Crafting Ever-changing Data Products: Towards a Process Model of Data Work

As we produce, collect, work, and live with data, organizational success gets shaped by the capabilities of data analytics. Although data science emerged more than a decade ago, we still lack a thorough understanding of this occupation and its interrelationships with other fields of work. Following prior research on the work of data scientists, which has primarily pursued a “becoming” or “relating” lens on this fledgling occupation, we adopt a “doing” lens to examine and conceptualize data science work from a human-centered perspective. Our qualitative inquiry includes 64 interviews with data scientists and their managers working in 24 globally distributed organizations. We find that data scientists constantly engage in a triangular relationship of practices (crafting data as their material, crafting tools, and crafting products) and thereby ensure the quality of data science work outcomes. The findings can explain changes in other occupations that are taking place as work becomes datafied.