ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some of the major dichotomies in training and staffing big data analytics organizations. First is the difference between academia and the business world. Then, within the commercial business world, the chapter examines distinctions between “clients,” or manufacturers and advertisers, and suppliers like agencies, data suppliers, and analytics consultants. There are significant differences between the academic environment where new professionals are trained in data science and the business world where that training must be put into practice. In the business world, data is dispersed among separate customer demographic, transaction, and product specification files, each with differing completion rates, time periods, and business rules for interpretation. The analytics translators take the business-focused requests of sales and marketing leaders and convert them into project guidelines for the analytics team to commence work. The skills of the analytics translator are to employ creativity and efficiency to navigate between these two languages adeptly and effectively bring business impact from deep quantitative analyses.
