Chief data officers numbered in the single digits not so long ago, but now the title is popping up every which way, from the financial services market to the healthcare industry and even non-core sectors such as manufacturing and media. IBM’s emerging roles leader Cortnie Abercrombie only sees that trend accelerating as the amount of information flooding into the enterprise continues to grow, creating new opportunities that organizations will need a fresh perspective to seize.

“The Internet of Things is just gonna make it that much more prolific on top of that,” Abercrombie commented during an interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at the recent IBM Insight summit in Las Vegas (full video below). “Now you can embed sensors that are gonna give you new sources of data – and potentially new sources of revenue if you know how to use that data, sell it and augment it to make it valuable.”

Harnessing that potential raises the need for a new kind of leadership that conventional roles within an organization can’t fill, she said. For a traditional enterprise to internalize and ingenuity pursue the value in information, a “change agent” is required to jolt the decision-making echelon into accepting the new reality of knowledge-driven business, and that’s where the chief data officer comes into the frame. According to Abercrombie, the CDO’s mission is not so much to sort out the nuances of how to operationalize information but rather develop the will within the C-Suite to tackle the challenges associated with the task.

That first and foremost requires the individual leaders around the table to accept that they may have to hand over some of their sway within the organization – which often takes the form of data – for the greater good of the company. This means expanding their perspectives beyond their job descriptions to the bigger picture of the risks and opportunists in analytics, which is perhaps the CDO’s most important responsibility. After all, understanding is the prerequisite to moving forward.

“This is only going to grow as people start getting more visionary in how to use data and analytics,” Abercrombie told hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante. “We’re just barely scratching the surface, because all of this time, data analytics has been at the manager level and broken out to silos across individual business units.”

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The chief data officer is in a position to change that situation, but Abercrombie highlighted that fostering the organizational courage to move beyond the status quo is just like any other group project in that it’s much easier said than done. That is across the board, but especially with the CIO, which she said often brings with them a project-oriented mentality that is not necessarily conducive to the highly iterative approach it takes to tap into the power of continuously evolving data reservoirs.

The increasing importance of analytics in decision-making will require IT leaders to break away from that mindset and take one of two routes into the future, according to Abercrombie: transition to a position focused more on new value-generation opportunities than merely keeping systems running, or take the CDO mantel themselves. Either way, the CIO and the rest of the C-Suite will all have to adjust for the new world of knowledge-driven business and the cornerstone role of the chief data officer within it if they want to remain competitive.

“It’s absolutely here to stay and it will cause other positions to morph around it because data is so incredibly important for competitive advantage at companies now, “ Abercrombie said. “It’s the new way to be innovative, you an learn new things about your customers – we have data available to us that we never had before that is now usable in so many way that it’s almost like a sci-fi novel.”