Dominic Jordan: Why Decision Scientist is key role in an analytics team
Written by
Simon Austin
December 4, 2024
Former Manchester United Director of Data Dominic Jordan says Decision Scientist is THE most important role in a football analytics department.
Jordan was United’s first Director of Data and worked for the club from March 2022 to August 2024. Prior to this he was Director of Data Science and Analytics at fashion retailer N Brown Group and was included in Data IQ’s list of the 100 most influential people in data in 2022.
Sessions with: Dominic Jordan, Gregg Broughton, Jason Todd, Pegah Rahimian, Sebastien Coustou, Adam David, Lucy Rowland and Mladen Sormaz.
Presenting at TGG’s 2024 Big Data Webinar last month, Jordan outlined the ‘target state for team structure’ in a football data department. You can watch Dominic’s whole presentation – plus seven others at the Big Data Webinar AND all of our other Webinars and Masterclasses – by becoming a TGG Member.
The first stage of the target team structure was data infrastructure, responsible for “ingesting, cleaning, governing and maintaining data stores and pipelines”, with jobs such as Data Operations, Data Engineering, Machine Learning Operations and Machine Learning Engineering.
Stage two was machine learning and artificial intelligence, with “people who are responsible… for the creation of KPIs, models and innovation,” with titles such as Data Scientist and Machine Learning Scientist.
The third and final stage was “people who are responsible for material processes and methods which are human in the loop.”
Jordan said: “I call this decision science, because it is literally the science of helping experts make the best decisions they can make.”
These could have the title Decision Scientist, Management Information Analyst, Business Intelligence Analyst, or Tableau or Power BI Developer and are “all people who should be clear about the fact that what they are doing is helping experts make better decisions.”
Manchester City have invested heavily in this area, with the creation of a Football Insights department. This is headed up by Tableau expert Ravi Mistry, who joined in May 2022.
When considering the most important position within an Analytics department, Jordan said categorically: “I’m going to tell you the most important role – the Decision Scientist. For all I’ve said about infrastructure, the role of decision science is the point in, it’s where the trust is developed.”
When asked by a delegate which skills and attributes were important for an effective Decision Scientist, Jordan said: “The people you hire as Decision Scientists are going to have to have high EQ, they are going to have to be able to talk to coaches and translate information in ways that those decision makers can understand, to speak their language.
“When I hire Decision Scientists, I would want them to be good quality coders – that’s really critical for any of these roles – but they don’t have to be so focused on creating software or software processes as some of the other roles.
Dominic Jordan's 'target state for team state structure'
“Machine Learning Scientists and Data Engineering functions, they don’t really have to interact with humans – and there are people who are quite comfortable working just with computers.
“(As a Decision Scientist) you need to be a domain expert within football and you need to have high EQ. This doesn’t always exist within data scientists or people working within IT.
“You are often coming up against people in these expert-led businesses that have done something one way for a long time and you need to unpick how you can introduce these new ways of making decisions to them and that requires building very strong human relationships and trust.”
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