Auspicious Moment for Cogitation

Lately, I have been having a lot of fun at work drafting emails to various internal ‘stakeholders’. Being a data analyst who spends the bulk of his time crafting and running SQL queries against a ponderous leviathan of a data warehouse, there are frequent downtimes due to competing queries running simultaneously, insolent IT cretins performing in broad daylight what are intended to be nocturnal ‘cron’ jobs, or my own queries scanning and processing gigantic datasets such as call record details.

Since I refuse to ascend to the sunny uplands of my non-existent Facebook to update my status every nanosecond, I often descend with glee and gusto, as I wait for my queries to fetch desired records from the netherworld of Teradata ‘amps’, to the corporate banality of email writing.

While not compromising or clouding the messages, one of my aims in drafting emails to the mythical stakeholders who rely on data analysts for reports and analyses is to parody the imagined diction of an educated foreigner who learned English by reading Gibbon with the aid of nothing more than a hefty, well-thumbed dictionary. For good measure, I often intersperse my turgid, highfalutin prose with Latin phrases. Quid quid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

“My final obiter dictum on the … report …”, announced one of my recent emails. Another began: “Now is a most auspicious moment to cogitate on …”. “Do you wish to circumscribe the report with a temporal boundary by prescribing an arbitrary baseline date? If yes, did the madam have a date in mind?” another inquired politely of a young marketing ‘exec’. Another finished by lavishing “most sincere thanks on the honorable gentlemen” who were implementing an IT change request.

Far be it from me to mock my stakeholders, who are really my colleagues, even though my partner warns that is how my playfulness, designed partly to alleviate ennui, could be misconstrued. In reality, I am also partly playing to the stereotype of data analysts, who inhabit, in my team’s case anyway, that crepuscular no-man’s land between the IT and marketing department.

With their Masters of the Universe mindset, some IT managers, the vast majority of whose roles furnish the modern equivalents of overseers of indentured labor in the far-flung sugarcane plantations of a benighted age, look down on data analysts as little more than middling marketing mediocrities uninitiated in the runes and rituals of information technology. Some marketing execs and product managers, on the other hand, suspect data analysts of being nothing more than number-crunching numb nuts devoid of humanizing creative impulses.

Actually, just like any other profession, “marketing analytics” attracts people from varied and storied backgrounds. My own group has, at various times, counted in its ranks analysts with degrees and backgrounds in mathematics, linguistics, literature, statistics, IT, computer science, software engineering, robotics, business, marketing, hospitality, customer service, etc.

All data analysts perform three key tasks: Scouring, sourcing and cleaning data, called “data munging” in the trade, followed by analysis and/or modeling, which can range from pivoting data in Excel to implementing sophisticated machine learning algorithms, and, finally, presenting them to stakeholders, an art that has spawned its own sub-discipline of “visualizing beautiful data”.

The profession, which is red-hot at the moment due to the exponential growth and availability of “big data”, has its share of quackery but is there one that does not?

But I have strayed far from the topic. Ipso facto, now is a most auspicious moment to shut up.