A hands-off approach would seem reckless for questions about things like security. And yet that approach is not just the norm for analytical questions in most organizations; it's often the ideal. Many analytics teams aspire to enable as much “self-serve” as possible - in other words, to remove themselves from as many decision-making processes as they can.

There's a fundamental change taking place in the way that organizations make decisions. For analysts and data scientists, the days of being forced to use conventional, monolithic data tools are ending. The individuals who answer the hardest questions within an organization can use the tools they choose. These tools let them investigate a problem, solve it, and move on.

Regardless of how agile your team might be, you're limited by how quickly you can provision a warehouse, build ETL pipelines, set up event tracking, and integrate an analytics tool. Doesn't this all take significant time and expertise to build?

One of the most common reasons an organization reaches out to Mode is that they're about to begin investing in analytics, and they want our advice. Sometimes these organizations are only a few months old, sometimes they've been around for decades. No matter how old they are, they all want to transition from being a company that has data to a company that truly uses their data.

Analysts often assume that the best way to advance their careers or provide more value is to improve their technical chops. While it's true that you need a baseline of technical skills to conduct analysis, most of us need further development of our soft skills rather than further honing of our hard skills.

The World Chess Championship 2018, a match between reigning champion Magnus Carlsen and challenger Fabiano Caruana, just came to a conclusion in London. Since all twelve classical games were drawn, the players entered a tiebreak round, where Carlsen was crowned world champion. This is the first time all classical games have been drawn, and many chess fans expressed disappointment in what seemed to be a “dull” or “bloodless” series of games.