Companies are throwing money at data scientists but don't know what to do with them, claims Lenovo

Lenovo's Mohammed Chaara believes companies are paying huge wages for data scientists but don't have a strategy for making the most of them

The world's biggest PC maker Lenovo is in the market for data scientists - but claims that it is competing with employers scooping up talent with big salaries, yet who don't know what to do with them once they've recruited them.

That is the no-nonsense assessment of Mohammed Chaara, director of the Customer Insight Center of Excellence, Strategy & Analytics, at Lenovo.

"There is a demand for talent, and you're competing with employers who don't even know what they want to do with analytics but are willing to pay the price. So the challenge is both in supply and demand," he told the media at SAS's headquarters in North Carolina.

Chaara's comments chime with what Jody Porrazzo, data scientist at multinational media company UBM told Computing at the SAS Global Forum, that the only thing the business understands when it comes to data science and analytics "is that they don't understand it".

Lenovo's Chaara said that the company currently has three groups of analytical talent.

"We have those who have recently graduated and have done some cool internship somewhere and they usually come in with knowledge of new technologies, like Hadoop or Spark.

"Then you have these mid-level analytics experts who are very strong on data modelling in a traditional way, but who lack the business acumen to be a leader within the organisation. And, finally, you have a more business-focused group which is really limited to BI and descriptive reporting," he said.

Chaara suggested that a data scientist is someone who should have a working knowledge in all three of those groups, but hiring someone like that is currently a real challenge for many organisations.

The Chinese company has organised hubs of expertise.

"We have four centres of excellence - four hubs of analytics and multiple teams embedded into the unit. We have about 100 people who are involved with analytics and this has grown drastically over the past two to three years," he said.

Dudley Gwaltney, group vice president and manager of analytical modelling at SunTrust Bank, also addressing the media at the SAS global event, suggested that the main skill he looks for when attempting to hire a data scientist is "intellectual curiosity", but he admitted that this was an incredibly hard characteristic to measure - and it's not something easily found on a CV either.

Lenovo's Chaara agreed with Gwaltney and added that it was difficult to know whether a candidate has this "intellectual curiosity" in one-on-one interviews either.

Chaara also revealed that Lenovo was using machine learning to analyse unstructured data from YouTube and Instagram.

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