Splice data scientist DNA into your existing team

Screen Shot 2013-05-07 at 2.38.52 PMAs 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

Jim Kaskade

Jim Kaskade is a serial entrepreneur & enterprise software executive of over 36 years. He is the CEO of Conversica, a leader in Augmented Workforce solutions that help clients attract, acquire, and grow end-customers. He most recently successfully exited a PE-backed SaaS company, Janrain, in the digital identity security space. Prior to identity, he led a digital application business of over 7,000 people ($1B). Prior to that he led a big data & analytics business of over 1,000 ($250M). He was the CEO of a Big Data Cloud company ($50M); was an EIR at PARC (the Bell Labs of Silicon Valley) which resulted in a spinout of an AML AI company; led two separate private cloud software startups; founded of one of the most advanced digital video SaaS companies delivering online and wireless solutions to over 10,000 enterprises; and was involved with three semiconductor startups (two of which he founded, one of which he sold). He started his career engineering massively parallel processing datacenter applications. Jim has an Electrical and Computer Science Engineering degree from University of California, Santa Barbara, with an emphasis in semiconductor design and computer science; and an MBA from the University of San Diego with an emphasis in entrepreneurship and finance.