A CEO can't say that a business is under control if the data and analytics used to make key decisions aren't adequately governed. They also can't assure that they have the data and analytics capabilities they need in their digital business platform without a survey leader who shepherding the information strategy, leading the data and analytics program, fostering a data-driven culture, and building the intelligence essential for the digital enterprise. Enterprises must learn to use data and analytics more easily and more effectively, rather than drown in the sea of data unable to separate truth from fiction and unable to make decisions with confidence. As a result, the Chief Data Officer or a CDO role is being created with much greater frequency to play a critical role in digital business transformation. The CDO champions data and analytics value creation and governance such as strategic discipline and builds the critical foundations of data-driven enterprise. Ideally, the CDO is a senior executive, who bears responsibility on behalf of an enterprise to foster value creation from the use of the organization's data assets, as well as the external data ecosystem. The authorities of the CDO include, value creation through data exploitation, envisioning data enabled strategies, as well as enabling all forms of business outcomes through analytics, data and analytics governance, and enterprise information policy. The CDO often is the head of all enterprise analytics, decision-nmaking affecting analytics, directing analytics processes, and for using analytics to drive innovation and enterprise objectives. Moreover, the CDO is the senior most executive with responsibility for aligning data policy and administration with relevant regulatory legal and ethical mandates. The roles of the CDO and the related data and analytics leaders including sometimes a head of analytics, have emerged as some of the highest growth roles at the executive table. These leaders champion data and analytics as strategic assets and are expected to be masters of change in building the critical foundations of digital business. Now a little bit more detail about the role of the CDO including their primary responsibilities. The CDO needs to be the executive with the authority, responsibility, and accountability, to exploit the value of enterprise information assets and the analytics used to render insights for decision-making and regulatory reporting. The CDO needs to define the information strategy practices, lead the creation and assure the ongoing relevance of the firm's information strategy in association with the aforementioned CIO, the Chief Strategy Officer and the CEO. The CDO needs to drive the development and deployment of the enterprise data and analytics platform for digital business, they need to lead the strategy and development of data and analytics products. To support these endeavors, they need to collaborate with the Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and CIO to assure digital products are released on time, on budget, and with high-quality. The CDO also needs to work with board members, the CEO and CIO and other C-level executives and legal counsel to establish a vision to govern and create a culture that manages data as an actual enterprise asset. The CDO also needs to identify and standardize the use and governance of data and analytics and support of the enterprise's business strategy. This includes the governance of data and algorithms used for analysis, analytical applications, and automated decision-making. Finally, the CDO needs to institute a programmatic approach for enterprise information management to identify, prioritize, and execute the data and analytics initiatives with a clear line of sight to enterprise strategies and business outcomes. The CDO has a number of business accountabilities as well. The CDO needs to be the corporate leader of data-driven insights, that help support the exploitation of strategic and tactical business opportunities, and be the champion for a data-driven decision-making culture. They need to exploit data using research and analytics to maximize the return on data assets, and develop methods to ensure the consistent application and use of analytics. They need to innovate with and expand the organizations research and analytics offerings, including emerging analytical approaches, skills and technologies. They need to identify different kinds, types and sources of data internally and externally, to drive business innovation throughout the organization. They need to define processes for the effect of integrated introduction of new data. CDOs also need to lead the research and development of new data products or services to expand markets, to monetize data directly or indirectly, and to grow company revenue. In the public sector in particular CDOs will create and expand open data offerings to empower citizens, to enable better government and commercial services. Finally, the CDO needs to be a marketing champion, promoting the information services provided by the enterprise, throughout the enterprise, along with the related data and analytics management capabilities. From a regulatory and compliance standpoint, CDOs need to act as the corporate representative to regulators and represent the enterprise to customers, suppliers, and external bodies in the development of industry data and analytic standards. They need to ensure that appropriate audit controls exist for data and analytics that serve as the source material for regulatory reports. They need to ensure that the data used for financial reporting into support legal requirements as valid, reliable, traceable, timely, available, secure, and consistent. They need to develop and maintain controls on data quality, interoperability, and sources of data to effectively manage corporate risk associated with the use of data and analytics. Accordingly, the CDO needs to lead the creation of policies and controls for the appropriate protection of enterprise information assets, through a defined lifecycle from the time when the data is acquired or captured to the end of life destruction and disposal procedures for that data. Often, the CDO will organize and lead a data and analytics governance council to provide executive sponsorship and oversight for governance policy creation and compliance. The CDO also has management and operational accountabilities to develop, manage, and control the annual budgets for the office of the Chief Data Officer or the OCDO. They need to organize and lead a data and analytics center of excellence and define member responsibilities and accountabilities for both. They need to lead the definition of job roles, recruiting candidates, and then managing directly or indirectly a team of data and analytics governance leaders and senior information management professionals in regions or business units across perhaps a complex International Group Enterprise. CDOs will also lead the development of the enterprise's capacity to develop insights with advanced analytics, to recruit and develop data science competencies and resources for the corporate exploitation of big data and sourced data, as well as the liberation of dark data using a combination of open source cloud and social era tools and techniques for data analytics machine learning, data mining and visualization. The CDO needs to lead the development publication, and maintenance of the corporate information architecture, as well as a roadmap for its future development that matches and supports business needs. They need to ensure the availability of master data and reference data for compliance to policy, standards, and conceptual models, and assure the deployment and management of data quality monitoring processes.
