Data scientists are a rare and coveted breed of IT professional. Data science is a relatively young field; many computer science programs at universities still do not offer data science specializations. The data scientists that do exist typically go to work for a few deep-pocketed companies who can afford them. What is a smaller company with Big Data ambitions to do? For one, they can use cutting-edge data tools to morph their business analysts into “citizen data scientists.”

Chris Lynskey, VP of Product Management at Oracle, said that even companies who have data scientists joke that they are more like data janitors than data scientists. He told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during a special On-the-Ground segment at Oracle’s Redwood Shores Headquarters that tasks like data integration often fall on the data scientist’s shoulders.

“It’s unfortunate because that’s the Ph.D. guy, and that’s menial labor to a large degree,” he said.

Democratizing data

Lynskey said that Oracle has created tools utilizing Apache Spark (an open-source Big Data processing engine) that abstract away the knowledge of the Ph.D. into data tools that ordinary business people can use.

“We think the big opportunity — especially as we create these citizen data scientists — is machine learning,” he said. “How can we embed [machine learning] into our products such that you don’t have to have the Ph.D. at the outset?”

Talent quotient

Lynskey said that Oracle tools, such as Data Lab, allow data scientists to work on innovation and predictive analytics rather the than grunt work like integration and management.

“We give you almost a shopping experience for data. You can go in, type in keywords — ‘I want to look for social media log data’ — and we actually search into Hadoop and index all that content. If you can get a data scientist — trust me — keep them,” he said, explaining that data scientists working to their greatest potential and “citizen data scientists” in business departments make the ideal combo.

Watch the full video interview with Chris Lynskey below:

Photo by SiliconANGLE