Scaling Data Science

A look at the tools, processes, and infrastructure your business

needs to derive value from data.

June 2020 | Version 1.01

Copyright © 2020, Oracle and/or its affiliates
INTRODUCTION
Scaling data science across the entirety
Though it has deep roots in academia, data science is now of an organization requires extensive

very much a business process. Just like accounting or resources, a defined roadmap, and the
right tools, processes, and
marketing, there is a cost to doing data science—as well as infrastructure to put work into
production.
great benefits that come from doing it well. In fact, 21
percent of executives report that investing in big data has
been transformative for their firms.1
For businesses unable to realize transformative
improvements from data-driven work, the roadblocks are
varied: organizational impediments, lack of alignment
between stakeholders, resistance to technology changes,
and more can hold up progress.
Scaling data science across the entirety of an organization 21 percent of executives report that big
data has been transformative for their
requires extensive resources and a defined roadmap, as well firms.

as the right tools, processes, infrastructure, and a plan for

putting work into production.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SCALE DATA SCIENCE?

The term scaling data science refers to making your data science team the engine that
powers every decision with powerful predictive models and comprehensive analyses.
For instance, a predictive customer churn model built by a data scientist could forecast
the likelihood that individual customers will stop buying from your business in a given
time period. That information could help you identify high-risk customers and
intervene before they defect—but only if that information gets to the appropriate
parties.
If you have the right processes in place, the outputs of that model can be integrated
with your call center software so customer service reps will be able to view risk scores
when they’re on the phone with customers. Or they might be delivered to your
marketing automation system enabling your marketers to create more targeted
campaigns. This is just one example of how to scale your data science efforts. To make
data science worth the investment, your company not only needs data scientists to do
the high-value work in the first place, but the tools, processes, and infrastructure to
support it.
1. NewVantage Partners, “Big Data Executive Survey 2017,” January 2017.

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1. TOOLS AND PROCESSES
Identifying the tools, you need to scale is both essential and complex. No two data
scientists possess the same skillsets or tool preferences, and tool sprawl—in which the
volume of tools being used exceeds an organization’s ability to effectively utilize
them—is the number one problem data-driven companies face.2 The following table
provides examples of the wide variety of available tools, but many more exist and new
ones enter the market frequently.

The Data Science Technology Landscape

TECHNOLOGY TOOLS

Programming languages Python, R, Scala

The typical enterprise data science
Machine learning frameworks Scikit-learn, R, Mllib, H2O, Turi project requires dozens of steps—from
cleaning data and selecting model
Data processing and compute resources SQL, Spark, Hive, Pig, Cascading features to model validation and
deployment. There are dozens of tools
Code editors and notebooks Jupyter, Zeppelin, RStudio, Eclipse, designed to cater to each part of the
IntelliJ process.

Data visualization libraries Matplotlib, ggplot, Seaborn, reflect.io, D3

Package management PyPI, CRAN, Maven

Build tools pip, packrat, sbt

Data pipelines Airflow, Luigi, Pinball, ML Pipelines

Model serialization PMML, PFA, Parquet, JSON, Pickle

Model deployment Palladium, Prediction.io, Oryx.io, Docker

Cloud computing AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, IBM Bluemix

The typical enterprise data science project requires dozens of steps—from cleaning Your tools and processes must
data and selecting model features to model validation and deployment. There are support data scientist’s ability to
dozens of tools designed to cater to each part of the process. The tools and processes Experiment
Create work that is reproducible
you have in place should support your data scientists’ ability to:
Collaborate and share across
Experiment teams

Not every data model is going to function perfectly out of the gate. Experimenting and
iterating is part of a typical data science process. Therefore, the tools your team uses
should support the deployment of different model versions and compile metrics to
measure the success of those versions. Experimentation also requires the collection
and storage of massive amounts of data. The more data your data scientists have, the
more opportunities for analysis they can uncover.
Create work that is reproducible
If your data scientists are reinventing the wheel for every project, you’re wasting
valuable time and resources. Because data scientists often store their work locally,
much of what has already been done goes unshared. Having a central location for files,
models, and code will help your team find and reuse data science work that has already
been battle tested.

2. Forrester Consulting, “Data Science Platforms Help Companies Turn Data Into Business Value,” December 2016

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Collaborate and share across teams
Your processes and tools should encourage knowledge sharing, especially between
technical and non-technical teams. Make sure it’s easy for data scientists to publish
analyses as shareable reports and integrate model results into the dashboards or real-
time applications that stakeholders rely on.

Accommodate the tools your data scientists use every day

When it comes to mitigating tool sprawl, you’ll find it’s just not possible to dictate
every tool your data science team uses. Data scientists embrace programming
languages such as R, Python, SQL, Ruby, and Scala, and rely on integrated
development environments (IDEs) and notebooks such as Apache Zeppelin, RStudio,
and Jupyter. Rather than require your team to code in a specific language and
environment, you can provide a data science platform that runs code written in any
language in the notebooks or IDEs your data scientists prefer. That way, your team
can work how they want and still share work, driving reproducibility and
collaboration.

As you build your data science

infrastructure, consider these elements
2. INFRASTRUCTURE AND ENVIRONMENTS
On-demand computing
The infrastructure needed to support complex data analyses is a critical—if often resources
unmentioned—component of data science. IT can spend a lot of time spinning up the Standardized data science
necessary resources to support data science work or setting up environments with the environments
right packages and then waiting for those packages to compile. Access control

But with the right approach, your data science team can get the resources they need
without costing you—and your IT team—an excess of money and time. Here are just a
few elements to consider:
On-demand computing resources
To reduce costs, companies are increasingly turning to on-demand computing—
enabling compute resources to be spun up as needed. Working in a cloud environment
is a great way to accommodate data science work in a way that doesn’t require your
computing resources to be always on.
Standardized data science environments
Don’t set up a new data science environment for every project. Containers such as
Docker make it easy to download standard, repeatable environments with the tools and
packages you need already installed.
Access control
Two and a half quintillion bytes of data are created every day, and much of it comes
from customer interactions with your business. It’s unlikely that every member of your
team needs access to every type of data or every analysis. The ability to delegate access
by role and protect sensitive data is an important one.

Give your it team the control it needs

Scaling data science isn’t just about giving your data scientists the tools they need. IT
is an integral part of getting the resources your data science team needs up and
running, and your IT department will likely be concerned with stability and data
security. Giving them the ability to manage your pool of servers, connect data science
tools reliably and securely to data sources, and grant or deny access to users in a few
clicks is essential. A data science platform with an IT admin dashboard can make this
process easier.

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3. PRODUCTION
Getting data science work into production is arguably the most important step in any
data science process. Until this point, you haven’t truly scaled data science at your
organization.
Putting data science work into production means building a pipeline in which data
science analyses and models are continuously running in real time to power your
business. Deploying a model—such as a recommendation engine—into production so
that it can suggest products to shoppers on your site is just one part of the equation.
That model will need to be retrained, A/B tested, and constantly fed new data. Making
this work seamlessly is no small undertaking. The process should allow for:

Automation of repetitive tasks

If your team is manually running the reports your stakeholders want regularly, cleaning
data, and retraining models, you’re not efficiently putting work into production.
Currently, three out of every five data scientists spend the majority of their time
cleaning and organizing data.3 Setting up a system that automates many of these low-
level tasks will give your data scientists more time to focus on building high-value
analyses.

Ongoing monitoring of model performance

Collecting data from your models to monitor their performance is essential for
identifying issues and addressing them. Set up a pipeline to deliver relevant data from
activities such as model API calls, training, and cross validation.

Constant improvement
A data scientist’s work is never done. Giving your data scientists the ability to deploy
different versions of their predictive models to compare and iterate upon is a great way
to constantly improve the results of your data science work.

Take the burden of model deployment off of engineering

Rather than asking your data scientists to hand off their models to the engineering
team for refactoring, testing, and deployment, consider providing a tool or platform
that allows them to deploy models as APIs. With that capability, the models your
data scientists build can be integrated anywhere instantly, like the dashboards and
real-time applications your decision makers use — ultimately saving time and
resources while providing real value.

3. CrowdFlower, “2016 Data Science Report,” 2016.

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 A data science platform is a software
hub around which all data science work
HOW A DATA SCIENCE PLATFORM BRINGS IT ALL takes place. That work usually includes
TOGETHER Integrating and exploring data
from various sources
Data science platforms are a relatively new technology that are becoming a must have
Coding and building models that
for enterprise data science teams. In fact, platform adoption is expected to rise from 26
leverage that data
percent to 69 percent over the next two years as companies increasingly recognize the Deploying those models into
value of managing data science tools and processes in a centralized hub. 4 production
In a nutshell, a data science platform is a software hub around which all data science Delivering results through
model-powered applications or
work takes place. That work usually includes integrating and exploring data from
reports
various sources, coding and building models that leverage that data, deploying those
models into production, and serving up results, whether that’s through model-powered
applications or reports. Platforms are designed to support this work to make scaling
data science much more achievable.
Are you ready to start performing data science at scale? Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Data Science is a platform that provides integrations with the tools your data scientists
already use and love—such as Jupyter notebooks and GitHub—intuitive project
organization, easy report publishing, model deployment capabilities, and much more,
backed by enterprise-grade security features and infrastructure.

4. Forrester Consulting, “Data Science Platforms Help Companies Turn Data into Business Value,” December 2016.

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Scaling Data Science

July, 2020