The research note, Emerging Role of the Data Scientist and the Art of Data Science, […] just hit the Gartner wires this week. Since most of the data scientist role dissenters we come across seem to believe that the role’s title is is nothing more than a pretentious moniker for a statistician or business intelligence (BI) analyst, we decided to take an…er…scientific approach to making that determination. (from Gartner)
http://blogs.gartner.com/doug-laney/defining-and-differentiating-the-role-of-the-data-scientist/
I agree, a data scientist is neither a statistician nor BI analyst (in fact, I think the BI analyst part is pretty far from the role). I’ve known a few people who, over the years, were data scientists. They tackled big data, big visualization, big mining, big computation, big complex problems — and way off the charts from mainstream understanding of business intelligence.