Digital Analytics is all About Context – Lessons from #TheDress

Over the past couple of weeks I have presented at a few conferences (SummitUp in Dayton, Ohio and UnSummit in Salt Lake City, Utah) on the topic of People, Process, and Platform. Now, before you roll your eyes because you’ve heard it all before, let me let you know that you won’t be getting my whole speech in this blog post. In fact, you won’t be getting any of the core parts. Instead, I want to remind you of the importance of the people you have looking at, analyzing, interpreting, and telling stories about your data, as I did to the audiences at these conferences. Most of you will have seen #TheDress, #DressGate, #WhiteAndGold, or #BlueAndBlack over the past couple of weeks. For those of you who haven’t, let me
Continue reading...

Business vs Technical Analyst – skill sets, limitations, and a place at the table

It’s the age old question – what’s the best skill set for a web (or digital) analyst? Many will tell you that you’ve got to be technical, meaning you at least need to know html, javascript and SQL (at minimum). Others will tell you that you don’t need to be technical at all, you just need to understand the toolsets and be able to talk to the business. Finally, the most common answer I hear is somewhere in between – you need to be technical enough, and business savvy enough. But what does that really mean? Am I technical enough if I can talk the talk but can’t actually write my own code? Am I biz savvy enough if I can make pretty graphs and powerpoints? I myself fall into
Continue reading...