According to official figures, The BBC has doubled its data staff from 139 to 277 over the past three years, significantly ramping up its investment in data.

The data was obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOI), and analysed by the Parliament Street Think Tack, observing the data spending of the BBC across the headcount of data scientists and analysts and salaries over the past three years.

In total, the BBC splashed £34,655,947 over the period, with a steady increase in investment year on year.

Over the past year, spending reached £16,399,147 on 277 staff members, the highest amount during the three years in both spending and number of employees. The size of the data team doubled compared to 2022, during which the BBC spent just £6,140,771.

Stuart Harvey, CEO of Datactics, commented: “The BBC is consumed by a huge audience across the UK and the world. Data is critical to the organisation, particularly enabling programmers and schedulers to better understand viewer or listener behaviour, as millions consume the corporation’s content on multiple devices and channels.”

The broadcaster faces increasing pressure from the regulator to make sure that its taxpayer-funded output remains relevant. In Ofcom’s 6th Annual Report on the BBC, published in early 2024, the regulator encouraged the BBC to publish content that relates “more authentically to the real-life experience” of working-class audiences as they watch more TV than any other socio-economic group.

Increasingly the BBC and other media outlets are making use of artificial intelligence to determine patterns and connections in large complex data sets. AI is only as good as the data that it consumes and so the organisation faces a challenge with regards to data quality and matching as it moves beyond surveys and starts to mine real-time information on who is watching what. It is excellent to see that the BBC is investing in data staff.

It is important that the staff are equipped with the data skills and tools to maximise the information that they are handling. How, for example, will it accurately determine the consumption of programming according to socio-economic group?

Legacy data quality tools, for example, have traditionally been overseen by centralised IT teams, but this often creates a bottleneck as maintaining data also requires knowledge about its content, including what good data and bad data look like, as well as its context.

This knowledge often sits with the business user, rather than the IT team. Due to the vast volumes of data handled by the BBC, centralised legacy methods lack sufficient scalability for effective data management.

When working with data staff and providing training, it’s important that organisations prioritise providing all staff with a base level of data skills, creating a self-service data culture where everyone can access, manipulate and utilise data to drive efficiency.”

Over the three years, the BBC also expanded the number of data roles it employed, going from 24 different data job titles to 27.

Rich Bovey, Chief for Data for AND Digital, said: “Without a doubt, organisations continue to invest more in their data teams, but the trend is for targeted spend to achieve specific outcomes. In a commercial environment, the name of the game is relentless focus on ROI, for organisations like the BBC, data teams represent intelligent ways to manage risk, deliver services in a more personalised fashion and improve internal efficiency.

Ultimately, organisations with high data maturity have higher productivity and better, data-driven outcomes.”

He added: “It’s hugely positive to see the BBC’s investment in people AND innovation, bringing in experts in key areas such as data science and data analysis. It’s also important to recognise that the benefit of ‘data teams’ is also through the culture they bring. Enabling and empowering other employees, promoting data literacy and equipping people with the tools and resources make a huge, measurable difference.

Proving the value brought by data teams has become a key success criteria for the modern Chief Data Officer and is a prerequisite to continuing positive trend for investment in roles.”

The investment of the BBC follows wider themes of public sector data investment with the departments of the UK government such as His Majesty’s Revenue and Customers (HMRC) recently investing £133 million into data science.