The entire purpose of business software systems has always been to provide business decision makers the KPI’s they need to make informed decisions. That was the goal with mainframes and reports on ribbon paper, and it remains the goal on today’s smartphones. Yet data scientist is a fairly new term; what changed?
While the speed of individual computers has massively grown since I was a computer operator in the 1980s, it’s not that which has created the large jump in computing power in the last decade. Clustered computing, the ability to share the workload between large numbers of computers, is what has exponentially grown the ability to perform far more complex calculations much faster.
