It’s not headline news that the amount of data individuals and firms produce is and will continue to grow exponentially. It’s also not headline news that the cost of storing and accessing this data is increasingly cheaper.

It’s hard to imagine but once upon a time, organizations would discard what could have potentially been information with the ability to uncover critical business insights. This disposal of data was seen as justifiable given the cost of storing it as well as limitations in querying and mining it.

Now, given that accelerating advancements in data storage and infrastructure are continuously increasing how much data we can store and how quickly we can process it, the idea of throwing out data is almost inconceivable. This leaves organizations with growing mounds of data waiting to be mined, explored, and discovered.

So where does this leave the analyst? More empowered than ever.

Analysts are being presented with new sets of tools which allow them to accomplish historically IT intensive tasks without IT intervention. Developing highly technical skills in order to manipulate and mine datasets for insights is increasingly unnecessary. This enables analysts to focus on their true value add: leveraging their business knowledge to generate business value.

Tableau is just one name in a sea of tools decreasing reliance on IT by providing analysts with complex technical capabilities in very non-technical and often drag-and-drop formats. What were traditionally time-consuming analytical and data mining functions are now possible in real-time and with instantaneous results.

Performing sophisticated calculations, aggregations, joins, and sub-query functions are possible within almost elementary-like GUIs, all without any indication of the technical complexity taking place in the background.  The resulting product is a series of concepts being presented to end-users in a way which requires from them nothing more than pure logic.

This abstraction of data mining and analytical functions is a growing trend that is changing who interacts with data. It’s part of the greater theme of streamlining and abstracting non-business critical activities to enable those with business knowledge unprecedented power.

In the coming years it will be hard to find any role, within in any organization, in any industry where data is not integral to the decision making process. This means that to some extent we will all become analysts, tasked with deriving value from data as it pertains to our function.

This inevitable truth highlights what will become an evolution of those who interact with data. The analyst will evolve into becoming less of a defined role and more of an integrated function embedded into every role.

The advancements in analytical tools we are seeing are not targeted just towards the business analytics and intelligence analysts of the world, the audience is much broader. By continuing to eliminate technical gaps that prohibit business users from answering business questions, the goal becomes clearer, to transform everyone into an analyst.

Who is the analyst of the future? We all are.