Data Science / Analytics Roles in 2023

Interesting to see emerging Data Science / Analytics roles from Gartner analysis and thoughts around that…

The Data Science / Analytics space is evolving and more adoption is happening across the industries. While roles are different based on the business need, budget in place, size of enterprise, type of enterprise, use case type etc., it is important to understand how they pan out in the next few quarters so that we can align these well into our ecosystem.

Interesting insights to observe from the Gartner analysis (captured in below diagram):

1. Adoption of Data Science / Analytics has grown, hence roles have matured.
2. Roles are not too much different — broad categorization would see multiple flavors such as: data engineering focus, data analysis and visualization focus, data science and business focus, data management and governance focus, managing and supporting roles, data leadership roles. And it depends on the magnitude of enterprise, business use case at hand to see what we are solving and how. Roles for a startup would be different for roles for a large enterprise, where one has to wear multiple hats in a startup ecosystem mostly.
3. Clear indication of Responsible AI dimension growing in importance — with roles such as “Data Ethicist” coming to the limelight along with CDAO roles. Gartner comments: “All personnel hired for AI development and training work will have to demonstrate expertise in Responsible development of AI by 2023”.
4. Overall some key emerging roles — Data Ethicist, Data Product Manager, Decision Engineer, Knowledge Engineer etc.
5. Roles such as Data Analyst / Data Journalist (may not have been highlighted clearly here, however it seems apparent from some of the role expectations that we observe where tasks are culminated) are crucial where Data Analysis + DV / EDA skills are critical for success.
6. Roles such as “Citizen Data Scientist” and others are important for productive execution and usage of Data Science platforms in Cloud environments (e.g. AWS Sagemaker, Azure ML Studio, IBM Watson, GCP ML platforms etc.) which will continue to progress and evolve.

“Data Ethicist” role:

• Can be amalgamated with a “Principal Data Scientist” / “Chief Data Scientist” / “Senior Data Scientist” if the need is not significant and can be managed by a PDS/CDS/SDS.
• The role can typically look at: what value can be generated from “new source(s) and uses of data”, is it appropriate to use the data and how will this benefit business/end users, does that match organization’s policy, strategy and values, what could be possible unforeseen consequences and how to assess those risk(s) and mitigate them, how to define a framework for entire stakeholders to “be aware of these data and AI ethics”.
• Examples such as Explainable AI, Handling fairness, Bias detection etc.
• May have to a new or separate role if it is to be formulated from scratch and aligned with the organization wide data strategy etc.
• Definitely requires solid mathematical and statistical acumen, business use case focus (which use case is relevant and where responsible/ethical AI dimension is more prevalent etc.)

One of the important dimension, that I personally feel is about the role of something like: “Principal Data Scientist” / “Chief Data Scientist” / “Data Science Leader” which will continue to be pivotal in the success who will have to think holistically, drive “big picture” along with the team, influence business stakeholders, understand value realization, build teams, contribute to solutions, define road mapping, strategy and overall impact.

The convergence of skills and expertise are also prevalent from the Gartner analysis:

- Data and Analytics skills - Business and Domain skills - IT and DevOps skills - Soft skills (Very important for articulating, storytelling, influencing etc.)

Happy reading and have a great new year ahead!!

Disclaimer: The postings here are personal point of views from my experiences, analysis, thoughts, readings from various sources and don’t necessarily represent any firm’s positions, strategies or opinions.