[Term of the Day]: Chief Data Officer
Term of the Day
“Chief Data Officer (CDO)”
Definition — What does Chief Data Officer (CDO) mean?
The Chief Data Officer (CDO) is a senior executive within an organization who oversees a range of data-related functions that may include data management, ensuring data quality and creating data strategy.
That data could be customer data, data gathered from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, social media, structured, or unstructured data; anything that the organization gathers itself or buys in from elsewhere. The CDO must ensure the data is secured and maintained, but the role is not simply about deciding the technical aspects, like whether the information should be held in a data warehouse or a data lake or master data management. Instead, the CDO is also responsible for analyzing and deriving valuable insights from data and look-out for ways to find opportunities for and through data analytics, whether that's predicting customer trends or finding new revenue-generating opportunities.
NewVantage Partners' Big Data Executive Survey 2018 found that 62.5 percent of senior Fortune 1000 business and technology decision-makers said their organization had appointed a chief data officer.
Data might be the crown jewels of a modern enterprise, but many organizations don't necessarily manage their information successfully. That realization, says analyst Gartner, helps explains why CDOs play a key role in helping organizations take care of the information they hold and use.