The Data Scientist

 

Recently the job title of "Data Scientist" has become en vogue.

Just like the buzz word "Business Intelligence" has evolved from previous concepts, the function of "Data Scientist" is hardly new. In fact, on of its predecessors, "Statisticians", had the aura of being dull & boring, back when being a geek was not chic.  So we needed a new title to justify it suddenly being cool?

Language in social context can be a funny thing. All the more ironic that many challenges in business intelligence and data analytics these days revolve around semantics and ambiguity of source data, the very phenomenon that humans seem to intrinsically create.

It also seems convenient how suddenly an army of consultants, tool vendors and job seekers smoothly morphed their existing portfolio and previous experience into being "Experts" in Business Intelligence  or , well, "Data Scientist". In the end, I find my friend Jeff's self-titulation as "Data Archeologist" cooler.

To be fair, what emerges under this new moniker of Data Scientist is an amalgamation and refinement of previously distinct disciplines, such as Business Analyst, Database Administrator, Software Developer, Statistician, etc. Yet, Information Science (not to be confused with Computer Science) has always concerned itself with topics just now hitting the lime-light in terms of desirability in businesses. The primary factor for the role of Data Scientist going viral may just be businesses' realization that there is money to be made with insights into the data exhaust from our business processes and social interactions on the Internet. The classic, "you build it and they will come". Now that this mass of data is available, we might as well use it, and "oh wow, you can actually monetize all this?!".

My hunch is that the role of an analytical and data integration specialist will eventually fade into an expected subset of skills in the modern knowledge worker, both as individual contributors as well as managers. If you look at how much responsibility over a broad range of complex decisions the average white-collar worker has these days, it is as if they were running their own business within the larger organization, with information tools and all. So it would make sense that eventually, between tool simplification, data-integration automation, and commodity-pricing of related products/services, "data science" will be yet another expected business skill set, such as fluency with Microsoft Office products and PCs has become the norm over the old business standards 30 years ago.