The movie Moneyball shows the example of how we can look at the data to make better decisions. Baseball is just one area where it can be applied. Software Engineering is another.
I came across the following statements related to “Data Science” topic which (although interdisciplinary in its nature) becomes a buzzword (I believe in Software Engineering too):
“The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians… The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill.” (Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist interviewed in the McKinsey Quarterly)
“Data Science is a valuable rebranding of computer science and applied statistics skills” (David Smith)
“Data science is clearly a blend of the hackers’ arts…; statistics and machine learning…; and the expertise in mathematics and the domain of the data for the analysis to be interpretable… It requires creative decisions and open-mindedness in a scientific context.” (Hilary Mason and Chris Wiggins in Taxonomy of Data Science)
“…data scientist: those who use both data and science to create something new.“ (DJ Patil in Building data science teams)