Data Science is Worth it

Data Science allows organisations to interact with their customers

• Data Science provides the mean towards meaningful interactions with your customer. Everyone breaths digital. Organisations that leverage data science enjoy higher customer satisfaction, higher offer response rate, and lower marketing opt-out rate.
• In Data Science, the concept is often referred to as mass personalisation. For example, in one of my previous projects we created a statistical clustering based on a mixture of customers demographic and financial profiles. This allowed greater transparency into their behaviour such as young couples with families or young adult travellers or young & risky. Based on this additional information, the marketing team was able to understand their customer base, whether it was within their target market segment, along with the intelligence to develop new campaigns and product offerings. It allows them a digital pathway to interact with customers and appreciate their uniqueness.

Data Science provides a trusted, ::unbiased:: and forward-looking business advice

• Due to the hype and demand, there is a strong rise of fake data scientists and fake data science leaders. I wrote an article below which delved a bit further into what a true Data Scientist looks like. In summary, a true Data Scientist needs a good grasp of mathematics, business, and technology as it is a commercial profession.

• There is a strong misconception in the industry to divorce business and mathematics. I recently interacted with an organisational leader who says “I know a lot about the business so we are only looking for strong quantitative PhDs”. On another project, another leader said “we’ll just pair data scientists with Business Analysts because data scientists don’t talk well and don’t understand business”.

• Real data scientists are business-****savvy professionals with the special power of mathematics and technology. When I was transitioning between jobs, there were many occasions when I was criticised for being “too business” and that “data scientists are supposed to talk maths only”. Data Scientists are able to communicate mathematical concepts for business uses. Having said that, I see value in many PhDs that would like to transition to a corporate life. There is another job category such as Algorithm Engineer or Quantitative Researcher that would be more suitable compared to Data Scientists.

• From my real-life observation, organisations that are able to truly realise the value of data science treat their data scientists as business partners. Having said that, there is a strong uphill battle due to an existing stigma or perception that divorces business and data science. I foresee that the upcoming data science revolution would be driven from a consulting background or mindset.

Data Science leads to outstanding customer experience

• Recently, I was helping an organisation to improve its customer experience for enterprise customers. These large corporate customers had an extremely variable and length order fulfilment time from 4 weeks to more than 24 weeks! The Data Science team was able to

• stitch together the process flows from disparate data source systems.

• This included the discovery of data entry inconsistencies

• inconsistency

• the fact of containing some ideas, statements, arguments, etc. that do not agree with others, or something such as an idea, statement, or argument that has this quality

• wrong data structure

• revenue leakages

• and many more.

• We were successful in this project because the data scientists are strong business-savvy professionals. Apparently, there were many unsuccessful attempts on this project over the past two years. Overall we were able to significantly reduce the cycle time to an average of 4 weeks and drove higher data quality through a new governance framework.

organisations need to truly invest in identifying true data scientists and data science leaders

• In summary, organisations need to truly invest in identifying true data scientists and data science leaders. The exercise might be excruciating. I recently met a few organisational leaders who are undergoing such a change. They had the courage to hire and identify leaders who understand business, mathematics, and technology. This is a transformational shift from the traditional PhD dominated or “General Manager” type business leaders.

Data Science is worth it

English Tips

• cluster

  a group of similar things that are close together, sometimes surrounding something

• uniqueness

  the quality of being unique (= unusual, or special in some way)

• delve

  to search, especially as if by digging, in order to find a thing or information

• savvy

  Practical knowledge and ability

• stigma

  a strong feeling of disapproval that most people in a society have about something, especially when this is unfair
  耻辱

• stitch

  a piece of thread sewn in cloth, or the single movement of a needle and thread into and out of the cloth that produces this
  一针

• excruciating

  extremely painful

• culinary

  connected with cooking or kitchens

Reference Articles ： A article from MEDIUM