An Analyst can assist a business in a variety of ways by utilizing the range of skills they have acquired from solving data problems, navigating the business landscape, moving across platforms, and getting their hands dirty with all aspects of the data life cycle:
1 Provide a Complete Data View
Data can be sourced from multiple channels (e.g., emails, surveys, servers, spreadsheets, csv files etc.) Analysts can incorporate information from multiple sources to provide a holistic summary of the data – graphs, dashboards, or hybrids.
Integrating data from multiple sources is not always immediate and straightforward, the data will need to be cleaned, organised, and structured in a format to be ready for analysis to be performed. An analyst is acquainted with multiple programs and languages, data integration can be performed routinely or can be automated available for “on demand”.
Imagine the strategic benefits of seeing customer reviews and ratings alongside sales of the product and corresponding inventory in real time and all in one place.
2 Translating Data into Business needs.
The data is clean and ready to use, but what is next?
Analysts can translate data into a visual representation of performance, identifying future business drivers. Allowing the user to better understand what trends are occurring in their business and what to adjust for the future.
Performing data analysis can identify financial targets and KPI’s to align with the business’s strategy. This allows business performance to be monitored, taking opportunistic action if falling short or overreaching targets and KPI’s.
A key benefit of translating Data into Business needs, is to help drive measurable and actionable behaviour, which can be through development of relevant Business Intelligence tools (reports, interactive dashboards) and to be communicated to the targeted audience.
3 Translates data requirements for Strategic Planning.
A new business strategy is to be investigated, how will it work, what will it cost?
If the data exists, the analyst can produce reports to assist with the decision making – or they can identify data and / or integrity checks/fixes required for the task.
Analysts can work with the data to provide insights (e.g., financial, operational) of what could come about because of the implementation of the strategic actions and provide analysis to monitor the strategic targets against actual performance.
3 Problem Solving
Identifying and presenting insights and trends from data is extremely useful in problem solving. Programs, languages, and platforms are utilized to analyse and mine the data, then through trial-and-error is the development of visuals to present meaningful actionable insights.
The analysts’ trial-and-error/ what if mind set is well versed to tackle the next problem.
4 Automation and Simplification
Analysts utilize the skills they have acquired from solving obstacles with data and fulfilling ad-hoc requests. As a result, they have an eye for breaking down processes and complexity into simpler components, streamlining processes, reducing unnecessary tasks, and automating workflow.
5 End to End Viewpoint
Not everyone in an organisation has a full end to end understanding of its operations and supply chain in detail. However, for an analyst to build meaningful reports, they must familiarise with the data life cycle. How the data is collected, modified, definition of terms, if something unusual changes within the data, an analyst is one of the first to realise.
When, an analyst provides insights to a process and identifies data gaps from an end-to-end perspective – they are best positioned to put things right.
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