Hiring data scientists isn’t as easy as it sounds. For instance, organizations often get tripped up by data specialists’ different roles and responsibilities. Understanding these distinct functions is crucial for making the right hiring decisions.
Learning about the differences between data architects and engineers, as well as how to hire data scientists, can help you pinpoint the skills needed to meet your data goals. This guide will help you build a solid foundation for allowing healthcare organizations through innovative data management.
Streamlining provider credentialing processes is one effective way to achieve these goals. Azulity’s provider credentialing services equip the potential of data to simplify and automate tedious verification tasks, reducing the burden on healthcare organizations so they can focus on what matters most—delivering quality patient care.
What is a Data Architect?
Data architects sit at the intersection of business and IT. They create the blueprints that data scientists, engineers, and other data professionals follow to do their jobs. Data architects are IT professionals who leverage their computer science and design skills to review and analyze an organization’s data infrastructure, plan future databases, and implement solutions to store and manage data for organizations and their users. Since almost every company uses data, data architects can work in nearly any industry, including technology, entertainment, health care, finance, and government.
What Does a Data Architect Do?
Data architects focus on the design of data systems. They evaluate current data architecture and plan to create new databases or modify existing structures to meet the business’s evolving data needs. Typical responsibilities range from assessing the current data architecture to keeping databases secure.
Depending on your organization and industry, your day-to-day tasks might include
- Translating business requirements into databases, data warehouses, and data streams
- Creating procedures to ensure data accuracy and accessibility
- Analyzing, planning, and defining data architecture framework, including security, reference data, metadata, and master data
- Creating and implementing data management processes and procedures
- Collaborating with other teams within the organization to devise and implement data strategies, build models, and assess shareholder needs and goals
- Researching data acquisition opportunities
- Developing application programming interfaces (APIs) to retrieve data
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What is a Data Engineer?
Cracking Open the Data Engineer Code
Data engineering focuses on designing and building systems to collect, store, and analyze data at scale. It’s a broad field with applications in just about every industry. Organizations can collect massive amounts of data, and they need the right people and technology to ensure it is in a highly usable state by the time it reaches data scientists and analysts.
Beyond making the lives of data scientists easier, working as a data engineer can allow you to make a tangible difference in a world where we’ll be producing 463 exabytes per day by 2025. That’s one and 18 zeros of bytes worth of data. Fields like machine learning and deep learning can’t succeed without data engineers to process and channel that data.
What Does a Data Engineer Do?
Data engineers work in various settings to build systems that collect, manage, and convert raw data into usable information for data scientists and business analysts to interpret. Their ultimate goal is to make data accessible so that organizations can use it to evaluate and optimize their performance.
Some of the everyday tasks a data engineer might perform when working with data include Acquiring datasets that align with business needs, developing algorithms to transform data into useful, actionable information, building, testing, and maintaining database pipeline architectures, collaborating with management to understand company objectives, create new data validation methods and data analysis tools, and ensure compliance with data governance and security policies.
Working at smaller companies often means taking on more data-related tasks in a generalist role. Some more prominent companies have data engineers dedicated to building data pipelines, and others focus on managing data warehouses, both populating warehouses with data and creating table schemas to keep track of where data is stored.
Azulity specializes in healthcare master data management and provider credentialing services, bringing proven expertise in implementing healthcare data solutions and credentialing across the US. Our comprehensive platform ensures consistent patient, provider, location, and claims data synchronization across all systems and departments.
Key features include healthcare MDM, provider MDM, reference data management, credentialing, and provider enrollment. We serve healthcare technology leaders – from CIOs and CDOs to VPs of data platforms and credentialing – helping them eliminate the costly problems of fragmented data systems. Book a call to learn more about our healthcare master data management services today!
Data Architect Vs. Data Engineer Detailed Comparison
Data Architect Roles and Responsibilities
Data architects create a vision for an organization’s data. To do this, they draw from extensive experience to understand the current and future needs of the business and its data users. Next, they design the structure of the data ecosystem, including integrations, databases, data streams, and more. Finally, they provide ongoing support to improve the data architecture over time.
Data Engineer Roles and Responsibilities
Data engineers build the systems and infrastructure that enable effective data collection, storage, and analysis. They create the data architecture that data scientists and analysts use to perform their jobs. Data engineers work to make data readily available, clean, and usable for analytical and operational tasks.
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Which One Do You Need for Your Company: Data Architect Vs Data Engineer
Azulity: Your Data Management Ally
Azulity is a data management company focused on improving healthcare data operations. Its comprehensive platform helps organizations synchronize master data across fragmented systems to eliminate costly inefficiencies. Azulity’s solutions boost data quality and ensure regulatory compliance, making it easier for healthcare organizations to meet their goals.
What Is a Data Architect?
A Data Architect is responsible for designing and structuring data systems. They focus on the big picture of how data is organized, stored, accessed, and protected. The strategic role requires knowledge of various databases, systems architecture, and data modeling.
When to Hire a Data Architect
Suppose you’re building or redesigning your data infrastructure. When scaling up data, operations need a straightforward, sustainable design. Suppose you need expertise in aligning data architecture with business goals and compliance needs.
What is a Data Engineer?
A Data Engineer focuses on building and maintaining the systems that allow data to flow through an organization. They deal with the day-to-day work of moving, transforming, and storing data for analysis. Data engineers typically work on creating and optimizing data pipelines, ensuring data is accessible, and managing large volumes of data efficiently.
When to Hire a Data Engineer
Suppose your company needs to handle large volumes of data daily. When you need to integrate data from multiple sources and transform it for analysis, suppose you have complex data processing requirements and need robust, scalable pipelines when you have an existing data infrastructure that requires constant maintenance and optimization.
Book a Call to Learn More About Our Provider Credentialing Services
While data architects and engineers build systems to store and manage data, their expertise and day-to-day tasks differ. Data architects primarily focus on designing the structure of a data system to optimize it for performance and efficiency. They create blueprints that outline how data will be stored, organized, and accessed.
These blueprints help stakeholders visualize the data structure before any database development begins. Data architects also establish the protocols and standards to ensure the data system is secure, scalable and meets the organization’s specific business goals. Conversely, data engineers take these blueprints and build the actual systems.
They develop the databases and create the pipelines that transfer data between systems and applications. Data engineers also ensure that stored data is easy to access and analyze by creating effective models. Over time, they optimize and maintain the systems and may even help organize data for specific analytical tasks.