Analytics
News, events, thought leadership and more.
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of the Nicholas Carr’s Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter”. The core thesis of Carr’s article was that trying to spend your way to competitive advantage through ever advancing technology infrastructure acquisitions was a foolish endeavor. To say that this stirred some controversies in the IT vendor landscape is an understatement. Tech company CEOs freaked out. (Interestingly the two people quoted freaking out are Balmer and Fiorina, neither of whom attacked the transition to new technology frontiers with anything approaching a sense of innovation).
Carr just did a Q&A with Network World discussing his thoughts on the piece a decade later. It makes interesting reading, especially regarding the transition to the cloud.
Having witnessed a lot of misunderstanding of Carr’s point a decade ago, including my own overly defensive response, I definitely want to be careful in making statements around this piece. However, I do see strong parallels between this discussion 10 years ago and the way that the Big Data discussion continues to play out in the market place. Big Data is currently all about infrastructure investments and acquiring expensive data science skillsets in order to achieve competitive advantage. Sound familiar?
I strongly believe in the evolution of the Big Data infrastructure market, but this has to be less about the infrastructure and more about the business processes that built around and on these technologies and critically, the analytics that are put in the hands of the business decision maker. There is still much to be done before the offerings of the fine companies providing the Big Data infrastructure even come close commodities, but hopefully 2013 will mark the transition to a focus on the analytics skills and value that have to permeate organizations. This is how competitive advantage will be delivered.
I’ll be discussing the new Alteryx Strategic Analytics 8.5 platform in a webinar this week.
You can register for the even event here
This release is all about how we make Big Data and Customer analytics easier for the two million data analysts in the world. Business value through analytics matters.
Paul Ross
VP of Product & Industry Marketing
Alteryx
