IT vs. the chief data officer: How to avoid turf wars
Instead of seeing the chief data officer (CDO) as one more encroachment on its territory, IT should align with CDOs, influence their vision, support and enhance their projects, and help spin all that data into gold.
As the first chief data officer for the city of San Diego, Maksim Pecherskiy and his IT partners have done precisely that. Pecherskiy knows the spotlight has been on him the past few years as he has conducted a citywide data inventory—which had never been done before—and established an open data portal accessible to the public.
Pecherskiy is part of the city’s performance and analytics department (PANDA), which he said is “lateral” to IT. However, for the first three of his four years as CDO, he was physically located in IT, which “ended up working out amazing.” He credits that to having a background working in information systems, “so that common language lets us work together really well.”
Pecherskiy has a standing weekly meeting with CIO Jonathan Behnke, who lets him know what’s going on with servers and the data centers and what is moving to the cloud. Pecherskiy, in turn, tells Behnke what his department is working on, including automation efforts with the data catalog.
That close collaboration with IT also extends to working with cybersecurity staff to ensure that the analysis and governance work PANDA is doing isn’t exposing any personally identifiable information (PII) as open data.
Pecherskiy didn’t experience a battle with IT, but that is not always the case. Here’s how to to avoid turf wars.
The CDO role has evolved as enterprises have come to understand the value of collecting and analyzing data to gain insights that lead to better customer experiences. As a result, the role is gaining prominence within organizations. Gartner estimated that by 2019, some 90% of large organizations will have a CDO.
CDOs “are here to stay,” said Brian Hopkins, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. Whom they report to varies by organization. Today, 38% of CDOs fall under the CEO, and 25% report to the CIO, according to Forrester.
The analyst firm’s numbers are virtually the same as in 2017, when 40% of CDOs reported to the CEO and 22% reported to the CIO. The maturity of an organization‘s data culture will have a bearing on whether the CDO and IT work cohesively or with friction, Hopkins said.
Forrester defines a mature company as one that is “obsessed with customers and understands them” and is turning that understanding into ways of creating excellent experiences and better ways to engage them through technology, Hopkins added.
As companies mature, they recognize that a database-focused way of working with data is not successful, nor does it help them make the kinds of decisions they need to make to ensure they’re successfully exploiting data for insights and actions, Hopkins said.
“So we tend to see [CDOs] moving up the value chain from simple management of data … to governance of data,” Hopkins said, “which is more about defining policies for securing and accessing data, up to data exploration, which is making data available for different analytic uses.” From there, organizations begin taking action on data and doing data analytics, he said.
Whether there is natural tension between the CDO and IT depends on where the CDO came from, Hopkins said. CDOs who come out of IT might struggle with the new role and face issues over who retains decision authority over data, but they are still technologists, which makes the relationship easier, as Pecherskiy said he’s found.
But when a CDO comes from the marketing department, for example, “that creates tensions, since data is so intertwined with IT,” Hopkins explained.
Ben Lorica, chief data scientist at O’Reilly Media, said that both IT and the business units have buy-in up front.
Who ultimately controls data is neither a pure tech decision nor a pure data decision, Hopkins said.
