Communications of the ACM
Prepare to Fill One of 1.5 Million Data-Savvy Manager Jobs
Credit: Atlanta Computer Repair
According to a recent McKinsey study, by 2018 the United States faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts to analyze big data and make decisions based on their findings. As a result, IT workers and educators should be thinking about the opportunities that this shortage presents and how workers can become data-savvy managers. There has been an explosion of information in almost all organizations and functions, and much of it is unstructured data that is difficult to analyze. Not only that, but the amount is doubling every two years. There is a void of skills, both deep analytical skills required for data mining and the knowledge needed to make sense of this data for everything from finance to marketing.
Workers in a variety of functional roles are starting to understand the value of being data-savvy and how the different kinds of data and analyses can be used to influence behavior, improve organizational policies and practices, or make better decisions. Predictive analytics uses past and current data to answer questions about the future. Scorecarding tracks business metrics against strategic and operational outcomes for better decision-making. Dashboards provide real-time presentations and aggregations of relevant data. Social analytics provide metrics from social media and networks. Content analytics provides an assessment of available content and how it is used. Web analytics tracks traffic and key words used to find particular sites.
Universities can provide students with data-savvy backgrounds in four ways. They can extend the current course curriculum with insights and exercises so that people are comfortable with information and analytics. Second, they can develop specific courses that focus on the applications for marketing, finance, social networks, and operations. There needs to be a basic understanding of natural language processing to know the kinds of questions that can be asked, but the focus needs to be on the questions and problems to be solved. Third, they can create more Centers of Excellence that are cross-college collaborations. Fourth, they can establish degree programs. DePaul, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern and many other schools are formalizing the background for data savvy managers, as are community colleges and continuing education providers.
From Web Worker Daily
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