| Allow a short vignette from a former academic and now management consultant. We spent six months at a major pharmaceuticals client examining their reimbursement data. Poring over many millions of rows of transaction data and thousands of payment codes (which, of course, were unique across sales geographies), we determined the ten regions at highest risk of reimbursement collapse. R was used, maps were created, beers all around. But almost none of it was used for the executive presentation. In fact, the only part that was included was that we had ten regions that needed fixing, and our suggestions on how to fix it. You see, the CEO was dyslexic, the chairman of the board was colorblind, and the COO was a white-boarding kind of gal, so given this audience the nuts and bolts of our advanced statistical analysis were simply irrelevant. This is hardly surprising. If we are having so much trouble hiring people who are fluent in Big Data, how can we expect business leaders to be even conversant? With only slight exaggeration, the way you do your analysis and the visualizations that you create are not important. Companies are demanding Big Data scientists because they suddenly have lots of data and see the term Data Scientist in the news. But what they really want is not Data Scientists, it's business insights and implications from Big Data. The customer needs 1/4" holes, but we're all arguing over which brand of laser powered diamond drill they should buy. |