• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, December 12, 2012

The Direct Marketing Association's Stephanie Milller cited a recent Harvard Business Review article titled "Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century." Miller asked attendees at the MediaPost Email Insider Summit if they have a data scientist in-house and a handful of hands went up.

Who are these people? According to the HBR:

"It’s a high-ranking professional with the training and curiosity to make discoveries in the world of big data. The title has been around for only a few years. (It was coined in 2008 by one of us, D.J. Patil, and Jeff Hammerbacher, then the respective leads of data and analytics efforts at LinkedIn and Facebook.) But thousands of data scientists are already working at both start-ups and well-established companies. Their sudden appearance on the business scene reflects the fact that companies are now wrestling with information that comes in varieties and volumes never encountered before. If your organization stores multiple petabytes of data, if the information most critical to your business resides in forms other than rows and columns of numbers, or if answering your biggest question would involve a 'mashup' of several analytical efforts, you’ve got a big data opportunity."