What the Chief Data Officer needs from a data catalog investment

The stakes keep getting higher for the Chief Data Officer (CDO), and the clock is ticking. Whilenearly a third of them consider themselves successfulat building a data-driven culture, the majority can’t do the same. In fact, the percentage of organizations that consider themselves data-drivenhas gotten lowerover the past two years. That doesn’t bode well for CDOs’ tenure. Especially, whenmost executives fear disruption from more data-driven competition (2019, NewVantage Partners). And according to Gartner, only half of CDOs will be successful at all. CDOs can’t afford a bad investment. But they’re the ones tasked with building a data-driven culture.

It truly is acareer-defining moment. So what’s holding CDOs back from cracking the code?

Enterprises first hired Chief Data Officers (CDOs) to bring data under control. Today, CDOs tackle much broader challenges. 

“Early CDOs were focused on data governance, data quality, and regulatory drivers, but today’s data and analytics leaders are becoming impactful change agents who are spearheading data-driven transformation,” saysValerie Logan, research director at Gartner.

Using data to drive business change isn’t just about data. The Chief Data Officer needs to solve problems that come from multiple directions:

Data. Of course, good, useful data remains a core piece of the CDO’s mandate.  places, including on-premises and the in cloud. Not all of the data is on servers and shared storage; there’s data on hard drives, laptops at home, mobile devices, and unauthorized shadow IT services. Some data may not be completely accurate, and data sources may not be known. Analysis. Despite the use of analytics programs, analysis is largely a thought process that happens in people’s heads. That means the work isn’t documented or reproducible. Because it’s not preserved, the up-front work of determining what data and what approach to use needs to be repeated for every project. Because it’s not documented, you can’t see the assumptions, data, and insights behind the discoveries the analytics generate. Tomake analysis reproducible , you need to treat it just like data. It needs to be archived, cataloged, and understood to be used again. People. Almost everyone who works in business today works with data, but they have differing levels of data literacy. Companies can’t be truly data-driven if the data is only accessible to “

So the problems the CDO needs to solve are only partly technical. In fact, Gartnerfound that “The top internal roadblock to the success of the office of the CDO is ‘culture challenges to accept change’.” They’re not the only ones saying that, either.