CDO’s Next Major Task: Enabling Data Access for Non-Analysts
Digital transformation requires a commitment to enterprisewide data literacy if your organization is going to thrive in this changing business climate.
The chief data officer (CDO) has taken on far greater digital responsibility than her predecessor has. She spearheaded the digital transformation in the past decade, laying pipes to bring disparate data sources to a centralized data lake. She migrated on-premises databases and technology stacks to cloud systems in the past five years. Finally, data from all the different sources — such as billing, marketing, customer support, web hosting, platform, and others — are flowing into a common data lake.
Unlike product managers from two decades ago, today’s product manager wants to look at the user flow data on the website and design changes to UX flow to improve revenue. He doesn’t have the luxury of a dedicated analyst supporting him for every question he has about his product. The marketing manager has direct hands-on access to the CRM system. He is pulling targeted customers for the next campaign and needs to have a lifetime value score for each of the customers to target the highest value customers effectively.
To resolve the customer concerns quickly, customer support agents need access to what happened when the customer accessed the website two days ago. He doesn’t have the luxury of the SLA of one-week resolution time of yesteryears; the customer expects resolution during the call.
The CDO needs a proper plan to enable appropriate access to the right kind of data to the right person, with the right security level. Barring that, the business’s numerous stakeholders will start standing up their individual mini data marts to serve their needs. If that happens, the CDO’s past five years of centralizing data sources will amount to nothing.
What is needed is a proper data access strategy and governance for the entire enterprise. As long as the CDO office doesn’t boil the ocean and try to solve the problem for every data point collected for every use case, this is a problem the enterprise can solve within a year. Most cloud technology stacks come pre-primed for this problem with a well-defined access template attached to data elements by roles and responsibilities. When implemented well, each metric’s lineage is traceable; definitions are clear and singular. Whether the product manager pulls that data via data visualization software or a marketing analyst pulls data using an interactive query service, it returns the same results. Data democratization is complete.
