Data Science Talent is Key to Analytical Innovators

Companies continually look for ways to outperform their competitors. One way they are trying to get ahead is through the application of analytics on their data. Researchers, for example, have found that top-performing businesses were twice as likely to use analytics to guide future strategies and guide day-to-day operations compared to their low-performing counterparts.

Researchers from MIT and SAS suggest that top performing companies use analytics differently than bottom performing companies. They found that Analytic Innovators (businesses where analytics created a competitive advantage and has helped innovation), more so than Analytically Challenged, use analytics primarily to increase value to the customer rather than to decrease costs/allocate resources, aggregate/integrate different business data silos to look for relationships among once-disparate metrics and gain executive support around the use of analytics to encourage sharing of best practices and data-driven insights throughout the company.

Analytics don't occur in a vacuum. Companies need the right people with the right data science skills (i.e., data workers) to make sense of the data. In their continuing study of analytics, MIT and SAS recently published new research about how Analytic Innovators optimize their data science capabilities. Their new report is well worth a read. I highlight some of the study results below.

Analytical talent plays a crucial role in the success of Analytical Innovators.;