What is a data analyst? A key role for data-driven business decisions

Hillary Green-Lerman, lead data scientist at Looker, says the difference between data analysts and data scientists comes down to timescale. A data analyst might help an organization better understand how its customers use its product in the present moment — what works and doesn’t work for them. A data scientist might use the insights generated from that work to help design a new product that anticipates future customer needs.

Data analyst role

Data analysts mostly work with an organization’s structured data. They create reports, dashboards, and other visualizations on data associated with customers, business processes, market economics, and more to provide insights to senior management and business leaders in support of decision-making efforts. Data analysts work with all manner of data, including inventories, logistics and transportation costs, market research, profit margins, sales figures, and so on. They use this data to help the business estimate market share, price products, time sales, optimize transportation costs, and the like.

Data analyst responsibilities

Data analysts seek to understand the questions the business needs to answer and determine whether those questions can be answered by data. They must understand the technical issues associated with collecting data, analyzing data, and reporting. They must be able to recognize trends and patterns. According to Workable, key data analyst responsibilities include: