2.14. What external skills can I surround myself with?

The use of data requires cultural venue teams to integrate or call upon a myriad of new skills for proper management, daily use, and implementation of the knowledge produced. It is important to consider the skills of your team and to explore the possibility of pooling positions or bringing in external specialist expertise.

Indeed, larger cultural venues benefit from developing a dedicated data hub encompassing these new skills. However, within smaller teams, it is more challenging to allocate the necessary work time or budget to recruit profiles with these specific skills. Moreover, relying on a single person for the venue's "Data" expertise can be risky, as that person may be absent due to leave or move outside the organization.

Thus, internal training around a core set of skills for teams (data literacy, governance, project management) combined with the use of external expertise for more technical topics or key phases of construction and deployment appears to be an appropriate solution.  

The integration of a new software solution is a delicate period full of challenges for the teams. It involves not only successfully deploying the tool but also managing the organizational change and the shifts in work practices that the new tool entails.

Whether offered by a firm or independent professionals, data specialists not affiliated with a software provider can complement your team's skills regarding the use of your data: Data Analyst, Data Scientist, Data Designer/Visualizer... These data-focused professions are as recent as they are specialized, and the differences between them can sometimes seem subtle.

First, the Data Analyst processes the organization's vast amounts of data to extract immediately useful information for the company and its strategy. They build your dashboards based on your data and their analysis. To create these analyses, they must also have a thorough understanding of the domain in which they operate. In short, the Data Analyst is grounded in the present and exploits data for managing the organization's activity while striving to make it understandable to all.  

The Data Scientist, for their part, works on the business challenges of an organization and attempts to address them by analyzing its data sets, often over a longer time frame. They can build statistical models and algorithms. Their value lies in their ability to exploit large volumes of raw data to extract trends, predictive models, and new analytical frameworks for the future of the activity.  

The Data Designer, Visualist, or Visualizer provides visual mediation of data, positioned between graphic design and data analysis. To make raw data accessible and readable, they create visual stories that make the data more understandable and illuminate decision-making for management.

These different professions can prove extremely valuable in data project management (see 4.03. From evaluation to management: making data speak differently). Although it is structurally unfeasible for most cultural venues to internalize these skills, they can be accessed through external services or data sharing projects. In all cases, it is important to comply with current regulations and to regulate data exchanges with these providers to ensure security (refer to the dedicated sheet "What regulations apply to personal data?").  

• [FR] Data, compétences, formations et métiers : quels impacts sur le secteur de la culture et des médias ? (external link), Etude Cap Digital - DIRECCTE IDF - AFDAS, 2019