Thought Leaders in Big Data: Scott Zoldi, Chief Analyst Officer at FICO (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let me now ask you given the trends of your industry, what are you seeing as open problems that need addressing where new entrepreneur can build stuff around?

Scott Zoldi: I’ll phrase it in terms of problems and opportunities. From a problem perspective, there are a lot of regulations that are coming up right now in terms of usage of different types of data. In Europe, they have what they call the GDPR. It is a new set of regulations around every company’s use of data to ensure that the company has the ability to remove all data if you, later on, ask them to remove your personalized data. It has a lot of responsibility around privacy and monitoring of breach information.

When you look at that, it’s very different from the way a lot of people use Big Data today where they don’t even have the same level of data governance that we would expect. An opportunity is companies that are really going to try to focus on the questions of consumer privacy and how to facilitate that, how to join data from many disparate sources that are related to you and your activity, how to ensure that there’s the proper governance processes in place, and limit the exposure that companies have to this collection of data.

Far too long, companies have been told to just gather all the data. There’s miracles inside of it. There are if you know the questions to ask. The biggest challenge that companies have is they’ve been collecting data and many of them spend millions of dollars on collecting this data but they didn’t actually collect the data with a question in mind. Now they are looking at this humongous investment asking what’s the question. Maybe clever companies and people can help them find ways to ask the right questions. In doing that, they’ve opened themselves up to exposure because this is not as well-controlled from a governance perspective.

In terms of brand new business, the Internet of Things is incredibly interesting. It’s an area that I focus more and more of my time on. I spend most of my time these days on Cyber Security Analytics. A lot of the analytics that we develop there is for self-learning and being self-aware, and understanding abnormal versus normal behaviour without training the model but allowing it to learn in the data space itself is directly applicable to Internet of Things. That’s an increasingly interesting area with connected devices. I also think, based on the meetings I’ve been in recently, that smart cities is a very interesting area. It could be as simple as just making sure that I understand where all the open parking spaces are. That tends to be a frustrating thing to deal with in cities. People waste time circling around looking for parking spaces.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Scott Zoldi, Chief Analyst Officer at FICO
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