What would you consider as the biggest challenge faced by CDOs today?

Culture change is 90% of the battle. Balancing agility and speed against protecting and unifying data assets across the corporation.

Transitioning from a back office cost-centre to a customer-facing profit-centre is also one hell of a transformation and cultural journey.

How do you think Big Data will impact your industry?

Traditionally insurance has help ‘data IP’ within its organisational borders. Big Data and the Internet of Things mean this will no longer be the case. We will need to collaborate outside our borders more to succeed in the global market place.

In your opinion, do people, in general, in your organization appreciate the value of data in decision-making? What do you think can be done to improve the situation?

They do but this is institutionally retrospective in nature. The use of analytics for decision-making support at each point of customer interaction is not fully appreciated. To improve the situation, we bring decision-support algorithms into core application development and drive this design by the required ‘customer experience’

How would you explain the role of a CDO to a fresh graduate?

The CDO ensures we deliver the right information at the right time to make the right decisions for our customers, our partners and our shareholders.

How do you see the role of CDO evolving in the next 3-5 years?

It will move from traditional governance and backoffice simplification towards customer-driven value-creation. It will improve organisational agility and creating a healthy tension in terms of risk and reward tolerance. If we cannot monetise our data it’s not worth doing.

Putting up a credible data analytics infrastructure is always a cost issue? How would you justify this to your company’s CEO/CFO?

It’s not if you frame it in the right way and, take a more radical approach to infrastructure provision. Creating small focused ‘art of the possible’ pilots on virtual infrastructure at a low monthly cost that demonstrates ‘seeds of change’ can be infectious and, often removes the barriers to organisational investment.  I see analytics infrastructure the bare minimum to compete. Every traditional data handoff and interface increases our OPEX, increases complexity and annihilates our ability to respond to market change.