What is a Chief Data Officer? Everything you need to know about the CDO role
A chief data officer (CDO) is a senior executive who is responsible for organisation-wide governance, management and exploitation of information. This data management and exploitation takes place through a variety of systems and services, including business intelligence, advanced analytics, data mining, and machine learning, and even artificial intelligence.
CDOs should be on the look-out for ways to find opportunities for and through data analytics, whether that’s predicting customer trends or finding new revenue-generating opportunities.
That data might be customer data, data gathered from Internet of Things sensors, social media, structured, or unstructured data; anything that the organisation gathers itself of buys in from elsewhere. The CDO must ensure the data is secured and maintained, but the role is not simply about deciding the technical aspects, like whether the information should be held in a data warehouse or a data lake or master data management. Instead, the CDO needs to help the business understand the value of this digital asset, enabling it to be mined for insights and competitive advantage.
Data might be the crown jewels of a modern enterprise, but many businesses don’t necessarily manage their information successfully. That realisation, says analyst Gartner, helps explains why CDOs play a key role in helping organisations take care of the information they hold and use.
Ian Cohen, who is global CIO at transport specialist Addison Lee, says the dual role of data executives — taking care of both governance and analytics — is a critical management position in modern organisations. Businesses who do not appoint a data-savvy executive could create significant challenges for themselves.
“If you’re not the master of your data, you’re bordering on being reckless, particularly in the current climate. It’s essential to know what you did, what you learnt, and what you’re doing about it,” he says.
The rise of the CDO has been rapid. Although a new role, research suggests the number of companies hiring a CDO has more than quadrupled since 2012. Gartner estimates 90 percent of large organisations will have a CDO by 2019.
Recruiter Harvey Nash and consultant KPMG report CDOs are already proving their worth. They report that organisations with a CDO, either in a dedicated or acting role, are more than twice as likely to have a clear and pervasive digital strategy than those without one (44 percent versus 21 percent).
Chief Data Officers are distinct from the other CDOs, chief digital officers. While chief digital officers are tasking with managing finite digital transformation projects, Chief data officers provide on-going guidance on data use. Teams that typically report to the CDO include analytics, data strategy, data science, data governance, and data architecture. CDOs often work alongside but independently of the chief information officer (CIO).
Such is the importance of the CDO role that a third report directly to the chief executive officer. Their work on information strategy also directly impacts how other c-suite executives, such as the chief marketing officer and chief financial officer, use data; as a result CDOs can also be found reporting to the CIO, CMO, and COO.
Yet CDOs also face a number of challenges, to the extent that Gartner suggests only 50 percent will be successful by the end of 2019. The role is new and most CDOs are learning on the job. They also have the difficult task of creating an information strategy with relevant metrics that tie the activities of their team to measurable business outcomes.
Andy Day — former Sainsbury’s CDO, now group CDO at Pepper Financial Services Group — told me back in June 2017: “Successful CDOs must do something different.
