Data Scientists Help Unlock the Value of Data in Business

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The data scientist, a profession barely mentioned 10 years ago, has grown in importance to become among the most sought after in the United States. That’s because the volume of data organizations must contend with is so overwhelming it’s impossible to find the insights needed to make strategic decisions.

A data scientist has the skills to analyze the growing volumes and help turn information into insights–insights that can transform businesses and industries.

The problem is, there’s just not enough data scientists to handle current, let alone future demands. As a result, firms will fill the data science skills gap with services and technology. To that end, Forrester says that 74 percent of firms with data and analytics decision makers are expanding or planning to expand their recruiting for advanced data skills. And, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that the big data technology and services market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of more than 23 percent through 2019, with annual spending reaching $48.6 billion in 2019.

To help prepare future data scientists, our online education program Big Data University has amassed 400,000 students. And this year, IBM announced a new Watson Analytics Academic Program, which will help educate more than 140,000 students at leading universities globally.

To advance these efforts even further, IBM today announced the first environment built for data scientists to create new insights that help drive better business outcomes.

Available on IBM Cloud, the Data Science Experience provides a place where data scientists can learn, create analytics using the computing languages they prefer, and collaborate together to find new answers for their businesses.

Another aid to data scientists is cognitive software, such as IBM Watson, which uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data. Watson is continuously learning as new data becomes available and makes a set of recommendations with a probability of outcomes.

Watson can answer customers’ most pressing questions, quickly extract key information from all documents and reveal insights, patterns and relationships across all of an organization’s data sources.

By taking advantage of new tools and technologies like these, data scientists can find better answers from data and make more accurate predictions. Data scientists can collaborate across their organizations to transform data into actionable data, which enables them to make quicker and more accurate decisions.

Getting the most out of data is a journey, and it starts with data scientists, the growing league of professionals at the heart of a Cognitive Business. The data scientist profession is at the forefront of helping organizations shift from relying on instinct and experience to becoming truly data driven.
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To learn more about the new era of marketing, visit ibm.com/outthink