Organizational Leadership for Data Analytics

The organization of a company is not just to ensure the hierarchical structure (or any structure for that matter) is setup to allow for effective communication in the leader/follower dyadic relationship. The goal is to establish an organization for the company that facilitates growth for both the company and employees.

In today's growing data intelligence world, companies continue to struggle with how (and where) to place their analytics group. Should data scientists and data analysts be part of IT? After all they write code, maintain data marts, and spend hours searching for gems inside the company's data. These areas have traditionally been the domain of IT. Or should these people be organized into marketing departments? When you're searching for new ways to create marketing plans and finding new customers then this would make sense. What companies all over the world are realizing is that every department, just like every company, is an IT department.

Now I do not believe that marketing and accounting departments should establish their own IT infrastructure. Perish the thought. More problems than good can only come from such an organization. Bridging technology with business needs is the reality for any organization. This is where business process management (BPM) begins to shine for a company.

The objective here is to have a process owner (PO), one in charge of analytics, build a process that flows horizontally across the company structure. The PO recruits the right talent (database administrators, data scientists, data analysts, marketing SMEs, etc) to be part of the process. This enables the employees to remain in their respective knowledge domains within the company structure, but also recognizes them as key stakeholders for analytics. As a CIO if you think your data scientists/analysts should be part of the marketing group, they can be, but they're still part of the analytics process. However, if you think these people should be part of the IT group, they can be, but the process is not impacted.

You can check out more organizational concepts around business intelligence here.