Relax - I’m a Business Scientist

When my partner saw the term “Business Scientist” on my website he said “Business Scientist?! Sounds like a title Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos would make up. I could see him saying ‘Relax — I’m a Business Scientist’ in his New Jersey accent.”

And I get it; the terms business and scientist together sound counterintuitive, but in the sea of titles in the data space, Business Scientist best describes what I think this role and its objectives should be.

I first heard the title proposed in the TDS article: “We Aren’t Data Scientists, We’re Business Scientists.” The title more closely aligns with my drive to build a more structured (i.e. scientific) approach to business so decisions can be made from truths. The business is my focus and data is only the “material” I use to build systems that improve it.

My opinion has changed over the years. As a Data Scientist, the “data” title made sense because I spent my days creatively using data to produce insights and outputs. I was focused on the technical aspects of the job, deploying the latest code, solving one problem at a time, and spending (too much) time making the process perfect. During that time, I paid less attention to how my solutions fit into the bigger business strategy.

For Business Scientists, it’s more important to focus on understanding a business’s objectives and building a data strategy that helps the organization achieve its goals. I leverage more tools than code to move data quickly, and I build data products that make insights accessible for anyone — not just those with “scientist” or “data” in their titles. We look for ways to integrate single-origin business data into everyone’s workflow, from developers who write it, to finance who audits it, to marketing who grows it. By distributing and enriching data use across the company, a Business Scientist can focus less on data science and more on moving the business forward.

So, if I heard someone say “Relax — I’m a Business Scientist,” I would be relieved. There is so much data to get lost in today, it is crucial to have someone who can shape it to help everyone in the org use it to meet actual business goals.