Identify and Build the Data & Analytics Skills Your Organization Needs

Blending soft skills with deep technical expertise is essential for building successful data & analytics teams.

Analyst Perspective

Blending soft skills with deep technical expertise is essential for building successful data & analytics teams.

In today's changing environment, data & analytics (D&A) teams have become an essential component, and it is critical for organizations to understand the skill and talent makeup of their D&A workforce. Chief data & analytics officers (CDAOs) or other equivalent data leaders can train current data employees or hire proven talent and quickly address skills gaps.

While developing technical skills is critical, soft skills are often left underdeveloped, yet lack of such skills is most likely why the data team would face difficulty moving beyond managing technology and into delivering business value.

Follow Info-Tech's methodology to identify and address skills gaps in today's data workplace. Align D&A skills with your organization's data strategy to ensure that you always have the right skills at the right time.

Ruyi Sun
Research Specialist,
Data & Analytics, and Enterprise Architecture
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

The rapid technological evolution in platforms, processes, and applications is leading to gaps in the skills needed to manage and use data. Some critical challenges organizations with skills deficiencies might face include:

• Time loss due to delayed progress and reworking of initiatives
• Poor implementation quality and low productivity
• Reduced credibility of data leader and data initiatives

Common Obstacles

Some common obstacles that could prevent you from identifying and building the data and analytics (D&A) skills your organization needs are:

• Lack of resources and knowledge to secure professionals with the right mixed D&A skills and the right experience/skill level
• Lack of well-formulated and robust data strategy
• Neglecting the value of soft skills and placing all your attention on technical skills

Info-Tech's Approach

Follow Info-Tech's guidance on the roles and skills required to support your D&A strategic growth objectives and how to execute an actionable plan:

• Define skills required for each essential data and analytics role
• Identify roles and skills gap in alignment with your current data strategy
• Establish action plan to close the gaps and reduce risks

Info-Tech Insight

Skills gaps are a frequently named obstacle to realizing corporate goals for D&A. Soft skills and technical skills are complementary, and a D&A team needs both to perform effectively. Identify the essential skills and the gap with current skills required by your organization's data strategy to ensure the right skill is available at the right time and to minimize applicable risks.

The rapidly changing environment is impacting the nature of work

Scarcity of data & analytics (D&A) skills

• Data is one of the most valuable organizational assets, and regardless of your industry, data remains the key to informed decision making. More than 75% of businesses are looking to adopt technologies like big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) in the next five years (World Economic Forum, 2023). As organizations pivot in response to industry disruptions and technological advancements, the nature of work is changing, and the demand for data expertise has grown.
• Despite an increasing need for data expertise, organizations still have trouble securing D&A roles due to inadequate upskilling programs, limited understanding of the skills required, and more (EY, 2022). Notably, scarce D&A skills have been critical. More workers will need at least a base level of D&A skills to adequately perform their jobs.

Organizations struggle to remain competitive when skills gaps aren't addressed

Organizations identify skills gaps as the key barriers preventing industry transformation:

60% of organizations identify skills gaps as the key barriers preventing business transformation (World Economic Forum, 2023)

43% of respondents agree the business area with the greatest need to address potential skills gaps is data analytics (McKinsey & Company, 2020)

Most organizations are not ready to address potential role disruptions and close skills gaps:

87% of surveyed companies say they currently experience skills gaps or expect them within a few years (McKinsey & Company, 2020)

28% say their organizations make effective decisions on how to close skills gaps (McKinsey & Company, 2020)

Neglecting soft skills development impedes CDOs/CDAOs from delivering value

According to BearingPoint's CDO survey, cultural challenges and limited data literacy are the main roadblocks to a CDO's success. To drill further into the problem and understand the root causes of the two main challenges, conduct a root cause analysis (RCA) using the Five Whys technique.

(Source: BearingPoint, 2020)

Five Whys RCA

Problem: Poor data literacy is the top challenge CDOs face when increasing the value of D&A. Why?

• People that lack data literacy find it difficult to embrace and trust the organization's data insights. Why?
• Data workers and the business team don't speak the same language. Why?
• No shared data definition or knowledge is established. Over-extensive data facts do not drive business outcomes. Why?
• Leaders fail to understand that data literacy is more than technical training, it is about encompassing all aspects of business, IT, and data. Why?
• A lack of leadership skills prevents leaders from recognizing these connections and the data team needing to develop soft skills.

Problem: Cultural challenge is one of the biggest obstacles to a CDO's success. Why?

• Decisions are made from gut instinct instead of data-driven insights, thus affecting business performance. Why?
• People within the organization do not believe that data drives operational excellence, so they resist change. Why?
• Companies overestimate the organization's level of data literacy and data maturity. Why?
• A lack of strategies in change management, continuous improvement & data literacy for data initiatives. Why?
• A lack of expertise/leaders possessing these relevant soft skills (e.g. change management, etc.).

As organizations strive to become more data-driven, most conversations around D&A emphasize hard skills. Soft skills like leadership and change management are equally crucial, and deficits there could be the root cause of the data team's inability to demonstrate improved business performance.

Data cannot be fully leveraged without a cohesive data strategy

Business strategy and data strategy are no longer separate entities.

• For any chief data & analytics officer (CDAO) or equivalent data leader, a robust and comprehensive data strategy is the number one tool for generating measurable business value from data. Data leaders should understand what skills are required to achieve these goals, consider the current skills gap, and build development programs to help employees improve those skills.
• Begin your skills development programs by ensuring you have a data strategy plan prepared. A data strategy should never be formulated independently from the business. Organizations with high data maturity will align such efforts to the needs of the business, making data a major part of the business strategy to achieve data centricity.
• Refer to Info-Tech's Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy blueprint to ensure data can be leveraged as a strategic asset of the organization.

Info-Tech Insight

The process of achieving data centricity requires alignment between the data and business teams, and that requires soft skills.

Follow Info-Tech's methodology to identify the roles and skills needed to execute a data strategy

1. Define Key Roles and Skills

   Digital Leadership Skills, Soft Skills, Technical Skills

   Key Output

   • Defined essential competencies, responsibilities for some common data roles

2. Uncover the Skills Gap

   Data Strategy Alignment, High-Level Data Maturity Assessment, Skills Gap Analysis

   Key Output

   • Data roles and skills aligned with your current data strategy
   • Identified current and target state of data skill sets

3. Build an Actionable Plan

   Initiative Priority, Skills Growth Feasibility, Hiring Feasibility

   Key Output

   • Identified action plan to address the risk of data skills deficiency

Info-Tech Insight

Skills gaps are a frequently named obstacle to realizing corporate goals for D&A. Soft skills and technical skills are complementary, and a D&A team needs both to perform effectively. Identify the essential skills and the gap with current skills that fit your organization's data strategy to ensure the right skill is available at the right time and to minimize applicable risks.

Research benefits

Member benefits

• Reduce time spent defining the target state of skill sets.
• Gain ability to reassess the feasibility of execution on your data strategy, including resources and timeline.
• Increase confidence in the data leader's ability to implement a successful skills development program that is aligned with the organization's data strategy, which correlates directly to successful business outcomes.

Business benefits

• Reduce time and cost spent hiring key data roles.
• Increase chance of retaining high-quality data professionals.
• Reduce time loss for delayed progress and rework of initiatives.
• Optimize quality of data initiative implementation.
• Improve data team productivity.

Insight summary

Overarching insight

Skills gaps are a frequently named obstacle to realizing corporate goals for D&A. Soft skills and technical skills are complementary, and a D&A team needs both to perform effectively. Identify the essential skills and the gap with current skills that fit your organization's data strategy to ensure the right skill is available at the right time and to minimize applicable risks.

Phase 1 insight

Technological advancements will inevitably require new technical skills, but the most in-demand skills go beyond mastering the newest technologies. Soft skills are essential to data roles as the global workforce navigates the changes of the last few years.

Phase 2 insight

Understanding and knowing your organization's data maturity level is a prerequisite to assessing your current skill and determining where you must align in the future.

Phase 3 insight

One of the misconceptions that organizations have includes viewing skills development as a one-time effort. This leads to underinvestment in data team skills, risk of falling behind on technological changes, and failure to connect with business partners. Employees must learn to continuously adapt to the changing circumstances of D&A.

While the program must be agile and dynamic to reflect technological improvements in the development of technical skills, the program should always be anchored in soft skills because data management is fundamentally about interaction, collaboration, and people.

Tactical insight

Seeking input and support across your business units can align stakeholders to focus on the right data analytics skills and build a data learning culture.