What makes data analysts’ work difficult?

Nowadays, data analysis is a rather recruited field. There is a huge need for well-qualified proffesionals. No concidence, that many people want to break into this labor market as part of career-hack.

And this is not a problem. Currentrly we are lack of well-qualified professionals, who can use Power BI, Tableau or SQL on an advanced level.

And you are able to learn these softwares. It’s not brain surgery… If you are interested in these tools, I encourage you to learn them. In my previos post I have wrote about it:

Self-learning, self-developement

Now I want to write a little about the difficulties we encounter as a data analyst at daily work.

During learning of a software (Power BI, SQL, Access, whatever…), you are always in an almost ideal environment. You can practice on a well-structured database, and you can try all the features with them.

In real life, this is usually not the case.

Let's have a look what obstacles we have to face.

 

Data inputs are coming from many different systems

Companies want to handle their data efficient, and optimize their workflows. This is often done by working with more than 10 (or more) IT systems simultaneously (ERP, planning software, contract management tools, procurement management tools, inventory/warehouse management systems, etc…).

So the data analyst need to collect the datas from many different systems, which are not connected (or not in every case) with interfaces.

And it is not so easy to build a database that we can work with efficiently.

We need to find out how to connect all the data properly.

With a well-structured Power Query or SQL/Access query, this is managable.

Writing a good query structure is always take time, but it is certain that we can make top-notch reports and dashboards.

The other big obstacle is when we need to analyze data out of the corporate systems

It’s more difficult.

There are many cases when we need to analyze additional datas coming from separate excel sheets (which are not unified).

Here you van use VBA macros, you can copy+paste the datas, but surely you can do a lot of extra additional/manual work. It takes time and not efficient. And it can easily occure data loss.

And no one likes to make the presentation of the management meeting based on false data.

We need to achieve to eliminate all these manual work. If all the datas coming from one of the corporate softwares, than we can automatize our reports/dashboards.

We have no authorization to access some data

As a data analyst, we want to have read+write access to everything. And our IT department wants the opposite of this.

But we need to acknowledge that there are sensitive data (wage costs, confidental project data, strategical financiak datas, etc…).

 

If we do not have the opportunity to access a data set (but we have to analyze it ...), then as an intermediate solution, we can surely get a consolidated statement from these datas. And then we can analyze them as a seperated spreadsheet (see previous bullet point: datas out of the systems…)

We need to change data in real-time.

It’s not a typical data analysis problem, but it happens often that we need to change data during a meeting (e.g.: forecast meetings), and we need to get a managable output at the end of the meeting.

In this case, we have no chance to make Power BI Dashboard. The Excel table remains.

I am not a believer that Excel is a good data analysis tool (although I use it a lot, I love it, but not for data analysis).

However, this is the fastest solution and, last but not least, a solution that can be handled for everyone.

Limited software access

If a company has a usual workflow (which is not necessarily good or efficient, but works), they will not always open for innovations.

Especially not, if they have to pay for it.

I mean, if I want to present the weekly report as a Power Bi dashboard, but the company doesn’t want to pay for Power BI, than we need to find another solution.

Sometimes it’s not easy to get MS Access to be insatlled to your PC, not an SQL server.

 

So the life of data analysts is not easy, but there should be a solution for everything! 😊