Analytics or Information?

Recently,  as I was touring a leading analytics firm, one of the team leads asked me: "Where do you think the analytics industry is going?". My answer was simple. Analytics is not the industry. Information is. Well, there is a caveat to that, of course. Analytics is the industry if you are building robots. But if you are not, then the industry is "Information".

Let me explain. If you look at the hardware industry, it is following Moore's law and has been for a while. For those of you don't know what that is, here is the Wikipedia first line: "Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law ). 

Ok, so if you don't know what transistors and dense integrated circuits mean, don't worry about it. To me and you, that means, our devices are getting smaller and smaller, till it becomes a contact lens or a brain implant. The question then becomes, what information do you provide to these devices? So here is the deal. "Analytics is the means by which you provide better quality information". So you see, you are not in the analytics business. You are in the "better information" business.