Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI) Group

Bob Rogers, Chief Data Scientist, Intel

“Business leaders want ‘the answer,’” says Bob Rogers, Chief Data Scientist for Big Data Solutions at Intel. But data scientists must understand what “the answer” means in the specific business context and communicate the expected impact in the language of the business executives.  They need to explain the results of their analysis in “terms of the risk to the business” and “translate uncertainty into outcomes,” says Rogers. “If you show error bars on a number in a business presentation, you are probably going down the wrong path.”

When the data scientist as a new business role has emerged about a decade ago, the emphasis was on how it combined two disciplines and skill sets: computer science and statistics. More recently, the discussion of this evolving role has been along the lines of Rogers’ observation, as one combining technical and business expertise, emphasizing the importance…