Breaking Data Science Open

Preface

Data science has captured the public’s attention over the past few years as perhaps the hottest and most lucrative technology field. No longer just a buzzword for advanced analytical software, data science is poised to change everything about an organization: its potential customers, its expansion plans, its engineering and manufacturing process, how it chooses and interacts with suppliers, and more. The leading edge of this tsunami is a combination of innovative business and technology trends that promise a more intelligent future based on the pairing of open source software and cross-organizational collaboration called Open Data Science. Open Data Science is a movement that makes the open source tools of data science—data, analytics, and computation—work together as a connected ecosystem.

Open Data Science, as we’ll explore in this report, is the combination—greater than the sum of its parts—of developments in software, hardware, and organizational culture. The ongoing consumerization of technology has brought open source to the forefront, creating a marketplace of ideas where innovation quickly emerges and is vetted by millions of demanding users worldwide. These users industrialize products faster than any commercial technology company could possibly accomplish. On top of this, the Agile trend fosters rapid experimentation and prototyping, which prompts modern data science teams to constantly generate and test new hypotheses, discarding many ideas and quickly arriving ...