Making Sense of Data: A Practical Guide to Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Mining

2.4 ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

It is helpful to consider the following roles that are important in any project.

• Project leader: Someone who is responsible for putting together a plan and ensuring the plan is executed.
• Subject matter experts and/or business analysts: Individuals who have specific knowledge of the subject matter or business problems including (1) how the data was collected, (2) what the data values mean, (3) the level of accuracy of the data, (4) how to interpret the results of the analysis, and (5) the business issues being addressed by the project.
• Data analysis/data mining expert: Someone who is familiar with statistics, data analysis methods and data mining approaches as well as issues of data preparation.
• IT expert: A person or persons with expertise in pulling data sets together (e.g., accessing databases, joining tables, pivoting tables, etc.) as well as knowledge of software and hardware issues important for the implementation and deployment steps.
• Consumer: Someone who will ultimately use the information derived from the data in making decisions, either as a one-off analysis or on a routine basis.

A single member of the team may take on multiple roles such as an individual may take on the role of project leader and data analysis/data mining expert. Another scenario is where multiple persons are responsible for a single role, for example, a team may include multiple subject matter experts, where one individual has knowledge of how the data was measured ...