Why a Combined Chief Data and Analytics Officer May Be Right For Your Company
Many organizations have merged the roles of the chief analytics officer (CAO) and chief data officer (CDO) to create a combined CDAO to serve as the principal advocate for data within the enterprise. Researchers at NewVantage Partners pointed out this trend in report released earlier this year on connecting data and artificial intelligence (AI) investments to business outcomes.
Other organizations have just a CDO or just a CAO, and some still have each, according to Randy Bean, founder and CEO of Boston-based NewVantage Partners, which tracks CDO and CAO trends.
“It’s interesting because I find many roles that, where there’s closeness in the roles, it makes them either partners or competitors in that regard, at least in terms of who has responsibility for what,” Bean said. “So that’s why some of the organizations have combined those roles with organizational simplicity at heart.”
Recent coverage examined the emerging role of the CDO and here we take a look at the differences between the chief data officer and chief analytics officer.
“The difference between a chief data officer (CDO) and chief analytics officer (CAO) is between managing data (in case of CDO) and leading data analytics (in case of CAO) which are two different functions even though the two positions may be used interchangeably,” according to a report by Vishal Chawla in Analytics India Magazine.
The CDO is an older role, according to Chawla, and focuses on driving maximum value from data whereas the chief analytics officer drives insights from data.
CAOs collect data, create business intelligence models and business-oriented decisions while developing data warehouses, data governance and management frameworks and use reporting and visualization tools, Chawla wrote. CDOs have data science skills and focus on data quality in data processes through data pressure processing and data mining.
NewVantage Partners found 54.6% of CDOs focus on “offense/revenue generation” while 45.4% focus on “defense/regulatory/compliance.” However, in reality, Bean said he sees more CDOs leaning closer to defensive side.
Pushing in the direction of innovation is always a good thing and CDOs should be investing in AI, machine learning and other functions to improve business processes. But when push comes to shove, Bean said CDOs, especially those in financial or other heavily regulated verticals, are going to spend a good chunk of their time in compliance and regulation.
Therein lies a key difference between CDOs and CAOs. According to Bean, CDOs are more focused on issues around data management and data governance: What’s the technical environment by which we’re managing our data? What’s the lineage of the data? How are we covering that data for proper storage?
Chief analytics officers, he said, may come from a CDO background but are much more focused on the use of the data: What are the algorithms? How can we gain insight? How can we do A/B testing or various other types of testing to identify primary market segments? How do we manage the models that we’ve built?
“So it’s a different set of questions that the first generation of chief data officers were and have been focused on,” Bean said.
Bean said one of the earliest CDOs was appointed at Citigroup, about 12 years ago. Since then, more CDOs began to pop up, a trend Bean credits to the financial crisis at the heart of the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009.
