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As any London Underground rider can attest, “Mind the Gap” is a message reinforced many times on every trip. Yet when it comes to filling today’s pervasive data management talent shortage, minding the gap often seems like a journey without a destination.  

But let’s face it, data management is a challenging arena covering a diverse data landscape that spans myriad technologies, multiple disciplines, and every business domain. The phrase, “It takes a village,” comes to mind.

Further, these challenges are growing exponentially as massive data trends, such as the ten I identified in a recent blog, combine to make data management more complex and difficult than ever. This puts a premium on finding and retaining the best data management talent, including data architects, data engineers, database administrators, data stewards, and so on.

As a provider of data management software solutions, we see how much our customers struggle to attract and retain the right data management talent. While recognizing there is no one size fits all approach, this blog seeks to help our customers “mind their ‘data management talent’ gap” in three important ways.  

1. Radically simplify your complex data management processes 

Data management solutions have evolved over many years resulting in a hodgepodge of sometimes adjacent/sometimes overlapping tools. These silos of data management functionality along with aging, inefficient processes conspire to consume extra resources without providing extra benefit. But what if you could free up a large share of those resources by radically simplifying your data management processes?

Take your data integration process for example. It is significantly simpler and faster to integrate data with TIBCO^® Data Virtualization than it is when trying to make traditional physical integration with all of its complex mappings, ETLs, staging schemas, and destination schemas work. In fact, data engineering staffing savings of 40 percent are typical. 

Rather than using three or more distinct tools to support metadata management, catalog services, and data governance processes, what if you could use one product to do them all as you can with TIBCO Cloud^™ Metadata? This lightens your data management workload by reducing set up, administration, and execution efforts, while also speeding up new employee learning curves. 

Rather than using three or more distinct tools to support metadata management, catalog services, and data governance processes, what if you could use one product to do them all? Click To Tweet

2. Team with your business to add value 

When it comes to today’s complex data landscape, IT doesn’t have the resources to go it alone. Your business staff can add value in a number of ways. One way is by developing citizen data engineering talent on the business side to complement your overworked IT data engineers. 

Let’s drill down on this citizen data engineering opportunity. As mentioned above, your IT data engineers can use TIBCO Data Virtualization to efficiently provision hundreds of reusable business views. From these views, your business analysts can quickly find the data they need, improving analytics productivity. But when just a bit more data engineering is required to further prepare and refine the business view for a unique need, you don’t need to add that to your IT data engineering queue. Instead, your business analysts can use specialized, citizen data engineer targeted functionality to finish the task. 

Another way your business can address the data management talent shortage is by enlisting business domain experts, since who knows more about your data than your business users who create and use it every day. For example, at Panera Bread, store managers who know their store layouts better than anyone, use TIBCO EBX^™ to maintain their individual store configurations in the master data repository. Similarly, corporate chefs maintain menu, recipe, and ingredient master data. 

With this new business-IT partnership, both sides work together to assess your needs and skills. They then collaborate to close your data management skills gap by proactively maximizing the value add each side can contribute.

3. Embed intelligence

Another way to address your data management talent shortage is to augment your people with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). IDC analyst Stewart Bond outlines multiple such augmentation opportunities in his March 2020 report, The AI Automation Framework Applied to Data Integration and Data Intelligence Software. 

By adopting modern data management solutions, such as TIBCO Unify, you can take advantage of embedded AI/ML capabilities to automate multiple manual activities across metadata discovery, data quality, model design, code generation, query optimization, resource allocation, and more. 

Closing your data management talent gap

When it comes to managing your data if you are like most organizations, the skilled resources you require far exceed your current resources, which puts your ability to be a data-driven business at risk. 

But you don’t have to settle for the status quo when you can help fill your data management skills gap with the three approaches outlined above. For more on how to effectively and intelligently manage your data and enable your teams with better access, trust, and control for all your data, check out these helpful resources.

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