Learn how CDOs leverage data, analytics, and AI to drive business growth and digital transformation.
The role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO) is a relatively new concept, yet it’s already making a significant impact on businesses and society. However, the CDO’s role is often misunderstood, leading to diffuse expectations and short tenures. To truly add value, CDOs must focus on enabling better data usage and consumption. This post will explore how CDOs can create value and drive business transformation.
Taking Responsibility for Analytics and AI
One of the key ways CDOs can create value is by taking responsibility for analytics and AI. According to a recent research project sponsored by Amazon Web Services, 35% of surveyed CDOs believe focusing on a small set of key analytics or AI projects delivers the most value. Moreover, 64% spend their time enabling new business initiatives based on data, analytics, or AI. This makes them, either officially or unofficially, chief data and analytics officers, a fast-growing variant of the CDO title.
Focusing on Data Products
Another surprising finding from the research is that many CDOs have adopted a data product focus. For instance, Manav Misra, the chief analytics and data officer at Regions Bank, ensures that each of the data products his team develops are successfully deployed and the value to the company carefully measured. Similarly, Sebastian Klapdor, CDO of printing and design service company Vista, assesses all of Vista’s data products quarterly with a sign-off on any monetary benefits from the finance organization.
Building Infrastructure for Scale
CDOs also need to build an infrastructure to accelerate the use of data, analytics, and AI throughout the company. Todd James, who leads data and AI for 84.51°, the data science subsidiary of The Kroger Co., emphasized the need for a set of reusable analytical capabilities to scale. Similarly, a leading bank’s head of enterprise data and machine learning is focused heavily on scale and infrastructure development for machine learning.
Conclusion
There is little doubt that organizations need CDOs and that the job is here to stay as long as its incumbents add value. Some are clearly doing so. If CDOs adopt these and related approaches to producing tangible value with data, analytics, and AI, they will be instrumental in transforming their organizations into more digital and data-driven competitors. As Bill Groves, a veteran CDO who held the role at Walmart, Honeywell, and Dun & Bradstreet put it, “This [the CDO function] is not a service organization; it’s a transformation organization.”
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Inspired by the Article “8 Strategies for Chief Data Officers to Create — and Demonstrate — Value” written by Thomas H. Davenport, Richard Y. Wang, and Priyanka Tiwari for Harvard Business Review.
