Should You be Hiring a Big Data Expert in Your Company?

Necessity drives innovation, but in the case of information technology it's slightly other way around. Innovation and rapid strides in technology and their affordability is driving a new genre of necessity if not fulfilled (by the organizations). The advent and growth of Internet, social media and online collaboration have multiplied the data sources and the collection of data  ets has become humungous to be handled by the traditional data processing applications and management tools.

With affordable big data technologies, organizations can now harness data from unstructured, semi-structured data by virtue of Facebooks, Twitters, email, blogs which were hitherto discarded. In my opinion, most of the organizations whatever vertical they operate will eventually be forced to adopt these big data technologies in near future with differing scales of implementations.

Hence there will be a growing need of Big Data experts of which we are already seeing a shortage in the market and the supply will be shorter and shorter as organizations start seeing the value of harnessing unstructured and unconventional data structures.

From our own organization's perspective we see three different distinct roles in the Big Data arena. They are Big Data Developer, Solution Architect and a Data Scientist. Data scientist is the new BI/DWH professional with more focus on analytics in its true sense. For developers, we look for specific development skills with respect to Big Data technologies including experience in distributed files systems such as Hadoop and brute force appliances such as teradata and also specific experience in associated core language skills such as Java and scripting languages such as Python /Perl, etc.

Creativity: Big Data streams offer wide variety of data sets hitherto un-heard of and the insights are always not very clear hence Big Data experts should be creative and open minded enough to uncover the business insights.

They should wear the artistic hat to understand what the varied data is trying to convey.

Interpersonal skills: Big Data experts/Data Scientists may not be working alone. With the challenges posed by Big Data and a combination of skill-sets required to handle Big Data from the time it is gathered, cleansed, stored and brought in for analysis a Data Scientist will always be working with a team of distinct individuals with varied skills.

Strong Analytical ability: As the challenge posed by Big Data is extremely complex and humongous, the success of Big Data expert lies in his ability to gather analyze and model appropriate data sets and draw insights from them.

Strong analytical and logical thinking alone helps the big data scientist to sail through in this complex data world.

Self Critique: One of the successful trait of a Data Scientist is self-criticism /constantly challenge oneself. This trait alone will bring in the best  business insight or prop one to create a better model for predictive analytics, else the insights and the predictions may have relatively higher margin for error.

Relevant educational background: One of the key success factors for a Data Scientist is relevant educational background; he should have a regular or relevant education in analytics or trained on respective toolset.
Adaptability: The explosion in Big Data technologies has just started and data experts should expect and be adaptable for the constant changes in technology, process and methodologies otherwise the role of a Big Data
Scientist shall soon become history.