WHAT IS A DATA MANAGER ?

As a pivotal Data Manager, you'll orchestrate the seamless flow of our BI/data landscape, bridging the gaps between needs and solutions. With a keen eye for identifying and prioritizing data requirements, you'll collaborate across teams, guiding the entire data journey from acquisition to delivery. Your expertise will ensure our BI platform and data warehouse are not just repositories, but trusted sources of high-quality, accessible data. Acting as both a guardian and a guide, you'll unlock the potential of data, making it work for us in the most efficient and impactful way.

Need-to-Know Overview of a Data Manager

1. Data Manager Roles and Responsibilities

  • Contribute to the development and evolution of the Data Strategy with the Business Intelligence Manager
  • Work with function team leads to understand business needs and identify the business goals/problems that can be solved with data
  • Analyse the raw datasets (source data) that needs to be collected, stored and managed in the data warehouse
  • Work with function teams to devise or re-engineer business processes to acquire and ingest the datasets into our BI platform. The datasets could take on any form (internal / external / structured / unstructured / semi-structured).
  • Collaborate and work with Global IT teams to ingest internal data sources into the BI platform
  • Collaborate and work with vendors to design and implement automated data pipelines to ingest and integrate different data sources and deliver the appropriate data products to end users. 
  • Data products can be in the form of pre-canned dashboards, or organized datasets in the data warehouse for power users to self-service.
  • Manage and ensure delivery of the BI projects
  • Serve as the data expert/ gatekeeper of the BI platform to answer ad-hoc queries on datasets and manage data source intakes
  • Provide fresh perspectives and challenge status quo if the situation fits
  • Actively work with users to seek out continuous improvements to BI projects implemented on the BI platform
  • Address root cause of data quality issues by ensuring it is fixed at source
  • Iterate and improve data architecture design for live BI projects to encourage users to self-serve
  • Analyse new enhancement requests and assess/validate the data source / business logic requirements with users
  • Liaise with users to manage and understand upstream data source changes
  • Work with vendors and offshore Data Admin team to implement the changes and perform UAT validation
  • Coach power users on accessing and using data effectively for analysis on their own via various data touchpoints available (e.g. HUE, Tableau, Power BI, Cloudera DataScience Workbench, R, Python)
  • Assess appropriate new tools and technologies introduced by global teams that can be leveraged upon to promote data literacy and evolve BI maturity levels within the BU.
  • Advocate data cataloging using Alation
  • Co-own / co-document business meta-data with users to encourage visibility and reusability of data centralized in the BI platform.
  • Work with vendors to train the Data Admin team on new data source intakes and business logic changes within the BI platform to ensure continuity in maintaining the data pipelines and architecture built when it goes live.

2. Data Manager Qualifications and Requirements

  • Bachelor’s Degree in Information Systems Management, Computer Engineering / Science
  • Experience in managing data or data warehousing systems
  • Experience in data modelling
  • Experience in big data technologies (e.g. Hadoop)
  • Strong understanding of relational and distributed data systems
  • Experience in using BI / data visualization tools like Tableau or Power BI to develop and deploy dashboards
  • Ability to synthesize information and put together an action plan
  • Inquisitive and willing to challenge status quo
  • Logical, detail oriented, sensitive to data
  • Strong coaching ability
  • Demonstrated analytical and problem-solving abilities
  • Strong sense of ownership and initiative; able to manage day-to-day operations independently
  • Team player
  • Active and fast learner: Willingness and ability to assimilate new domain knowledge / new tools
  • Expert in SQL, Excel, Access, VBA
  • Experience in either Commodities / Supply Chain or Financial Services Industry
  • Experience in IT projects
  • Experience in Data Engineering or working on Data Science
  • Experience in ETL automation and tools
  • Experience in building and developing hybrid business intelligence operational model for organizations
  • Experience in Data Cataloging tools
  • R and Python programming skills