In a highly compelling Forbes article published in June, Arvind Murali M.B.A., M.S. walks us through the wheelhouse of skills modern CDOs need to master in order to drive data's commercial value and impact.
Arvind identifies 7 core priorities for CDO success:
1. FORMALISE THE VALUE OF DATA
CDOs need to partner their CFOs to formally evaluate & determine the value their organisations data assets & initiatives.
2. CLARIFY & COMMUNICATE A DATA & ANALYTICS STRATEGY
Shift data strategies away from tactics (e.g. build a data warehouse) to focus on business strategies such as growth, M&A, process optimisation & innovation.
3. PRIORITISE CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Communication & training are paramount to adoption & building a data-driven culture. And culture is driven by people. Get them on board!
4. SPONSOR & SUPPORT DATA GOVERNANCE
Data sharing, and decentralisation requires discipline across an enterprise. Data governance shouldn’t be driven by bureaucracy – rather value, architecture, security, and interoperability.
5. IMPLEMENT A CENTRALISED DATA & ANALYTICS PLATFORM
As businesses continue their digitalisation, CDOs need to build centralised platforms to serve the entire enterprise to capture, consume and convert data into insights.
6. MEASURE BUSINESS VALUE USING KPIs
Informatica states that 80% of CDO KPIs focus on operational efficiency, productivity, customer satisfaction and innovation. KPIs link outputs to business outcomes.
7. FORM PARTNERSHIPS
Just as CDO KPIs straddle multiple ’departments’, CDOs need to build relationships across organisations to understand their colleagues' goals and align the data strategy accordingly. After all, data strategies should be about solving business problems (see point 2!). This also means that CDOs are emerging as natural business leaders (not just ‘technology’ leaders) as their goals and outputs become more strategic.
For DataDiligence's clients, all the points above will sound familiar!
They very much form the founding activities in our interim-CDO engagement - where we systematically partner with CEOs, CFOs, CTOs (the entire c-suite!) to pull these priorities into a comprehensive data strategy that we help craft and implement.
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This article was first published on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chelsea-wilkinson-35527079_cdos-data-value-ugcPost-6841269438558281728-rKP5