Published on the 19/04/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
As organisational demand for data analytics increases, every organisation needs to hire or create a part time data scientist…
So says Greg Cullen, ANZ managing director of software company Talend, noting that emerging easier-to-use analytics and data integration tools made it possible to allow companies to take an “Experimental ‘minimum viable product’ approach, and then get back to the business”. Cullen, talking to iStart this week, says this agile approach can quickly test whether data delivered value to the organisation.
“Data is the new currency,” he said. But Cullen acknowledged that data scientists able to coin that currency are expensive and scarce. “I’ve seen organisations struggling to find a $200,000 a year data scientist,” he said, adding that instead companies were taking existing skills such as financial analysts and equipping them with the tools and the smarts to be able to deliver data insights to the business.
They were in effect becoming part time data scientists.
Cullen’s local observations are backed up by global trends. Internationally, Gartner estimates that the business intelligence and analytics market is forecast to reach $US16.9 billion this year. But analytics is shifting from being a specialist standalone role within the IT department to becoming business-led, using self-service analytics.
A series of platforms are emerging which allow business users to perform their own analytics – as long as they know the questions to ask.
Gartner highlights the pivotal role that data analysis is playing: “as analytics has become increasingly strategic to most businesses and central to most business roles, every business is an analytics business, every business process is an analytics process and every person is an analytics user.”
Ian Bertram, managing vice president at Gartner added; “It is no longer possible for chief marketing officers to be experts only in branding and ad placement. They must also be customer analytics experts.
“The same is true for the chief HR, supply chain and financial roles in most industries,” Bertram said.
Cullen said that it was important whoever was put in charge of extracting value from data take advice from the lines of business about the data that was available, the data that was needed, and the insights that would be useful if they could be actioned.
But he warned that many organisations still laboured with poor data quality. “I was in a meeting with a company this morning and they had 16,000 records of people aged 110 or over,” he said.
At present Talend has 20 customers in Australia and New Zealand. Ten years old, it was originally established in France, but has since re-headquartered in San Francisco. Internationally it boasts around 2,000 customers.
Its Talend Data Fabric solutions are aimed at data management, tackling issues such as integration, quality and mobile device management, and can be deployed on premise or in the cloud. The company also offers an AWS hosted Integration Cloud to manage data integration involving the cloud.
