To some senior executives, analytics is mistaken for an IT function. This may lead to a misalignment of the analytics function or business unit. The alignment question is critical to getting work done, hiring people and communicating to internal stakeholders. Truthfully, most IT executives also probably think analytics is another IT service (or would like it to be). Analytics is a science and does not fit into the IT business model and will likely never perform well within IT. But clearly technology is critical to data science. I propose that IT establish a special service practice, organized and staffed specifically to enable the analytics function. If not that model, then analytics should have its own technology staff, reporting up to the analytics executive. Either way, just as the organization overall needs to mobilize and re-engineer itself to fully exploit analytics, IT must step up to it’s critical but supporting role for analytics.
The Analytic Executive 