The Data Analysts of the Future: What Will They be Doing?

The need for citizen data scientists — people who can use real-time, data-powered insights — will be on the rise with the widespread availability of data and AI-enabled, self-service analytics platforms.

The Biggest Obstacle to Being a Perfect Data Technologist

It is very hard for a single expert to keep up with diverse fields of study such as computer science, computer engineering, neural science, statistics, mathematics, artificial intelligence and associated fields, and even the newer technologies like Big Data, Hadoop, IoT, serverless, edge — The reality of Data Science is that it indicates an “intersection of too many disparate disciplines,” and it is humanly impossible for one person to be an expert in so many fields.

However, a survey of 550 Italian SME businesses, found that 50 percent of the surveyed businesses have plans to hire a data analyst in the next three years through 2021. The World Economic Forum has forecast that data analysts will be in high demand by 2020. Women are giving tough competition to men in data analysis field — the female to male data analyst ratio is 41 to 59. There is a growing demand for “interpretation of data,” which machines have not fully mastered as yet.

How to Future-Proof Human Data Technologists

Every global business acknowledges that “data and analytics” will be the key drivers of market competition in the future years. In an ever-evolving human workforce, now the industry operators are talking about the induction of a data ethicist (who judges what should be done with the data), algorithmic business-domain experts, and algorithmic business trailblazers.

The Top Data Industry Career Predictions for 2019

Technologies like augmented analytics, continuous intelligence, and explainable artificial intelligence will disrupt the business ecosystem in the next three to five years.  These technologies have the potential to automate many major data analytics tasks.

The McKinsey Report The Age of Analytics: Competing in a Data-Driven World indicates the growing sophistication of ML algorithms is slowly taking the mystery out of advanced business analytics. This insightful report also indicates that while petabytes of data are available now, the sensor-driven culture has not captured mainstream businesses. Although the potentials for extracting “value” from business data is enormous, the current business models are not adequately prepared to extract value from their data piles. Businesses have not made a significant leap forward since 2011.

In the future, companies will have to redesign their business models in order to make the best use of technology infrastructure and available talent to commoditize “insights or competitive intelligence” to create additional revenue channels.

How Does Big Data Impact the Data-Driven Business World?

Here is a statistic to help explain the phenomenal impact of Big Data: In Europe, government bodies have the potential to save over “€100 billion ($149 billion) in operational efficiency” by using Big Data, besides using this technology to reduce fraud in tax collections.  Advanced Analytics: Exploration of Some Transformative Future Trends provides a business case for governments adopting advanced Big Data technologies.

On one end of the value chain, businesses are struggling over Crossing the Big Data / Data Science Analytics Chasm, which is becoming a moving barrier to value creation. So the net result is that uninformed organizations are continuously investing in newer technologies without “understanding how what it takes to cross the Analytics Chasm.

On the other end of the value chain, there is Big Data — conquering one data-related challenge after another. According to the results collected from Peer Research – Big Data Analytics survey, 74 percent of the survey respondents believe that Big Data Analytics is adding value to their organizations by enabling timely data-driven decision-making. With the future growth of semi- and unstructured data, Big Data analysts will be high in demand.