I, for one, am glad that IEEE is making an effort to get people excited about a formal education in data science. My education was a disjoint combination of CS and Statistics (my degree is formally in statistics), with no union between the two except what I made of it. In neither CS nor Statistics did my education formally cover problems associated with having too much data to fit in memory or store on one hard disk.

My biggest issue with the teams of statisticians I've worked with before is that they lack a basic understanding of computer science. My biggest complaint dealing with the software developers on analytics projects is they don't understand statistics. I heard a great quote for which I don't remember the source (I paraphrase here): "A data scientist is someone who knows more computer science than a statistician, and more statistics than a computer scientist." The nature of the analytics world right now suggests that this type of specialty is sorely needed in many places.