Careful What You Wish For: In Defense of IDSA
At every large company, there's a common refrain: the centralized analytics organization is a slow, bureaucratic bottleneck. The calls to dismantle IDSA and embed analysts directly into the business have grown louder every quarter since I’ve been here. It’s a tempting idea. It’s also a terrible one.
Before you champion the downfall of IDSA, consider the function they serve beyond building dashboards—a function governments honestly perfected long ago: the role of the scapegoat.
The Problems Don’t Disappear, They Relocate…
You think the analytics org is slow? Do you believe it’s because hundreds of people are collectively lazy? Poor Leadership? Or is it the tangled web of poor data systems, corporate red tape, constant re-orgs, and knowledge loss they contend with daily? These systemic issues won’t vanish with a new org chart. They will simply become your problem. The frustration you feel now will be the same frustration your embedded analyst feels later, except now they report to you. Guess what, you also have poor leadership…
The Work—and the Blame—Becomes Yours
Leadership’s appetite for data is infinite. When the central team is gone, those requests don’t stop. They land on your desk. This means one of two things:
- * Your workload increases. You or your team will be expected to learn how to wrangle data from Snowflake, Excel, and Databricks. It will be framed as a "career growth opportunity," but it won't come with a raise.
- * Your budget shrinks. If you hire dedicated analysts, their higher salaries come from your finite budget. That’s money that could have gone to raises for your current team, new roles for career advancement, or travel and team-building funds.
And when a report fails to refresh, numbers don't match, or the backlog moves too slowly, there is no one else to point to. The scapegoat is gone. You are the new reason things are broken.
You Already Have the Perfect Arrangement…
Think about your current process. You come up with the requirements, hand them off, and then present the finished project to leadership as a win. You get the credit without the grind. If you own the analytics yourself, you might move faster on one project, but good work is only rewarded with more work. You’ll get the same strategic win, but with an added mountain of technical debt and support tasks.
In a culture where influence and likeability often matter more than pure output, remember this: nobody ever resents the business leader who presents the data. They resent the team that tells them the data is messy and it will take three weeks.
IDSA is your shield. They absorb the blame for systemic failures too complex and politically charged to solve. Keep the scapegoat. Be glad it’s there. (Actually, sc--w it. Lay us off, and rehire us as ETWs making 1.5x what we were and soak up your budget. The Nike way)