Decision Scientist

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What Does Decision Scientist Mean?

A decision scientist is a technology professional who is mainly focused on making technologies work for decision-making and enterprise. However, the term "decision scientist" is really meaningful when you contrast it with another similar job role referred to as a "data scientist" or "big data scientist."

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Techopedia Explains Decision Scientist

Here's the context — years ago, big data was the way that people advanced technology. They poured enormous amounts of data into linear systems and created business insights. So the big data scientist was one of the most sought-after professionals in the tech world.

Advance the clock to today, and you have the emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning systems. That has led to the emergence of the decision scientist. Unlike the data scientist, the decision scientist is not mainly focused on working with huge amounts of data. Instead, that individual is looking at the output of the systems and what they do, and trying to make those systems work for enterprise goals and objectives.

The amount of skill crossover and similarity between data scientists and decision scientists is enormous. They do so many of the same things that their job roles can be almost identical. But that key difference is that for the data scientists, the focus is on the mathematics and algorithmic work of handling the data while the decision scientist focuses more on the result and the context of use cases.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.