18 Aug WANTED – Data Consultants
There’s a new sheriff in town…and goes by the name Lob…more commonly known as Line of Business. Lob is offering huge rewards for gun slingers that can identify, integrate, deliver, and analyze data to drive operational efficiency and aid in fast and more accurate decision making.
What is driving Sheriff Lob to track down these talented data consultants with monikers like Annie ETL Oakley, Wild B.I. Hickok, or Billy the Data Munger? There are many factors but I’m going to focus on just three:
- Formation of the Modern Company
- The Data-Driven Enterprise
- Knowledge Workers
Formation of the Modern Company
Modern companies form and grow in two primary ways. Through mergers and acquisitions
or they are organic and self-made. The extreme cases on either end are the conglomerate and the startup. In both cases, change is constant. It may seem like some initiatives move slowly in big enterprises, but those wildly successful companies are constantly buying and integrating new companies creating a stampede of data…it’s time for some data wrangling. The modern business creates many disparate business applications and data stored in many locations in varying formats. The company built through acquisitions results in hundreds of legacy and custom applications running the various divisions of the company making data consolidation difficult. In the startup, most if not all business applications are in the cloud through SaaS providers. In my opinion the decades old argument of Best-of-Breed verses Best-of-Suite is over. The speed of change for both the conglomerate and the startup in addition to the rapid adoption of cloud solutions will guarantee the proliferation of business applications. Best-of-Suite lost…in fact it doesn’t even exist anymore as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and the major business application providers have expanded their own suites through acquisition. Best-of-Breed is the fastest gun in the west.
The Data Driven Enterprise
Simply stated, the value chain of data begins with data residing in source business applications and ending in the hands of business operators that execute business processes and create operational efficiency, as well as the business leaders that make critical business decisions and drive the company strategy. The companies that reliably and optimally perform all the steps between the data source and the data consumers will have a competitive advantage. The data driven enterprise must find a way to reliably and efficiently provide the data to produce consolidated financial reports, provide complete visibility of the sales pipeline, optimize procurement and the supply chain, create manufacturing efficiencies, manage all customers, vendors, and products, and the list goes on. Who knows? The Butte, Montana of the old west could be the modern day Seattle, Washington if they had descriptive, predictive, and even prescriptive analytics to understand the world demand for copper, grain, beef, and other exports.
Knowledge Workers
The law abiding citizens known as knowledge workers are those that use information to perform their job and this group of individuals is continually expanding to include more and more workers. It’s all those individuals that enable the business leaders and operators to perform their responsibilities. More and more self-service business intelligence and data tools have arrived for knowledge workers to analyze and visualize data to gain new insights. But, the biggest problem is the preparation and provisioning of the data is not sufficient to maximize the value of the tools. It requires experts to put the smarts in data before the knowledge workers can utilize it successfully. The early stage of the data value chain is where the data is identified, extracted, validated, cleansed, integrated, enriched, and prepared for the downstream consumers. Historically this was mostly done in the data warehouse. But the speed of change makes that architecture only viable for certain use cases. To really empower the knowledge workers in the line of business, there needs to be economical availability of data specialists, and data consultants that can perform the preparation and delivery of data to truly create the data driven enterprise. As the gun fighter wielded the Colt revolver, the Winchester rifle, and the Parker Brothers 12-gauge shotgun, the data consultant works magic with the Oracle database, Microsoft BI, and Tableau.
Closing
The formation of the modern company is generating huge quantities of disparate data both on premise and in the cloud. All this data needs to be effectively utilized. To achieve this more and more individuals are becoming knowledge workers meaning that they use data and information to perform their job. But, the lack of access to data that has been accurately and reliably prepared for consumption will limit the success of the knowledge workers and will certainly make Sherriff Lob uneasy. Data experts are needed to overcome this major challenge and they ain’t cheap. An economical approach of partnering home town slingers with international talented data wranglers is needed to meet the growing demand. You may never find data consultants that have heard of a Winchester rifle but they will wield the likes of Pentaho, QlikView, and SSAS to drive your business to a new level of data understanding creating competitive advantage.
WANTED – Data Consultants!
Pat Roche (Co-Founder, pat@TenPoint7.com)