True data scientists don't exist, says EE's head of data and insight

Analysts are either good with data or good at storytelling, but very rarely both says Richard Tate

Richard Tate is head of data and insight at mobile communications company EE. His team includes a lot of technical types including data scientists, analysts and data managers, as might be expected, but he sees himself as being very much on the marketing side. "Tech is mostly an enabler, it's insight that's driving the business," he tells Computing.

It's the process of translating data into insight and then communicating that insight that interests him most. With a background in journalism, storytelling is something comes naturally to him, he says, but it is not a skill that his more technically minded colleagues tend to possess.

Tate's team analyses data for the purposes of testing new products and campaigns, optimising processes, increasing engagement, and identifying new opportunities. This means presenting information to an audience of senior managers in a digestible and engaging way.

Combining the development of algorithms with the ability to interpret and explain the findings is meant to be a core capability of the data scientist, but Tate says this is largely the stuff of myth. In fact he makes a point of not using the title of ‘data scientist' when he's looking for new hires.

"The more people call themselves data scientists, the more the pound signs go up and eventually they price themselves out of the market," he says.

"I look for people who have the technical ability to do analyses with R, Python and SQL and who can also tell the story to the business, but I find you get one or the other. A true data scientist can do both, but in my experience so far they don't exist."

Tate has come up against something of a cultural issue: presentation skills are not generally valued among developers. Asked which skills are hardest to recruit he answers without hesitation: "people who do reporting".

"Analysts like to dig around in data and code and pull out the insights from it but finding people who are comfortable with digging in data and building a report for people to consume is really tough," he says.

"Reporting is always seen as a dull, boring job. It's not easy because their mindset is data, data, data. They'd much rather show a load of complicated charts than boiling it down to a few lines that a board director can understand."

Coders wanna code, in other words, and they like to show their workings, whereas a good storyteller is usually more of a generalist, able to pull information from multiple sources and distil it to make a point.

"Everyone loves a dashboard, but they don't give that much information. It's the insight that you derive from it that important. Finding people who are technical and can also pull out insight and put it really succinctly on a dashboard is really tough. You can't find them," he says.

Tate's team ranges in experience from recent graduates in maths and the sciences all the way up to senior analysts. Whatever their level, though, it's almost always the communication part that's lacking, he says.

"The technical part comes easy, but we often find the storytelling side needs some work."

EE does not have a formal training scheme to teach this skill though. Instead the firm takes an informal, person-centric approach.

"It's done at the personal level because everyone's different, so we have to try to figure out what aptitude they already have and then build on that. There's mentoring across the team but there's no formal training on how we can bring storytelling to life."