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I think we’re all in agreement that data science is crucial to business success. Unfortunately, as raised in my previous post, it is often passed around inside organizations like a hot potato as businesses struggle to find the data analysts and data scientists needed to manage it. These comments spurred some interesting conversations with customers and partners that made me want to stress again the urgency of acquiring these skills, especially in organizations across the Asia-Pacific region. I see three key reasons for this: ‘Tiger’ economies are slowing – While the Asia-Pacific region remains one of the main growth drivers of the world economy, accounting for about two-fifths of global economic growth, our pace has slowed significantly. China’s foreign trade fell dramatically in the first two months of 2016, and while showing small signs of improvement, it still faces downward pressure. The outlook for Australia looks similarly soft. Manufacturing has been the driving force behind our success to date but we need to find new sources of innovation as we move into a post-industrial era. And data is at the heart of this. McKinsey estimates that those who make use of it generate productivity and profit gains that are 5-6% higher than the competition Currently, skills are lacking – to get the job done properly without external support. According to Malaysia’s national ICT agency Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), there are only 80 data scientists in the country, with a need for at least 1,500 by 2020. This skills gap is indicative of the whole APAC region. Demand dramatically outstrips supply. So much so that salaries for data scientists and analytics professionals in Australia surged by 14% in 2014. Cost rises like these aren’t sustainable, particularly for slowing economies. We need to invest in developing more talent. Data scientists are at their most valuable when they are deeply embedded within the business – as they already have an incomparable understanding of strategy, culture, practices and processes. As I’ve previously mentioned, data offers huge tactical and strategic value to pretty much every single department within an organization. So arguably there’s a place for a data specialist within each of these; someone in the marketing and customer service team who can use it to analyze niche customer trends and habits, another in finance to dig deep for productivity and efficiencies, and so on. The nuanced knowledge of a company required to do this effectively can take months, or even years, to ascertain. For this reason, retraining or enhancing the skills of existing employees to fill the data science skills gap is more likely to drive immediate value than bringing in new data science graduates. As such, I urge divisional leaders, CIOs, IT managers, and Learning & Development teams to collaborate to develop this kind of talent internally, either in the form of running organizational development plans and training programs internally or getting external support from third-party data experts. The positive potential of big data is huge, but only if organizations in APAC are able to implement it. I’d love to get your view of the challenges of recruiting big data scientists across APAC. Please leave your thoughts in the Comments. The post Three Reasons APAC Organizations Need to Nurture Data Scientists appeared first on InFocus. |
