Carragee Consulting

One of the reasons that blogging on LinkedIn is a questionable long-run strategy is that its not indexed and organized to be easy to find later. The news feed is meant to be addictive and interactive in the moment, not optimized to log material in-depth on a topic.

It seems intentionally hard to find your content later and link back to it when it would be relevant to reuse in presentations or other dialogs off the LinkedIn platform. This is a minor example of how SaaS companies can make their products sticky and hard to quit in the long-run, by owning the data you develop through their platform.

As massive volumes of data can now be analyzed, meta analysis across companies in the same industry (who share common data structures and business metrics on a SaaS platform) can now be completed with relative ease.

Data architecture and engineering are increasingly valuable skills at the small scale for analysts working in desktop applications — e.g. Microsoft’s Power Query and at much larger scales for database administrators and data scientist.

As you start to blend data from across sources you can build out novel analyses with predictive power, but to do this you need to centralize and structure it to be machine readable — cueing the need for ETL tools.

The myriad of options for ETL are entirely overwhelming. Portable has compiled the most comprehensive list I’ve seen to date with 100! Naturally, they have ranked themselves highest among the group and I’m in not position to refute that given my limited exposure to competitors and recent positive experience using Portable to connect to ServiceTitan.

If you think of ETL as the logistics of the data world, its hardly surprising there are so many solutions available. Check out the BLS.gov stats on the percentage of Americans employed as drivers and imagine all the types of physical logistics — uber, long-haul truckers, local deliveries, school bus drivers, its seemingly endless and each trade has different vehicle types, wage structures –why would the digital transportation be any less nuanced?