As 2020 approached, Silicon asked CIOs and CTOs what the tech landscape will look like and, what challenges they expect to face. Richard Grove, Director of Digital Services at CYB responded with... The way we value data is going to change rapidly in 2020. Until very recently, ‘data’ was generically viewed as a good thing for the modern business; grist to the mill of customer insight and business strategy. Accordingly, companies’ approach to gathering data was to cast the widest net possible, with a shotgun approach to analysis.

New regulations like GDPR have shown this can’t continue. Data is no longer an unlimited source of useful insight. It’s expensive to handle, and if handled incorrectly (or at least, non-compliantly), data can be a toxic burden for a company which opens it up to penalties like fines.

The role of the data scientist will become more refined and central to the running of a successful business, as they’re entrusted to generate even more useful insights from a shrinking amount of raw material.

That said, although data scientists will be working with a smaller amount of stored data, it will by its very nature be more relevant data, so their work may even become a little easier!