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Experts, analytics and the age of infinite possibilities

20 Dec 2016
Experts, analytics and the age of infinite possibilities

Experts, analytics and the age of infinite possibilities

Gartner reckons 90 percent of large global organizations will have a chief data officer by 2019; at the end of 2015, just 25 percent had one in place. The research house reckons this mirrors a much deeper change in many enterprises and ushers in infinite possibilities. Really?

According to Ted Friedman, Gartner’s Research VP and Distinguished Analyst, this is only the tip of the iceberg and “Practitioners of distinctive data and analytics disciplines will need to broaden their understanding, and work more closely with others to realize the benefits of using data and analytics to capture transformative business opportunities and mitigate risks.”

This put me in mind of Humboldt, who is probably best known for the endangered species of penguin named after him. In fact, he has more species and geographic features named after him than any other human and was an inspiration to Charles Darwin, among others.

But I was thinking about him in the context of analytics experts needing to broaden their horizons because, as the author of this award-winning new biography argues very eloquently, Humboldt was the last great polymath: He had a deep knowledge of many subjects and was highly articulate about them too. He died in 1859 at the age of 89, and the latter part of his life was the beginning of the era of the specialist or expert that we still live in today – and as has been said, an expert is someone who knows a lot about relatively little.
The missing link

This necessary shift from specialist to generalist isn’t much mentioned when we talk about the cultural challenges for organizations undergoing digital transformation – but it should be. Smashing down silos is a terrific idea. What happens next hasn’t been thought through. As someone who has earned a living by extracting, sorting and presenting information, I know that experts are often the least able to identify and articulate what is most important about their subjects in any given context.

Typically, this is because they are much too close to it and cannot imagine what it is like not to know what they know, that is, what’s most important for someone else to grasp. Yet this is critical to broadening analytics people’s understanding and working more closely with others as Gartner recommends, so we have a dangerous disconnect here.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs study has an angle on this too. The study predicts that 5 million jobs will be lost before 2020 as artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology and other socio-economic factors replace human workers. It concludes that the combination of soft (social) skills and mathematical ability is an unbeatable one – and this is what is needed for Gartner’s world of infinite possibilities to come true. How many people do you know who’ve got both? Bet you don’t need two hands to count – they're even rarer than Humboldt penguins.