Creating a Data-Driven Organization

Chapter 4. The Analyst Organization

A really great data analyst should get people excited... I knew I was the first to get the data, so I was the first to know the story. It’s fun discovering stuff.

Dan Murray

The human component of a great data-driven organization is a great analytics organization. Who are those people, and how should they be organized?

In this chapter, I will cover the analytics organization itself: the types of staff that comprise it and the skills that they should possess. I’ll examine the breadth of analytics positions, and we’ll meet some of the people in those varied roles. In addition, there are a number of ways in which analysts can be organized, each with a different set of pros and cons, and so I’ll step through various organizational structures.

Types of Analysts

A data-driven organization is likely to have a variety of analyst roles, typically organized into multiple teams. Different people describe different analyst roles differently, and many of the skills are overlapping among them, but I’ll outline a general description of my version of data analysts, data and analytics engineers, business analysts, data scientists, statisticians, quants, accountants and financial analysts, and data-visualization specialists. For each, I’ll describe the types of skills they tend to possess, the tools they use, and provide an example of someone in that role. Your organization may have a different set of titles, but the skills described here are generally necessary ...