You often hear business people saying IT people think too much in terms of “solutions”. The beef here is the idea that technologists always want to build a new system, whenever there's an opportunity.
You also hear IT people making the same complaint about business people. In this case, the technologists fear their colleagues have been sold an out-of-the-box – or off-of-the-cloud – “solution” which will be incompatible with everything else in the applications porfolio.
So I paused when I noticed Ken Collier of ThoughtWorks advocating “Solutions Thinking” as one of his touchstones for agile analytics. But he's coming from a different angle. And what he says might just help to rehabilitate the problematic “solution” word:
“Solutions Thinking. The best analytics are not simple answers to singular questions. Rather they are the complex heart of powerful solutions to challenging business problems. Examples like using machine learning on traffic flow data in real-time to reduce gridlock and traffic jams or using dynamic, real-time bioinformatics embedded in a sports bra to detect breast cancer in women are at the pinnacle of such solutions thinking.”
Collier has picked up on the effects of a little noticed cultural clash that's under way in our organizations. We have two kinds of data analysts in the analytics space. There's the IT version of data analyst, who is concerned with formats, consistency, quality and so on – but not actual content. Then there's the scientific data analyst, who is interested in working with the data to find patterns – and answers to questions.
When Collier asks for solutions rather than “simple answers to singular questions”, he's asking for the IT view to be joined with the specialist view. This is about adding repeatability, auditability, and shareability to the specialist's work.
From time to time, business absorbs new kinds of specialties. Each profession joining an organization has to adapt to the needs of business. Just as a research scientist moving from a university lab to a clinical setting needs to adapt to a new environment, so analytics experts must recognize the economic, regulatory, and collaborative drivers of the businesses they serve. Thought Works
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