The past few years have seen massive changes in the analytics ecosystem. Problems we've been struggling with for years are essentially solved. But we're still not good at analytics. The workflow of most analysts today needs to adapt, and we're building the thinking and the tooling to let that happen.

1. Building a Mature
Analytics Workflow
Tristan Handy, RJMetrics

2. − What is the state of analytics today?
− Our vision for the future
− Bringing this vision to life
− Conversation
What are we going to talk about?

3. − Open source project building:
○ Analytic workflow tools
○ Reusable analysis
− Focused on solving the problems we’re going to discuss today
− Community-run, sponsored by RJMetrics, in progress for 3 months
− Currently 5 active contributors
But first...what is Analyst Collective?

4. The State of Analytics

5. So much good stuff happening!

6. Interactive query response time is low and
requires less thought.1

7. You have many choices for ETL. Data
warehouses no longer need to be
expensive.
2

8. BI is converging around SQL.3

9. Visualization options abound. Many are
free.4

10. There has never been a better time
to be an analyst...
but we still have huge problems to solve.

11. Most businesses don’t have a single source
of truth.5

12. Most analytic code is produced with limited
(if any) quality control.6

13. Analysts typically specialize in narrow
domains leading to low bus factors.7

14. It still takes a long time to get an answer.8

15. We’ve solved some core technical
challenges.
We need to learn how to build analytical processes and
teams on this tech.

16. Our Vision for Analytics

17. “
Analytics doesn’t have to be this
way. In fact, the playbook for solving
these problems already exists — on
our software engineering teams.

18. “
In order to be managed like
software, analytics must be done
in code.

19. Core Belief #1
Analytics is
collaborative.

20. Analyst Collective Viewpoint #1
Version Control
All analytic code should be version
controlled.

21. Analyst Collective Viewpoint #2
Quality Control
Any code that generates data or analysis
should be reviewed and tested.

22. Analyst Collective Viewpoint #3
Documentation
Your code should come packaged with a
basic description of how it should be
interpreted.

23. Analyst Collective Viewpoint #4
Modularity
Create tables, views, or other data sets that
expose a consistent schema and can be
modified if business logic changes.

24. Exploring modularity with Stripe
Invoices Plans Subscriptions
Mapping layer
Raw data layer
Invoices cleaned
Invoices Plans Subscriptions
Invoices
transformed
Query 1
Query 2 Query 3

25. Core Belief #2
Analytics code is
an asset.

26. Analyst Collective Viewpoint #5
Maintainability
Analytic code should be written to minimize
long-term maintenance burden.

27. Analyst Collective Viewpoint #6
Environments
Analytics requires multiple environments.

28. Analyst Collective Viewpoint #6
SLAs
Production analytics should be consistently
available and accurate.

29. Core Belief #3
Analytics requires
automation.

30. Bringing This to Life

31. Thank you!
Thoughts or
questions?
More information at:
github.com/analyst-collective