What is Data Science? and What Makes the Team of Data so Important?

According to MIKTI (Indonesian Information and Communication Technology Creative Industry Society), there are 1,190 startups in Indonesia until the end of 2021. if XYZ is one of them, that company must compete with around 1,000 other startups. startup development increases from year to year, but some startups are only able to survive for a while, and many are out of business

Then, what position will XYZ be in? Will it occupy the Rapid Growth position or go out of business?

In addition to having a good business idea and product, a startup must also have a team. It is sufficient if only one person creates the business idea. But, is that one person able to implement it? The answer is yes, but how long can he survive alone?

We return to the natural law that humans are social creatures, which means we also need other people. No matter how good someone is, they need the help of others. A simple example is this if we want to build a house, we can’t build it alone, there are architects, builders, and interior designers who will realize the house we want.

Similar to building a startup, a CEO can’t possibly work alone. In a business not only one ability is required. a CEO needs people who have more ability than him in something or even abilities that he doesn’t have.

There are five important parts to building a business. first, a CEO (Chief Executive Officer) is usually associated with the term BOS who is in charge of designing the business, recruiting and supervising, drafting budgets, and establishing relationships with investors.

Second, the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) is usually in the field of technology. Assigned to adapt products to technological developments and ensure products can always be up to date so that they can continue to be the customer’s choice.

Third, the COO (Chief Operating Officer) is responsible for the company’s operational affairs. To manage the running of the company, manage the core business, and as a liaison between employees and the CEO.

Fourth, the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) is the marketing department that takes care of product marketing, including developing marketing strategies and conducting market research.

Fifth, the CFO (Chief Financial Officer) is responsible for the company’s financial affairs, including budgeting, financial reporting, fund management strategies, and decision-making related to Human Resources.

A team business building company must work together, complement, and have responsibilities to keep the business growing. It’s the same with the Data Science team.

Data Science Team is very useful for startups that we build. To form a Data Science Team, a CEO must conduct a needs analysis and what work needs to be done. From there it can only be determined how many resources are needed to complete the work efficiently.

Before discussing the Data Science Team section, we also need to know how Data Science affects a startup business and what is it.

“Data Science is clickbait.” That’s what Mr. Ainun Najib -an information technology practitioner from Gresik, East Java — said at the National Onboard Startup Campus batch III last week. If we search for a definition on Google about what data science is, there is no specific answer because the term data science was simply coined by D.J Patil, Chief Data Scientist of the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy.

At the moment he wanted to find a team to help process data with the criteria of understanding coding, statistics, and understanding data structures and then trying to open a form for applicants with many titles and it turned out that the most registered were data science. From here the term emerged and is used to this day.

The application of data science is not only used in the business sector to gain customer insight, cross-sell, up-sell and others but also penetrates other areas of life. For example, in finance, they use data science to predict market stock and risks from customers who deposit their money in banks, borrow funds from banks, and so on.

In the health sector, data science is also important for patients, like detecting tumors, taking medications, checking heart rates, and much more.

Then Mr. Ainun added a common thread in understanding data science. is that everything starts from data, then the data is understood and interpreted so that it becomes information, relevant information then becomes knowledge (relevant and useful information) and we will get wisdom (knowing what should be done). The essence of data science itself is processing data to gain insight.

The process from data into wisdom is not necessarily easy, there are data engineering methods, and data warehousing to turn data into information, then data science will turn information into wisdom. The result is decision-making.

after we know the importance of data science then one scientist can solve a problem in a short time? the answer may be yes, but he will finish one by one, and the job desk is piling up so it’s not efficient.

So, we go back, How much data science is important needed in a company? the answer is very necessary if the company wants effective and efficient insight. Then what about the data science team that supports the end-to-end data ecosystem?

Before that, we have to know. The work of the data science team is first, to ask the right question and explore the data, they must know what problems they are facing and how the data must be collected to solve the problem and do data cleaning to eliminate false values.

Second, modeling the data using various algorithms, creating appropriate graphs or tables to be able to describe the results of the data that has been explored, and finally communicating and visualizing the results, presenting or describing the results of the data models that have been made so that others can understand the results of the data. which has been processed.

Then from the final result, insight will be obtained into what to do to for example increase the number of sales, or compete with new competitors that are preferred by consumers.

In the book Creating a Data-Driven Organization, it is said that everyone has a different skill set, for example as shown in the picture below

each other in the team will work together to solve existing problems, if only Arun solves the problem about the business it will a long time because Arun has a low base knowledge about it, but if the business problem is done by Jason G it will be very quick and easy because he has a high business domain knowledge.

So it is important to combine these skills to be effective and this is an important task for a CEO to build a data science team that is useful for the sustainability of an ongoing startup.

Thanks for reading, I hope it’s useful. suggestions and feedback will be very valuable so you can connect to Twitter or LinkedIn to talk to much

Resources

The Guide Book of Startup: Pedoman Sempurna untuk Memulai Bisnis startup yang Wajib Anda Tahu. 2018

Creating a Data-Driven Organization. Practical Advice from the Trenches. 2015