Building a Modern Data Team
Webinar Speaker: Philip Russom, Senior Research Director for Data Management
Date: Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Time: 9:00 a.m. PT, 12:00 p.m. ET
Webinar Abstract
To keep pace with modern requirements for analytics and platforms, data management professionals are reorganizing their teams, skills, methods, and management.
Given all the changes that are taking place today in business and IT, it is no surprise that the many disciplines of data management (DM) need to modernize, too. This includes upgrades and replacements of data platforms and tools for data management, and these areas have gotten a lot of attention in the IT press in recent years. However, handling today’s data successfully for a modern digital business also requires improvements in the teams that build and maintain data-driven solutions.
For example, TDWI’s 2019 cloud data management survey reveals that data architects have arisen as the leaders and managers of data teams for analytics, data warehousing, data lakes, and operational data. Similarly, increasing numbers of business people (plus CDOs and CIOs) are taking an active role in the design of data management solutions, to ensure their business and compliance requirements are met. Across the board, the number of full-time employees in the average data team is increasing. Furthermore, there is a recurring struggle to fill the “skills gap” with training and tooling, driven by rising adoption of analytics, real-time data, the cloud, and hybrid architectures.
In one direction, DM gets increasingly harder at the leading edge, requiring uber-geeks like data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts on the data team. In another direction, democratized data promises self-service data prep for “citizen data professionals.” The challenge is to create a data team – or two or more – that enables these diverse classes of DM developers. Finally, all classes of DM developers and users need more productivity, tool automation, no-code development, curation, and governance.
This webinar will describe recent changes seen in modern data teams, as well as directions these teams will go in the future.
Webinar attendees will learn:
- Trends and drivers for data team headcount, skill list, team managers, reporting structure (central versus local), internal team structure, and specialties within DM
- How older team structures like the competency center and center of excellence are giving way to new ones like DataOps and DevOps
- Shifts toward preferred methods such as agile and lean plus preferred platforms such as cloud and multicloud
Philip Russom, Ph.D.