CDO Matters Podcast

Companies are handing agents real decision-making authority. Almost none of them have figured out who's accountable when the agent gets it wrong.

📌 In this episode:

Why "the business owns the data" was never a real governance strategy and why AI autonomy makes that obvious

The case for formalizing data decision frameworks into agentic decision frameworks, RACI matrix and all

Why every automated decision still needs a human name in the "accountable" column, and what regulators are already demanding

What "governance as code" really means: front-loading human judgment into system design, then codifying it to move at machine speed

💬 The takeaway: "It should be that someone ends up uncomfortable and they start asking questions — because the more questions you ask, the more thought goes into what possibly could go badly." — Kelle O'Neal

About the host + guest: Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters on Substack, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast. Guest: Kelle O'Neal is CEO and founder of First San Francisco Partners.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelleoneal/

Most data teams think they're too busy to slow down. The real problem is they're too busy taking orders to ever be seen as anything but a cost center.

📌 In this episode:

The real difference between a "product owner" and a "product manager" and why most data teams are stuck playing the former

Why Nick Zervoudis argues data democratization isn't automatically good, using a peanut-butter-aisle analogy for customer segmentation

The vendor-funded origin story behind the entire "data literacy" movement traced back to a Qlik-commissioned report

Nick's "shift left, shift right" framework for product thinking, and why you need both to serve human and AI-agent customers alike

💬 The takeaway: "If you run your organization as a service desk and an order taker, then you are a tax on the business." — Malcolm Hawker

About the host + guest: Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters on Substack, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast. Guest: Nick Zervoudis is a data product management consultant, trainer, and founder of Value from Data and AI.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nzervoudis/

Executives at the World Economic Forum in Davos are asking for data governance but the data profession wasn't in the room to answer. The gap isn't the business's understanding. It's ours.

📌 In this episode:

Why Donna Burbank found business leaders, not data teams, driving governance conversations at Davos this year

The flip from "data literacy" to "business literacy" and why the old term is judgmental

Donna's "Semantic Pedanticism Feedback Loop" and how jargon fights kill credibility in front of executives

Why "assume positive intent" isn't enough on its own. You have to assume positive intelligence too

💬 The takeaway: "We tend to sit in our own little silo and say, how come the business isn't hearing us? Because we're talking to ourselves about others." — Donna Burbank

About the host + guest: Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters on Substack, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast. Guest: Donna Burbank is founder and managing director of Global Data Strategy, a firm focused on data strategy and hands-on implementation.

Every CDO is being told to make their data AI-ready. What that actually requires is a harder conversation — and this episode gets into it.

📌 In this episode:

Why vector embeddings alone aren't enough for enterprise AI — and what knowledge graphs provide that vectors fundamentally can't

How the Semantic Web's original vision for open metadata standards maps directly to what CDOs are being asked to build for AI today

Why knowledge graphs aren't as technically heavy a lift as most CDOs assume — and what a practical starting point looks like

How MDM and knowledge graphs can work together to get CDOs beyond the 360-degree view they've been chasing for decades

💬 The takeaway: "The knowledge graph is kind of a translator between natural language and the data and by that, far more people can make use of the data and ask questions across different data silos." — Andreas Blumauer

About the host and guest

Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters on Substack, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast. Andreas Blumauer is SVP Growth & Marketing at Graphwise and founder of the Semantic Web Company.

🔗 Watch + full transcript: [profisee.com/podcast/making-data-ai-ready-with-knowledge-graphs-summer-replay]

Subscribe to CDO Matters Monthly → https://profisee.com/cdo-matters-community/#join-community

Follow Malcolm on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malhawker/

Guest → https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreasblumauer/

Most CDOs talk about data products. Very few approach them the way a product manager would starting with customer need, validating demand, and building only what people will actually use.

📌 In this episode:

Why scalability without proven demand is a bridge to nowhere and how CDOs fall into that trap constantly

What "outside-in" product management looks like in a data function and why it changes everything about how you prioritize

How Jonathan Reeve's team at BetaNext links financial data assets to create insights clients didn't know they needed

Why influence and storytelling aren't soft skills for data leaders they're the job

💬 The takeaway: "You hold the keys to the kingdom. If you're managing data better, you've got the power to influence innovation, product direction, and where investment goes." — Jonathan Reeve

About the host and guest

Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters on Substack, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast. Jonathan Reeve is Chief Product Officer at BetaNext, a financial services data company.

🔗 Watch + full transcript: profisee.com/podcast/data-as-a-product-summer-replay

Subscribe to CDO Matters Monthly → https://profisee.com/cdo-matters-community/#join-community

Follow Malcolm on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malhawker/

Guest → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-reeve-5a62271/

A Delaware state court ruling rewrote the rules on corporate liability and CDOs are directly in the crosshairs. This is our most-played episode ever, and if you haven't heard it, now's your moment.

📌 In this episode:

What the Delaware Chancery Court ruling means for data leaders and why fiduciary duty now extends to every corporate officer, not just the board and CEO

Why bad data quality is no longer just an operational problem it's a legal and reputational one, with real personal liability attached

Why AI is rapidly eliminating the "zone of ambiguity" that data leaders have operated in for decades

Why aligning your data function closer to the CFO might be the smartest career move a CDO can make right now

💬 The takeaway: "Compliance and audit and regulatory risk drives a lot of investment in business. It always has. Don't be afraid of using this as a lever." — Malcolm Hawker

About the host and guest

Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters on Substack, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast. Mark Stouse is CEO of Proof Analytics and a former Fortune 500 CMO with extensive experience as an expert witness in data-related litigation.

🔗 Watch + full transcript: [profisee.com/podcast/a-state-court-ruling-just-changed-the-game-are-cdos-ready-summer-replay]

Subscribe to CDO Matters Monthly → https://profisee.com/cdo-matters-community/#join-community

Follow Malcolm on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malhawker/

Guest → https://www.linkedin.com/in/markstouse/

Most CDOs are still measuring AI readiness with a BI-readiness checklist and it's costing them. 80 to 90 percent of enterprise data is unstructured, sitting outside every governance program built over the last three decades.

📌 In this episode:

The split Malcolm calls "the world of measurement vs. the world of meaning" and why Gen AI lives entirely in the latter

Why only 25% of the data feeding AI models today is actually governed (per Dresner Research)

Why a product manager and a value engineer might matter more right now than any new governance policy

Why the 30-year-old model of data ownership breaks down in an AI-driven world and what it needs to become instead

💬 The takeaway: "You get budgets of millions of dollars to solve this problem but every day we disempower ourselves by saying 'garbage in, garbage out.'"

About the host: Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters on Substack, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast. This keynote was recorded live at the CDO Magazine CDO/CAO Summit.

If you liked this episode: Check out "Beyond Data Catalogs: Building Context for AI and Data Products (Ep. 87)"

Subscribe to CDO Matters Monthly → https://profisee.com/cdo-matters-community/#join-community

Follow Malcolm on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malhawker/

Most organizations are committing serious capital to AI and can't answer a basic question: how much are we actually spending, and on what? That accountability gap is about to close, whether data leaders are ready or not.

📌 In this episode:

Why fewer than 5% of large companies can accurately track AI spend as a distinct category — and what happens when the CFO gets involved

The Vane Loop framework: a quadrant-based approach to scoring data and AI investments on feasibility and impact across 70+ factors

Why AI architecture decisions are now financial variables — and why most product managers aren't equipped to make them

The strategic case for decommissioning: why building a library of reusable skills beats running 200 half-finished use cases

💬 The takeaway: "If you don't manage your costs, your costs will be managed for you." — Malcolm Hawker, Episode 104

About the host + guest: Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters on Substack, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast.

Karl Ivo Sokolov is Managing Director at Specific Group Austria and co-author of Finance, Grade Data and AI Products. He sits on the US Institute of Management Accountants board and is the creator of the Vane Loop framework for AI portfolio steering.

Every organization is told they need context for AI to work. Almost none of them know where to start. The answer has been sitting in their metadata all along — but most CDOs haven't connected those dots yet.

📌 In this episode:

Why your data catalog is already a source of context — and how to expose it to agentic workflows today

The semantic layer problem: definitions living in BI tools instead of governed catalogs, and why that creates risk

Why engineers and library scientists think about language completely differently — and why that gap matters for AI

Malcolm's argument that CDOs are in a unique position to make a "land grab" on unstructured data before someone else does

💬 The takeaway: "CDOs are in a unique position to make a land grab: the ontologists, the taxonomists, the library scientists are all over the organization without one single leader. That's your moment." — Malcolm Hawker

About the host + guest: Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast. Ole Olesen-Bagneux is Chief Evangelist at Actian and O'Reilly author of Fundamentals of Metadata Management (2025) and The Enterprise Data Catalog (2023) — the practitioner's reference for anyone building or governing a data catalog.

Subscribe to CDO Matters Monthly → https://profisee.com/cdo-matters-community/#join-community

Follow Malcolm on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malhawker/

Guest Ole Olesen-Bagneux → https://www.linkedin.com/in/ole-olesen-bagneux/

Most organizations default to replicating data: copying it from source systems into warehouses and lakes so their tools can reach it. Anu Jain, founder and CEO of Nexus One, thinks that's the wrong answer. Malcolm isn't so sure and that's where it gets interesting.

📌 In this episode:

Why the official count of data sources is always an undercount: shadow data, unstructured data, and legacy systems mean the real number is far higher than anyone reports

The case for virtualization over replication: bring the compute to the data, leave it where it lives, and collapse deployment timelines from months to days

"Information yield" — the metric Walmart once reported publicly and stopped, and why AI is about to force every CDO to bring it back

Why centralize-vs-decentralize is a false choice: the Venn diagram reality of golden records, distributed data, and why you need governance across all of it regardless

💬 The takeaway: "Think of CDOs as refineries. You have all this raw data. The question is: how are you enabling your organization to extract value and can you put a metric to it?" — Anu Jain

About the host + guest: Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast. Anu Jain is founder and CEO of Nexus One, former CEO of Think Big Analytics, and a veteran of IBM Watson and Teradata. He publishes in Fortune and is active on LinkedIn.

Subscribe to CDO Matters Monthly → https://profisee.com/cdo-matters-community/#join-community

Follow Malcolm on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malhawker/

Guest Anu Jain → https://www.linkedin.com/in/anujain/