Why you Need a Data Analyst in your Business?
I was discussing with my friend about data analyst experience. We share variance industry experience of our career.
The main topic of the discussion I found would be end at one keyword : mindset.
Doing data analyst job could be in easy way or in a hard way based on the situation. We find if we like to use the full potential value of data analyst, the first priority is that the team should be care about the data.
What is caring about data?
In my point of view, caring about data is all about you like to learn more about your business base on the data.
Like if you like to learn more about sales, you would like to ask about variance question about your business : What is the QoQ, YoY of the sales? What’s the performance base on product line, market segmentation, customer segmentation? Could we track the performance regularly? How could we improve it base on the issue we have to solved?
If your team is really caring above questions, that's a good start. But we could do far more beyond this.
Data is not only about figures, it’s about management. Based on what you like to management, it would make different who would you like to communicate with and co-work with.
For example if our business performance is declined, we like to explain to our manager and request support from our partners. Instead of showing them with a figure of negative YoY, we could share two lines compare with each other in a chart to show what tremendous issue we faced here and we should put resources into our business.
Or sometimes we are facing a new business model, we like to build a new methodology for evaluate the performance. Then we would need to spend time to studying the data and choose the best way to tell the story of our business performance to our stakeholders.
However, not only about communication and team work with stakeholders, how to find a efficient process to manipulate the data also a significant topic.
With a better way to processing the data, we could free our hand from spending time on transforming and calculating the data, spending more resource on defining business issue and planning our business strategy.
What I like to express here is that, there are different ways to using data and managing your business base with data. But would depends on what you thinks and planning to do with your mindset.
Take some situation for example, if you are a manager don’t like to collecting data from ERP system, you could find your teammate to collecting data with basic excel.
If you like to update data from Google Analytic(GA) with chart to express you website traffic, you could find talent good at Data Studio to design a report for your presentation.
If you like to segment customer in to 3 level of life time attribution, you could find a business intelligence developer to coding a report with business logic for the research.
Or you like to build a suggestion system base on the data in company, you could find data science(DS), business analyst(BA), system analyst(SA) for developing a data solution for your business.
All the example above surely depends on the requirement of your business and the resources on hand, like time, capital, talent.
So may we ask again why we need a data analyst in our business? What’s our requirement, planning and mind of data strategy in our business?
