| | October 20179certain industry experts opine that, all that data compiled on paper can wrap our Earth four times over. A brand can gain immensely and in myriad ways, if they understand customers genuinely; and this is where data science comes into the picture. Furthermore, data science has changed the process of decision making completely. Transitioning into a complete data driven company made significantly enhanced their objective, financial, and operations mea-surements. Previously, when there was no access to data, decision making was best left to someone who had rele-vant expertise and experience. These people, in turn, re-lied on patterns, common sense, and instincts, which they had developed over the years. Such decision is fraught with lots of loopholes that may be dangerous. The tech industry puts this quite rightly - you can't manage what you can't measure. Data science enables management and therefore, measurements.Data science enables trend finding- Data scientist ag-gregate data to spot trends. Within an organization, they do this in accordance with the organizational goals. Also, these data crunchers let you know what is on the anvil be-fore experts come to know of such trends. Moreover, data driven decisions are always more accurate than decisions made on the basis of past movements. For example, think of Google Trends. It uses an algorithm that crunches data collected through its search engine, and generates accu-rate results. There is an avalanche of structured and un-structured data getting generated every single day, around the world. As per a report released by IBM, 90 percent of the data existing in the world today has been generated in the last two years alone, at a rate of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. Amidst this data deluge, data science and data scientists reside. Data is coming in from a variety of sources, such as sensors, internet, social media, apps, wearable technology, e-commerce, and m-commerce, etc. The form varies from videos to texts to audios. Cloud computing also contributed to this data deluge, but it also made data collection both widespread by making it more scalable. As mentioned above, big data and analytics can in-deed assist businesses in understanding their customers in a much better way than human counterparts, and can surely fetch game-changing inferences if used correctly. Netflix and Amazon are reputed for their powerful recom-mendation engines that not only use what people buy but also what they browse. Similarly, credit card companies analyze associative power found in big data. Therefore, big businesses require big data to function efficiently. Even the tech industry is required to harness the power of data science into something worthwhile. The need is to create apps, systems, and algorithms that power these data-driven customer targeting engines. Apart from that, the demand for data scientists possessing rare data skills is in high demand today. Ed-tech platforms like Udacity are also offering specifically designed degree courses to can-didates willing to build a career in the data domain. With Udacity, candidates can learn the nuances of data science from industry experts at Facebook, Cloudera, MongoDB, Georgia Tech, and more. The platform offers introductory, advanced as well as industry-specific courses to meet spe-cific learning goals. Data driven decisions are always more accurate than decisions made on the basis of past movementsIshan Gupta
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