At the ODSC East 2016, I heard a lot of terms thrown about. This one resonated. It came out of a talk by Todd Cioffi, formerly from RapidMiner and now with the Mass Gov data initiative.
He defined this as “The Analytics Adjacent” – people with expertise and skills but not specific data science skills.
I’m not a hard core engineer. I explore data. I understand it. I run analysis. I model and mine the data. I’m expert at data prep and profiling. I’m close to the business and come up with the relevant questions we’re asking the data. I’m the guy that gives the engineers and folks that can take a well founded hypothesis and apply it at scale to a deployed solution. Turns out that folks like me are participants in the data science workflow…but maybe not a “data scientist”.
I’ve also just heard the term “Data Whisperer”. Shhhhhhh…..