Businesses worldwide face intensifying competition and surging data volumes. C-suite executives struggle to develop strategic solutions within legacy systems that fail to advance organizational goals.
The solution involves adopting a data strategy that manages data expansion while supporting business objectives — specifically, onboarding a Chief Data Officer on-demand.
Chief Data Officer
The CDO is a senior executive responsible for enterprise-wide data and information strategy, including governance, control, policy, and data exploitation. This role combines accountability for information protection, privacy, governance, data quality, lifecycle management, and leveraging data assets for business value.
The Case for a CDO: The ROI That Keeps on Giving
Data drives business decisions, customer targeting, compliance, and innovation. As reliance on data grows, investing in a CDO becomes strategically essential.
According to Gartner research, "86 percent of Gartner's 2017 survey respondents ranked 'defining data and analytics strategy for the organization' as their top responsibility." This underscores the evolving importance of the CDO role across all departments.
As Forrester's Jennifer Belissent notes: "The CDO role galvanizes an organization around the promise of data."
The Top Three Concerns of a CDO
- Revenue creation now overshadows security as the key CDO function — directly impacting the bottom line twice as significantly as other roles.
- Cost savings through efficiencies ranks second, achieved through maximizing data quality, implementing efficient analytics, and eliminating waste from poor data.
- Risk management and mitigation ensures data compliance and security effectively.
Three Key Industries Affected
Health Care:
Healthcare organizations manage exploding data from multiple sources: mobile devices, wearables, medical equipment, and cooperating institutions. Patient data sourcing demands strict compliance with HIPAA and regulatory requirements. Managing accuracy, transparency, and privacy across diverse systems makes the CDO role essential — the stakes are too high for alternatives.
Education:
The education sector faces similar transformation pressures: expanding data volumes, online course proliferation, increased competition, and evolving regulations. Data sensitivity (student records, research, institutional assessments) requires secure sourcing, storage, and analysis across multiple institutions.
Education Dive reports: "The CDO can take the 50,000-foot view and guide policy relating to data, focusing primarily on the data governance structure on a campus."
Publishing:
Publishers navigate multiple threats: global B2C audience expansion, political challenges, GDPR compliance, and legacy-to-digital transitions. Siloed data across hybrid systems demands change agents capable of leading digital transformation. For European audiences, GDPR requirements make CDOs (or Data Protection Officers) essential — smaller businesses often outsource this function.
Why a CDO On-Demand?
Growing companies may prefer initially adopting an on-demand CDO — outsourced, part-time — for fiscal reasons. However, on-demand CDOs provide strategic value:
- They address outstanding issues quickly (compliance, governance, analytics) while advancing business objectives.
- They lead organizational cultural shifts toward data-driven strategy without introducing full-time executive overhead risks.
Why Add a CDO Position Now?
The short answer: bridge the data management gap and avoid falling behind.
Gartner's Logan emphasizes that "data literacy is the new high bar for good business communication, a necessary ingredient for business success."
Key trends drive CDO adoption:
- Metadata and Data Privacy: GDPR and IoT growth demand sophisticated privacy management and security protocols. Organizations increasingly recognize the need to "leverage big data and analytics to create a better customer experience, achieve business objectives, gain a competitive advantage and ultimately, become market leaders."
- Data Governance: The data explosion created a rigorous regulatory environment amplifying analytics requirements. Comprehensive, accurate, transparent governance meets regulatory approval while driving privacy protection.
- IoT Impact: Forbes predicts CDOs will manage "an influx of new and current data delivered via new devices and sources that must be managed in very precise ways," leveraging data efficiently from diverse, algorithm-dependent sources.
In a Nutshell
A CDO's core strength lies in unlocking data power: implementing transformational systems that maximize data quality, exploitation, and compliance.
Gartner's Valerie Logan characterizes today's CDOs as "impactful change agents who are spearheading data-driven transformation."
Cruz Street team members serve as expert change agents supporting organizational data transformation. Contact us to explore implementation possibilities.