Meet your new data department

You may have never even thought about it but your business is dependent on data. You might be creating it to be shared as entertainment or as a training course. It could be service requests coming in from clients as they need you to do pieces of work or you might be processing payroll, invoices or mortgages for other companies or even scanning barcodes in order to sell packets of crisps, books, toys and so on. All of those processes involve the creation, manipulation and processing of data.

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Your business does not just use data, it is data. You have a company registration number and various properties stored in a database. How vital is data, well just like atoms, data makes up everything.

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Every company needs the right data skills to be able compete with each other but the big companies have a major advantage, deep pockets. They get to use the latest and greatest tools and techniques to squeeze out every possible fraction of improvement they can but let us tell you a secret. 75% of companies do not trust their data and the bigger they are the worse state they can be in. When they are big they can be slow, when you are small you can be nimble. The key is to keep things simple, test, learn and implement those small wins across your company so they add up to major advantages in the marketplace.

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So who are these data professionals and what skills do they have that you need to be able to put to good use?

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Data Architect - Designs how data is to be stored and ETL processes that are required to gather information from source systems whilst maintaining lineage and integrity.

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Data Engineer - The Mario of the data world. They build out the physical pipelines from the designs the architects created and get the data for the data analysts.

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Database Administrator - Guardians of the database. They protect, secure, optimise and manage database, the backend of every application.

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Data Analyst - Digs into the data prepared by the data engineers.

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Data Integration Engineer - Putting together data sets from various sources, similar to a data engineer but often works integrating data from disparate systems and applications.

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Data Scientist - Digs deep into the data to reveal insight and value.

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AI Engineer - Here's a shocker, AI relies on data. If you think your untrusted data is doing damage now, you have seen nothing yet. Super charge that bad data to make terrible decisions..... or sort it out at the ground level, build trust and super charge great decisions based off clean, trusted data.

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