It is a point of no debate that data drives development in almost every major domain. By 2020, data volume is expected to achieve 44 trillion Gbs, a number large enough to exhaust any supercomputer.
However, the ability to harness this data to deliver strategic insights is a valuable skill sought after by every organization.
Data science takes an analytical approach to raw numbers, facts, and statistics and transforms them into solutions that address organizational problems. In an age of competition in almost every domain, data science has become a useful tool to stay ahead of the curve.
More and more businesses are now utilizing data science to make evidence-based decisions. Data-savvy is now a new skill in demand, thus spurring the popularity of data science courses.
Ways Data Science is Impacting the career and Business
Data science is thus driving impact both in career and business performance in a variety of meaningful ways:
Promotes better decision-making:
For any enterprise to make effective business decisions, it is imperative for it to become data-savvy. However, most organizational data is unstructured and requires predictive analytics tools to derive relevant insights. Data science uses numbers and statistics in unstructured data and creates predictive models for the simulation of various possibilities.
With all the scenarios in one place, it becomes easier for business owners and managers to select and work on the best possible outcomes. For instance, South West Airlines uses historical consumer data to determine which new services they can launch to attract more flyers.
By analyzing consumers, interactions, and reactions to their social media posts, the airline has come up with a number of strategies that have proved profitable for them in the long run.
Thus, data science enables businesses to take a logical approach instead of earlier trial-and-error methods. As an additional advantage, recording and analyzing performance metrics over time allows the enterprise to make business decisions on recurring trends more efficiently. Having an idea of how predictive analytics can be employed to enhance decision-making can thus add even more value to your career.
Improves product relevance:
Data science methodologies can also use the massive volume of organizational data to calculate the true worth of a business, service, or product. By studying current and historical data, data science draws comparisons with competitors and analyses the market to recommend when and where the product will perform the best.
This insight can not only help businesses understand how their products impact the market, but it can also help them optimize their existing business processes.
Further, the continuous reflection and analysis of performance metrics necessitated by data science inculcate in professionals a deeper understanding of their organization’s products and services.
Uber, for instance, uses both customer feedback and competitor performance to improve its service further. By studying data gathered from these sources, Uber keeps optimizing processes to ensure that its cab service remains relevant among its growing customer base.
Better recruitment:
Data science makes the recruiting process faster and more accurate through its unique evaluation metrics. Recruiters can arrive at data points related to talent acquisition through social media posts, job sites, and company databases. Business owners can then utilize these data points to use analytical methods to find candidates who fit their requirements best.
Recruiting candidates through data mining thus ensures finding employees who fit the organization’s work culture instead of candidates who just look good on paper. Data science can act as a useful recruitment tool, especially for a high number of candidates.
Recognizing the target audience:
It is estimated that organizations generate roughly 2.5 billion Gbs of data daily in the form of reports, surveys, customer feedback, performance metrics, and other related material. Data science can effectively use this data to identify a business, and target customer base, thus giving enterprises better clarity about how they could further improve their products and services.
By taking into account all forms of customer data, be it in the form of website visits, social media responses, or email interaction, data science can deliver insights about which product factors are the most appealing to consumers.
These insights can be transformed into data points that give businesses a piece-by-piece mapping of their target audience. The audience is divided into groups by age, preferences, and lifestyle habits. This allows businesses to tailor their products and services to particular groups, thus giving them an improved customer response rate.
Aid in skill development:
Training and development form an essential part of any growing organization. However, continuous growth and expansion make it challenging to keep the employees informed and up-to-date with the latest industry trends.
Data science can pull the most recent industry insights that can aid teams in knowing all they need to know without spending countless hours looking for training and development options on the web.
These insights can then be utilized to populate an enterprise-specific online knowledge base that lists all the crucial information that employees need to refer to.
Taking a Data Science course ensures that organizations work smarter, not harder. Implementing data science methodologies and techniques at every level can significantly improve the overall productivity of a business.
By taking hard data and delivering statistics, data science can help a company grow strategically and in the right direction. Therefore, taking the time to understand how data science works can act as a significant performance booster not only at a personal level but also at the enterprise level.
Guest Author: Abhinav Rai is the Data Analyst at UpGrad, an online education platform providing industry-oriented programs in collaboration with world-class institutes, some of which are MICA, IIIT Bangalore, BITS, and various industry leaders which include MakeMyTrip, Ola, Flipkart, etc.