I don't usually write about my career—a small firebreak against professional encroachment on personal time—but I've been working more closely with my studio's people/process/culture consulting practice and "data-science-as-discipline" has been a reliable kickstarter of contentious conversation.

Despite it being my third year of having "data scientist" in my job title, I'm still fairly skeptical of the separation between "conventional" digital analytics and "data science". The distinctions between the two seem to only grow more arbitrary and fiddly with time (and I'm not entirely convinced those distinctions were particularly sound to begin with). My colleague David J. Neff leads our consulting practice and after some thorough navel-gazing we decided to assemble our thoughts into a discussion piece.