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

There’s a couple of pieces. I don’t think I could put one ahead of another. I think the constantly changing technology landscape, and the tools that you would use to set up your data environment and manage it. Because it’s changing, and there’s always a newer, better, faster way to do it, adds some challenges to CDOs to stay the course. The second piece would be the role. Because of it being the concept of data, at least for financial services let’s say, we don’t have products to sell – you’re selling the concept of data. So, you could eventually turn everything within the company into something within your purview, so being able to draw some distinct walls is a pretty big challenge, because people want to just pile on,

How do you think Big Data will impact your industry?

‘Big Data’ has been interesting because, to me, Big Data is all about advanced analytics. And, in financial services, some places may be more advanced than others.  I’d say, for the most part, banks are not all that advanced in their analytics – they’re no Google! As a result of that, it can be distracting because everybody is asking us about what are we doing with Big Data, but the reality is that we have a lot of really basic ‘Little Data’ things we need to get done. Like, for example, internal structured data still needs to be dealt with in most banks, and so not getting distracted by Big Data is probably the challenge.

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?

I do. I think they do appreciate how important it is to decision-making. The flip side of that is, because company data is complex and the ability to simply it is challenging, that I don’t think they completely get it. It’s easy to say it’s kind of like ‘Mum and Apple Pie’. It’s easy to say data is important to my decision-making, but I don’t think they have a true appreciation of how difficult it is to make the data available for them, to truly be able to use it for good decision-making. We’ve all been used to, in financial services, to make do with what we have, but you forget that it may not be that great and that you’ve got to keep moving.  But yes, they absolutely do, but until you can show them the difference between the data they have today compared to how it was, they can’t truly appreciate it. They don’t even know if it’s good or bad in some cases. So, they would absolutely say ‘yeah, I need data to make decisions’ but being able to show them the difference between what they’ve been doing and what we’re trying to do, and highlighting those data quality challenges, is one way, I would say, to improve the situation.

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

I think a successful CDO has a perspective of both business and technology. Which means they understand they understand the business that the company is in and how those folks do those roles. You also have to understand how technology enables and supports those roles. So,  I don’t think you can come out of college and say ‘you know what? I want to get on the path to becoming a CDO’ because how you would get to it would seem a lot crazy! Because you’re going to have to spend time in the businesses, you’re going to have spend a little time in technology – it’s not a straight line. I’m not sure if, when you come out of college, you can say, ‘Okay, that’s the job I want to work my way to’. There’s not straight line, you can’t go deep into analytics, or deep into data warehousing because that could be too siloed in your thinking – you need to get experience in technology and business. I think it’s a real challenge to talk of the CDO role to graduates, potentially thinking that’s the role I eventually want.

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

In the three to five year range, I think it will stay similar to what it is now. Although, I think it will become a little bit more about analytics. I think you’ll continue to see more of them [CDOs] with a move towards standardisation of the role, in financial services especially. So that the job description becomes tighter. Post-five years, I could eventually see the role being absorbed into business areas and becoming a bit more ‘way-of-life’ as opposed to a specific Chief Data Officer role.  Because once you build the infrastructure and people are playing the roles of stewards or custodians – the governance process-ees – are in place, I think you need a lot less of the CDO role. You could actually embed that into finance, ops or risk and all those different areas because people are already playing the role. Although you need a bit of oversight for it, I could eventually see the role going away, although that’s probably more in the 10 year horizon.

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

You’ve got to find a pain point that they are struggling with, that the analytics environment supports. So, it’s got to be very, very targeted pain point for the various business areas. Then you say, okay we have these same challenges in two or three areas and this is the reason to spend the money once to set up an environment that we can leverage across multiple businesses. Re-usability, targeted at specific pains.