Finding analysts with the skill to unlock the potential of Big Data requires an innovative strategy to recruit, retain and inspire them.
After the 2013 holiday season, retailers were notably concerned about lower shopping volumes. There was a silver lining, though. As one digital marketing agency headlined a November 19 blog post, “The Holiday Season’s Greatest Gift Isn’t Big Cash. It’s Big Data.”
Wal-Mart already captures from customer transactions more than 2.5 petabytes (2.5 quadrillion bytes—a 16-digit figure) every hour.That is, every 60 minutes, Wal-Mart stuffs the equivalent of 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets with data. Fifteen out of 17 US sectors now have more data stored per companythan the Library of Congress. A McKinsey Global Institute study finds that this single data category has “the potential to provide more than $800 billion in economic value to individual consumers over the next decade.” Some gift! Provided companies can successfully unwrap and actually make use of it.
Simply collecting Big Data does not unpack its potential value. People need to do that, and those people are hard to come by. Just 3.4 % of CMOs surveyed by McKinsey in 2013 believe they currently have the right talent to fully leverage marketing analytics, and 98.8% describe finding that talent as “challenging.” In consequence, while few dispute the potential value of Big Data, CMOs surveyed say they use marketing analytics just 29% of the time to make decisions, and a paltry 3% say that analytics contributes “very highly” to their company’s performance.
The University of California, Berkeley, recently announced an online Master of data science degree, and, in August, IBM unveiled a Big Data educational partnership with more than a thousand colleges and universities. Such academic forays into data science are noteworthy because they are exceptional. Over the long term, we’re hopeful that these sorts of initiatives will prove to be the first of many and that they will at least begin to meet the demand for data science talent.
For now, however, many companies are trying to fill their ranks with candidates holding degrees in computer science, industrial engineering, and statistics. But there are just not enough of them, so employers need to improvise. Major companies are starting to turn to disciplines as diverse as physics, philosophy, psychology, economics, and even biostatistics to find Big Data talent. They seek people with analytical minds and deep curiosity – critical talents for working with data in business. We know of companies, for example, that have successfully transformed computational fluid dynamics engineers and West Point-trained ordnance engineers into data scientists.
Cracking the Big Data enigma requires more than number crunchers. To turn the fruits of Big Data insight into value in the marketplace calls for an extensive mix of expertise. Companies need to fill multiple roles with specific skillsets. Specialist competence is essential but not sufficient.
