Every company is after data-driven decision-making, looking for trends in past performance to predict future risks and opportunities. Strategic planning requires clean data and people who understand the business’s most important signals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Therefore, data can be your company’s competitive advantage, but it takes a team to surface insights.
What is a data team / business intelligence team?
A data or business intelligence team is responsible for making data valuable to an organization. Although it is often said, “data is an asset,” in reality, data is often raw, inconsistent, and unusable.
A data or business intelligence team is responsible for the end-to-end process of making that raw data into insights, answers, and information.
What is business intelligence consulting?
Business intelligence (BI) consulting is the process of taking a business’s metrics or KPIs and visualizing them in actionable charts and graphs that the business can use. Raw data, itself, is NOT actionable. Therefore, working with a business intelligence team can help a company make sense of its data.
What is the relationship between a data team and business intelligence consulting?
The data team is going to consist of data engineers at a minimum and may consist of data analysts and data scientists. The business intelligence team, on the other hand, will work less directly with the raw data (the engineers do that). Both teams will have overlap where it comes to building predictive models or writing the math problems that result in visualized KPIs. Finally, the BI team will be the ones using the BI tools to visualize the data.
Related: What Is Analytics as a Service (AaaS)? Overview of Data Analytics Services & Consulting
What does a data/business intelligence team do?
A data team’s purpose and process can vary across different businesses. Ultimately, businesses want to extract value from data: answering questions, making decisions, and being informed.
Typically, a business intelligence team is responsible for shaping and presenting data to business stakeholders. This often comes in the form of reports and dashboards.
A data team may have broader responsibilities, including:
- Data engineering - organizing the data and optimizing for performance and maintenance
- Analytics engineering - transforming raw data from business systems into metrics, KPIs, and insights
- Business intelligence - writing reports, creating visualizations (embedded analytics), and delivering analytics to the end consumers
- Data analysis - deep-diving into data to answer specific questions
Why do I need a data team?
Businesses that become data-driven in their decision-making grow at an average of 30%, compared to all businesses at 3% (Forrester). Small businesses can often get by with reporting available from their applications, manual reporting, or no reporting at all.
As businesses grow, they need more timely information and consistent metrics and reporting. You need a data team when you know you have more valuable information hiding in your data, but it is difficult to make use of it. This can manifest in many ways such as:
- Reports requiring a specialized process that takes days or weeks
- Data from different systems or sources does not reconcile
- Your customers or employees do not have access to the data that you know is available
Related: 4 Stages of Data Maturity: Why Companies Continue to Invest in Analytics
Benefits of Using A Data Team and Business Intelligence Consulting
There are various benefits of using a data team along with business intelligence consulting services. Some of the benefits include:
You Can Scale Your Business Intelligence Team Up And Down As Needed
Rather than hiring, managing, and paying for an internal team, you can scale your business intelligence team up and down as your needs change. A data team will help plan your data strategy, manage your data roadmap with you, and break down your strategic goals into achievable service requests.
By having an expert ”data team” permanently assigned to your account, you’ll always get the same Lead Data Engineer and the same Data Product Owner for all your needs.
Most data teams use a customer Portal, through which you’ll always have visibility and control over your spending, priorities, and velocity. Your business intelligence team is a complete set of experts, on-demand as you need them.
Unlock Invaluable Insights Using Proven Best Practices
Navigating the data landscape can be overwhelming, but not when you have the right companions. A business intelligence (BI) team, a data-as-a-service team, offer more than just solutions; they are a scalable, fractional data team that’s permanently assigned to you.
This team, committed to understanding your business, becomes an integral part of your journey. As you chart your course in business intelligence, they’ll bring invaluable insights and proven best practices.
Expert Collaboration: Flexible, Adaptable, and Always Ready
In the ever-evolving landscape of business, your data needs can change and expand. Data consulting services, embodied by a data team, understand this dynamic nature. As your business intelligence team grows and pivots, which can be seen as your data platform team, is right there with you, creating and refining Data Assets that reflect the latest developments in your journey.
Whether you have specific queries that require ad hoc analyses or you're aiming to set up self-serve data analytics team structure pipelines, a business intelligence consulting approach ensures solutions that fit like a glove.
Need to scale up? A data team expands effortlessly, just like a flexible data engineering consulting service would.
Need to slow down? Only pay for what you need.
It’s like having an in-house data engineering team, ready to adjust and redefine as you chart new territories. Dive into growth, confident that your database team, is synced perfectly with every twist and turn.
3 Teams Combined In One, Tailored To Your Needs
In the current complex data landscape, having a strong data team is essential for effective data management and analysis. A well-structured data team can provide tailored business intelligence consulting services, functioning as a fractional data team that supports your organization’s needs.
This dedicated team typically integrates the roles of business intelligence, data engineering, and data platform specialists. By doing so, they help organizations navigate the complexities of data, ensuring clarity and confidence in decision-making.
Utilizing the combined expertise of data consulting services and business intelligence professionals allows businesses to remain informed, adaptable, and prepared for future growth. This approach fosters a data-driven culture that can respond effectively to changing demands and opportunities.
How to structure a data team?
The prevailing best practice to structure a data team is along the following responsibilities:
- A central data engineering team that brings data all into one place (often using ETL/ELT and a data warehouse)
- An analytics team that combines and transforms data from multiple sources into a single, unified, consistent reporting model
- Data analysts embedded in functional departments to further tailor the reporting model to answer department-specific questions
- Business intelligence experts (either centrally or embedded in departments) to create reports, dashboards, scheduled notifications, or other means of getting information to the right audiences
- A central data operations team (sometimes called “DataOps”) to provide support, monitor technical health, and manage data quality
How to measure the success of a data team?
The success of data teams is notoriously hard to measure because typically they enable other initiatives or departments to succeed. And they are typically cross-cutting, meaning they serve many different areas of the business.
Identify Initiatives Made Possible By Data Team
One approach is to identify strategic initiatives made possible by the efforts of the data team and to attribute a portion of that success to the data team.
For example, a company that launches a new data product to its customers may measure success by looking at new revenue or new leads generated. This product required efforts from several areas of the business, including the data team.
Project-By-Project Approach
A project-by-project approach can be appropriate for internal initiatives. For example, the marketing team may be able to optimize ad spend if metrics are clear and available to ad buyers. The data team that provides these data assets could be attributed for positive effects such as reducing ad spend, increasing ad effectiveness, or reducing customer acquisition costs.
What is the difference between a data engineer and a data analyst?
Imagine you are building a LEGO city:
The data engineer is like the person who gathers and organizes all the pieces, ensuring they are available to the builders.
The data analyst is like the person who determines what buildings, parks, and roads need to be built and creates them.
Another way to look at it is that a data engineer is like a librarian, gathering and organizing books. The data analyst pulls only the books needed for a specific research project and performs the research.
Work with Datateer, Offering Data Team & Business Intelligence Consulting Services
When pinpointing your needs, our data team seamlessly transforms them into service requests, followed by a clear quote. This business intelligence consultant approach ensures transparency—you're always informed about costs upfront, eliminating hourly tracking concerns.
The Datateer Client Portal offers you a central hub to manage your requests and monitor progress. Always be in the loop, always in control. What's more, your Data Crew is just a chat away, accessible via tools like Slack and the Portal's live chat feature.
This data services team allows you to dictate the pace of work, ensuring flexibility in both speed and budget management. For those with continuous requirements, we even offer discounted Reserved Time.
Bear in mind, data analytics often pull from "upstream" systems—complex entities that, over time, may require adjustments or face obstacles. Rest assured, your data team as a service stands ready, proactively addressing any challenges that emerge.
Staying connected matters to us. Regular touchpoints include detailed status checks, strategy reviews, and specialized workshops.