CIOs seeking to cement their legacies by making better use of business intelligence and analytics are often stymied by how to analyze big data to streamline operations, drive revenue and gain marketplace advantages. Advances in tools are progressing rapidly and the sheer volume of data to analyze is increasing exponentially, but the methods have not evolved much since IT analysts graduated from business school.
CIO Magazine asks Who’s Training the Next Generation of Data Scientists? and points to an innovative masters’ level program at the University of California at Berkeley’s new School of Information that teaches graduate students to better leverage big data for analytics. This Master of Information and Data Science program features a multidisciplinary curriculum designed to prepare data science professionals to solve real-world problems using complex and unstructured data.
It teaches the next generation of data scientists how to analyze information not just as text and physical artifacts but also as video, data, audio, sensor data collected from computers and even Web clickstream data, and educates the graduate students in the social, economic and personal usage issues that encompass data. They learn all the necessary skills for extracting, cleaning, modeling and analyzing the data, and students are taught to work with data sets of all sizes, including massive big data analysis methods.
They are also taught how to ask the questions that IT needs answered to drill deeper into the data to get answers that will drive a better understanding of operations. The program isn’t just churning out programming and data mining experts; students learn about the legal issues of protecting information as well as how to analyze the impact of behavioral studies, user interface design and user interaction.
This program is intriguing for CIOs hiring analysts because graduates look like they’ll be more well-rounded than newly minted MBAs and offer CIOs an opportunity to better analyze the role of IT within the organization and make changes that will improve their legacies in their current jobs while better preparing them for their next CIO positions. Do you think CIOs need traditional analytics-as-usual or should opt for this new generation of data scientists more broadly trained in behavioral sciences, law, big data, and analytics?
Chris Carroll is a freelance technology writer with over 30 years editorial experience. See more information about his background, including samples of his work and references, at www.chriscarroll.com.