by Angela Guess
A recent article calls for companies to start employing more data scientists: “Load the term “data scientist” into Dice.com’s and Monster.com’s search engines, and you’ll get eight and seven responses respectively. Clearly, data scientists – the brainy, analytical folks who are charged with using statistical modeling tools to draw insights from huge quantities of data – aren’t in demand today the way software engineers are, but experts in the field of data mining and data science believe that’s going to change.”
The article goes on, “Brian Hopkins, a principal analyst with Forrester Research who specializes in enterprise architecture with a focus on emerging information management technologies, anticipates demand for data scientists to grow as companies increasingly seek a competitive advantage from the massive amounts of data they collect and as they realize they’re not getting the wisdom they need from existing data mining and business intelligence tools alone. ‘Companies are always looking for ways to know more than their competitors,’ says Hopkins. ‘There’s this notion that if they buy some predictive analytics tools, the tools will give them insight. [In fact,] You need this specialized class of data scientist to create and run [statistical] models against data and present the results in ways people can act on.’”
It continues, “The limitations of existing business intelligence software combined with the maturation of parallel computing and sophisticated data modeling tools have paved the way for the data scientist’s emergence, according to Steve Hillion, vice president of analytics with data storage company EMC. Like Hopkins, Hillion agrees that companies are beginning to realize they can’t rely on software alone to make sense of their terabytes of data. They need individuals with highly specialized skills, and those individuals require special technology. Hillion says the hardware and software data scientists use to perform their analysis is now robust, scalable and cheap enough that a variety of companies in different industries can use it.”
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