Analytics-hungry agencies finding skills shortfall

Interest in the use of big data analytics techniques may be surging, but efforts to plug an increasingly obvious skills gap have gained urgency as Australia’s pool of data scientists rapidly dries up and would-be analytics users are sent scrambling to find appropriate staff.

Adoption of analytics remains a key strategic priority for 2016 and beyond, with a recent CompTIA survey the latest in a string of research confirming that many companies were hitting the skills market after investing in technology to get their analytics houses in order.

“After an initial burst of enthusiasm,” the group’s recent IT Industry Outlook 2016 noted, “The big data trend saw some backlash since many companies did not have data management practices that allowed them to adopt newer tools for storage and analysis… As with cloud computing, companies can gain some level of benefit from initial adoption of these tools, but the full benefit will only be realised with a comprehensive approach.”

That comprehensive approach includes an overall trend for organisations to push towards growing internal skills in analytics as well as areas such as software development, IT support and cybersecurity. Despite their intention, however, delivering on this goal has proven tricky as the market struggles to feed the hunger of eager big data adopters and demand rapidly outstrips supply.

The situation is hardly new: a Gartner survey in 2014 flagged the shortfall in Australia’s analytics market, noting that 31% of big data users said finding the right skills and capabilities was one of their top challenges. Gartner also found that 73% of organisations were planning to invest in big data during 2015 and 2016 — reflecting the ongoing strong demand for big data solutions.

The situation is becoming even more complex as Australian organisations transition from building broad big data frameworks to focusing on advanced analytics, with Gartner this year flagging a surge in adoption of smart data-discovery processes that will dominate other types of analytic tools by 2018.

This is broadly in line with the rapidly transforming culture of analytics within government agencies, which are experimenting with both in-house skills development and shared analytics capabilities.

Little wonder training in Hadoop, a fast-growing open-source big data platform, is surging on the back of demand that has been forecast to grow the Australian market from $52.7 million in 2012 to $1.05 billion by 2019, reflecting 54.9% year-on-year growth.

Supporting this growth, however, will require skilled analytics professionals that many organisations are lacking. The deficit in analytics skills has become a big enough problem that managed-services provider Servian this week branched into big data training through a partnership with Hadoop provider MapR.

This program will see Servian delivering a number of big data courses — covering areas such as big data administration and data-science specialisations — building on the foundation set by MapR’s Spark On Demand Training, which was launched last year and according to MapR has enrolled more than 50,000 students.

Local demand for analytics skills has surged in the 18 months since Servian began investigating ways to boost its training capabilities, Vivak Pradhan, Servian’s general manager for Victoria, told GTR. Led by financial services, retail and telecommunications organisations, that growing demand will see numerous cohorts, each of 20 to 25 students, who will complete the five-day training courses every year.

“Big data certainly offers ways for our customers to do things differently and to differentiate themselves in the market,” Pradhan said. “But technology procurement is easy; what we are seeing is customer challenges around getting the relevant skills to support working on the platforms.

“We’ve had several requests from existing customers to help them with upskilling their workforce,” he added. “Until such time as big data skills are a commodity, the adoption of the technology will be difficult.”

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