The Emerging Role of the Chief Data Officer

Across all industries, enterprises have access to more data than ever before as insights pour in from machines throughout the company, customer queries, and archived information. These exponentially growing volumes of information have become overwhelming and unusable for enterprises, making it necessary to have designated staff in the organization to lead data strategy and decide how to manage the digitization of the customer experience, determine the stance on data ethics and the use of that data.

Thus, the role of the Chief Data Officer is emerging as companies are looking for ways to properly manage (and potentially monetize) data. In fact, Gartner believes that 90% of large organizations will have a Chief Data Officer (CDO) by 2019. This type of C-level support for Enterprise Information Management (EIM) strengthens the entire organization, getting everyone behind the concept that data is a valuable business asset and is vital to operating a successful company.

For many data managers today, their title may not be “CDO,” but the role is on the rise and will continue to be more formalized in the next few years.

As organizations continue to see how data is influencing the overall business model, the need for a data expert to sit in on the c-suite conversations will increase. For now, this person may be billed as a data scientist or IT manager, but as she or he gets pulled into more and more future-shaping conversations, that Chief Data Officer title will soon follow.

The role (whether formally titled CDO or not) includes a multitude of data-related responsibilities:

Data Strategy: This strategy will set the stage for the enterprise’s overall rules and policies that inform how data is treated throughout the organization. The CDO must consider internal and external data partnerships. For example, a customer agreement may promise that data gathered from that relationship does not go to any other parties. All of these contracts and relationships must be reviewed and considered before any decisions are made on how data is handled.

Data Management Processes: Once that strategy is in place, the CDO must build out the tactical aspects of executing on that strategy. To ensure that all lines of business are able to properly contribute to preserving the data’s value and integrity, an enterprise-wide process for managing data properly must be implemented and enforced to guide the way data is submitted: how much, to whom, at what time, in what format, using which tools.

Manage Challenging Data: The classic “old becomes new again” adage comes to mind as I think about the inception of the data warehouse in the 90s, and the realization shortly thereafter that we had to manage and clean it. Today companies have more than tenfold the amount of data than a data warehouse, as real-time information floods in from Hadoop, the cloud, data lakes, IoT, you name it.