Suhanti11 wrote
I come from a technical background, or at least believe that you must have technical skills. I am faced with a Dinosaur organisation who refuses us any production data, or real time information just because I am in the IT department. I find it so difficult to validate my work, without accurate informaiton especially when it comes to automating reports for the business. |
Hi Su,
First of all, welcome to the Modern Analyst community! I'm glad you're finding our site helpful and valuable for your business analyst career.
While I do understand your frustration, what you are experiencing is not uncommon especially in larger organizations. Many BAs with technical backgrounds (aka used to be developers) are accustomed to having back-door access to the data in the production system/database.
Having said that, there are good reasons for organizations to limit direct access to the production data except when there is a clear justification to do so - this is due to privacy and security concerns and probably not out of ill-intent. On many of the projects I've worked on, certain analysts in the support groups get access to the production data when they need to troubleshoot production issues.
For testing and validation purposes, we use non-production environments with test data or data from the production system but with sensitive data (social security numbers, names, DOBs, account numbers, etc.) scrambled.
I'm sure that if you make a good case as to why you need access to the production data you will get it - but you need to ensure first that there are no other ways to solve the same need/issue.
- Adrian