The Ever-Evolving Role of Chief Data Officers

As companies collect more and more data on every aspect of their businesses, there’s an increasing need to ensure that the data is used strategically and intelligently to generate growth. This sounds like a job for a Chief Data Officer (CDO).
The role of the CDO in corporate America is intriguing because it’s expanding to encompass much more than just the historical requirement of managing and enforcing data governance. The CDO is now increasingly responsible for ensuring that their entire organization has trustworthy, secure, and readily available data that can be used to make decisive and impactful choices that will drive rapid growth.
Maybe more fascinating, is that CDOs are now commonly the spearhead for their entire organization's digital transformation - an initiative that sits atop the strategic agenda for nearly every enterprise. This trend is highlighted in a recent survey  that indicates that the CDO’s top priority is to increase revenue and create value through the use of data - a change over previous years’ survey results, where governance was king.
This new role for CDOs isn’t without its challenges, even with advancements in data analytics technologies.
About 35% of survey participants said that “poor data literacy” within their companies was among the top barriers to achieving their goals.
To champion the use of data analytics in their organizations, CDOs need to establish a strong foundation through clear data-and-analytics strategies, better organizational design, and talent-management practices.
Encouraging employees to share and utilize data across the organization by providing access to trustworthy data while ensuring proper governance is key to fueling growth through data monetization.

How to fuel growth through data analytics

To help their organizations get the most value out of a growing wealth of digitally-generated information, CDOs need to drive data agility while maintaining strict data governance:

Champion data literacy

Data literacy is the ability to derive meaningful information from data. For an organization to benefit from the wealth of available data, there must be a widespread awareness and understanding of how it can benefit the growth of the enterprise.
Besides training and education, you need to provide the right tools for employees to put data literacy into action through streamlined data access, discovery, sharing, preparation, blending and even automation of data reporting processes.

Improve data accessibility

For the entire organization to benefit from the use of data, the information must be easily accessible to all employees at all times.
Implement a browser-based data marketplace to provide a dedicated space for building, discovering, sharing and collaborating on data and models so everyone involved can have real-time access to the most accurate information.

Encourage data utilization

Your data is only as good as how well it is utilized to generate insights that will lead to growth and profits.
Through data socialization and gamification, you can raise awareness while encouraging data discovery and extraction of insights from the information.

Maintain control over data governance

In order to extract valuable insights and devise impactful actions from data, you need to ensure that the data is up-to-date, accurate and trustworthy.
Data from different sources needs to be collated and constantly updated - a series of time-consuming and error-prone tasks if it was to be performed manually.
The use of self-service data prep software has become essential in helping companies ensure the trustworthiness of their data while eliminating the enormous labor costs associated with collating and cleansing data.
Finally, any improvements in the areas we’ve already discussed - data literacy, accessibility and utilization – are worthless if the organization is not working with good data. Utilizing a centralized marketplace of data means it’s easier to curate and certify internal and external data sets. Tracking complete lineage and change history ensures there are no disputes over the trustworthiness of information.

Chief Data Officers: The champions of successful transformation

We are entering a new era of business and CDOs are at the forefront of this transformation. CDO’s can successfully transform their organizations by striking the right balance between data and agility and data governance - our dedicated microsite provides rich detail and a wealth of resources that show how to achieve this balance.
Selecting the right tools helps build a culture of data literacy and improve data accessibility, which is essential for fueling growth through data.
Monarch Swarm is created with today’s CDOs in mind, to help you reshape the way your organization utilizes data, while also providing better governance and control. Request a demo to see how it can change your data culture.