The emergence of Chief Data Officers(CDO) demonstrates the growing recognition of information as an asset. In fact, Gartner says that 90% of large organizations will have a CDO by 2019.

To understand the CDO role more deeply, I turned to Richard Wendell.

I met Mr. Wendell last year at the Chief Data Officer Summit and thought his background and expertise would help us understand the critical role a CDO plays in managing an organization’s data.

Mr. Wendell is a is a founding Member of the Board of Directors of MIT’s International Society for Chief Data Officers (ISCDO). Under his leadership, he has helped create and shape the de facto community of senior executives responsible for maximizing the opportunities in data-driven decision making. Prior to ISCDO, Mr. Wendell spent two and a half years as the Vice President of Data Science and Strategic Analytics for Tyco Electronics.

In this first part in a series of podcasts, Mr. Wendell defines the role of a CDO, the value a CDO brings to an organization and what a CDO needs to do in order to thrive.

Most recently, Mr. Wendell is a founding member of the board of directors of MIT's International Society for Chief Data Officers.

I'm thrilled to have Richard Wendell join us today to tell us more about the goals of a CDO. Because, according to Gartner, by 2019, 90% of large organizations will have a Chief Data Officer.

Richard: Sure, Cindy, happy to. So, the world around us is changing very, very fast. Particularly, when you start talking about information and technology. So, just out of curiosity I went and I was looking at Google Analytics and Google Trends and some search terms for "chief data officer." And the first blip that we start seeing of any significance around "chief data officer" searches came in late 2011. Then we start to see another uptick in 2012.

And, more or less, since 2013, up through current time, the searches on Google for the word "chief data officer" are growing at 100% compound annual growth rate. So, really substantial uptick.

Like many areas in its early days, there are some different meanings for what people mean by chief data officer and the areas of responsibility.

What we're seeing, different flavors of chief data officers, but by and large they could be characterized in sort of two buckets, the defensive chief data officer and the offensive chief data officer.

Defensive CDOs, often there are a lot of them in financial services. They're more responsible typically for data governance, reporting, regulatory, and really critical functions.

Quite different from the offensive CDOs we're seeing. Offensive CDOs still can be in financial services, but increasingly in other sectors, like life sciences and retail and CPG, are focusing on transforming companies that want to be, 20th century companies that want to be 21st century companies. So really, transforming the enterprise around data and analytics. Coming out with new ways of using data, data science to create insights that are truly going to be transformational for the way that business conducts itself into the future.

You can see, both called CDOs, but two very, very different missions and mandates.

Richard: So, the answer to that question is part, I think, very largely the job of the CDO, right?

So, quite often a CDO, particularly offensive CDOs, their job starts like this: a CEO or a CFO or maybe a CMO says,

You really...in the beginning, the value chain is raw data, and at the end is raw dollars.

If you want to get from raw data to raw dollars, you have to check all three of those boxes. And, so many organizations focus on that middle slice, the analysis piece, the insights piece. Insight is incredibly important, but insight's only one of those three boxes.

Richard: Yeah, yeah, I mean data is absolutely critical for sure. I mean data is the raw material, the building blocks on which everything else is contingent. So I would argue that data is critical, necessary, but not sufficient.

At the end of the day…creating the right data that is ready for analysis and driving insight is really, really challenging. I don't want to undermine the really intense hard work that comes out of figuring out what to do when your enterprise has many, many data centers. Or, hit legacy ETL scripting that is indecipherable and not well documented.

These are just two of the many challenges that Chief Data Officers face in creating good quality data. I would just say though, that businesses are here to make money. That could mean different things. It could be on the P&L side, on revenue and growth like you're talking about. Or, it could be cost savings efficiencies, right? Or, it could also be over on the balance sheet.

There are many, many fantastic data and analytics use cases that don't hit the P&L, but hit maybe it's a reduction in inventory that flows over to a cash savings on the balance sheet. Or, increase in customer lifetime value, which has many intangible effects.

So, I think really, across all the company financials, it's really the job of a chief data officer to understand business strategy, corporate strategy well enough to say,"What is the company's strategy? Are we here to accelerate revenue and growth? Are we here to transform our industry? Or, are we here to drive efficiencies?"

And then, based on that corporate strategy, figure out where the right strategic levers across the P&L and the balance sheet. And then, what data has to be put together, prepared in what way, and used in what combination with analytics to drive those strategic levers.

Inside Out Security: And for the CDO to highlight, okay here's why you brought me in. Here's what's important to the company. Here's how we'll achieve, and here's the roadmap to where we want to go.

Richard: Yeah, and you know, here's the money that we're making because I'm here. I think that one of the critical, sort of in my opinion, one of the critical success factors of a chief data officer is being able to translate between the technical language of data and analytics, and the maybe less technical but equally important language of business and strategy.

So, when you are talking to a CEO or a Board of Directors or a CFO or a CMO or whoever it may be, you're not speaking geek all the time, right?

You're speaking to them in a language that they understand, and you're talking to them about making money. Which, ultimately, most businesses are around to make money.

Inside Out Security: And really, for this CDO to speak their language too.

Richard: So important, being a good listener. I think that CDOs really...in order to know where to focus and prioritize the really, frankly, expensive investments in data and analytics that companies are making - it's so important to be able to listen to one's stakeholders, be it the GMs or presidents of a large business unit or the chief marketing officer.

But really, those partners who are ultimately going to be critical to the adoption of the insights that are created out of data and analytics, that translate those insights into action, and ultimately money.

Listening to them and what are their priorities is such a really important first starting point. Because at the end of the day if...we could be creating the coolest data asset in the world, but if it's not generating insights that people care about or want to act on, it's hypothetical.

Richard: The relationship with a chief marketing officer is really critical.

I mean it's very different for different kinds of companies. Obviously, consumer companies have very different marketing focus than B-to-B companies, so I can't 100% generalize all the time.

But by and large, marketing is on the front end of the business.

Marketing often owns the customers. Marketing is quite often either responsible for customer acquisition, or closely partnered with sales, and jointly responsible for customer acquisition. And increasingly, responsible for the digital channels, so the web channels to the customer, and other digital channels.

And those digital channels have a lot of data, and a lot of analytics.

And, what has happened in a lot of companies is the marketing teams have built up their own sort of ownership of customer data. Be it CRM data, be it digital web data, and maybe even some of their own specialized analytics around how to leverage that data to get the right insights from a marketing perspective. All good things, all very good things, but from a different perspective you could also think of that as a silo.

So, what happens in a company where at the end of the day...say the company is manufacturing a product, right?

Maybe it's the case that getting up the product that you make to your customer quickly is the largest driver of customer satisfaction and customer lifetime. So, makes sense. People want to get their things quickly, that they buy, right? That's Amazon's model.

So, well what if...and a lot of these companies...how quickly...how much of a product you manufacture, and how much inventory you store is more on the operations side. So, what to do in a company where that more operation or transaction data resides either in operations or in IT, and marketing has digital data.

But at the end of the day, the company wants to do the right things for its customers. It wants to get the customers, in this example, their products quickly. Well, in this kind of...this is a perfect example. I've seen it many times. And this is where a chief data officer comes in.

A chief data officer's primary job is breaking down these silos and helping a company optimize all of its data and analytics through different groups to get to its strategy.

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