Hire a Data Visualization Engineer

What Happens First#

It happens. Your C-level leaders want to be able to get a high-level overview of how the company is doing in one aspect really quickly and in a way that is easy to read and understand. They want a report! Or at least that's what they say they want. Middle management now turns to their software engineers and says we need to build a report for the CEO to see an aggregate amount of data over x months divided by x individuals. At the end of the day, the engineers decide that the best way to see this and interact with it is using a business intelligence tool such as PowerBI or Tableau. An engineer then builds an awesome "dashboard" for the CEO to see the data she wants to see and they absolutely love it. It's exactly what they wanted. Except now, they want it to update all the time and they want an updated version of it sent to their email every day. Oh, and they want 3 more dashboards of other questions they wanted to answer as well. Next thing you know, the software engineers are not doing any actual "software development" and instead are building data visualizations as their main job.

The Impact#

As a software consultant, I've seen this happen at several companies. Outside of software engineers, I've also seen this same thing happen to business analysts, marketing professionals, and other employees that may have some type of knowledge of the data. At the end of the day though, completing data analysis within a company and providing data visualizations can very quickly turn into a full-time job. I also strongly believe that when the job is completed well, it can be one of the most important jobs in a company as it serves to make sense of company data and can make a business really agile.

Data Visualization Engineer#

A Data Visualization Engineer is one of those jobs in a company that most companies don't really know that they want or need until they get a taste of what it can provide. I define a Data Visualization Engineer as a role that is meant to focus on answering specific questions about a company, analyzing structured and/or unstructured data, and providing answers through the use of visualization tools such as PowerBI or Tableau. In some cases, there may not be specific questions that are trying to be answered, and instead just trying to make sense of connections between data can provide answers to questions the company never thought to ask. Another name for this type of job title can sometimes be a Business Intelligence Analyst. I consider a Data Scientist to be a more advanced version of this. A lot of companies are sitting on tons of data about their company and some of that data is in unconnected systems. A Data Visualization Engineer would be an impactful force that could help drive getting data into a central system or even capturing new data that the company didn't realize it wanted.

Conclusion#

I'm only really aware of the need for companies to hire this type of role in their company because I'm a software consultant and I have found myself in a situation a few times where I was asked to build a PowerBI dashboard. My ability to easily do this then turned into me doing this more regularly. This eventually became a problem as my skills were better suited to be allocated to other tasks. With this experience and knowledge, I have found that it is in the best interest of companies to prioritize hiring a Data Visualization Engineer of sorts to provide the most value.