Digital Analytics Competency Framework
Progress Report #2
The CNN world headquarters in Atlanta takes up an entire city block and is a bit overwhelming. For three days in July, 2014, it graciously hosted the Digital Analytics Association Joint Task Force on Competency Framework Development.
It took about a half an hour of commute time for the 15 of us to reach our meeting room ("Ability") after arriving at the front door. Once ensconced - it was off to the races - with only minor distractions from breaking news.
This gathering in Atlanta was so interesting and so engaging that I only made it to the lobby bar on the first evening after dinner. We were all simply too tired after full days of wrestling with the creation of industry competencies, skills and required knowledge. What an effort!
We had all been warned about how the process would not be what we would have expected. That turned out to be quite correct.
We did not write job descriptions.
We did not invent job titles.
We did not create an org chart.
We wrote Competencies for beginner, intermediate and expert levels of our industry:
What happens?
To what?
How does it happen?
Why?
Why such a stilted approach? Because we've only just scratched the surface.
Coming up with a fully-blown Digital Analytics Competency Framework that will allow us to create job descriptions, career paths, educational plans, certification tests, and conduct deep-dive surveys about who we are, where we are and what we do is very structured. Therefore, it is very arduous.
The clarifications, consolidations, validations, classifications, calculations and further verifications all require that the initial input - what we were doing for three days at CNN - must be in a specific format.
And so, 15 brave souls grappled with a very formal taxonomy long enough to be deeply impressed by what we do for a living: We collect, manage, clean, integrate, correlate, investigate, interrogate, extrapolate and do our very best to communicate data.
This first effort was just that - an industry first. We all know what we do, but it's never been captured in a systematized way before. We not only felt very leading-edge and quite chuffed with ourselves, we felt we had actually made some progress.
To quote one of the participants, "Now that we have something on the canvas, I am confident we can fine-tune/expand on that as we move along."
Who were these 15 special people who are outlining an industry? Once we get further down the road, their identities will be revealed, but first, we have more work to do.
Stay tuned.