Leading in Analytics

TASK 2The Team

BUILDING A WINNING ANALYTICS TEAM

A shortage of good analytics talent is often the weakest link in many analytics projects. You may have heard that data scientists were named as having the “sexiest job of the 21st century” in a well‐cited Harvard Business Review article¹ due to their high demand, ability to add value, and the difficulty in finding them. Data scientists, analysts, data engineers, and similar flavors of dedicated analytics professionals have a critical role to play in doing the analytics that businesses need to succeed, and they are often hard to recruit and retain.

Yet, as discussed in Task 0: Analytics Leadership, for analytics to take hold and succeed in a business, it takes more than a team of data scientists. It takes analytics‐minded talent at many levels in the organization to truly succeed in this arena. Recall the McKinsey report,² which we referenced, that signaled a shortage of 250,000 data scientists and an order of magnitude larger (2 to 4 million) shortage of data savvy business leaders to lead and support their organizational analytics efforts.

In order to succeed in analytics, we must think about teams more broadly than just the technical team. Yes, there are many data scientists, engineers, analysts, and others who play a role in the mix. But we start with a broader view of the team by going deeper into the Pleines's minimal viable team, which you need for analytics to succeed. In the next section, Dr. Rudi Pleines, head of business ...