Table of Contents
Introduction
It would be a fair assumption to make that since you are here reading this blog, you are aware of the importance of data science in the world we are living in today. But do you really know what is driving this upsurge in data science and data science-related jobs? We also see that the importance of data science varies from big to small businesses. While large enterprises are already hooked onto the data science buzz, there are scores of small and medium-sized businesses that still run their business out of excel sheets. In the future, the adoption of data science by such businesses coupled with innovative start-ups will drive the adoption of data science in a big way. In this blog, let’s take a quick look at the history of data science and why is data science important at all?
Data Science and its Importance
To put it very simply, the importance of data science is all about any data ecosystem, structures, theories, and algorithms on how to manage this data ecosystem. Data science is nothing but the science of working with data, the study of data, its characteristics, methods, and algorithms to leverage this data to benefit businesses. The formal definition of data science is, ‘Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms, and systems to extract knowledge and insights from structured and unstructured data and apply knowledge and actionable insights from data across a broad range of applications domains.’
So yes, data science is a field that puts together theories and practices from various fields like mathematics, statistics, computer science, and information science to extract the best possible information from massive data sets in the most efficient way possible.
To answer why data science is important, you will have to look at how businesses are run. Businesses are run on tactical decisions and strategic direction. When both aren’t based on facts, businesses tend to lose out and fall to the competition in the long run, if not earlier. To lose truly reliable facts, you need to depend on the importance of data science in the business domain, both within the business’s ecosystem and outside in the marketplace. It was a lot easier to crunch data in yesteryear due to its low volume and complexity. With the advent of cheaper storage and the availability of faster processing, a lot more data can be stored and processed. Organisations could no longer apply the traditional data crunching methods to data at this massive scale, and data science was born and continues to evolve rapidly. The importance of data science is to make better decisions based on a larger set of facts that give a true picture of the business ecosystem while also helping businesses with direction by uncovering other streams of revenue or innovative ways of cutting costs.
Importance of Data Science in 2021 and beyond
The importance of data science does not stop here. Some of the benefits of data science are;
Decision support systems
Decisions today are based on data systems of massive scale. Without data science, techniques analysing this data set would need a mountain of resources and time. And to be able to do that consistently and continuously is practically impossible. Data Science brings in theories, techniques, and practices to extract meaningful inferences from existing data and make it available in the shortest time for quick decision making.
Product Innovation
Data science allows businesses to read into feedback from customers dynamically. It allows research and development to work on shortcomings and features that customers yearn for and result in faster product innovations.
Business Efficiency
Data science lets businesses understand excesses within business processes and their shortcomings and help design innovative ways of running the business efficiently.
Predictive analysis
Data science can help businesses use their data to build predictive models enabling them to see well in the advanced effect of new strategies. Businesses can then have several plans ready to ensure success in the marketplace.
Data Science helping humanity
Data Science is being used in a big way in
Urban Planning
Urban Planning involves connected cities, and that means thousands of IoT devices streaming in data to be analysed and help make an efficient and sustainable future-ready city.
Environment Protection
Massive data sets are being crunched using Data Science to establish predictive models for forest fires, helping save thousands of hectares of invaluable forests and prevent greenhouse emissions.
Public Health
DNA sequencing involves data on massive scales when it comes to detecting mutations in pandemics. Data science also helps in building predictive models and patterns that diseases of pandemic scale follow.
Conclusion
We hope this article has shown you the importance of data science in business. The future will see a lot more artificial intelligence (AI) being used within businesses, and without data science, implementing a successful AI-powered system is not conceivable. Data science will drive the world tomorrow well into the future. And, if that inspires you to tread the challenging data science course, logon on to Jigsaw Academy for the carefully designed courses on data science.
In addition, you can find more helpful resources at Dyifo.
