During the last HOWA Buenos Aires Mariano Amartino (one of the most recognized bloggers in the region) was presenting the topic Analytics & Bloggers. He agued that he is not an Analytics expert but just a guy that uses a couple of metrics and a lot of intuition to manage their blogs.
Actually I invited him to challenge us (people working in Analytics). You know, something like “I never used Analytics and I’m very successful”. I had the fantasy that if it is possible to be successful without Analytics then we had a lot to learn from…actually we could even understand why Analytics is not as much developed in this region as it should be.
Mariano’s presentation started and it seemed like he was really accomplishing that objective, he was not talking about Analytics at all…at least he was repeating that he never used Analytics in his life.
Some minutes later Mariano started to give more information about how he managed their projects and… voila! Analytics appeared. Even when he never said “I use/d Analytics” or “I carry on this technique” or whatever else, he begin mentioning some activities that are Analytics activities but in a non formal way. Was he lying? I’m sure that he was not. The problem is that there is a lot of people that has an “Analytics Ninja” mind “by defauld”, I call them The Analytics Ninjas Undercover. They say that they have no idea about Analytics but in fact they are really good Analytics practitioners.
The problem with this profiles is that they are not aware about what they do. Their Analytical mind works automatically, they ask and answer questions in their mind in an almost unconscious way and if you are not aware of what you do, you wont be able to teach other people, ergo the knowledge remains as the Analytics James Bond prisoner.
In my career in the Analytics industry I was face to face with a lot of Analytics James Bond believe me, at a first sight they seemed to be regular civilians but if you talk with them for a while you will get in the fact that they are not. So, stay alert, there are a lot of Analytics James bond trying to leave their knowledge behind bars, you mission is to unmask them and learn!