To better understand the role of the chief data officer in digital change, consulting firm Egon Zehnder International Ltd. interviewed over 100 CDOs of global companies. The results showed that 85% were the first in their organizations to hold the title and nearly two-thirds had been in the job for less than three years.

The bottom line for CDOs is that most are new to their roles and there is a ton of work ahead.

“I think there’s a maturity process going on here,” said Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the final wrap analysis at the MIT CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “What you’re seeing now is a realization that ‘oh my God, this is a mess.’ What we heard this year was about cleaning up data, finding the data that you’ve got, organizing it, applying metadata, just getting it in shape to do something with it.”

Gillin spoke with co-host Dave Vellante (@dvellante), discussing the need to leverage automation tools in the handling of significant amounts of data and the role CDOs can play to realize strategic value from that effort (see the full interview with transcript here).

Bringing intelligence to the table

A key element of that maturity process will involve leveraging automation to handle the mass of data that is accumulating daily in enterprise organizations around the world. This vast amount of data has opened the opportunity for CDOs to train and execute algorithms that may finally propel artificial intelligence and machine learning into mainstream use.

“It’s really bringing machine intelligence to the table,” Vellante said. “We haven’t heard that as much at this event before. It’s now front-and-center and is just another example of AI injecting itself into virtually every aspect, every corner of the industry.”

Under the direction of CDOs, the use of automation tools may also result in a roll out that is more strategic and carefully implemented than previous efforts.

“It’s not like you’re putting machine learning out there in front of the customer where it could potentially do some real damage,” Gillin said. “They’re burning in machine learning in an environment that they can control.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the MIT CDOIQ Symposium.

Photo: mitcdoiq.org