Can Your 'Chief Data Officer' Perform Miracles?

Big Data can do amazing things – help treat cancer, predict earthquakes, and manoeuvre a spacecraft across the surface of Mars. But this doesn’t mean that the people behind these fantastic feats are miracle workers. I’ve got the impression, however, that sometimes they are expected to be.

A somewhat alarming statistic highlighted in a recent Gartner report is that only 50% of Chief Data Officers are successful in their posts. This is partly due to the high turnover rates. Experienced CDOs are always in demand, but are there other factors at play here?

I believe so, and this belief is reinforced by a report published by IBM, the Chief Data Officer Playbook, which suggests that CDOs are often expected to do too much, too quickly. Often they find themselves held back by lack of infrastructure, or even strategic thinking about what their role involves.

The report’s author – IBM Big Data and analytics research leader Rebecca Shockley, told me “I think what we’re seeing right now is a lack of focus – and the expectations that are being put on CDOs is that they are expected to do things that the organization just isn’t capable of yet.

“We are seeing a very high turnover rate among CDOs, and we think that is in part – actually, in most – based on these mismatched expectations of what the organization can do.”

Part of this, I feel, is down the widespread perception among business executives that data and analytics is purely an IT matter. And as with all IT matters, this means they don’t really need to understand how it works, and why. They simply need to know what it does – drive growth – and throw money at it.

Businesses know – because they can see it happening – that data can make their processes more efficient, improve their customer relations and drive sales. Often, it seems, that the appointment of a CDO – someone who can just take this jumble of messy information and tell everyone else what to do with it, is all that’s needed.

But this overlooks the fact that Chief Data Officer is a nebulous and badly defined catch-all title and can mean hugely different things between different organizations. The expectations and responsibilities put on them vary enormously and among any gathering of CDOs you are unlikely to find two with similar career histories, educational backgrounds and personal characteristics. 

What businesses need to really focus on, IBM’s report suggests, is the need to find the right CDO, who fits in with the business needs and culture of the organization.

“What we’re trying to say is that an organization really has to think about its own maturity and its own culture, and strategically think about what it wants the CDO to do, because what we’re seeing is that a lot of orgs are just grabbing the first CDO off the streets that they can find, and that misalignment is creating the high turnover rate,” Shockley tells me.

 Another fact highlighted is that there’s a very close to 50/50 split between the number of internal and external CDO appointments. There are compelling reasons behind both options. Appointments tend to me made from within the organization when the driver is a need to create a collaborative approach to data strategy. When there’s a need for dramatic cultural shifts, a rabble-rousing outsider might be more appropriate.

A CDO often has to juggle two objectives. In one hand they must do the fundamental job of applying the data they have to drive business growth. With the other they must move that strategy forward – seeking new sources of data and putting infrastructure in place to exploit it. Both are full time jobs - but who else is supposed to do them?

As well as technological ability, a CDO will often have to possess top tier social and communications skills. Often it will fall to them to encourage “buy in” among the rank and file staff, whose participation (and support) is essential in transforming to a data driven business model.

Gartner statistics show that by 2019, it is expected that 90% of large organizations will have hired a CDO. Given the high churn rate it can be extrapolated that a high percentage will also have fired, or otherwise disposed of, one. Those which find they are successful at making these vital appointments are likely to be those which have given careful thought to the precise needs they expect their CDO to fill, and don’t expect them to perform miracles without the support and tools which they need.

As Shockley says, “Really the CDOs have opportunities to both optimize and innovate with data, but in most organizations there’s still a lot of foundational data integration, and upgrading to a platform which can reliably generate those kind of insights, that needs to take place before they can deliver.”

As always, I am keen to hear your views, please share them in the comments below. 

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