Everywhere you turn these days, you are experiencing some flavor of data science. Whether it’s when you’re shopping on Amazon, driving your car, or at work (especially if you work for a tech company like me!) – data science is all around us.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with data science, I wanted to take a few minutes to share a bit more about what it is and how it impacts Sales Enablement Technology.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jeff Charbeneau, SAVO’s own in-house data scientist, to learn a little about his career path and some insider info.
At a high level, data science involves using data and statistics to solve business problems.
Raj Bandyopadhyay does a great job of blowing out the definition further in his post on data science:
Like the name suggests, a data scientist is a person who analyzes and interprets data.
Data Scientist (n): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician.
Many of us have heard these buzz words but may not be sure what they mean.
Jeff believes that everyone uses these terms a little differently, which is part of the problem. At a high level, he suggests the best way to think of each of them is:
If you don’t have the data, you can’t even get started. Once you do, you need the right people to look at it the right way and determine what can be done with it. In general, the more and the better data you have, the more successful your efforts can be.
Much of the work is around helping people within the business figure out what the “problem” is, and then using data to solve it as best you can.
As with most careers, everyone’s path is unique and different.
Jeff’s started in healthcare.
