The Job Description
I reached out to Sumit Nijhawan, CEO & President of the data solutions company Infogix, for a little more background on the CDO’s duties after receiving the company’s sheet of 2018 data trends, which highlighted the CDO’s rise. Here’s what he had to say in an email statement. So what’s powering the rise of the Chief Data Officer? The growing important of the information assets that they manage. Having a CDO in place has become more important than ever to navigate regulatory demands, successfully leverage data and manage enterprise-wide governance. Successfully managing any type of data, especially unstructured and unpredictable data, while simultaneously leveraging advanced analytics requires a CDO in today’s data-intensive environments.”
The Big Data Race
While data has been around forever, the widespread acceptance of the computing power needed to process it hasn’t. Thanks to the rise of cloud computing, companies everyone can now outsource their big data crunching to third-party data companies. And that data needs executive oversight. The Chief Data Officer’s rise can be pinpointed to the early years of the 2010s: The “large organizations” cited in that Gartner survey saw 1,000 CDOs in 2015, up from 400 in 2014. By now, the CDO has cemented their importance: Big data has a chunk of the C-suite pie, and it isn’t going anywhere. Read more about the business side of technology on TechCo
