No matter what type of business you’re in, boosting your bottom line is always in the back of your mind. In a rough economy, it can be tempting to focus too much on pulling in more money and not enough on containing it from within.

That’s right, containing it. You have the potential to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars every year right under your nose from something as simple as lack of or ineffective computer training.

How much do the employees you have working for you right now really understand about technology? How good is your IT tech department? Technology changes faster than a blink of an eye and oftentimes, businesses struggle to keep their top employees trained.

With millions of dollars being lost to Internet espionage, file corruption and other computer crimes, staying on top of changes is essential. Recently, online learning centers have been emerging as the go-to method for quick and inexpensive learning. Unfortunately, this type of computer learning isn’t always the best solution.

The interpreted programming language Python has surged in popularity in recent years. Long beloved by system administrators and others who had good use for the way it made routine tasks easy to automate, it has gained traction in other sectors as well. In particular, it has become one of the most-used tools in the discipline of numerical computing and analysis. Being put to use for such heavy lifting has endowed the language with a great selection of powerful libraries and other tools that make it even more flexible. One upshot of this development has been that sophisticated business analysts have also come to see the language as a valuable tool for those own data analysis needs.

Greatly appreciated for its simplicity and elegance of syntax, Python makes an excellent first programming language for previously non-technical people. Many business analysts, in fact, have had success growing their skill sets in this way thanks to the language's tractability. Long beloved by specialized data scientists, the iPython interactive computing environment has also attracted great attention within the business analyst’s community. Its instant feedback and visualization options have made it easy for many analysts to become skilled Python programmers while doing valuable work along the way.

Using iPython and appropriate notebooks for it, for example, business analysts can easily make interactive use of such tools as cohort analysis and pivot tables. iPython makes it easy to benefit from real-time, interactive researches which produce immediately visible results, including charts and graphs suitable for use in other contexts. Through becoming familiar with this powerful interactive application, business analysts are also exposing themselves in a natural and productive way to the Python programming language itself.

Gaining proficiency with this language opens up further possibilities. While interactive analytic techniques are of great use to many business analysts, being able to create fully functioning, independent programs is of similar value. Becoming comfortable with Python allows analysts to tackle and plumb even larger data sets than would be possible through an interactive approach, as results can be allowed to accumulate over hours and days of processing time.

This ability can sometime allow business analysts to address the so-called "Big Data" questions that can otherwise seem the sole province of specialized data scientists. More important than this higher level of independence, perhaps, is the fact that this increased facility with data analysis and handling allows analysts to communicate more effectively with such stakeholders. Through learning a programming language which allows them to begin making independent inroads into such areas, business analysts gain a better perspective on these specialized domains, and this allows them to function as even more effective intermediaries.

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Who Are the Main Players in Big Data?

Recently, I asked my friend, Ray, to list those he believes are the top 10 most forward thinkers in the IT industry.  Below is the list he generated. 

Like most smart people, Ray gets his information from institutions such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Huffington Post, Ted Talks ...  Ray is not an IT expert; he is, however, a marketer: the type that has an opinion on everything and is all too willing to share it.  Unfortunately, many of his opinions are based upon the writings/editorials of those attempting to appeal to the reading level of an 8th grader.  I suppose it could be worse.  He could be referencing Yahoo News, where important stories get priority placement such as when the voluptuous Kate Upton holds a computer close to her breasts.

Before you read further, note that missing from this list and not credited are innovators: Bill Joy, Dennis Ritchie, Linus Torvalds, Alan Turing, Edward Howard Armstrong, Peter Andreas Grunberg and Albert Fent, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz/Hermann Grassmann ... You know the type:  the type of individual who burns the midnight oil and rarely, if ever, guffaws over their discoveries or achievements.