Business, Data Analytics

Tips for creating your data analytics team

Some of the most successful companies are those that have embraced data-driven decision-making. Basing business decisions on real, tangible data brings many benefits, including the ability to spot trends, challenges, and opportunities before your competition.

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You may be looking to put together a specialist data analytics team from scratch or perhaps through deploying certain members of your in-house IT staff. Either way a coherent and planned approach is crucial to gain the most valuable insights from your hard-won data.

Before you embark on creating a data analytics team you need to put a framework in place based on strategy.

What is your data strategy?

Before starting out on professional data analytics undertaken by experts you need to know exactly what your data requirements are.

What do you want to learn from data analytics? Are you concerned with generating revenue, manage risk, improve the customer experience with your business? Improve processes such as production? Or is it a combination of these and other factors?

How far advanced is your data journey?

Perhaps your data collection and analytics is working quite well but needs an upgrade or a more focussed approach through dedicated experts? Or maybe your data activities are in an elementary phase with work needed on collecting and storing before you even get to analytics?

The level of work required will of course determine the type of team and expertise you require.

The data analytics team structure

A team that builds datasets that for analysis to provide meaningful insights and business intelligence would consist of the following:

  • Data Engineer – responsible for designing and building the datasets that will be worked on as an analytics project. Engineers would work with the data scientist and analysts.
  • Data Analyst – they use data that’s been put into a user friendly format to provide direct analysis and reports.
  • Data Scientist – they use specific programming tools and statistics to build predictive models.
  • Business Analyst – they help the business improve systems and processes, and could be seen as bridging the gap between the IT specialism and the business generally: for example, providing easy to understand dashboards and illustrating how the data provides the information management need to inform actions and policy.
  • Head of Data Analytics – helps everyone stay on track regarding the data strategy, and help the business analysts draw meaningful insights from the data.

A dedicated data analytics team will often be ‘central’ in that other departments such as marketing, finance and production will go to them to seek data analytics pertaining to their side of the business.

For example, the marketing team may ask for data insights relating to past campaigns of a certain type to use as benchmarks and models to plan something new.

The Outsourced Option

Putting together a dedicated data analytics team is a hard and lengthy process: recruiting alone is a challenge where finding people with the right skills and experience isn’t easy in a high demand sector.

One option is to partner up with data analytics professionals who can provide the expertise you require based on your exact needs. The right company can effectively provide you with a dedicated and skilled analytics team.

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