From Data to Insight: Work Practices of Analysts in the Enterprise

With greater availability of data, businesses are increasingly becoming data-driven enterprises, establishing standards for data acquisition, processing, infrastructure, and decision making. Enterprises now have people dedicated to performing analytic work to support decision makers. To better understand analytic work, particularly the role of enterprise business analysts, researchers interviewed 34 analysts at a large corporation. Analytical work occurred in an ecosystem of data, tools, and people; the ecosystem's overall quality and efficiency depended on the amount of coordination and collaboration. Analysts were the bridge between business and IT, closing the semantic gap between datasets, tools, and people. This article provides an overview of the analytic work in the enterprise, describing challenges in data, tools, and practices and identifying opportunities for new tools for collaborative analytics.