>I'm a firm believer that data science should be pulled out of IT and put into the business. I say this from personal experience. The major risk here is that

>I'm a firm believer that data science should be pulled out of IT and put into the business. I say this from personal experience. The major risk here is that Data Scientists will constantly get pulled in as resources to support business fires and high visibility projects that should be handled by other people. Otherwise what happens is this: "I know you are working on that Data Science project that is scoped for 4 weeks, but can you do this Business Analyst thing the insert exec name here asked for by this Friday?" Data Scientists need to be shielded from that day to day analyst stuff, otherwise they'll never be able to do their jobs. One of the ways to do this is to put them in IT in a business facing consulting role. IT is typically (not always) is more focused on a proper solution, not day to day triage. So they can filter out projects that aren't appropriate.