Check out the Accidental Analyst!
Unless you’ve been asleep for years, it’s impossible to miss the data explosion. In 1998, for example, the first Google page index counted 26 million unique web pages. By 2008 that number had grown to 1 trillion, which means the number of web pages doubled every 8 months over that ten-year period.
Because of this torrent of data, statisticians are now “cool”, but in this data-rich world, even business folks who never trained to deal with numbers are being forced to face the inrush of data and try to turn it to their advantage by thinking in new ways. And that’s where The Accidental Analyst, a terrific new book by Eileen and Stephen McDaniel, comes in.
I like this book because it explains in plain English the tips and techniques you can use to become an Accidental Analyst. These steps aren’t rocket science and don’t require math more complicated than addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. If you can work a hand calculator and have basic common sense, you can use lessons from this book to achieve business success. It’s as simple as that.
Of course, there’s a lot more to analysis than doing calculations, and the book walks you through all that, focusing specifically on tricks of the trade gleaned from the authors’ experience in doing analysis and training analysts. By the end of the book you’ll know the questions to ask so that you’ll never again be at the mercy of vendors, colleagues, and competitors who traffic in “proof by vigorous assertion”.
The Accidental Analyst is a nice introduction to basic analytical techniques. For more advanced readers, check out my book Turning Numbers into Knowledge.
