I think this screen shot from insights for search tells the story all by itself. The age of hiring a “consultant” are coming to an end. Why would you hire someone with all this so-called experience when your own business, with it’s specific problems and issues, has all the data it needs to figure out what to do? What you really need is a skilled analyst to figure out what all that data is saying.

In a post by Stephen Few,

The problems that we face today, both big ones in society like the current health care debate and smaller ones like strategic business decisions, do not exist because we lack information, but because we don’t understand it. They can be solved only by developing skills and tools to make sense of information that is often complex. In other words, the major obstacle to solving modern problems isn’t the lack of information, solved by acquiring it, but the lack of understanding, solved by analytics.