21st Century HR Tips
August 29, 2019
If it isn’t about the Benjamins, what drives business intelligence analysts away? ITProPortal considers, “Why Are BI Engineers so Frustrated? (It’s Not Money).” Reporter Amnon Drori notes that business intelligence salaries are on par with other IT workers’. However, much of their work occurs behind the scenes and is not well understood by others, meaning it is often underappreciated. Furthermore, the work itself can be some of the most frustrating in the software industry, involving tedious efforts to clean up and transform data in a never ending cycle. A lack of standardization and haphazard implementations make matters worse. Drori writes:
“In order to make data usable and searchable, metadata needs to be accurate, and organizations may have standards and specifications for metadata. But this tends to go by the wayside; departments that need to get their work done develop their own lingo and labels, and over the years, as organizations build up large caches of data and implement new databases, those differences grow – essentially rendering the data stored by a department useless to anyone in the organization other than itself. For example, an organization might record information about a customer’s location with a label called ‘location,’ ‘address,’ ‘city and state,’ etc. Whatever search system that is implemented needs to take into account these issues. This is a chronic – and central – problem for many organizations, and one that could seriously hamper their ability to find data at all. Of course, BI will come in and save the day – hence the frustration. Subject your BI staff to a few cycles of this metadata confusion and remediation, and you begin to understand the staff turnover numbers.”
The article suggests a couple remedies. Companies should take the time to set and enforce policies around metadata terms and data-storage protocols throughout the organization. This includes establishing consistent data catalogues, dictionaries, and glossaries. Automated remediation systems can then be used to clean up legacy data and bring it in line with those standards. Once all that juicy data is properly labeled, BI engineers can turn their attention to the satisfying, and profitable, work—deriving insights about products, customers, markets, and the company itself. That should give them enough reason to stick around.
Cynthia Murrell, August 29, 2019
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