Computerworld -
Centerstone Research Institute built a team of business intelligence specialists for its four-year-old analytics division by hiring some new talent and bringing in some of its own IT and business workers and training them in the social sciences or technical skills they lacked.
But Russell Galyon, CRI's director of analytics, says he's now finding it tougher to expand the eight-person unit. Galyon says he can't find the unique combination of skills he needs in CRI's existing pool of employees, and he can't easily find that talent in the open labor market, either. Even a headhunter he hired to help with the search has found the task challenging.
"We get people who meet the tech qualifications, they have programming skills, but they don't have the skills to go into a meeting with a business owner and take abstract ideas and make them understandable," he says. "And that's hard to train for."
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Computerworld - Centerstone Research Institute built a team of business intelligence specialists for its four-year-old analytics division by hiring some new talent and bringing in some of its own IT and business workers and training them in the social sciences or technical skills they lacked.
But Russell Galyon, CRI's director of analytics, says he's now finding it tougher to expand the eight-person unit. Galyon says he can't find the unique combination of skills he needs in CRI's existing pool of employees, and he can't easily find that talent in the open labor market, either. Even a headhunter he hired to help with the search has found the task challenging.
"We get people who meet the tech qualifications, they have programming skills, but they don't have the skills to go into a meeting with a business owner and take abstract ideas and make them understandable," he says. "And that's hard to train for."
Galyon isn't the only one having trouble filling BI positions.
In a recent Computerworld reader poll, 46% of the 52 respondents said they are either currently hiring BI specialists or plan to do so in the next 12 months. Of those who are hiring, 71% said they feel that finding and recruiting BI specialists is either somewhat difficult or very difficult.
Don't expect it to get easier anytime soon.
McKinsey Global Institute's May 2011 "Big Data" report says that by 2018, demand for people with deep analytical talent could be 50% to 60% greater than the supply in the U.S.
The hiring challenge stems from the basic rule of supply and demand: Companies are creating more positions than there are qualified workers. But the roots of that equation are deep, and relate to the evolution of business intelligence software and the organizational use of data.
As organizations become increasingly sophisticated in the way they use the vast volumes of data they collect, they're finding that they need professionals with unique skills who know how to handle it. But these professionals aren't strictly IT folks, nor can they be business specialists who don't have deep technical acumen. Rather, this is an emerging hybrid position that requires someone who can manage data, handle software, ask the right business questions and present results.
"You're combining technical, functional and business acumen. It is a unique breed, and there aren't a lot of them out there," says Stacy Blanchard, who leads the organization effectiveness services and human capital unit at Accenture Analytics.
But companies must find people with these skills or train them if they want to compete in the future, Blanchard says.
According to a 2010 Accenture report called "Getting Serious about Analytics: Better Insights, Better Outcomes," a growing number of companies are developing advanced analytic capabilities to gain a competitive advantage. Those companies realize that analytics is more than just collecting and storing data, and it's more than just deploying BI technologies. It's about embedding analytics into their decision-making and strategic processes and using data to drive decisions.
Not surprisingly, Blanchard says demand for BI specialists increases as the use of BI matures at those companies -- and as others inch toward that model.
BI Goes to School
Building a Better BI Specialist
In 2008, students at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce asked associate professor Barbara Haley Wixom to teach them SQL. Recruiters, they said, wanted them to know that database language.
So Wixom, a data warehousing and business intelligence specialist, held a special three-hour evening class that drew about 80 students willing to give up an evening and earn no credits just to learn what was becoming a hot skill that would look good on their résumés.
Given that demand, Wixom says lessons in SQL and other BI skills became part of the regular course work the following semester, as the college started to incorporate a bigger focus on analytics and BI technologies into its curriculum.
Wixom, co-author of a 2010 report called "The State of Business Intelligence in Academia," says more and more colleges and other institutions are developing academic programs to teach these skills. The idea is to prepare workers for companies that need to maximize the value of their investments in business intelligence.
Others active in educating students include IBM, which teamed up with Columbia, DePaul, Fordham and Yale to provide analytics training, and Accenture, which developed its own Analytics Academy.
"Universities are trying to catch up and produce the right candidates, and there are some leading schools who are getting there, but that's going to take time to develop," Wixom says. "In the meantime, the hiring is just going to be really difficult."
— Mary K. Pratt
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