The Eras of Analytics

Instructive look at the evolution of analytics.  Though I disagree regarding backroom vs sexy.  Informed management always knew these methods were powerful,  they won the supply aspects of WWII,  they were just never marketed well enough.   Or overmarketed?

Four Eras of Analytics and Data Science
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Professor Thomas Davenport of Babson College, Harvard Business School and the MIT Sloan School of Management delivered his keynote address on the history of data analytics at Open Data Science Conference East 2017 in Boston, titled Four Eras of Analytics and Data Science.

Prof. Davenport’s speech covered the span of data analytics from a business perspective, beginning in the 1970s up through modern times, breaking the practice out into four main eras.

The history of data science is extraordinarily brief compared to the long arcs of biology, chemistry, and other disciplines. Nonetheless, this history rich in its own way, drawn from a group of movers and shakers that contrasts sharply with the academics who established the study of the physical world centuries before. Read on to get a sense of how we got from ‘back room’ analysts to the ‘sexiest job of the 21st Century’. .... "