Toward Improved Knowledge Retention: A Template for Describing Data Science Projects

Data Science (DS) aims to extract knowledge from large amounts of data. Organizations can use the retrieved insights to achieve various performance improvements. However, DS projects often fail to fulfill their objectives due to the explorative nature of this discipline and technical as well as managerial challenges. Consequently, new approaches to support DS project execution are sought after. A viable contribution in this regard is improving knowledge retention in DS to predict socio-technical obstacles of an undertaking and derive best practices. Therefore, in this work, a template for describing the central characteristics of DS projects is proposed using a Design Science Research approach. The artifact is structured based on the common DS project stages and features 32 fields, enabling comparability and transparency in DS. The applicability of the template is demonstrated based on three DS use cases from the literature. While further steps for evaluation are pending, the template can serve as a foundation for developing a categorization model for DS projects in the future.