sascom voices - The sascom magazine blog

I love this idea of the analytics community being the "translation layer" within an organization. Customer Lori Bieda introduced the concept in the fourth quarter 2009 sascom column, Lost in translation:

For large organizations with many lines of business and deep, rich databases, making sense of information has become a business itself. What is needed now is a “translation layer” to ground businesses in fact-based decision making. The analytics community is ideally positioned to become the translation layer.

Bieda, who leads a team of 80 analysts at Canadian bank CIBC, explores this idea further in the new white paper, The Translation Layer.

The paper includes a useful chart defining and describing three roles for analytic workers in the tranlation layer:

• Analytics Community as SERVICE PROVIDER: Facilitates execution of analysis and research for the organization and provides analytical support to enable business decisions.
  
• Analytics Community as CONSULTANT: Acts as a centralized hub for all analytics and research knowledge and expertise in the organization and facilitates best practice information exchange related to that expertise.
  
• Analytics Community as BUSINESS DRIVER: Leverages domain expertise in analytics and
  research, combined with business knowledge, to filter, challenge and prioritize incoming requests for the benefit of overall business.

Which of these roles sounds familiar to you? Does one of them fit your job description? Or does your organization still need to create a translation layer?