Unveiling the Data Warehousing Professional

What Works?, Volume 11

• By Wayne W. Eckerson
• 05/01/01

"It's the People, Stupid!"
As technologists, we love to talk about architectures and methodologies, products and technologies, gidgets and gadgets. What we do not often talk about is people—in particular, ourselves as data warehousing managers!

What our industry needs is a flesh-and-bones profile of who we are, what we do, what skills we have, how we think and operate, and where we came from and where we're headed.

This article is a first attempt to create a profile of data warehousing managers based on The Data Warehousing Institute's 2000 Salary Survey, to which more than 1,000 professionals responded. This data gives us a thorough audit of data warehousing managers' roles, responsibilities, titles, and skills as well as their monetary compensation, level of job satisfaction, and the type of teams and organizations for which they work.

Future installments of the Salary Survey will add more "flesh" to this skeleton profile by examining other issues, such as education, training, age, and personal interests. This emphasis on "us" is important, because if there is one maxim in data warehousing it is that people deliver successful solutions, not technology!

Primary Roles
When data warehousing managers are forced to select just one role to describe what they do, most choose "project manager." Twenty-two percent of survey respondents selected "project manager" as their primary role, twice the percentage of any other role.
(See chart 1.)

Since project managers represent the largest percentage of data warehousing professionals, profiling these individuals gives us a good feel of data warehousing professionals in general. (TDWI's annual Salary Survey, which is available free to TDWI members, profiles all the major data warehousing roles. If you are not a member, you can purchase a copy at www.tdwi.org/research/store.asp).

The Data Warehousing Project Manager
Experience and Teams. Interestingly, most data warehousing project managers are pretty new to data warehousing and their jobs. A majority (58 percent) have between one and three years of data warehousing experience. Only half have been in their present position between two and three years, and a majority (58 percent) joined their current companies less than five years ago.

With only a few years of experience, most project managers are not managing large teams or projects yet. Half of the managers lead teams with between 4 and 10 individuals, and two-thirds oversee budgets of less than $1 million. Although the projects may not be large, they are significant. More than two-thirds (69 percent) said their companies consider data warehousing either "very strategic" or "fairly strategic."

It's clear that managing a data warehousing project is a good first step for these aspiring business and/or information technology chiefs. If they succeed, they will be noticed and rise up through the ranks.

Compensation. Given the relative inexperience of most data warehousing project managers, it is no surprise that they command less in terms of salary and bonuses than the average data warehousing professional. Data warehousing project managers earn $72,732 a year in salary compared to $78,884 for all data warehousing professionals.

Data warehousing project managers are less likely to receive a bonus than other data warehousing professionals (59 percent to 64 percent) and when they do, they take home fewer dollars ($9,036 versus $10,860.) However, project managers are well above the median bonus amount of $7,000. Also, only slightly more than one-quarter (26 percent) received options. Most (86 percent) did not take a pay cut to get them.

Project managers are about halfway up the payscale for data warehousing professionals. They earn less than business sponsors/users, consultants, chief and data architects, and program managers, but more than analysts, developers, administrators, and technical architects. (See chart 2).

In work and life, attitudes count for everything. Unfortunately, a large percentage (39 percent) of data warehousing project managers feel they are unfairly compensated. Only 37 percent believe they are fairly compensated, and the rest (24 percent) are not sure! Those who do not think they are fairly compensated, however, have a legitimate complaint: their wages ($67,296) and bonus ($7,860) are lower than the average for project managers. Nonetheless, despite their less-than-ideal wages, few project managers (8 percent) moonlight to make extra money.

Interestingly, a large number of "consultants" consider themselves as project managers. Although it is difficult to tell from the survey, these individuals most likely work for third party consultancies and specialize in managing data warehousing projects for client firms.

Roles
Project managers are busy professionals; they do not just manage projects. Almost three-quarters (71 percent) assume other data warehousing roles. In fact, these versatile players assume an average of 4.7 roles. The most common "additional" roles the project managers specified are business requirements analyst (49 percent) and data architect (46 percent). (See Chart 3.)

The prevalence of these extra roles suggests that project managers serve as the prime liaison between business and IT professionals and translate business requirements into a workable technical architecture. Project managers are also more likely to pick up the minor roles, such as trainer, data quality analyst, decision support developer, and meta data architect, that few respondents identified as primary roles.

Responsibilities, Skills, and Titles
When asked about their primary responsibilities, data warehousing project managers mention a number of items, most of which revolve around three things: manage the project, manage the budget, and manage the team. To do these things, project managers say they rely on the key skills of communicating well with staff, peers, and executives; gathering requirements, managing expectations, and solving problems; and managing the design of the data warehouse and applications.

In short, the data warehousing project manager must have excellent project planning and people/organizational skills along with strong technical understanding. The words "flexibility" and "diplomacy" also kept reoccurring in the skills descriptions.

With such broad responsibilities and skill sets, it's not surprising that project managers claim every title in the data warehousing spectrum. Interestingly, many consultants consider themselves project managers, even though their titles suggest otherwise.

Doing a root analysis of project manager titles reveals that one-third of project managers have "manager" or "project manager" in their titles. The word "consultant" is apparent in about 16 percent of project manager titles, while "analyst" appears in another 15 percent of titles. Architect (9 percent) and Director (7 percent) also were prevalent.

Reflective of their diverse titles and interests, project managers consider the "type of work" (58 percent) and "opportunity to develop new skills" (53 percent) the most important criteria when evaluating new positions, other than compensation.

Conclusion
On the whole, data warehousing project managers are new employees who are gaining critical business and technology experience in moderately low-risk but high-value projects. Many are also third party consultants who specialize in managing client projects.

Their compensation package—which is below average for data warehousing professionals—reflects their lack of data warehousing experience and tenure in their organizations. However, it appears they have greater upside compensation potential than more technically-oriented professionals. As project managers, they are on a long-term track to vie for coveted CIO, business sponsor, or principal consultant roles.

This article originally appeared in the 5/1/2001 issue of TDWI.

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