Having the Right Team
Companies today are hard pressed to ensure they
have the right human talent in place for their data
analytics activities. First off, analytics requires
valuable domain knowledge. It requires technical
skills, as well as problem-solving and critical
thinking capabilities. It also necessitates having
the right business acumen and a solid sense of
intuition to make sense of the data.
"Very few people have this full set of skills," says
Dan Magestro, senior manager of advanced
analytics at consulting firm West Monroe. "In fact,
what is just described is truly a unicorn. But a
team of people with these three elements can be
even more effective." Sometimes referred to as
"blended beings", these individuals have both
business and technology skill sets.
One of the best ways to drive value in the
organization is to show value. "Even the best
teams will fail if they aren't delivering analytics
solutions that work," says Sangeeta Edwin,
director of business intelligence at Rockwell
Automation. "Proving the value of your analytics
solutions, even incrementally, will help motivate
the larger workforce to stay in your corner. After
all, your work should make everyone's jobs more
efficient and improve revenue streams. Prove you
can make that happen."
Technology to the Rescue
Having the right data is important. Having the
right people is important. And having the right
technology is important. But technology is never
the panacea it has been described as.
In an article in the Harvard Business Review,
Cassie Kozyrkov, chief data scientist at Google,
suggested that even the latest technologies can
create issues… especially when sudden change or
disruption occurs.
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