Data analysis is as much about people and processes as it about the technology that makes separating the signal from the noise possible in the first place. But while the overwhelming majority of organizations have adjusted to the new reality of information-driven decisions, at least conceptually, finding professionals with the necessary skills to uncover actionable business insights remains a major obstacle for all but the largest tech firms.

The challenge extends beyond just the data scientists who do the number crunching to the senior leadership level as well, where the difficulty is twofold: finding individuals with the necessary qualifications to bear responsibility for an entire enterprise’s worth of information, and effectively fitting them into corporate structure.  The emerging role of “chief data officer”, or CDO for short, is hailed by some as the answer to that challenge.

Wikibon lead Big Data analyst Jeff Kelly appeared on the newest episode of SiliconANGLE’s CubeConversations to explain what the title entails and share the arguments for appointing a CDO with Stu Miniman.

The optimal hierarchy

The chief information officer is tasked with regulating the use of information within their organizations, a broad task that Kelly detailed means different things for different companies and can encompass everything from identifying which sources to tap to determining who can access what. Their guiding philosophy is always the same, however: “just because Big Data makes something possible doesn’t mean you should do it,” as he put it.

But although the need bring more focus into the analytics lifecycle is becoming increasingly apparent as corporate infrastructure comes under more and more strain, the exact responsibilities of the CDO are still far from clear. “The chief data officer is very much an emerging and evolving role, there is no hard-set definition yet, but we’re seeing it leaning more towards the governance side and less around specific analytics,” Kelly said.

In other words, the CDO typically has the last say over the data itself rather than the systems used to store it. As a result, many of the organizations in which the role exists assign it the same seniority level as the CIO, who is in charge of those systems. And even when that’s not the case, the CDO usually reports to a different C-level executive, most often the chief financial officer but in some cases the chief security officer.

That same dynamic also affects the way the CDO interacts with peers on lower levels of the corporate food chain, notably data scientists. “While there is certainly a relationship there, we don’t see the CDO overseeing data scientists but rather supporting them with some of the compliance-type functions that are necessary when you are talking about doing advanced analytics on sensitive data like personally identifiable data,” Kelly said.

Keeping analytics under control

In addition to compliance, chief data officers also have to take into account the myriad of different legal considerations concerning their organizations and the specific datasets and sources being accessed. These factors have a direct impact on the analytics process, according to Kelly, first and foremost by dictating how long a given piece of information can be stored on company systems.

There are very practical motives behind that requirement, he highlighted. Holding onto more data than is absolutely needed can make it harder for organizations to retrieve a necessary subset in the the event of litigation, which might have been avoided entirely had that information not been collected in the first place. It’s in scenarios such as these that the need for a chief data officer becomes truly evident.

“Anytime you start to bring in new data sources that are not “traditional” data sources and anytime you start to merge that data with other types of data and do analytics, it’s a good idea to at least start thinking if not about a chief data officer specifically then somebody in the organization taking responsibility for the compliance and ethical considerations related to using data wisely.”

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