5 Steps for CDOs to Transform Data into a Strategic Asset
A unified approach to data management, supported by modern data management technologies, can help a chief data officer turn data into a strategic asset.
According to Gartner, a chief data officer’s role combines “accountability and responsibility for information protection and privacy, information governance, data quality and data [life cycle] management, along with the exploitation of data assets to create business value.”
CDOs are on the rise, especially in regulated industries. With the explosion of data everywhere, an important task for any CDO is determining which information can add business value, drive efficiency, or improve risk management to ensure the future well-being of the organization.
Whether you’re one of the pioneering CDOs or newly anointed at your organization — and your CEO is on board and has a clear vision of what the business needs to be doing — here are five steps to help you transform your data into a strategic asset.
The CDO role should not be a technology-only position. It’s a business role that spans data acquisition, data governance, data quality, analytics, and data science. The CDO must bring all departments together to create a common understanding of the business objectives (such as business alignment or connected omnichannel customer experiences) and create a cohesive data strategy to meet those goals. Isolating the applicable use cases and understanding the desired customer experience helps you focus on finding the best strategy and data architecture, building effective teams, and identifying the appropriate tools and platforms.
This step is important for all industries, but it rings true especially in the current retail environment. Amazon is not the only driver behind the “Retail Apocalypse” — shoppers’ changing consumption habits, competition, and too many retail stores have all contributed to declining sales and a shrinking customer base. Never has it been more important to have reliable methods to learn what customers prefer to buy and from which channel.
Having a clear understanding of the business objectives and aligning your data strategy with them is critical for business success.
Once your business objectives are clear, you must focus on improving the reliability and relevance of internal data to refine business operations. If your internal data is not sufficient, leverage data-as-a-service to bring in third-party data assets to enrich and augment information for your data-driven applications.
CDOs are spearheading initiatives to establish reliable data foundations — these serve as a single source of truth for all operational and analytics systems across all functional groups. To achieve this, make sure you have a modern data management platform in place that can connect to all internal, external, and third-party data sources as well as blend the information by matching and merging data.
Newer graph technologies also help you uncover complex relationships across data entities such as people, places, products, and organizations. This accurate and consolidated data, with relationships understood, becomes the foundation for operational and analytics processing.
Once your foundation is ready, you can visualize the data profiles with attributes collected from all sources and complex relationships within data-driven applications, customized for each business objective and role. Moreover, you can provide this data to all other operational systems such as CRM, ERP, supply chain, and support, ensuring consistent information across all departments and systems.
A modern data management architecture provides accurate data both to your customer applications and channels for a connected experience and to your analytics systems for deeper insights about relationships, next-best actions, and improved data quality.
