The path to an Analytics Director Role for middle career folks
I talk about Data Analytics Director job background options, challenges & opportunities
In this newsletter, I will talk with my experience in analytics about the role of Director Analytics. This newsletter would be helpful if you are looking to discover data analytics director role from a traditional senior IT role.
This newsletter edition is divided into 4 segments:
Segment 1 : Analytics director role depends on organizational data maturity
Segment 2 – Past IT background that are helpful for transition into data analytics director role
Segment 3 – Traditional and emerging concepts in data analytics and architecture.
Segment 4 – How to prepare for the role of Data analytics Director
Segment 1 : Analytics director role depends on organizational data maturity
So a data analytics director would be primarily involved in an organization to lead the strategic development and implementation of data-driven insights to drive business decisions and innovation across the organization.
This is a functional role not IT role.
Ok let me detail the next part of the video using segments.
Please note that in this video I am explaining the role from the lens of a functional organization like a GCC and not from a project organization like IT services1.
So this role is a middle management role and delivers data analytics as a capability for the organization.
The role of a data analytics director is still an evolving play as the data landscape maturity varies for organizations.
I can think of the data maturity of an enterprise in 4 broad level.
Level1 – The base data maturity where data is collected, track and reported
Level2 – In this level there is a pro-active need to understand & optimize the business with data but this practice is often ad-hoc
Level3 – There are hybrid centralized analytics team and the business is data driven at scale
Level 4 – Here the data can be used to predict business outcomes and analytics is seen as a key driver to respond to changes in the market
Hence, depending on the data maturity, the role and responsibilities of a Director may change and you need to adjust business expectations in a similar way and prepare for the same.
For example, in a L1/L2 organization you can be the only Director setting up data practice in foundational areas like data collection, warehousing and BI reporting.
In such cases, you may even have to start with very basics as data source identification or getting to know where “data” is born.
In a higher data maturity organization, you may be handling a Business unit in a large enterprise where there is a central data team.
At highest level, you may also have a team of data scientist and data architects who are involved in business forecasting using machine learning at scale & drive market strategy from corporate business strategy.
Data Governance is also an area which will be of your interest across levels & you may be expected to set up or scale a Data governance practice within your role.
Segment 2 – Past IT background that are helpful for transition into data analytics director role
The most obvious path to this role of Analytics Director is always with the narrative of data and analytics. So if your past experience is with data based technology like DWH,ETL, Data Architecture and business reporting then trying to see a vertical movement in data analytics director space can be possible.
The next combination which work is business facing experience like Business analyst, Domain & Functional consultant, and Solution architects.
If you are coming from this background than an onsite customer experience would be more needed or expected as business roles are traditionally seen to be strong at onsite especially the pre-GCC days or the period from 2000 – 2010.
It should be noted that irrespective of your past software and IT background, if you are considering moving into this role then knowhow about traditional and emerging trends in data, insights and analytics should be known to you.
It is also expected that you are hands-on to a certain extent in one such platform or OEM2 suite.
This is explained in next Segment.
Segment 3 – Traditional and emerging concepts in data analytics and architecture.
The role of a director would need you to know traditional concepts like data warehouse and data lakes and also emerging trends as Lakehouse & New Generation DWH.
An analytics director would need to know analytical data needs from a business standpoint like multi source integration, data historization, data refinement, orchestration, user accessibility, reporting KPI, inter application data sharing.
The role would also need exposure to Governance paradigms as Dash mesh and data fabric although there may be no implementation plans in the immediate time.
Finally, this role is not all about being technical or data driven but also would need intermediate general management skills as cost center management, Financial reporting, Alliance forming skills, vendor & RFP management, program management framework as MSP, EA framework as TOGAF and large scale contract management.
Segment 4 – How to prepare for the role of Data analytics Director
If you are from the natural path of data and analytics then the path towards Director Analytics is like a vertical movement, for example from a BI & Insights Associate Director to a Director Analytics.
But what if your current career track is not in analytics and you have an aspiration to move into an analytics director role?
There may be couple of suggestions that I would suggest,
One, In your current IT role try to get involved towards more of end to end data flow from the step of data generation to data gathering, data engineering and reporting.
For example – if you are in ERP try to get involved in work how data is used and consumed and then reported like say in Dashboards.
Two, Try to move in data architecture. This is not so easy but possible if there is a separation between solution architecture and data architecture role in your organization and you are currently involved in some kind of application architecture.
Talking internally from a horizontal movement in your current organization may do the trick.
In such a case you can look to implementation and design of modern data system within your organization, and it may get you some leverage towards movement into analytics.
Finally, if you are neither in solution architecture nor you have a chance to get involved in downstream systems- what can you do?
Try moving into data roles. Without data there is no AI, ML or analytics. Some roles that you can consider moving and working by skilling are data engineering, data security, data governance and data manager.
Finally, there is no running away from the fact that you need to know how modern analytics system works and develop a deep expertise in at least one area of analytics like say predictive analytics.
Courses, mentorship, or a cohort lead learning track can help you here.
I hope you found this video informative, and it gave you a clarity on the analytics director role.
Please comment if you want me to continue with more episodes on data analytics director role.
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This newsletter looks at the angle of a Data analytics Director in a Functional organisation. A functional organisation is an organisation where sales of IT or software is not the main source of revenue but IT/Software is seen as a key driver and department. The role in other organisational structure as a projectised structure where the main source of revuenue for the company is selling IT/Analytics project or services then in that case the job role will change substantially and involved P&L and Sales, Account minning, GTM. Please comment if you would need to to cover that role in some other edition of the newsletter.
OEM may include product suites from analytics family like Snowflake, Databricks Or anaytics stacks from public cloud as Azure, GCP, AWS etc