For reasons beyond me, people want to be managers rather than analysts. I regard the title 'analyst' as a badge worth wearing, whereas I'm not so sure that 'manager' is really worth it – these days, managers in large organisations are little more than bag-carriers for the senior guys, “messengers, sent by grocery clerks, to deliver a bill”, as Colonel Kurtz describes Captain Willard in Apocolypse Now.
There are jobs with 'analyst' in the title which are more concerned with processing, say, prices for commercial accounts from the salesman's proposal into the computer systems – these are really administration roles. Then there are the poor bloody infantry sorting out the errors in vast databases - these are data administrators, and no less valuable for that.
The role of an analyst is to source, interpret and report information and provide an informed view on what that information means for the future. It's to dig into the numbers and then assemble a picture: which is both analysis and synthesis. If this is done at all now, it's done by top-flight investigative journalists when they write books, and maybe a handful of stock-pickers in the financial industry.
That can be difficult to do well or with integrity when the information and evaluations are contrary to the chosen aims and ambitions of the executive. CIA analysts had this problem in a big way with the Bush administration. An analyst whose interpretations don't fit the current policies is usually told to get with the program: in most organisations, raising money or gaining management support is everything, and figures and anecdotes are plucked from thin air to support the policies.
You can't be an analyst in a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are inherently political, and politics is the opposite of honest, creative scientific, artistic or technological endeavour. Managers in bureaucracies do one of three things: push initiatives they believe will advance their careers, resist changes pushed by career-advancers, or act as the willing servant of their senior managers. Everything they do is with a political end in mind, everything has an ulterior motive, which is why their annual appraisals are dishonest and hypocritical. Bureaucracies are not knowledge organisations: knowledge implies truth and an authority independent of rank and personality. That is incongruous in a bureaucracy: a manager does not have to be right, they just have to be senior. If your Director says that making loans to high-risk individuals so that you can book the up-front insurance premiums and a bunch of income in the next three months is the way to go, and damn the bad debts later, then by golly, that's they way all the under-managers will go and it's the song they will all sing.
Bureaucracies are not skill-organisations: skills, technical ability and expertise, have the same implication of truth and independent authority, and are therefore anathema. That's why big organisations don't train people in transferable, market-valuable skills: not because “they might leave” but because then those people would know something that could not be contradicted by management to suit some bogus policy.
An analyst needs seven things: knowledge of their industry and market; a broad general knowledge of economics and demography; a grasp of technicalities from statistical analysis through cost accounting to SQL query writing and programming; the ability to present information clearly and concisely; a clear-eyed understanding of the way the world works; a grasp of the principles of formal and informal logic and of epistemology. Oh, and a sense of humour.
Bureaucracies take analysts and reduce them to jargon-spouting, cliche-scribbling number-crunchers, because the value is in the organisation, not the people, so the people must not have unique skills and knowledge. If there is a need, such as in IT, it must be devalued as much as possible by being outsourced and off-shored. The only thing of value to the management of a bureaucracy is the ability to source and present figures that support their positions.
What I'm doing working where I am, I don't know. Oh, yes, I do. The location is one of the best in the world. No kidding.
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