Data Driven

Chapter 1. Data Driven: Creating a Data Culture

The data movement is in full swing. There are conferences (Strata+Hadoop World), bestselling books (Big Data, The Signal and the Noise, Lean Analytics), business articles (“Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century”), and training courses (An Introduction to Machine Learning with Web Data, the Insight Data Science Fellows Program) on the value of data and how to be a data scientist. Unfortunately, there is little that discusses how companies that successfully use data actually do that work. Using data effectively is not just about which database you use or how many data scientists you have on staff, but rather it’s a complex interplay between the data you have, where it is stored and how people work with it, and what problems are considered worth solving.

While most people focus on the technology, the best organizations recognize that people are at the center of this complexity. In any organization, the answers to questions such as who controls the data, who they report to, and how they choose what to work on are always more important than whether to use a database like PostgreSQL or Amazon Redshift or HDFS.

We want to see more organizations succeed with data. We believe data will change the way that businesses interact with the world, and we want more people to have access. To succeed with data, businesses must develop a data culture. 

What Is a Data Scientist?

Culture starts with the people in your organization, and ...