Data Science Maturity in an Organization
Domino released a pretty comprehensive paper on data science maturity models in organizations.
Link to the paper: https://www.dominodatalab.com/p/data-science-maturity-model-ungated
Data Science is not something that a company can just immediately buy from the market (hiring and tooling); its much more than that. It requires time for the organization to get used to having the Data Science team and the practises that the team preach. However, having a guy from C-level who believes in the impact of Data Science would definitely help in having the rest of the organization engage the rest of the company.
Even if a company preaches analytics and try their best to get the tools and talent in place, many things still prevent the company from reaching their full potential.
- Wiki and proper file sharing services are set up in the organization. Employees are encouraged to use to store their files and analysis etc. Some of the files actually automate huge amounts of work by moving data across various excel files and consolidating all that data into a single file for easier analysis. However, even with those tools in place, there are times where employees keep recreating the analysis/automation excel files from scratch over and over again. Some possible reasons on why this could have happen:
- There is no proper process/procedure on how to share those files/processes on the platform. The files are generated not labelled with metadata and just relying on file name doesn’t help in trying to guess what the file does
- Excel files for automations are usually single purpose. They are usually very customized to do a certain set of functions and to do it very well. Due to that, there is very few people who would be around who would be available to maintain moving forward (you would usually need to know a huge amount of business knowledge in order to understand what is happening in the code)
- New people on team are not pointed out on where such resources are. Most of the time, there isn’t a guide for teams to point out to those files and to inform users on what those files do.
It’s kind of interesting to see how such scenarios crop up but it would be more interesting to wonder if it’s possible to even solve such problems. (No, your solution shouldn’t be to just use Excel; there are plenty of people in the corporate world who swear by Excel and believe that it could solve any problem - believe me, I was there… The lack of version, the awkward way to automate it via VBA scripts)