Just an anecdote but if you go to most baseball data departments, where there is real competition between teams, you don't just have PHds. You have people with

Just an anecdote but if you go to most baseball data departments, where there is real competition between teams, you don't just have PHds. You have people with undergrads/domain knowledge, and people with PHds. This isn't to say that PHd knowledge isn't valuable but if you look at firms in finance that have had success with data i.e. RenTech, they hire very smart people with PHds but it isn't only the PHd. You need someone who has the knowledge AND someone who has common sense/can get results. That is very hard to do correctly (and yes, some people who come from academia literally do not want anything to do with business...it is like the devs who come from a CS PHd and insist on using complicated algo and data structure everywhere, optimising every line, etc.).