When it comes to organizing your teams, how do you make sure you’re maximizing the capabilities of your data scientists within the enterprise? What is the best way to support innovation that leads to value?

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Director of Data2 years ago

When organizing data skills, there is a continuum from fully centralized to fully distributed, and I think people have very strong views on the right and wrong. My view is very pragmatic and that it needs to be tied to that organization. Some organizations are, by their culture, more distributed. Some are more centralized. 

In some, you might need to have the data analysts and data scientists embedded in the business team structure with some kind of centralized support. Embedded analysts get closer to the data and customers and have greater control. More centralized teams, you have slightly higher efficiency because you've got less people to train and organize and there's less tools but the teams are less connected to the end users and data. So I think there's pros and cons of both. I don't think any are the right or wrong answer. 

The larger and more sophisticated organizations are using more distributed data analytics teams. I think that comes with a level of maturity and the smaller or less sophisticated start with a centralized model. So I think it's always right to go from centralized to distributed, but I think it depends on the organization.

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