3 min read
The Analytics Engineer from within your own organization
Do you recognize that problem? Your organization is too small for a full data team, but your ambitions are too big to keep things small. In earlier blogs I already showed how low-code tools like TimeXtender make a new generation of Analytics Engineers possible. In this blog I want to show why these Analytics Engineers in particular are an answer to this situation.
The Analytics Engineer I'm referring to is a professional who takes on multiple roles: talking with the business, building data warehouses, and developing front-end. This is possible today thanks to new technologies such as TimeXtender.
No more single point of failure
Anyone starting out with data often starts with a front-end specialist, someone skilled with a data visualization tool such as Power BI. This colleague often starts by building on a single application and a bunch of Excel files. That person is also the point of contact for the organization. After the first successes, this grows organically, and soon additional applications get unlocked. That's usually the moment a tool like Power BI becomes too limited, and demand for a data warehouse arises.
In the past you'd solve this by hiring an extra Data Engineer with different expertise from your existing employee. In effect, you remained just as vulnerable, because each role was still filled by a single person. If you want to reduce risk, knowledge shouldn't sit with one or two people, but should be carried by multiple employees.
The Analytics Engineer offers a solution for exactly this. By hiring one extra employee in this case and training your own front-end specialist, you quickly have two employees who understand each other's work and can take it over. This way you can grow without immediately having to grow large.
Growth from within your own organization
In the past it was much harder to become a Data Engineer. You had to study programming and have a lot of knowledge of databases and management. Nowadays, Data Warehouse Automation tools such as TimeXtender solve these problems for you, largely without you even noticing. This creates room for colleagues who already work in the organization to grow into the role.
For Analytics Engineers who also gather the business's needs, it's very valuable if they already know the organization. This makes upskilling your own employees very appealing: thanks to the automation TimeXtender offers, they get up to speed quickly, and thanks to their experience within the company, they're effective right away. This shows how the Analytics Engineer role is ideally suited for career switchers moving into the data field.
How E-mergo helps organizations get started
At E-mergo we encourage organizations to become self-sufficient with their data. We think along with the organizational setup, provide the right tooling such as TimeXtender, Power BI, Qlik, and other low-code solutions, and support specialist challenges such as architecture, strategy, and technical implementations.
And if it really gets complicated? Then our experts are ready to take over. This way you can quickly achieve success with data, let internal employees grow into new roles, scale up quickly without bottlenecks, and rely on E-mergo's backup whenever things get genuinely difficult for a while. Want to know more? Feel free to give us a call!
Written by Stefan Timmerman
BI Consultant