Data Science is a very new field. The first degree programmes were noticed about 2, possibly 3 years ago. When you ask ‘Data Scientists’ what they do, you will hear them mention a diverse set of tasks and functions. It is a new discipline. Here is a link to an article about interviews with ‘Data Scientists’. They talk about what they do.
In the TVET sector both the IT and MIS (management information systems) are located in the ‘Corporate Services’ sector of the current business model. You observed that in the business corporate models, the CIO sits on the same level as the CFO, COO, etc. The reason is understood. “Data” is the new oil.
In a typical TVET College, the MIS person is tasked with providing management with relevant, accurate and reliable data and information to enable management to make good business decisions, our experience tells us that the process is way too slow. I frequently had to wait for up to 1 week to receive datasets or subsets when I worked as a consultant internal auditor in the sector.
What is required is CI/CD. Continuous integration with the data and continuous deployment of the analysis, data and, machine learning algorithms. The minimum requirement for efficient collaboration between administration staff is to have real-time acess to the same database so that employees can ‘sing together off the same hymn sheet’. Currently there is not a single TVET College that operates in this manner.
Which brings us to IT. IT refers to the physical infrastructure and software systems used by a corporate to enable seamless communication, data capture and collection, software development, etc. Here is a more robust description.
You will quickly notice the differences in definition between IT and data science.
Briefly I think data science can serve you in the following ways:
Please remember that a data scientist can fetch your data from any location in any format (SAS, Excel, csv, SQL, web-scraping, etc,.)
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