Do You Need a Chief Data Governance Officer?
Do you need a chief data governance officer or a chief data officer? Here are three questions that will help you decide.
It was before blockchain, serverless computing, and augmented everything — about a decade ago if I had to guess. Data governance was a hot topic to the point where it had become a drinking game. At a Data Crunch conference a few years ago, my friends and I counted 150 mentions of data governance.
Then again, we’d been drinking.
As with all tech trends, data governance was hardly impervious to the bloviations of tech analysts, but at the same time it fell victim to their short attention spans. Thus, data governance has waned as the topic of day-long workshops and best-practices debates. Part of the hype decline is that companies that really needed formalized policy-making and oversight of heterogeneous data are now practicing just that. For them, data governance has evolved from drinking game to a set of entrenched business processes.
I was intrigued by Ted’s letter asking if data governance should be an official C-level role.
Hey, Jill. We met four years ago at technology event where you said that companies that needed data governance were already doing it. I disagreed with you. That’s because my company desperately needed data governance, and we weren’t doing it yet. I’m not proud of it, but we’re not even doing it now. There are what you called “random acts of data governance” around our company. I laugh out loud when I think about that. Our company’s data is only as good as the person who’s making the definitions and rules on that data. It’s pretty random. In our company, it seems that designating a chief of something validates it. In addition to the staple CEO, CFO, and COO roles, we have a chief risk officer, a chief privacy officer, a chief talent officer, and a chief digital officer. We also have a CAO (chief analytics officer) who, in my opinion, is failing at her job. She is not the leader the title implies. She essentially runs a reporting factory and loves to count how many reports her team delivers monthly to various business units. To those of us in IT, she and her team are kind of a joke. Recently I suggested to the CAO that she take on more data responsibility. I figured she’d see it as an opportunity for visibility and relationship building. Instead, she claimed not to have any time. In my opinion, she likes having her team hunt and peck for data to show how hard they’re working. If we were governing our data, their reports would take hours to build, not weeks. I don’t want to go into battle with our CAO. I don’t want the job (though I’d do it better). However, I would like my company to have better-managed and more available data. It would make all our lives easier. I’m afraid that if I just pitch the chief data officer idea, it will be seen as a parallel function to the CAO and become just a data factory. I think “chief data governance officer” has a nice ring to it, and suggests a level of authority that chief data officer does not.
What an interesting conundrum, Ted! Your letter makes it clear you’ve been frustrated by the lack of data management at your company. Here, let me pour you a drink.
I’ll refrain from exploring whether you want to be the next data (governance) officer and focus on the problem at hand, which is this: your company focuses more on titles than it does on delivery. No wonder Ms.
