 10.1007/978-1-4842-1311-7_9

9. Self-Service Analytics

Hype and Reality

Thomas W. Dinsmore¹ 

(1)Newton, Massachusetts, USA

About 15 years ago, the author attended a sales presentation by a vendor touting an automated predictive analytics tool. His value proposition was, “buy our software and you can fire your SAS programmers”.

Unfortunately for that sales rep, every customer in the room was a SAS programmer.

The story underscores a basic problem for those who believe that software can democratize analytics: the people who care the most about analytics, and are most passionate about it, are not afraid to learn analytic programming languages like SAS, Python, and R.

Moreover, because they ...