What is the role of a data analyst in a company?. What is Data Analytics cycle?

I think most of you have read my previous article which is Essential skills to know in Data Analytics to get a Job. You got the point that what should you have to learn, but what is the role of a data analyst in a company? How they work in a company? You have a lot of questions, so let me answer one by one. First, I will tell some important things about data, and then we will explore the main points.

Data is the most important thing today. Because whatever you do, you generate data. Whether you watch Netflix, or do online shopping ,or scroll through an Instagram post. You are generating a ton of data. You might be wondering, but you are generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day. It may seem nothing to you, and you might not have any idea how important your data is. But data is worth more than anything in the world today.

That is the reason why utilizing that data is the most important thing to do for any company. That's where the Data analyst comes into the picture. Let me give you a very realistic example that you have been experienced before. 

So, whenever you plan to buy something from Amazon, or Flipkart, You search for something, and then you leave. Suppose you searched for iPhone, and then you left due to some emergency, or because you changed your mood. After some time, you open your Instagram, Facebook, or Youtube, you have notice that the exact same iPhone ad is showing in front of you that you searched for a few hours ago. This is called customer-specific marketing. Now, you may ask how did amazon, or FB know that you want an iPhone? It is because you searched for iPhone before also. They have stored that data, they also track your activities, and those activities also generate data. This is how it works. So, now I think you understand the power of data, so let's move ahead.

What are the roles of a data analyst?

1. Company-specific goal.

2. Cleaning data & mining data.

3.  report data with visualization.

1. Company-specific goal.

Whenever a company hires someone, then it wants something to get done. If the company is working on some project, then it will hire employees to get that done. So, in the term of data, there is a data scientist who works for the company to find patterns, and trends which will help the company to grow its business. 

In order to achieve that, he can requests data from the data analyst to give him data in the format he wants. Because what happens is that there is a lot of data that is mostly stored in the databases which are unorganized, and some part of data is missing. So, the data analyst helps him to get data from the database, data warehouse, and he filters it out as the data scientist tells him to do. He will eliminate unwanted data, and provides data which is more relevant, and makes sure that there are no missing fields in that.

So, then the data scientist can work easily on that data because the data analyst had already given him a cleaned and properly filled data.

2. Cleaning data and mining data.

This is the major role that data analysts have to do anywhere. Because when it comes to data entry, or gathering data from other people, there is major chances that data will be improper, and it will lack so many important data fields. That is why whenever a company wants data from their database, they generally put data analysts to work there. They put them to clean the data, to put some mathematical or computational algorithm, to fill those empty data fields. In short, data analyst can help in keeping data in organized manner, which they can use for their further business planning.

3. Report data with visualization

Look, Data is only useful when other people can understand. Who are these other people?. They can be business analysts, investors, marketing teams, etc. Data is useful when non-technical people can also understand. What do you mean by that? Okay, let me explain.

When the company is making some product, let's say X, then they have business experts, marketing team, contract dealer like that person. These people don't have any technical knowledge like how to clean data, how to apply some algorithms, they don't know about these things. Their goal is to sell products, and how they can increase their sale?. They have expertise in business, how to do marketing, how to make deals, how to increase sales, they know those kinds of things. So, there is no use in giving them complicated data that they will never understand.

So, what data analyst do is they first filter out data which is useful, then they clean them, and fill some missing values if empty fields are found. Finally, they make an excel sheet which contains data, and also make charts and this is how they create the whole report. So, now business analysts can easily understand charts, and can make decisions. For example, if a graph shows that people with age more than 30 buy company's product more, so the company should focus on them more. That's a simple example, but there are more complicated things there.

That is why data analysts not only have to master technical skills, but they also should be prepared to represent against business people.

What is the data analytics cycle?

The data analytics cycle is nothing, but it is a process from where data analysts start their work, and finish it. It consists of 5 steps.

1. Acquire

2. Explore

3. Visualize

4. Test

5. Study

As I explained earlier, the first need is to get the data to work with. So, first it is about acquiring data from databases, or warehouse. Now because data is in unorganized form and incomplete so, he(data analyst) has to apply his skills, and put some mathematical, and computational algorithms on data. Which will reduce his tension, because it will eliminate all the unwanted data, and it will fill all the missing values which are necessary.

Once data becomes more reliable, and filtered then he will try to find some patterns, or correlation between the datasets so that he can find something important information. For example, if he has computer shop data then he will find that whenever customers buy a processor, they also buy a motherboard according to its compatibility. I will give you one more example; if you go to a mall, and then go for the checkout, you can see there are many chocolates that stand near the cash counter. So, there is a high probability that you go for checkout, and buy some chocolate for your kid, or for your girlfriend. So, how exactly they know that, why should you do that?. Because when that mall was putting chocolates into the inner side of the compartment then chocolates were not selling enough. And when this data went to the business analyst, he applied his skills that how can I increase choclate sales?.

What type of data goes to the business analyst?. Obviously, filtered data report. So, data analyst have to make a report, and visualization before sending to the business analyst.

When everything gets done, then he again tests his data sets to find new things that may help the company. He makes a study about how, he is doing things, what he is using to do things. A data scientist can help him if needed.

So, this is the whole cycle of Data analytics. I hope you got the simplest explanation. If you have any doubts, then please make sure to comment down below. We read, and reply to every single comment. Also you can suggest, which article you want me to write next?. I would love to do that. So, till then keep learning, we will meet you soon.

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