The good, the bad and the ugly: The world of data is changing
It has never been more exciting to work in the data world. Twenty years ago, data was relegated to a back-office function. In 2023, it lies at the heart of an organization’s competitive advantage. Digitalization has accelerated the need for IT leaders to pay special attention to their data, AI and analytics estate.
Beyond needing to meet companies’ goals to create more compelling customer experiences and optimize operations, technology leaders will see data play an increasingly integral role in their career evolutions in new and interesting ways: According to Gartner, 25% of traditional large enterprise CIOs will be held accountable for digital business operational results — effectively becoming “COO by proxy” by next year.
To succeed, technology and data leaders will need to take stock of the good, bad and ugly of the fast-evolving data space.
Here is the great news: 83% of companies report that they have appointed an executive to drive their data strategy. This represents an approximately 700% growth in 10 years (in 2012, only 12% of companies had Chief Data Officers (CDOs). 70% of these data leaders report to the company’s president, CEO, COO or CIO, allowing them to focus on what creates business value rather than activities that look like a cost center.
Additionally, technology executives are now structuring their teams to support the building of data products. According to Harvard Business Review, this can reduce the time it takes to implement data in new use cases by as much as 90%, decrease total ownership costs by up to 30% and reduce risk and data governance burden.
Consequently, nearly 40% of data leaders report adopting a product management orientation to their data strategy, hiring data product managers to ensure that members of a data product team don’t just create algorithms, but instead collaborate in deploying entire business-critical applications.
While 92% of firms say they are seeing returns from data and AI investments, only 40%of companies said the CDO role is currently successful within their organization.
Data chiefs sound pretty depressed, too: 62% report that they feel their role is poorly understood. They point to the typical issues of nascent organizations: overinflated expectations, unclear charters and difficulty to influence.
This tends to frustrate everyone involved: To MIT, Fortune 1000 companies claim that only half of their data leaders can drive innovation using data, and 25% say they have no single point of accountability for data within their organizations.
The result: Close to 75% of organizations have failed to create a data-driven organization.
