CHIEF DATA OFFICER: WHAT IT IS?

A chief data officer (CDO) is a c-suite strategic role focused on enabling data-driven decision making and performance improvements through oversight of data governance, quality, policy and analytics. As data volume, sources and business integration expands exponentially, a dedicated CDO has become pivotal in many organizations.

Top pros are responsible for crafting overarching data strategy aligned to business priorities and objectives. That means identifying high-value business use cases to pursue with data analytics such as improving customer conversion rates, predicting equipment failures to minimize downtime, or detecting fraud more quickly. With target capabilities defined, CDOs can assemble cross-functional data teams to develop and operationalize data pipelines, models and applications to deliver these use cases.

On the data governance side, CDOs establish policies, processes, structure and roles to enable access to timely, accurate and comprehensive data sets while adhering to regulatory compliance and ethics. It is the foundation for not just storing data but activating it across the business. Execs may manage enterprise data warehouses and lakes that standardize and integrate data from dispersed systems into a “single source of truth”. Master data management, metadata standards, data security, and data quality disciplines help curate this integrated view.

Organizationally, CDOs promote and nurture a data and analytics-oriented culture through change management, training and communication. That facilitates data democratization initiatives that empower more employees to leverage data in their roles via self-service analytics tools. More broadly, positioning trusted data as an asset and decision cue affects behaviors, processes and operations over the long-term.

With proliferating data volume and sources, the complex orchestration of a CDO allows organizations to transform disjointed data into strategic assets unlocking efficiency gains, informed decisions, and performance lifts across business functions. The executive sits at the helm of competitive differentiation achieved by not just warehousing data but activating meaningful signals from the noise.