Data Management Staffing a Rising Tide

September, 2013

To no one’s surprise, the number of data architects, data analysts, and other personnel involved with the management of data has been trending upward as businesses seek to harvest more and more intelligence from the ever-rising quantities of data accumulating in their data warehouses.

As a percentage of the IT staff, data management personnel have grown over the past four years from an average 2.8% of the IT staff in 2010 to 3.6% in 2013, as shown in Figure 1 from our study, Data Management Staffing Ratios.

data Mgmt staffingFig 1 - Data Management Staffing a Rising Tide


In 2009, data management was 3.2% of the IT staff. This was the first year we tracked this category in our annual survey of 200 IT organizations. As such, it is uncertain whether the decline was recession-related or had some other cause. The trend since 2010, however, shows a clear and consistent upward course, which aligns with expectations about the growth in this function.

Data management is a mission-critical function that crosses departmental borders and involves business intelligence, data warehousing, and data security, among other functions. This category of IT employees, as we define it, includes IT staff members directly involved with business intelligence reporting, data warehouse applications, and data architecture.

It is a growing category that requires ongoing assessment. In the full study, we use three benchmarks to assess data management staffing levels: data management staff as a percentage of the IT staff, data management staff as a percentage of the application group, users per data management staff member, and applications per data management staff member.
 


This Research Byte is a brief overview of our report on this subject, Data Management Staffing Ratios. 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).

Do you also need staffing ratios for other IT job functions? Consider this collection of all of our staffing ratio reports, which bundles them all into a single report at a significant discount: IT Staffing Ratios–Special Report Bundle.