The Chief Data Officer’s Evolution to a Data Democracy Sponsor

Under the pressure of digital transformation, Chief Data Officers (CDO) have appeared within large companies. According to Gartner, 90% of large companies will have a CDO by the end of 2019.

The thousands of CDOs appointed in the course of the past few years were in charge of improving efficiency and capacity to create value for their organization’s information ecosystem. That is to say, they were invited to direct their organization in processing and exploiting information with the same discipline as the other, more traditional, assets.

Companies that valorize their information assets surpass their rivals in using them to reinvent, digitize, or eliminate existing processes or products.

The CDO’s missions can be summarized as exploiting and finding uses for corporate data as well as being in charge of developing the use of and trust of employees regarding internal enterprise data. As we have seen, these missions often collide with the powerful cultural restraints within organizations.

How Have the Chief Data Officer’s Missions Evolved?

The CDO has many responsibilities. Gartner identified the main responsibilities of a CDO during their 2019 Data & Analytics event in London. These are, among others:

• Defining a data and analytics strategy in their organization.
• Supervising operational initiatives in response to the established upstream strategy.
• Ensuring information made available on data is trustworthy and valuable.
• Constructing data governance.
• Creating business value in data analytics.
• Managing efforts regarding data science.
• Operating and maintaining efforts in infrastructure in response to data analysis needs.

We believe that this impressive list of responsibilities is complemented by another, which could serve as a common thread for all the others and facilitate them: promoting Data Democracy and supporting cultural changes.

At first, CDOs had to lead a mission to convince interest organizations to exploit data. The first few years of this mission were often supported by the construction of a data universe adapted to new uses, often in the form of a Data Lake or Data Mart. The investments agreed upon to construct these data universes were significant but often reserved to specialists. In brief, organizations had more so implemented Data Aristocracies rather than Data Democracies.