Identifying Your Organization’s Data & Analytic Skills Gap
An Important Step In Conquering The DSA Divide
Statistics show that most organizations have substantial skill gaps. The statistics covering data & analytics are somewhere at the bottom of the prioritization list, making it safe to assume they are only more severe. They also tend to prove more difficult to identify for just that same reason.
Identifying ALL Your Needs Requires You To Embrace Exponential Change
It starts with data. Data right now is growing so fast, 25 EB per day by some estimates, that there is an entire cottage industry dedicated to naming new units of measurement just to keep up. Organizations are flooded in new data. It is an exponential concern.
Technology providers aren’t standing still. New data technologies are the rule. Today there are more data frameworks, structures, and storage types than ever before. The decision tree is growing by the day. Enterprise or siloed? Cloud or in-house? Proprietary or open-source? SQL or NoSQL? OLAP or OLTP? Real-time or Batch? Likely, the answer is all of the above.
It will quickly become a many-to-many mapping exercise. Your data & analytics teams will need the right skills to not only utilize this flood of data, but also find it, re-stage it, and explore it. All of this is just the preparation phase. So maybe there is a better way?
Identifying Your Most Important Needs Requires Broad Experience
While there seems to be a cottage industry to make t-shirts for this role, I am afraid they may be more about branding of aspiration. The talent you want to carry out this project is going to be difficult to secure. Thank heavens for fractional resources.
To understand what is most important, you will need to model the business, the customer, the product (or platform, or porfolio), and the P&L. You will also want an information engineering perspective with a strong eye for logistics and organizational feedback. This is not just about data — it is about decision-making, accountability, and learning.
But with that, you can simplify your vast array of data and analytic needs into a simple map or storyboard. Part of that exercise will reveal the skills gap. Once you understand the most important needs of the business and tie them to sources & technologies available, you now know what you need. The last question is — what do you already have?
Identifying The Skills Your Team Already Possesses Requires An Assessment
Testing services are nothing new, but no such cottage industry has grown to do Analytic Testing (at least not yet). The only way to truly know what your existing team is capable of — is to test them.
This may seem tedious — and it will be — if you rely on off-the-shelf tools. You want an assessment tailored specifically to the needs of your organization. This will be most effective, affordable, and expedient. Anything short is likely to bore or frighten people.
Once You Know Where You Stand And Where You Want To Go…
It is as simple as connecting the dots. Well at least, it should be.
Just as you want to assess what you have against what you need, you now want to train accordingly. Again off-the-shelf solutions are going to be a lot of what everybody already knows. Boredom and the believe that management is clueless are not the brands you are searching for.
You are now in the market for targeted, tailored training. Once again this should be most effective, affordable, and expedient. It should also apply to many employees outside of your data and analytics organizations. Data-driven is a corporate culture — not just a function.
Armed with your map, your assessment, and a great training program — your company can enter a whole new era of data empowerment and access. Your organization will be a learning one, capable of dealing with exponential change. All from just three simple steps… simple, not easy.
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