Why the Role of the Role is Important?

Darshil Mehta, Head of Data Strategy, Bupa

Darshil Mehta, Head of Data Strategy, Bupa

Every organization has a finance department, and leader of the team is generally the chief financial officer (aka CFO). Why? A chief financial officer is the senior executive responsible for managing the financial actions of a company. The CFO's duties include tracking cash flow and financial planning as well as analyzing the company's financial strengths and weaknesses and proposing corrective actions. For example, when the marketing department wants to launch a new campaign, the CFO may help to ensure the campaign is feasible or give input on the funds available for the campaign. The CFO role has emerged from focusing on compliance and quality control to business planning and process changes, and they are a strategic partner to the CEO. The CFO plays a vital role in influencing company strategy. CFOs must also adhere to regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that includes provisions such as fraud prevention and disclosing financial information.

THE CDO ROLE HAS EMERGED FROM FOCUSING ON COMPLIANCE AND REGULATORY CHANGES, FREQUENTLY AND FAST CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES AND THEIR CAPABILITY TO INGEST MORE AND VARIETY OF DATA

Now let's replace the word CFO with CDO (Chief Data Officer).

A chief data officer is the senior executive responsible for managing the data of a company. The CDO's duties include tracking data and data management across the organization, including analyzing the company's data fitness and weaknesses, and proposing corrective actions. For example, when the marketing department wants to launch a new campaign, the CDO may help to ensure the campaign has the right type of data, from data quality perspective and from a compliance perspective too. The CDO role has emerged from focusing on compliance and regulatory changes, frequently and fast changing technologies and their capability to ingest more and variety of data. Because of that, organizations are seeing a sudden data explosion, which can be synonymized with Big Data.

The sudden data explosion creates enormous opportunities but also brings new challenges. 1) Does everyone understand all data? 2) Does the new data integrate well with existing data? 3) Will these data meet data quality requirements? 4) How to ensure the usage of the data?

Apart from keeping a good track of data for the organization, the CDO must be on top of all local and international regulations impacting data, such as Privacy Act, data sharing standards, GDPR, and local and international financial regulations, to name a few.

Putting these activities together, it just makes sense to create a chief data officer role whose remit spans across the organization, and he/she is adequately empowered to make the right data decisions for the organization.