In the age of digital economy, data science plays a key role in accelerating improvements acrbusiness processes and decision making processes. Every business entity wants to streamline their business and strategize by using useful prediction, prescription, benchmarking and automation.

Navin Manaswi, a senior data scientist at Xchanging Asia Pacific, uses a slew of tools on a daily basis to make sense of data deluge and translate them into meaningful business insights. In an interaction with BW CIOWorld, he talks about how a data scientist can help government of India tackle some of the biggest issues and help improve governance.

Why do business leaders need data science to accelerate their business growth?

Due to large volume of data coming from various sources in various formats at various points of time, traditional business intelligence does not meet the needs of business leaders. Business problems can range from minimizing the transportation cost in a given network to the finding the best recommendation engine for their various kinds of customers. Even traditional knowledge of customer segmentation, building prediction models, building classifiers sound to be not-so-good solutions. Every business has started investing a lot of money and efforts in adopting advanced data analytics based on data science. It simply implies that return on investment (RoI) for data science initiatives is very high.

Can you explain how data scientists help big companies solve big problems?

Data scientists, in big companies like Adidas, General Mills, Snapdeal and Vodafone, solve their own business problems and help them strategize and grow fast in the fast-changing competitive business world. They aim to delight their customers, to automate various business processes and to better decision making processes by discovering the hidden insights/patterns.

For example, if right discounts/coupons are given to the right set of customers at the right time, the company makes a lot of money. Data science help e-commerce companies like Flipkart recommend right item to the e-customers and then significantly increase the revenue.