This section provides the motivation for this project, the relevance of the topic addressed by the bookand a synopsis of the main themes covered by each chapter.Chapter 1.Big data analytics professionals: emerging trends and job profilesOrganizations have been deeply changing because of the digital transformation. New jobs arebecoming central to the success of any company, regardless the sector and the industry (Vidgen et al.2017; Davenport and Harris 2017, 2007; Lorenz et al. 2015). One of the most pertinent definitionabout professionals working in Big Data field is from American Marketing Association website: Big Data professionals [are] individuals who can apply sophisticated quantitative skills todata transcribing actions, interactions, or other behaviors of people to derive insights andprescribe actions. Big Data professionals are further distinguished due to their ability towork with extremely large datasets that may be problematic for standard tools. DataScientists are another subset of Big Data professional, and typically work withcontinuously streaming, unstructured data that may come from social media, audio, orvideo files (Keller, Ahern, & Works).Scientific literature is still struggling to find a common definition of professionals working with BigData. More importantly, there is still confusion about the boundaries of different groups of jobs.Indeed, job profiles, duties, tasks, and responsibilities are often overlapping. A first macro distinctionwas recognized by Harris and Mehrotra (2014) between data scientists and analysts in general. Theydistinguished the two categories according to five dimensions: types of data, preferred tools, nature ofwork, typical educational background, and mind-set. However, nowadays organizations have differentprofiles and all of them contribute in maintaining and providing solutions leveraging on a largevolume of data, for instance system architects, data analysts, data engineers, business analysts, anddata scientists. System architects are responsible to build and maintain the full technologyinfrastructure for data ecosystems. Therefore, they manage the company's server platform; theysupport processes to load and manage the analytical data store; they integrate new data sources. Dataanalysts on the other hand are responsible to support other IT functions regarding data processing in aspecific domain. Data engineers are quantitative analysts (such as programmers, software engineers)and they support the data governance. They collect, cleanse, blend, form, organize data in the generaldata warehouse. They solve more conventional quantitative analysis problems and their mainresponsibility is to ensure data quality so that it can be properly analyzed. Business analysts analyzedata and communicate results through reports and dashboards to facilitate (and possibly give adviceto) business decision making. Lastly, data scientists are statisticians with a strong scientificbackground. They acquire and bring structure to large quantities of formless data (or Big Data) togenerate value to the company. Despite the current literature acknowledges about these four macrocategories of job profiles, there is still a confusion about their impact within organizations and howthey contribute in decision making process. Therefore, this chapter will contribute to the extantliterature by addressing the following questions: which is the macro trend in the labor market of BigData professionals? What is the role and the main responsibilities of these emerging profiles withinthe organiza
About the Author: Sara Bonesso is associate professor of Business Organization and Human Resources Management at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy. She is also one of the founders and the Vice-Director of the Ca' Foscari Competency Centre.
Elena Bruni is post-doc researcher at the Department of Management, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy.
Fabrizio Gerli is Associate Professor of Business Organization and Human Resources Management at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy. He is also one of the founders and the Director of the Ca' Foscari Competency Centre.