It’s done now. What has been a topic of heated (or bored) discussions for a couple of years has now come to reality: the Web Analytics Association (WAA) is now the Digital Analytics Association (DAA). Here’s the announcement (or here).
Personally, I welcome the change, since it does reflect what we do in many people’s mind. I have always used the term “Web” in its broadest meaning, i.e. encompassing everything digital. It seems though, that Web means “Web sites” to a lot of people, so the use of the term “digital” is probably better suited.
The change of names also reflects how ambitious Web analysts have always been, and I suspect that it is not unrelated to the big analytics wave that is coming. With “Web” in the name and title, web analysts ran a serious risk of being painted in the web site corner. Now, since digital is so generic, and that customer data is all being digitized, we can claim our seat at the Big Data table.
The thing is, the game is really, really tough at the grown up table, with many players wanting a piece of the Digital Customer. The newly christened Digital Analysts will have to demonstrate skills that were not required of them until now, since they were nicely keeping inside the Web site sandbox.
Are you ready?
If you really look at the past 15-20 years its actually a full circle. It was the BI world for the longest time then due to the nature of data size, technology and methodologies that were used in BI, it would take forever to do anything. The comes Web Analytics and the beautiful world of SAAS. Although what they lacked was focus on one channel and building that tightly integrated product across all channels.
Big Data is more forgiving in that nature. It has the advantage of both traditional BI(Although I feel its much better in lot of sense) and the so called Webanalytics platforms. There is quite sometime before the Big Data industry matures. Although it has opened doors for 1000+ startups 🙂