Self-service analytics is growing - where now for the CDO and data scientist?

As cloud BI firm Birst announces another funding round where does the rise of self-service analytics leave the trendy new data roles?

Cloud business intelligence (BI) and analytics company Birst has announced a $65m funding round led by Wellington Management Company LLP and joined by all existing investors including Sequoia Capital, Hummer Winblad, DAG Ventures and Northgate Capital. The latest investment brings the total amount raised by Birst to $156m.

Birst is one of the companies at the forefront of the trend towards "democratising" analytics, moving business analysis and BI away from a core of specialist expert users to allow potentially anyone to access core business information via dashboards. Others working in the same area include Tableau, Pentaho and Tibco. Commenting on this marketplace, Clive Longbottom, service director at analyst firm Quocirca, said: "The newer kids on the block, such as Birst and Tableau, have created good market traction, whereas Spotfire was grabbed by Tibco and doesn't seem to be doing so well."

Longbottom continued: "Pentaho has just been acquired by Hitachi Data Systems [HDS], and looks like it will be used to enable HDS to compete with Oracle, IBM and Teradata in more of a big data analytics appliance."

Also prominent in this arena is Qlik, which Longbottom claims has "tripped up a bit with its latest releases," and open source players such as R, which is being used by some for predictive analytics.

In this crowded marketplace Birst is focused on the integration of data, with a two-tier architecture to provide a single source of all operational data across an organisation so that everyone accesses the same data with their self-service tools.

"We meet the needs of both the technology team and the business users while giving organisations the ability to blend agility with governance," said Birst CEO Jay Larson in a statement.

The rise of self-service analytics poses some questions about the validity of trendy roles such as the data scientist and chief data officer (CDO). As demand for analytics starts to come more from the business, with IT servicing the needs by choosing the right technological approach and tools, will these roles still be needed?

Longbottom believes their days are numbered.

"The advent of the stupid idea of the data scientist has led many an organisation to try and put ultimate power in the hands of a small group of people; people who have little commercial sense," he said.

Meanwhile the CDO is an unnecessary addition to an already crowded boardroom. Everyone is now involved in converting "worthless" data into useful information, and that information into valuable knowledge, Longbottom said, so the role is not needed.

"The CDO is a red herring that is costing not only money in salary and overheads, but is probably negatively impacting the overall bottom line."

In terms of democratising analytics, certain sectors are leading the charge. Insurance is one, alongside the historically data-heavy verticals such as oil and gas, pharmaceutical, aerospace, automotive, and so on.

Recent research by Computing found that those sectors with an overall strategy - driven by the business - to find new opportunities by making the most their data were (in order): banking, financial & insurance; telecoms & technology; business & professional services; and manufacturing.