. Virtually every organization is actively pursuing the goal of becoming more data-centric, enabling them to swiftly uncover and respond to valuable insights. With generative AI, the power and potential of organizational data is bigger than ever before. Organizations often appoint chief data officers (CDOs) to lead them toward data-driven success. (View Highlight)
One of the key findings from our study is that CDOs need to show a visible value for their efforts—in part by emphasizing analytics and AI. As a relatively new C-level role, CDOs have more topics than ever to focus on, which makes it difficult to standardize the job description. We found that CDOs also need to be flexible and agile to change their charter with changing technologies, such as generative AI. (View Highlight)
More than half (57 percent) had not yet made necessary changes to their company’s data strategies to support generative AI, but a majority (93 percent) of CDOs agreed that data strategy is crucial for getting value out of generative AI. A quarter of CDOs are pursuing data integration and cleaning, while nearly one-fifth are surveying data to understand what might support generative AI use cases. (View Highlight)
Forty-four percent of CDOs still define success as achieving business objectives, as opposed to technical accomplishments (only 3 percent), and mark analytics and AI as keys to providing value. Other approaches include literacy training, councils across the organization, approaching data management use case by use case, and the data product management approach. (View Highlight)
Culture is increasingly critical to effective data use, but CDOs are taking a “slow and steady” approach to changing it. Culture initiatives are a major focus for over half of the CDOs surveyed, including data literacy programs and change management. (View Highlight)
Generative AI dominated the discussion. The majority of CDOs (80 percent) agreed that it would eventually transform their organization’s business environment, but they don’t want to abandon existing data- related initiatives in favor of generative AI yet. (View Highlight)
Similar to last year, CDOs spend a substantial part of their time focusing on data governance activities (63 percent in 2023 vs. 44 percent in 2022).
The new methods of establishing governance include an “enablement” focus—making it easier to do the right thing with data—and common data platforms. (View Highlight)
A large portion of CDOs (46 percent) rank data quality and finding the right use cases as the two biggest challenges for realizing the potential of generative AI, followed by (creating) guardrails around responsible AI, security, and privacy of data. Customer operation, such as customer support and chatbots, was the top generative AI use case (44 percent), followed by overall personal productivity (40 percent), and software code generation (36 percent). (View Highlight)
Successful CDOs see their role as making their internal clients more successful in achieving their objectives. They don’t focus so much on their own performance alone but on building coalitions to help their organizations succeed. (View Highlight)
“We are use case-driven, so for us, the first two priorities were revenue growth management— pricing and promotion in store and online—and marketing and media effectiveness analytics. We’re trying not to take the “boil the ocean” approach to fixing our data. If we worked on everything at once and we talk five years from now, I still would say we’re still working on trying to fix our data.” Diana Schildhouse Chief Data, Analytics, and Insights Officer, Colgate-Palmolive (View Highlight)
“The data product focus has brought data and analytics people much closer to the rest of the organization. Now data product managers will start to follow the same way of working as the PMs building customer facing software and I have taken responsibility for technology as well as data.“ Sebastian Klapdor Chief Data and Technology, Vista (View Highlight)
“People in this job talk about metrics and value, but I think the real value add is making other people successful. This is a client service role; you have to make the other person successful… I don’t have numbers to make. It’s their numbers, not my numbers.“ Naras Eechambadi Chief Global Data and Analytics Officer, Universal Music (View Highlight)
