Data warehouses are growing in size, scope, and complexity as they serve increasing numbers of demanding users. At the same time, government mandates such as those for e-discovery place pressures on organizations to expand data warehouse operations, while business units clamor for more business intelligence.
Yet not all organizations have a distinct data warehouse support staff. Currently, about 65% of all IT organizations have dedicated data warehouse staff, as Figure 1 shows.
This Research Byte is a summary of our full report, Staffing Ratios for Data Warehouse and BI Functions.
The larger the organization, the more likely it is that it has DW personnel: slightly less than half of small businesses report having DW staff, while 80% of large companies do so. Our survey shows that 61% of midsize companies have their own DW staff, which is slightly below the 65% level for all business sizes. Large organizations clearly are making the most use of these enterprise applications and are most likely to have distinct data warehouse employees within their operations.
In our survey, data warehouse staff specifically includes data warehouse, data architects, data analysts, and business intelligence personnel, regardless of their titles. Database administrators (DBAs)–IT staff members who implement and maintain the physical database layer–however, are not included in our definition.
The full version of this report, based on a survey of more than 200 IT organizations, provides benchmarks for staffing the data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) functions. We provide the ratio of data warehouse/BI staff to total IT staff for the composite sample and by organization size. We also provide median staffing ratios by business sector and discuss strategies for maximizing the efficiency of data warehousing/BI operations.
This Research Byte is a brief overview of our report on this subject, Staffing Ratios for Data Warehouse and BI Functions. The full report is available at no charge for Computer Economics clients, or it may be purchased by non-clients directly from our website (click for pricing).
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