How is the role of the 'Analyst' changing in a data driven world?

     I remember the days when I was considered a top notch resource when it came to answering data driven questions. My Excel sheets were sparkling, my PowerPoint slides were beautiful, and my MS Access database was driving it all. In those days, when you needed to know how many widgets the sales team had sold, you asked them for their results sheet, and probably received it by email. When you needed to see attendance records for the call centers, they replied with their own spreadsheet, and a few paper based updates perhaps. After you had all your data collected and entered or imported to Access you could do with it what you pleased, and get some results worth sharing. But those days are gone, over the last 10 years I have witnessed an amazing transition from the scenario I describe above to the new paradigm of the 'Analyst' as power user and SQL dabbler. The data companies house internally is larger and more broad than ever before and growing quickly, and in order to present informed conclusions about a business, market or customer group, you need to be able to intelligently ask questions of these large stores of data.
     Enter the new 'Analyst', someone who is expected to know how to interact with databases like never before and to collate and present data from varied sources. Where a job description from those bygone days might have read "requires advanced MS Office suite knowledge" it is typical now to see requirements similar to "Must be familiar with SQL querying and tools such as SQL Server, Toad for SQL or PC SAS in order to gather results".