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The roles of data managers and professionals are evolving quickly. Until recently, databases were standalone environments that were only accessible to a limited numbers of users. These databases had caretakers, database administrators, who saw to the day-to-day operation of these systems, and regulated the data that flowed into and out of them.
Enterprises recognize that data is their most strategic asset, and that ability to leverage information coming out of their systems means competitive advantage. Data professionals are being called upon to provide services and value well beyond administrative tasks. Organizations need data professionals who will perform higher-level tasks and interact with the business, taking roles as "data stewards." To be successful in this environment, many data professionals indicate they need additional training, new tools, improved automation of routine tasks and career advancement.
A new survey among members of the International DB2 Users Group (IDUG) finds that many data managers and professionals are expanding their range of expertise to provide higher-level services to enterprises. However, many feel that Data professionals are not receiving the training and support needed to improve their skills base.
In March and April 2008, Unisphere Research conducted a study for IDUG to measure the changes impacting the jobs of data managers and professionals. The survey was conducted in cooperation with CA. The survey was announced via an email notification to the IDUG membership list, which directed participants to a Web-based survey instrument. A total of 853 responses were collected by the survey deadline.
Survey respondents represented a cross-section of database platforms, job functions, and geographies. Respondents' job titles ranged from database administrators (54 percent), to IT consultants (eight percent), team leaders (six percent), and systems architects (five percent). (See Figures 25 through 30 in the appendix at the end of this report for more details on respondents' demographics.) Respondents also represented a wide range of sizes of organizations from many industries. At the top of the scale, about 36 percent came from organizations with more than 10,000 employees, and 29 percent said their companies make more than a billion US dollars in revenue each year. Another 21 percent represented companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. The largest segment of respondents, about 38 percent, came from the financial services and insurance sector, and another 13 represented government, educational, or nonprofit organizations. Another 13 percent came from service and consulting firms, and eight percent from high-tech manufacturers. Today's data professionals engage in a wide range of duties, from traditional database administration, database and application design, quality assurance, integrating applications, to managing performance and data security.
The survey looked at the training requirements of building an effective database team that can serve today's organization, and focused on four key areas shaping the job of the data professional: business consulting, application development and integration, database administration, and data security. The survey found respondents are actively engaged in all of these areas. Key findings from the survey include the following:
Improving database performance is driving many sites, and a majority of respondents see a strong connection between improving database performance and overall corporate performance (increasing revenue/reducing costs). Data managers are concerned about managing the explosion of data, and are looking for ways to manage the process. Performance management skills are the most sought-after skill among data professionals. To address their need for new skills, most cite forms of ad hoc on-the-job training. In-person, off-site training in the form of industry conference and local users groups is the approach most respondents prefer.
Top business challenges include managing data growth, compliance, enterprise information management, business intelligence and master data management.
Forty-four percent reported their time engaged in business consulting activities has grown over the past year. Most efforts are focused on database design/modeling and resolving storage or archiving issues.
Thirty-seven percent reported their time engaged in application development and integration has grown over the past year. Most efforts focus on SQL statement development and data modeling and design.
Forty-one percent reported their time engaged in data security activities has grown over the past year. Most activity in this area has been focused on access control and user authentication, and managing users, roles and permissions. By working closely with the business to achieve better data output and performance, data managers and professionals are dramatically changing their roles within organizations, with new tools as well as resourcefulness. For example, one respondent noted how within his organization, "a specific partitioned data warehouse table was closely reaching its maximum size and this table is used by operational systems also. I increased the partition numbers from 20 to 100 to better distribute the data and slow partition growth rate. An outage on this table would result in a severity 1-level outage of many critical operational systems."
Respondents were in agreement that improving both database and business process performance is one of the most essential parts of their jobs, and they provided numerous examples of how they took action in this area. For example, one respondent discussed how discrete changes to SQL statements were frequently credited with dramatic performance gains and substantial cost and time savings. “Tuning SQL statements in some programs increased performance 1000%,” he said. Another indicated that “SQL statements are regularly reviewed, explained, and tuned. Efforts in this area have had dramatic results, enabling hours-long running programs to complete in seconds.” Still, another explained, “I was able to improve performance of an application by analyzing indexes and make proper change to optimize data retrieval.”
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