Establishing your first few team members for your data team requires careful consideration. They need to bring a range of skills to the table to influence your business and ensure you get value from the investment. Get this wrong, and you won’t be able to leverage your data when you need it.
Navigating the organisation
The initial team members need to navigate the organisation, different teams, understand business processes and recognise the value of the data so it can be unlocked.
They will need to engage with stakeholders to understand business problems, translate these to user stories, create data pipelines, then analyse and model the data to create meaningful insights. That’s a lot of skills needed from a small team to do, which you would typically see in the below roles:
- Business Analyst – Understanding the business problem and process
- Data Engineer – Creating data pipelines
- Data Analyst – Making the data available to the business
- Data Architect – Designing fit for purpose solutions, that aren’t over complicated
If one of these skills isn’t met, then that area will become your bottleneck in unlocking your data.
Solving Data Problems to Unlock Business Potential
A typical initial data problem for an organisation with an application journey can be complicated. One example is to identify where they are losing customers in their lending application journey which uses multiple systems.
To answer this, the data team will need to:
- Understand the Business Process
- Understand the Architecture and back-end design of the system
- Understand the user journey that generates the data and the schema where data is stored
- Create a data pipeline in a scalable, sustainable, reliable way
- Model the data
- Make it available
To deliver meaningful business value from the data, the small team will need to understand the end-to-end process from customer application, through to KYC, KYB, underwriting and the remainder of the loan completion process. This can be a complicated process and one they may need support in navigating.
Supporting the team
One option is to buddy the first few hires with a senior person within the business to work through their challenges, however there may be a capacity constraint if your business is rapidly growing with tight deadlines. Regardless, an investment will need to be made to ensure the team can deliver meaningful outcomes.
Get in touch
If you’re starting on a data journey and you want discuss some of the challenges you are facing, reach out for a call. There is no one size fits all for companies. We can explore your specific challenges and goals, and develop a plan to achieve them.
I’ve used a lending and underwriting process as an example, however the challenge is similar across different industries where you are analysing a customer journey.
Get in touch for a call or email Pratik@indatawetrust.co.uk . We’re here to help you navigate your business’s data journey.