Why scale-ups should outsource data science
UK & US Data Scientists demand vs supply
Data Scientists demand is fueled by the increasing commercial adoption of Machine Learning and AI-powered solutions. In an article, Raconteur quotes a recent report from Accenture, forecasting that “AI will add £654 billion to the UK economy by 2035. A significant portion of that will be outsourced to third-party service providers. Increasingly, organisations are looking at external parties to drive innovation”.
Data Scientists needed to slice through all the data and find insights, by building accurate prediction models, capturing patterns and anomalies in data that would normally take humans hundreds of years to process. For companies looking to accelerate their business, data and Data Scientists skills are invaluable, however, it is becoming increasingly difficult to source and find the right Data Science talent.
A January 2019 report from Indeed shows that in the US the demand for Data Scientists increases 29% year on year. On the other hand, Data Scientists' supply grew at a slower pace of 14%, indicating a gap between supply and demand. An IBM report shared similar findings: they predict that the demand for Data Scientists in the US, will increase from 364,000 job openings to 2,720,000, by 2020.
This year, 80% of UK-based companies are planning to hire or seek Data Scientist Consultants. According to the EU Commission, 100,000 new data-related jobs will be created by 2020, however, there won't be enough skilled people to fill the roles.
“Machine learning, big data and data science skills are the most challenging to recruit for, and can potentially create the greatest disruption if not filled.”
IBM's The Quant Crunch report
With this growing gap between supply and demand for Data Scientists that makes it extremely competitive to hire, you add complication, and expense if building your own internal team especially at a time when you've recently raised growth capital and have product and revenue growth targets to meet. By outsourcing your Data Science requirements you'll work with an efficient data science team that can hit the ground running; you'll gain access to expertise and know-how that can build your cutting-edge technology, saving you time and internal resources. You'll still retain ownership of the IP, but without the headache of developing it, while you can focus on delivering your business goals.
What are the benefits of outsourcing Data Science expertise?
Data Scientists aren't just hard to find, they are generally hard to retain and training requires time, stopping you from reaching business-impacting results as quickly.
Outsourcing AI and Data Science solutions offer benefits including access to global talent pools, essential generalists skills and expertise that can solve business-specific problems with efficient model selection thus helping business leaders choose the appropriate technology to scale up rapidly. Businesses have the opportunity to leverage third parties' larger volumes of data (i.e. unstructured web data), and to combine skills and technologies not yet available to them, with industry knowledge.
Data Experts are supporting businesses by picking the right models, data processing techniques and applying them correctly. Poorly thought-through AI applications can be highly disadvantageous by distracting a software engineering or IT team with data or systems requirements whilst not fully supporting a project and therefore setting it up to fail from the start. Working with an outsourced Data Science team gives space for internal development teams to continue on a day to day tasks while a longer Machine Learning project can be built and tested without distraction, to later integrate into the development teams roadmap.
How can Deeper Insights™ help you scale-up?
Outsourcing Data Science work makes it easier to scale up as needs arise. We provide Data Science expertise and consultancy on what would work best for you based on near and future roadmap requirements. We make sure you are ready to implement ML and AI systems in your organisation by analysing your data and systems, and ensuring you have the best chance of success once a model is deployed.
Our service doesn't end there, we have time-tested and proven project managing skills that cover your concerns with outsourcing data projects. We embrace CRISP-DM and TDSP Data Science Methodologies for project management. These methods provide a systematic approach, built on the industry's best practices to structure and control data projects, to enhance teams collaboration, learning, and ultimately to ensure high quality data-driven solutions.
We've been successfully delivering meaningful projects by:
- Managing expectations: we are proactively involved in managing the partnership with our clients from on-boarding to post-delivery activities.
- Enhancing communication: we create open and honest communication between executive management and our project managers, which is key to the success of the project. Not only, we make complex data projects easier to understand for all non-technical parties involved in the project.
- Joining forces: to help bridge the gap between teams, we provide regular status updates with recurrent meeting via video conference. By being able to put a face to names we build trust and help everyone involved to feel part of a team.
- Encouraging engagement: it's in our best interests that both our team and the in-house teams are fully engaged in the project, to drive your business goals forward.
Training and understanding: we have the necessary skills needed to perform the job successfully and we are open to listen and learn about our clients, their needs, and the industry they are operating in.
“Deeper Insights™ (formerly Skim Technologies) were a pleasure to work with, and extremely knowledgeable in the field of NLP. Their ability to take our idea and turn it into a working product made them perfect partner for our fast growth business”
Mahmood Noorani, CEO Quant-insight
See more reviews here.
A note from Deeper Insights™' founder, Jack:
“We love working with Scale-up clients, as these are the companies building our futures. Technical teams are always very hands-on, and the business leaders are imaginative and driven, which motivates us to deliver cutting edge, practical and scalable solutions for them.”
Jack Hampson, CEO Deeper Insights
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