The changing roles of the modern Data Team

Data innovation is happening now – in the cloud. For businesses, that should mean a faster time to insights for everyone. As a data leader, it’s important to invest in building modern data teams. But they will need the right skills and role structures to work with data differently.

Think about what talent you already have in your teams, and what needs to change. Here’s a table we shared in our whitepaper showing how the responsibilities of each team member will change with the migration to cloud-native analytics.

The Cloud Data Team

The Cloud BI Developer

Let’s focus on one key role here: The Cloud-BI Developer. In a pre-cloud setup, the BI Developer receives data extracts that they manipulate and cleanse to build and visualize business metrics.

On the cloud, the BI Developer’s role becomes more collaborative. They’ll be relying on the Data Analyst and Data Engineer to help define and implement business logic in a centralized cloud data warehouse – where the data cleansing and transformation is maintained.

Cloud-first solutions, like Astrato, really come into play in the last-mile analysis. For instance, creating aliases, defining dimensions and measures, and developing key metrics can be saved in a data view within Astrato. Unlike legacy tools, these data views aren’t created in isolation, but rather are open and accessible for developers to use, share and collaborate with.

To keep ahead of their game, smart BI Developers will focus on the following skills to prepare for a cloud-native analytics career:

• Develop a basic understanding of cloud data warehousing and computing
• Grow deeper SQL knowledge including Data Manipulation Language (DML), Data Definition Language (DDL), and Data Query Language (DQL)
• Enhance collaboration with data analytics team, particularly Data Engineers and Data Analysts
• Learn to create storyboards prior to diving into dashboard development. This process is super simple in creator-centric tools, like Astrato.

Hiring tip: Hire people with good communication skills. Because if they can’t communicate their data findings to the rest of the Cloud Data Team, the flow of insights through the business could get blocked!

And once you’ve got the right skills on board, make sure they’ve got good quality data to work with! To avoid garbage in/garbage out, ensure your organization is working with a single source of truth.

 

Learn more about how data teams are evolving in our whitepaper, Cloud BI: Time to unlearn traditional BI development.

Download the whitepaper