Digital business largely boils down to data. For an organization to become truly data-driven, it may have to rearrange employees’ rank and role. Aptly, the reshuffle may put the chief data officer at the front lines.

“Data’s valuable to me from the point that I create it to the endpoint that I delete it — if I ever delete it,” said Paul Lewis (pictured), chief technology officer, Americas, at Hitachi Vantara Corp.

This is in stark contrast to the economics of infrastructure and of applications. Traditional infrastructure lasts three to five years before replacements or maintenance start to cost money, according to Lewis. Applications can last up to nine years until performance or scalability problems arise. Then adding new apps, modernizing, etc., can become expensive, he added.

Data as an asset is just the opposite — it appreciates in value, Lewis told Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during an interview at theCUBE’s Palo Alto studio in California. (* Disclosure below.)

Data stored and combined with other data over time can only produce greater value. And adding more data presents no modernizing or backward compatibility problems, Lewis stated. “If I add more data to data, the bigger potential pot of gold I have and the nuggets that I can find, the more precise my algorithms become; the more [insights] I’ll be able to create from a client’s perspective or from product-to-transaction perspective,” he said.

In sum, data is now the value creator for information technology rather than the side effect it once was.

CDO usurps CIO

Placing data at the center of IT and of business generally reshapes operations. In turn, new roles emerge. The most important of which is the chief data officer. The CDO is a crucial value driver for the business and is a peer to the vice presidents on infrastructure and applications, according to Lewis.

If companies do not hire a CDO ready-made, they may groom their chief information officer into one. This appears an inevitable evolution of the CIO title (some techies joke that CIO stands for career is over). The CIO must transition to a role that creates value, Lewis explained.

“The only way they’re going to be a value creator is if they move from an application-centric world of IT to a data-centric world of IT,” Lewis concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below. (* Disclosure: Hitachi Vantara Corp. sponsored this segment. Neither Hitachi Vantara, the segment sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE