Communications of the ACM
Big Data's Big Problem: Little Talent
Credit: Fast Company
The technology industry is in love with "Big Data" — the ability to acquire, process, and sort vast quantities of data in real time. And this week, Big Data Week events are being held in cities in the U.S. and the U.K. By all accounts, Big Data is the next big thing.
However, according to a report published last year by McKinsey, there is a problem. "A significant constraint on realizing value from Big Data will be a shortage of talent, particularly of people with deep expertise in statistics and machine learning, and the managers and analysts who know how to operate companies by using insights from Big Data," the report said. "We project a need for 1.5 million additional managers and analysts in the United States who can ask the right questions and consume the results of the analysis of Big Data effectively." What the industry needs is a new type of person: the data scientist.
Hilary Mason, chief scientist for the URL shortening service bit.ly, says a data scientist must have three key skills. "They can take a data set and model it mathematically and understand the math required to build those models; and finally they are someone who can find insights and tell stories from their data."
From The Wall Street Journal
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