Andy Leonard explains that good old ETL remains vital to an organization:
A Problem
As Jen points out earlier in her Analytics Market Commoditization and Consolidation post (you should read it all – it’s awesome – like all of Jen’s posts!) many analytics solution providers share the “Same look, same marketing story, same saves time and allows users [to] avoid evil IT.”
I can hear some of you thinking, “Are you telling us analytics doesn’t work, Andy?” Goodness no. I’m telling you hype and sales strategy work in the analytics market as well as anywhere. When asked why a solution may not perform to expectations, the #1 response is “your data is not clean.”
Data engineering (think ETL specifically designed for analytics and “big data”) is the backbone behind data science. To Andy’s point, the data engineer’s job is to get clean, context-heavy data in front of a data scientist, the same way a “classical” Business Intelligence specialist works with analysts.