Analytics: Not About Saving Time

 We hear a lot these days about how analytics can accelerate a calculation that used to take ten hours and do it in six minutes. For me, this is a very poor argument for analytics. After all, is an analyst going to stare at a screen for ten hours waiting for a response? Of course not, she will be busy doing other things, so the time lag, or latency as it’s referred to these days, is not really an issue. However, if that bit of analysis is so timely that it needs to be done in six minutes, then that is probably a good case, but I doubt that it is that timely.
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