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The Big Data Consultant advises organisations about big data, a big data strategy, the implementation of big data, which technologies best fit the needs of the organisation and even implements the selected big data solution. A big data consultant therefore should have business experiences as well as sound technical knowledge of a broad range of big data tools.
The big data consultant should design strategies and programs to collect, store, analyse and visualize data from various sources for specific projects. The big data consultant should be able to lead a team and project, while ensuring the quality and on-time delivery according to the specifications. He or she should be able to develop big data solution recommendations and ensure implementation of the chosen big data solution.
In addition, he or she should produce accurate analyses of the datasets using smart algorithms and the latest big data technologies. He or she should be aware of the latest big data trends as well as know which big data technology companies are out on the market and would fit a chosen strategy. Understanding of the possibilities regarding public data is important as well. The big data consultant should be able to assess data sets and take care of the quality and correctness of the available data. Subsequently, the big data consultant should be able to query the data, perform analyses and present findings in a clear and understandable language.
The big data consultant should have sufficient technical knowledge. He or she needs to be able to program, preferably in different programming/scripting languages such as Python, R, Java, Ruby, Clojure, Matlab, Pig or SQL. They need to have an understanding of Hadoop, Hive, HBase, MongoDB and/or MapReduce. In addition he or she needs to be familiar with disciplines like text mining, clustering analysis, recommendation analysis, outlier detection, predictive analytics or similarity searches as well as different modelling techniques.
The big data solution can be delivered on premises or in the cloud. Therefore, the big data consultant should also have experience with one of the large cloud-computing infrastructure solutions like Amazon Web Services or Elastic MapReduce.
The big data consultant should enjoy working in teams as he or she will need to work with big data scientists and big data engineers to produce powerful data processes to be purposed into real time analytics and reporting applications as well as building the necessary hardware and software for the chosen big data solution.
A big data consultant also needs to be able to communicate effectively at executive level as quite often he or she deals with executive management when advising an organisation. The big data consultant should be able to ask the right questions in order to understand the big data problem at hand and to propose the right big data solution.
A big data consultants view should be to improve business results using big data technology. Therefore he or she needs to be able to translate business issues into big data solutions that will help (senior) managers in their decision-making. A big data consultant should also have, apart from the technical expertise, the standard strategy consultant skills like:
- Excellent Masters degree (or equivalent) from a top tier university
- Excellent oral and written communication skills
- Commercial awareness;
- Excellent interpersonal skills;
- Enjoying working in a fast-changing and competitive environment;
- Having a natural curiosity and enjoying solving complex problems;
- Having the ability to handle multiple tasks and responsibilities;
- Having the ability to work under pressure and meet regulatory deadlines;
- Having a logical approach to the solution of problems and good conceptual ability and skills in analysis;
- Being able to integrate research and best practices into problem avoidance and continuous improvement;
- Being self reliant and capable of both independent work and as member of a team;
- Being able to deliver clear and concise presentations to (senior) management regarding the big data project;
- Developing and reviews project plans, identifying and solving issues, resolves issues, and communicating status of assigned projects to users and managers.
The role of a big data consultant is an important one for organisations that want to develop a big data strategy and need help understanding the needs and issues related to it as well as need help implementing it. In addition, a big data consultant can give organisations that already have a big data solution new insights on how to improve the current solution and thereby improving business results. It is a difficult, but highly regarded, role as so many technical skills as well as business skills are required.
