This article was inspired by Stephan Schwab’s excellent piece “Why We’ve Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade Since 1969” which traces the recurring dream of eliminating software developers from COBOL through to AI. Reading it, I recognised the same pattern playing out in my own field of data warehousing, data analytics and business intelligence; a fifty-year cycle of tools promising to democratise data work, each delivering genuine value while leaving the fundamental need for specialists stubbornly intact.

Every decade brings new promises: this time, we’ll finally make building analytics platforms simple enough that we won’t need so many specialists. From SQL to OLAP to AI, the pattern repeats. Business leaders grow frustrated waiting months for a data warehouse that should take weeks, or weeks for a dashboard that should take days. Data teams feel overwhelmed by request backlogs they can never clear. Understanding why this cycle persists for fifty years reveals what both sides need to know about the nature of data analytics work. — Read More