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A blog post

The Dark Art of Quantitative Data

Posted on the 27 September, 2014 at 2:34 am Written by in All, Data Analysis

For the past few years “big data” has been the rage. Everybody wants it and many believe it will provide answers to critical business questions. It can, but the road to insight requires a bit more wizardry than you might expect.

Like many, our customers love data – it provides context and fact-based support for business decisions. As a result, a big part of our product and research strategic consulting services is doing quantitative work and analytics for companies with large databases. This area has gotten so hot in recent years that the profession of “data scientist” has been proclaimed by the Harvard Business Review as “the sexiest job of the 21st century.”

But as in other arenas, there’s some less glamorous work that has to take place first. In fact, a recent NY Times article, For Big-Data Scientists, ‘Janitor Work’ Is Key Hurdle to Insights, pointed something out that we see every day:

80% of big data time is spent “data wrangling”

Data wrangling is the dark art of collecting, blending and manipulating (often by hand) the raw data produced by systems. Doing this well often takes time, energy and a fair amount of imagination before you can get to the sexy aspects of the job – analytics and interpretation.  

Infoweek has listed 16 Top Big Data Analytics Platforms (January 30, 2014) that simplify data analysis. Identifying platforms is a great first step, but it’s not all you need to analyze data. What you also need are tools that help get data into a form that they can be analyzed by those platforms!

In our practice we have identified a host of ways to get started on the dark art of data wrangling. In our next post, we’ll fill you in on some easy ways to get started and generate some quick insights without having to go to wizard school.

16 Top Big Data Analytics Platforms

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Image Source: Informationweek.com

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