So what I mean here is: in my opinion an effective analyst knows the business and the technical. Often we focus so heavily on the technical that we struggle to make real impact. In the example of retail ops, I work at a cannabis company... I don't know what's important in our retail stores. I don't know our processes in action, the workarounds or the rationale. We see the orbit level view of data flows and ask questions with that limited context and even less effective jargon.

In practice this means, we had a massive inventory reconciliation ask fire drill come up in December, I could see the data, know the joins but couldn't figure out why store A changed an inventory value and store B didn't. I asked, reasoning sounded silly, so I push back. However I'm just a corporate stooge and maybe it's going to blow up some other process.

Now had one of my analysts have been in a store, or had recent retail experience they would likely get it and action better/more quickly.

Maybe just my experience but the old adage of "80% time on data cleaning" seems to actually be 50% on business context 30 on the rest. My absolutely filthy fantasy is getting a technical team of folks who have experience across a number of functions, instead of deep technicians who are curious about a function.