Why Data Scientist is top job in Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation has become a burning question for all the businesses and the foundation to ride on the wave is being data driven.

DJ Patil & Thomas Davenport mentioned in 2012 HBR article, that Data Scientist is the sexiest job of the century, and how true!  Even the latest Glassdoor ranked Data Scientist at 1^st in top 25 best jobs in America.

Over the last decade there’s been a massive explosion in both the data generated and retained by companies. Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Wallmart, Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter all process tons of data every minute and use that for revenue growth, cost reductions and increase in customer satisfaction.

Most industries such as Retail, Banking, Travel, Financial Sector, Healthcare, and Manufacturing want to be able to make better decisions. With speed of change and profitability pressures on the businesses, the ability to take decisions had gone down to real time. Data has become an asset for every company, hence they need someone who can comb through these data sets and apply their logic and use tools to find some patterns and provide insights for future.

Think about Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, smartphone apps, in-store purchase behavior data, online website analytics, and now all connected devices with internet of things are generating tsunami of new data streams.

All this data is useless if not analyzed for actions or new insights.

The importance of Data Scientists has rose to top due to two key issues:

• Increased need & desire among businesses to gain greater value from their data
• Over 80% of data/information that businesses generate and collect is unstructured or semi-structured data that need special treatment 

Data Scientists:

• Typically requires mix of skills - mathematics, statistics, computer science, machine learning and most importantly business knowledge
• They need to employ the R or Python programming language to clean and remove irrelevant data
• Create algorithms to solve the business problems
• Finally effectively communicate the findings to management

Any company, in any industry, that crunches large volumes of numbers, possesses lots of operational and customer data, or can benefit from social media streams, credit data, consumer research or third-party data sets can benefit from having a data scientist or a data science team.

Top data scientists in the world today are:

• Kirk D Borne of BoozAllen
• D J Patil Chief Data Scientist at White House
• Gregory Piatetsky of kdnuggets
• Vincent Granville of Analyticsbridge
• Jonathan Goldman of LinkedIn
• Ronald Van Loon

Data science will involve all the aspects of statistics, machine leaning, and artificial intelligence, deep learning & cognitive computing with addition of storage from big data.