You Need A Data Processor or A Data Processing Solution?

Volume and velocity of data has multiplied immensely, giving rise to various data-related challenges. In order to deal with these challenges in an effective manner, several industry-verticals are quickly adopting a data-driven approach. And this has increased the demand for data processing and analytics, leading to exponential increase in the demand for skilled data processing specialists.

But, if you have to be honest, do you feel that the solution to this is to find a perfect Data Scientist? How is it that your success depends on one individual? A lot of our clients have proved this methodology wrong by shifting their focus from an individual to a team. Also it becomes very easy to hire a team that comprise of all the skills and each individual among the team compliments each other for the skills they need.

Finding skilled individuals – a challenge

Data processor is a tough role to play as it requires a mix of different skills. Not only it needs some technical expertise in data languages and machine learnings, but also requires strong numerical and business skills (like flawless communication and influencing). And needless to say, searching an ideal resource with all these skills, gives a tough time to the recruitment team. To counter this situation, several recruiters place emphasis on finding a team of professionals possessing distinct skill-sets, rather than going for a perfectly data processor.

Data processing is like a Swiss army knife!

Data processing is not a standalone process, instead is an amalgamation of various processes and people, together they form a team alike Swiss army knife. A multi-purpose tool, Swiss knives provide every useful tool. Similarly, data processing team is about bringing together various processes and people (skilled resource) on a single platform performing towards a unanimous task.

It is not just about the processes, but also about people!

Whether in sports or business, it is always the group of high-performing individuals that form the core of any successful team. Since Google, first came up with the job title ‘Data Scientist’, a range of such associated job titles started to emerge in the market. Data science has now spread across a team, rather than just one specialist. So, you have a data engineer, a data architect, a data programmer, to support the team and accomplish the task of processing, structuring and visualizing complex data. There are more chances that your business requirements, even your data science requirements, are best addressed when data processing solutions providers walk in, rather than one specialist?

What determines the success of a team?

Dig dipper and you would find businesses with large data science functions that succeeded in recruiting individuals, strong in only a part of the ideal job scenario. Say for example recruiting skilled coders to complement existing statisticians, adding individuals with strong business analysis and communication skills to more technical teams, or artistic data visualizers to teams with the other data skills. All these approaches have proven to strengthen their teams.

As Aristotle once said, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’, businesses needs to concentrate on assembling multi-skilled teams to achieve better outputs through such collaboration. So, assigning individuals with sound business analysis and communication skills to team of technical experts, or a person with artistic data visualizers will prove to strengthen the team and ultimately simplify the complicated task of processing large data.

Moreover, it is observed that team-work make a difference in the businesses, as compared to (highly skilled) individual data processor. The answer to whether it is better to hire a data processor or data processing team depends on the requirement of your business and how much you intend to invest to grow. However; it is worth not forgetting the good old Swiss knife legacy.

Chirag Shivalker heads the digital content for Hi-Tech BPO, an India based firm recognized for the leadership and ability to execute innovative approaches to data management.