Rare and Valuable Data Skills

Avoiding the data service desk trap

There is a silent struggle in your company that you as a data professional can fix with very little effort while at the same time demonstrating the tremendous value of the data team. But there’s a problem….you’re most likely blind to it.

And to add insult to injury they don’t even know you could do this easily.

Time for a history lesson.

When I was a business analyst one of the things I was often asked to do was to sit in and shadow operations teams (marketing, sales, customer service, etc.) Every now and then I’d notice them doing things that would baffle me.

While on the phone with a customer, a salesperson would jump between several applications (CRM, email, Excel, etc) to answer customer questions. Other times they would be copy/pasting information from these systems into Excel to create reports that were used by the whole team.

Flabbergasted I would ask why they were doing this. To them this was just how things worked, they had no idea I could write a SQL query in 10 minutes and automate away hours of meaningless work. Productivity gains would be tremendous.

On the other hand, the requests I was getting for data and reports were nothing like what I was witnessing. I started calling this “suffering in silence.” They had no idea I could solve their problems with very little effort while I had no idea they needed this in the first place.

How to avoid the data service desk trap

I often joke that the moment you walk into a company as a data professional asking what their data needs are, you’ve fallen into the “data service desk trap.” You think you’re being helpful instead you’re setting yourself up for endless toil.

You see, business users are often unaware of what data and information is available, or could be easily obtained from existing infrastructure. They also don’t know what’s possible to do with data.

This means there's a HUGE opportunity for you as a data professional to work directly with the business, discover exactly what’s needed, what can be solved with data and what the highest ROI requests are.

But you have to be proactive, not reactive. It requires a very particular set of skills; skills that are often not taught in any course and not seen as super valuable.

Rare and valuable skills

In one of my previous newsletter I wrote about the data expertise triad.

One of the legs of the triad is about mapping business systems with data. This is one area that often gets neglected. You can take a course and learn technical skills or math and statistics skills but there’s no training for learning about the business.

When I was sitting and shadowing operations teams, I wasn’t looking to learn how they did things. I was looking for points of struggle, ideally struggle I could alleviate easily with a simple report or a dashboard.

I was doing what’s known as “problem finding.”

Dan Pink in his book "To Sell is Human” writes that the skill of problem finding is far more valuable than the skill of problem solving. That book was published back in 2012.

In today’s age of advanced LLMs and Artificial Intelligence, problem solving is increasingly being performed by machines thus decreasing in value. Meanwhile the skill of problem finding (ie. figuring out what to ask the LLM and how to prompt it) is suddenly becoming very valuable.

So you tell me.

Do you want to sit back, waiting for requests to land on your desk, or would you prefer to take initiative actively seeking out important problems, crafting thoughtful solutions, pitching your ideas, and take on the work to deliver meaningful results?

And what’s even better, this is EASY!

That’s it for this issue, how you enjoyed it. Until next time.