Splice data scientist DNA into your existing team
As organizations continue to grapple with big data demands, they may find that business managers who understand data may meet their “data scientist” needs better than the hard core data technologists.
There’s little doubt that data-derived insight will be a key differentiator in business success, and even less doubt that those who produce such insight are going to be in very high demand. Harvard Business Review called “data scientist” the“sexiest” job of the 21st century, and McKinsey predicts a shortfall of about 140,000 by 2018. Yet most companies are still clueless as to how they’re going to meet this shortfall.
Unfortunately, the job description for a data scientist has become quite lofty. Unless your company is Google-level cool, you’re going to struggle to hire your big data dream team (well, at least right now), and few firms out there could recruit them for you. Ultimately, most organizations will need to enlist the support of existing staff to achieve their data-driven goals, and train them to become data scientists. To accomplish this, you must determine the basic elements of data scientist “DNA” and strategically splice it into the right people.
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P.S. Josh Thompson is passionate about the topic. See his work at Mastersindatascience.com
