by Angela Guess
A recent press release states, “The chief data officer is one of the newest arrivals in the C-suite. The title didn’t even exist until Visa coined it in 2001. But with the increasing importance of data analytics to all businesses, more companies are bringing CDOs on board – there are now about 2,000, according to the Gartner Group – and their roles are expanding. Their impact varies, however, as debates swirl over governance issues, often leaving data on the sidelines, stuck in silos. Meanwhile, many companies don’t yet see the need for a CDO, and make do with their chief information or chief technology officers.”
The release goes on, “But while CIOs and CTOs are essential to keeping the lights on in a company’s data infrastructure, and to provide safeguards against cyberattacks, a strong CDO has a singular role to play in harnessing the power of data to increase business value, according to a panel of information management experts who participated in an Executive Roundtable discussion hosted on Feb. 22 by Earley Information Science (EIS), a leading consulting firm focused on organizing information for business outcomes. ‘Data is the new oil, fueling everything in the virtual world,’ said one of the experts, Seth Earley, Chief Executive Officer and founder of EIS. ‘Simply put, it provides the competitive advantage.’ And it is the CDO who is best positioned to turn the spigot on to fuel that advantage, he added.”
It continues, “Governance is certainly needed to organize and deploy the mountains of data that companies accumulate about markets, products and customers, Earley said, but the term is off-putting and CDOs often don’t help themselves by being too abstract and becoming mired in minutiae. ‘So don’t call it governance,’ he said. Instead, ‘weave governance into the process and tie the data to metrics and key performance indicators to focus on the right things.’ – Business objectives and strategies that are important to people in the company. In short, ‘cut through the noise and the distractions to get to the value’.”
Read more at PRweb.
Photo credit: Earley Executive Roundtable