Business Analytics or Data Analytics – a career perspective

Excerpt from article published at Economic Times CIO by Tapan Rayaguru, Executive Director, Sunstone

Business School

With the hype around big data and analytics everyone seems to have an opinion

on what it is and how one should get on board. The street lamp posts in

Hyderabad and Bangalore are full of 10 digit phone numbers that claim to make

you an expert in big data, social media analytics, Hadoop and what not in two

weeks! Almost feels like the 2 bedroom real estate market.

In this confusion a lot is being bought and sold, often, without any value.

I am offering a simple way to look at analytics from a skills perspective and see

what careers you can build for yourself based on your current skills and what

you need to acquire in order to be good at the role you want.

To be a good analyst you need four core skills:

1. Understanding of business so you know the problem you are trying to solve

2. Appreciation for mathematics (primarily statistics) so you know if the right

technique is being applied and the nuances of the technique have been

accounted for

3. Of course, technology without which data cannot be extracted, manipulated,

interpreted. These technologies typically revolve around extraction,

mathematical processing and visualization

4. In addition to the hard skills above, a key ingredient for success is the ability

to communicate. One must understand what needs to be solved and also

have the ability to communicate the solution back to the stakeholders.

I see three types of roles evolving over time:

a. Users – in the end user corporate community we will find tech and math

savvy business folks who will be great users of insights from data before

making decisions (BMT combination in 70:20:10)

b. Producers – These will be data analysts that will pick up the latest and

greatest technology as it evolves and be able to apply mathematical

techniques to convert an analytical problem to an analytical solution (BMT

combination in 10:30:60)

c. Translators – These will be unique folks that understand both the users and

the producers and can broker a healthy communication and make be the

grease that oils the machinery (BMT combination in 40:20:40). They are the

ones that will take a business problem and formulation an analytical problem

that needs to be solved; once the analytical problem has been solved and

there is an analytical solution, they will be the ones that will translate it back

to the business solution

So here is the big ‘so what’ for your career:

If you are in the world of technology today as a programmer, analyst, manager

you have two choices in front of you to take benefit of the boom in the world of

analytics today

1. Learn the new technology and become a Data Analyst – become a SAS/R

programmer from a Java/.net one and live happily ever after not knowing

what you missed. You will see a single spurt of growth in your career but

over time you will be yet another programmer in a skill that younger

programmers will pick up as their first skill. Welcome to competition from

fresh engineering graduates who are learning R programming in their

colleges as part of their BE/BTech degree.

2. Adapt and get to a Business Analyst role – Pick business and math skills that

complement your existing skillset in technology and get yourself ready for

translator roles. These translator roles are now available both on the users

and on the producer organizations. Enterprises will need as many translators

as will the analytics service providers.

My fear is we will end up with lots of exotic technologies that work well but

very few people will know how to use it in real businesses. Hence my bet is

there will be shortage of true translators that understand the capabilities of

the new technologies while being able to find the right application of those to

businesses.