Appoint A Data Chief

Originally published as part of, “The Day Before Digital Transformation” by Phil Perkins and Cheryl Smith

There is one major exception to introducing a new C-level role: A senior position with the word ‘data’ in the title.  While data has for the past few decades been the responsibility of the IT group, there is a strong case to be made to make it a separate group that supports all operational units in an organization. Because the data group crosses operational units, it is often still located within the IT organization.

Since early in the Digital Age (back when it was still generally called the Information Age) an individual or team who knew where all of the data was buried in the organization, and more importantly what each element actually meant, was invaluable.  As file systems were migrating to database systems, understanding specifically how each data element was being processed in the original system was critical when moving the data into a highly structured database management system (DBMS). The same piece of data in different file systems usually meant the same thing but very often had been entered differently. 

But databases did not process exceptions.  For example, if two different systems had different data for the same piece of information, database systems rejected one or both. So strict data entry rules were put in place, and ‘capture the original keystroke’ became the mantra and still is today.  All other downstream applications then used the original (and clean) data.  An employee entering his or her own name and address into a system typically got it right the first time around.  A call center agent accepting a new customer almost always got the information correct, but even if they did not it was still a single source for the data. Keypunch operators working from hard copy forms had measurable error rates.

Today’s organizations do not have the same problem with data accuracy as everyone did at the beginning of the age.  Today’s issue is the vast amount of data that is being collected throughout the organization. The miniaturized computing and sensing devices that created the technology leap that started the Digital Age have been superb at collecting data everywhere about everything.  Data is one of an organization’s most valuable resources, and massive amounts of it are in individual business units for first-level processing.  Having a ‘data guru’ who keeps track of data throughout the organization, understands its potential value to other units for business analytics, and sees other monetization opportunities, is an incredible organizational asset.  

For example, data from IoT systems provide great contextual awareness of equipment and systems for their primary processing: predictive and prescriptive management of equipment; optimization and supervisory control of equipment and resources; proactive environmental compliance. This is what direct business leaders care about.  But that same data can be included in analytics that can be used by the CFO for financial risk management. Individual sensing systems deployed in a city produce a tremendous amount of information—traffic lights, pothole maintenance, toll road charges, water usage, the list is almost endless. When analyzed using emerging technologies across the systems, data becomes available to make decisions to create smart cities.

Organizations should consider appointing a chief data officer or a senior data leader to champion data analytics efforts and lead the data governance strategy across the enterprise.  Since the entirety of data should be tracked and viewed across the organization’s units to receive powerful benefits, having a separate data team that is able to operate across the entire organization is almost mandatory today.  Smart organizations have known this data secret since the late 1990s.