Are You Asking Too Much of Your Chief Data Officer?
Since the first chief data officer was appointed at Capital One in 2002, the role has been plagued by confusion about its purpose. In studying CDOs and their roles over the past decade, the authors identified seven key types of CDO jobs, each distinct enough that it would be difficult or impossible for one person to perform all of them well. Understanding what a given organization expects of its CDO, and then matching capabilities with those expectations, can be the key to longer, more effective, and happier CDO tenures.
Since the first chief data officer was appointed at Capital One in 2002, the role has been plagued by confusion about its purpose. Although surveys of large organizations by Randy’s firm NewVantage Partners show an overall increase in the prevalence of the role — climbing from 12% in 2012 to 68% in 2018, and falling somewhat in 2019 — CDOs’ responsibilities have remained unclear. In the most recent survey, only 28% of respondents agreed that the role was “successful and established.”
Early on, when most CDOs were in large financial institutions, their most common roles were defense-oriented, involving the security, privacy, quality, and regulatory compliance of key data. However, these functions proved difficult to evaluate except in their absence or breach, and companies have increasingly desired offense-oriented benefits from data — better decision-making, marketing, customer service, and monetization.
Today, CDOs typically have multiple objectives, but often there is little consensus about which are most important. In addition, achieving these different objectives may require substantially different types of experience and skills. Many CDOs will find it difficult to excel at everything they’re expected to do.
The most recent NewVantage survey illustrates this problem. It asks respondents — more than half of whom are CDOs themselves — what the primary attribute of a successful CDO is within their organization. Some say their organizations desire an external change agent (the most common and fastest-growing response), others a company veteran or insider. Some want a line-of-business executive who owns business results, others want a technology executive, and still others want the attributes of a data scientist or analytics leader. You’d think at least there would be agreement that the CDO is primarily responsible for data — but several years of surveys find that that’s true in only about 40% of organizations.
In part because of this lack of consensus, we have observed short CDO tenures — typically two to three years in many firms, particularly in industries like financial services, where data is the organization’s lifeblood. Lack of role clarity and unachievable expectations are certainly a factor in short job tenures.
Understanding what a given organization expects of its CDO, and then matching capabilities with those expectations, can be the key to longer, more effective, and happier CDO tenures. In studying CDOs and their roles over the past decade, we’ve identified seven key types of CDO jobs, each distinct enough that it would be difficult or impossible for one person to perform all of them well. New CDO hires may not know which combination of the seven they are expected to perform, and formal performance evaluations may not make clear on which of the seven an incumbent CDO is being assessed. One CDO, after reviewing the seven job types, said in an email, “I am evaluated on all seven, but the only ones I get any credit for are the offense-oriented ones.”
The first three roles described below are primarily offense-oriented; the last four are more defense-related. Of course, some CDO jobs involve combinations of these roles.
CDOs in this role manage the data science, analytics and, sometimes, the artificial intelligence functions for the enterprise.
