Month: March 2019

Glamour in Business Analytics

Or how mindset and attitude are most critical hiring criteria

If you need access to data, you usually go through some central entity. The department of Global Business Analytics. Their main skill is to be a guard keeper on who is allowed to send data, what data should be sent, how it’s transformed, and who has the right to gain access to data. Additionally, technical complexities around building on-premise data cubes required hiring highly skilled database and server admins.

It’s an exclusive club of professionals. They are in the center of the world. They are looked at in awe. Lines are queuing up every day to get a slice of their data for the next presentation to the CEO.

Business Analytics needs personalities who need this glamour.

There is an alternative way. Supported by technological advancement that make it easier to democratize data. Technologies that are cloud-based, focusing on ease of moving data, and delaying complex data transformation towards the end of the chain. And supported by organizations that believe in democratizing and decentralizing access to data.

It’s a way that removes the glamour from the Central Business Analytics team. It merely becomes an engineering team. Just like any other software engineering team. With technical challenges, interesting client interactions and a publicly visible roadmap to execute on. No glamour, no fuss, just work. Interesting and challenging work.

Embrace technology and start hiring for the right mindset.

The organization that shouldn’t exist

Or how to rethink your next org-chart.

Refactoring code is straight forward. I don’t have hard feelings deleting code. Potentially even enjoy it. This is different with organizations. While organizations must evolve, change and adopt, the speed and flexibility is still limited with regards to people.

So it’s critical that organizations that shouldn’t exists don’t start to exist. And I continue seeing it happening. And then people are surprised of a re-org once someone notices the problem. They are everywhere:

The software engineers maintaining a legacy system that are tasked to also re-invent the future instead of radically under-staffing the legacy system and truly focus on the future.

The DevOps team not believing in the company’s principles by holding on to a central, gate-keeping mindset and related staffing while it could focus on engineering, trust and enabling autonomous teams.

The project management office with a heavyweight, central quarterly planning process involving 10.000s of hours and imposing non-suitable processes to teams instead of working along simple principles and objectives leading to autonomously operating teams.

The system admins that believe in the past and continue hosting servers and building racks for virtual machines instead of embracing the cloud.

The security teams that continue purchasing expensive firewall hardware and worry about USB sticks being put into computers instead of following the more secure and lightweight zero-trust concept.

Embrace change. Be radical. Trust in people. Think of the future.