If you don't know data, you're out of the game. via @tableau

Tableau Software have published "2018: The Year Ahead for Business Intelligence" - it is always interesting to check out what respected and leading companies like Tableau think the future might hold. A key theme throughout is how much easier it is going to be to analyse data so that anyone can do it. While the article is very general, it breaks down into the following 10 topics:

1. Don't Fear AI
2. Liberal Arts Impact
3. Promise of NLP
4. Multi-Cloud Debate
5. Rise of the CDO
6. Crowdsourced Governance
7. Data Insurance
8. Data Engineer Role
9. Location IoT
10. Academics Investment

Go to the article to read and watch videos (which rather annoyingly are not available to embed) for yourself, but for me two topics stand out for attention: #2 "Liberal Arts Impact", and #10 "Academics Investment". 

Liberal Arts Impact

Who'd have thought that data had anything to do with the Arts? Anya A'hearn (what a brilliant name!) of Datablick tells us that the art of storytelling has helped "influence the data analytics industry" and that "organizations are placing a higher value on hiring workers who can use data and insights to affect change and drive transformation through art and persuasion, not only on the analytics itself" - it's all about telling a story with data.

Academic Investment

A little bit closer to home for me is data analysis, not just teaching, has a role in third level institutions. As Dr Michael Galbreth (University of South Carolina) puts it; graduates "need to be comfortable with data". There is a huge demand from students to learn more about data, with most colleges now having some kind of data analytics/science programme. Colleges are responding to this demand, and we have to be on our game to develop, update, and deliver the right programmes. As Anya A'hearn puts it; "If you don't know data, you're out of the game". True.