Analytic Process Automation: Behind a new data analytics movement

Companies are scrambling right now to respond to a rapidly changing context, and they’re using data to navigate the necessary transformations. But too often, they’ve failed to make needed changes because their solutions were tied to a legacy approach to analytics.

Dean Stoecker, co-founder and chief executive officer of data science and analytics company Alteryx, believes now is the critical time for changing course to achieve better business outcomes.

“Most companies don’t see success in digital transformation at all because they keep doing the same thing over and over,” he says. “If COVID-19’s problems aren’t a wake-up call that change is needed, then we’re all toast.”

We need a cultural shift that puts more emphasis on human creativity working in tandem with analytics tools and artificial intelligence. And to that point, businesses must take risks to liberate data and analytics, making those things available to a workforce full of untapped citizen data scientists.

“There’s only two million PhD data scientists in the world. There are never enough scientists to solve the world’s problems,” Stoecker explains.

Enter Analytic Process Automation, or APA—a new movement that seeks to solve those problems by upskilling almost anyone to become part of an organization’s engine for analyzing and acting on data.

APA involves “turning every data worker into a discoverer of marginal profitability.” And the only way you can accomplish that is when you begin to treat data as an asset, democratize it, and make it available to the workforce.

“Most organizations don’t do this,” Stoecker explains. “What they do is hire scientists, buy big machines, and hope that they’re going to see better results. And it just never happens.”

The end-to-end analytics platform Alteryx provides to businesses is used by banks to do derivatives modeling, airlines to hedge fuel, retailers to optimize hyperlocal merchandising, and the Dallas Cowboys to do sentiment analysis in the stadium during the game.

Each of those is a case of a successful digital transformation for some part of an enterprise, and Stoecker says this progress has been made possible by Analytic Process Automation.

Alteryx was founded before many of the foundational changes for APA had fully taken hold, but Stoecker saw what was coming. “We started the company because we knew that point solutions were going to be dead, because they force people to change their approach to work and that’s demeaning to most workers,” he says.

“We’re seeing this colliding world of AI and ML converge with BI and analytics,” Stoecker explains. “That means that that while the technologies are converging, the consumers or producers of those capabilities are also converging. We see this convergence of the trained statistician and the citizen data scientist.”

In 1960, computer scientist and psychologist J.C.R. Licklider wrote an influential paper titled “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” now common reading among business leaders, particularly in the tech space.