Data Science is a Team Sport!

The value of creating analytical communities

If only I got an analytics insight every time I heard the phrase “we are going to hire one data scientist and see how it goes”… Some companies are just hellbent on going down this route, presumably as they are uncertain about the potential outcomes of a data scientist’s work, and therefore hesitant about investing a greater amount. We will come back to what options exist for this dilemma later on, but for now, let us just establish one ground truth: hiring one data scientists does not work. Data science is a team sport.

Let us first think about how data science projects work. Each project will require a wide range of skills; programming and engineering, maths and statistics, machine-learning, database querying and more. The likelihood of finding all these skills in one person is small, and the price to pay if you do is high. Individuals that cover all these skill sets are also likely to get frustrated soon, unless given sufficiently challenging problems to solve. A more cost effective and future proof strategy is to hire a team of individuals with complimentary skills, that feed off each other and deliver projects faster and more creatively.

Let us then think about where this team sits within an organisation. A core data science team will typically sit within a larger analytics team of some sort, which will also include BI analysts, analytics managers, and the IT department. This team, in turn, is likely to be one business unit out of many within a company…