Data Manager
During the summer holidays, I had time to exchange and share my experience with my family and close friends.
It was great to be able to do that after having spent the last eight years of my career in Asia, far from family and from the French culture. During this last year in the land of bread, wine and cheese, I had to find a lot of answers to a lot of questions about many different topics.
One of the most frequent question which led me to write this post is the following: what do you do for a living?
My go-to answer is usually : I work with data. However, I quickly realized that the people around me were not completely satisfied with just that line. So from there, the next question was often: what do you do with data?
When you work in a field that appeared only a few years ago following breakthroughs both theoretical and technological, which generates important changes in the business world and which creates jobs that didn't exist before, it's understandable to see eyes wide open staring right at you when you talk about data.
So let's dive into it, I am currently a data manager at Avanci which belongs to MV Group. Avanci is a consulting agency based in Tours, France which offers services in digital marketing strategies and data intelligence.
Data Manager :reveal the potential of data
La fiche métier de l’Onisep pour le data manager indique :
"From the multiplication and complexity of data, the data manager collect, organise and make available data with the objective of optimal use for different applications. Nowadays, the data manager works in every sector of industry."
Since the advent of IT in companies combined with the omnipresence of the Internet and the various connected devices, you have surely heard somewhere: "data is the new oil".
This means that every data points that are created by our use of services and products have an incredible economic potential. And similarly to oil or any valuable resources, complex systems exists to cover the collection, extraction, processing and distribution of the raw data in order to allow it's use and add value to it.
To also read: Data Management, what is it all about?
My days as a data manager are filled with the following activities :
- Qualification of data sources
- Exploration and evaluation of the coherence and relevancy of the information
- Design of data models for the future usage of the processed data
- Creation of incoming and outgoing data pipelines from the datamart.
- Development of automated processes which includes operation such as data cleaning, data preparation and data enrichment to match specific usage and audiences (marketing automation, data analysis, GDPR, custom request from the customer)
I manage a portfolio of several customers operating in various industries and maintain regular exchanges with them to maintain the quality of the data and the customer satisfaction. I am also supporting other department to prepare data for analysis and to recommend technical solutions to business needs.
What I love in this job is to be able to access to the raw data and being able to manipulate, organize, prepare, enhance and share it. On top of the customer satisfaction, there are also very exciting parts such as the discovery and the innovation closely linked to such jobs in general.
At each step of the data pipeline, it is possible to reveal another layer of information by for example aggregating the data or using all sorts of modeling techniques to detect pattern and make predictions.
In conclusion, being a data manager is for me a mixture of explorer researcher, engineer and designer.
