I agree with the article in broad strokes, but I think it focuses a bit too much on the data science portion. I work for a BI consultancy. There are so many enterprises where the measure of success in data analysis projects is being able to perform arithmetic accurately and in a timely manner.
Data science is a pipe dream for many companies currently. Having up-to-date sales figures that can be sliced by dimensions as simple as product hierarchy, customer, and region is a realistic goal for many of our clients.
I am not trying to discount data science. We have a data science practice that does some cool things, but it's so much smaller than the BI practice, because there's currently so much more opportunity for doing basic ETL correctly and simple reporting and dashboarding.
There are multiple clients who were looking for "real-time access to data", which was actually synonymous with "automatic weekly refresh would make our lives so much easier. Right now we have to wait on $overworked_analyst to get this out monthly, and depending on workload that can lag by a week or two after the end of the month." These are not exact quotes, but entirely accurate paraphrases.
This is the reality for so many organizations that I think sometimes falls out of context in an HN-like environment.
Data science is a pipe dream for many companies currently. Having up-to-date sales figures that can be sliced by dimensions as simple as product hierarchy, customer, and region is a realistic goal for many of our clients.
I am not trying to discount data science. We have a data science practice that does some cool things, but it's so much smaller than the BI practice, because there's currently so much more opportunity for doing basic ETL correctly and simple reporting and dashboarding.
There are multiple clients who were looking for "real-time access to data", which was actually synonymous with "automatic weekly refresh would make our lives so much easier. Right now we have to wait on $overworked_analyst to get this out monthly, and depending on workload that can lag by a week or two after the end of the month." These are not exact quotes, but entirely accurate paraphrases.
This is the reality for so many organizations that I think sometimes falls out of context in an HN-like environment.