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The new role of data curator focuses on bridging data analytics Cloud
between the worlds of business and IT.
 Data Governance and
By Kelly Stirman Compliance
January 26, 2018
Data Lakes and Data
Storage
A new role is emerging in the world of data analytics: the data
Data Management
curator. As companies become more sophisticated in their use of
Data Quality
data to solve their most critical business challenges, they develop
Data Science
specializations in their teams to address each stage of the end-
IoT
to-end process.
Security and Privacy
Data Specializations Self-Service Business
Intelligence
Today these roles For Further Reading: Staf ng and Hiring
include individuals
who reside in IT -- data Wanted: A Data Architecture for
engineers -- as well as On-Demand Data Access
those who sit in the
business: data analysts 5 Rules for Successful Self-Service
Analytics
FEATURED
and data scientists. In
CONTRIBUTORS
2018, we will likely see
more data curators, a Creating Self-Service
new role that focuses Organizations with Data Catalogs
David Fern
on bridging the worlds Loshin Halper

of business and IT in
terms of data analytics. Let's review the responsibilities of each Barry William
Devlin McKnight
role:
View all | Become a contributor
Data analysts typically use tools such as Tableau and Power
BI to develop visualizations, reports, and dashboards that
tell a story about business data. They work within the
business and rely on IT to provide access to data from
different applications and systems.

Data scientists use tools such as Python and R to build

models that provide predictions, recommendations, and
visualizations based on data. They also work within the
business and rely on IT to provision their data.

Data engineers have a deep understanding of the systems

and infrastructure that generate and store the business
data. They work in SQL, Python, Java, and other languages
 to query, transform, aggregate, and move data between FEATURED
systems for different end user needs. They work within IT. RESOURCES

Data curators use tools such as Dremio to curate data for

different analytical tasks, to allocate computational
resources for accelerating data analysis, to add semantic
meaning to a data catalog, to blend data sets together, and
to organize project areas for teams of data analysts and
data scientists to work together more effectively. [Full
disclosure: the author works for Dremio.]
TDWI Checklist Report
How Data Curators Streamline Analytics Ingestion and Integration fo
Cloud
Data analysts and data scientists understand the meaning of the
data but are dependent on IT to source the data, including
applying transformations, blending data from different sources,
and securing access at all steps in the process.

It is common for data analysts and data scientists to begin an

analytics task by opening a ticket with IT. In this ticket they
describe the data sets required for the job as well as speci c
formatting requirements, update frequency, and what tools they
will use to perform their analysis. IT takes this ticket and assigns
TDWI Checklist Report
the task to a data engineer, who in turn is responsible for
Preparing to Migrate to the
gathering any additional requirements and performing the work Cloud
necessary to ful ll the request.

This back and forth between the business and IT can slow down
the process due to a lack of common understanding of the data Q&A
and the processing required to make it available for analysis. with
Data engineers have a deep understanding of the infrastructure Jill
Dyché
and the formatting of the data but not of the data itself. Analysts
and data scientists, on the other hand, have a deep Find
understanding of the data but not the underlying systems and out what's keeping
tools used to process it. teams up at night and
get great advice on how
Data curators ll this gap and streamline the process of sourcing,
to face common
organizing, and accelerating data for analysis. They know the
problems when it comes
data and understand the analytics workloads better than data
to analytic and data
engineers because they are closer to the business units. Data
programs. From head-
curators also have a good understanding of the types of systems
that store the data and the types of tools that can be used for scratchers about
processing the data, even if they are not practitioners of these analytics and data
technologies themselves. They have up-to-date knowledge about management to
data sets, their provenance, and what data curation is needed. organizational issues
They also understand the different types of analysis to be and culture, we are
performed on speci c data sets as well as the expectations of talking about it all with
latency and availability set by diverse business users. Q&A with Jill Dyche.

By working with data engineers, data analysts, and data View Recent Article

scientists, the data curator develops a deep understanding of how

Submit Your Questions
data is used by the business and how IT applies technology to
to Jill
make the data available. Data curators are making data analysts
and data scientists more productive by allowing them to focus on
what they do best.

  CONTRIBUTE TO
UPSIDE
About the Author
View Our Writer’s
Kelly Stirman is the VP of strategy and CMO at Dremio. He Guide
oversees the planning, development, and execution of Dremio’s Join Our Contributor
strategic initiatives centered on messaging, brand awareness, Network
customer satisfaction, and business development. Previously,
Stirman was VP of strategy at MongoDB where he worked closely
with customers, partners, and the open source community. For
more than 15 years, he has worked at the forefront of database
technologies.

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