Introduction

This chapter explores the concept of disruption and what it means, and whether the CDO is a disruptor or an innovator. The role of data as a disruptor is examined.

Without a doubt, many parts of a business may find a CDO challenging as they suggest different and better ways of doing things, especially related to data.

Disruption and innovation

If this is the definition, then we don't really think that in most cases the CDO is a disruptor, or indeed should be a disruptor. If you are a first-generation CDO (FCDO, probably the first CDO the business has seen) then you are probably risk-averse (more about this in Chapter 12, which explores the different generations of the CDO). In data terms, the business is probably in a fragile state – certainly in a state where the first imperative is to stabilise the current position and put out the burning fires. There is too much at stake in the early days for the FCDO to be a disruptor.

However, there is often confusion between disruption and innovation:

Innovation, then, introduces new ways of doing things but maintains the same course and doesn't suggest a left turn. The majority of the products and services of the organisation, or its purpose, remain the same, they are just done in new ways. The FCDO is probably more of an innovator than a disruptor. The FCDO will suggest new ways of doing things, with new tools, and will transform the business through innovation.

Introduction

This chapter begins by painting a picture of BAU (business as usual), what the ‘data environment’ looks like at day zero when the first CDO arrives, and understanding who is currently making the data decisions, or how and why they are being made. The chapter then puts forward the case for a dual-track approach to a data strategy – the immediate data strategy and the target data strategy – with six tips for success and the idea of fixing forward.

Business as usual

One of the most difficult tasks for a new CDO is developing and delivering a data strategy while the organisation continues to operate (and must continue to operate) using and abusing data, continuing with bad habits around data and often with a lack of governance and planning. This has been likened to performing open heart surgery on a runner while they are in the middle of a marathon; they still have to run and compete and finish the race. In reality what has probably been happening is more like patching up the runner, putting a sticking plaster on the heart problem, giving them water to keep them going without a clear map to get them to the end of the race. In most situations for a new CDO the organisation probably feels that it has been operating quite happily without this new person for a very long while – or this will almost certainly be the case in parts of the business and helps to explain low levels of data maturity; people really don't understand the problems that they have. So, for the new CDO it may feel like they are sitting in the corner, talking to themselves.

Introduction

The CDO is still a relatively new role, and while we have moved into having more CDOs who are proven, know their niche and can really lead data within organisations, the role is still evolving. There are major differences in role models and the market for them is still changing. This chapter discusses how you can present yourself as a CDO and how to get help to do so.

Questions to ask yourself

The very first thing you need to ask yourself is why you want to be a CDO. Obviously, we think it is an awesome job and love it, but we also recognise that it's not for everyone. It's always a good idea to check your reasons for wanting to do it, because they are the thing that will carry you forward when the going gets really tough.

Second, who do you think you are? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Whatever answer you give will probably be right, as we tend to become the person we think we are, but the more important question is, who do you want to be? It's critical to know that who you are isn't all that you are capable of being. It really is up to you.

As a small aside here, let's just touch upon values and how they are inextricably linked to our beliefs and behaviours, as it's ultimately committing to a choice of behaviour that we usually need to work on, while maintaining our values and beliefs.

Beliefs are things we hold to be true, values set the standard for what we think is important, and both shape our behaviour (what we actually do). So your belief could be that everyone is essentially good, you value honesty and your behaviour is that you are honest and expect that in others.

Everything we suggest that you try in this chapter has to fit with your values, we aren't suggesting that you become something that is alien to you. Make sure that you understand your non-negotiables – where are the red lines that you aren't prepared to compromise on?

Introduction

This chapter stresses the importance of ‘making sure you think before you do’. Data is dangerous, it is combustible and should be handled with caution. The theory of unintended consequences is also explored.

Opportunities and ethics

There's a common saying in the UK along the lines of ‘just because you can doesn't mean you should’, usually said to someone who is using their money, skills or power in a way that isn't morally the best. Pulling our company's data together, governing it and making it trustworthy and then capitalising on it for the good of our organisation could give us a tremendous amount of power – so how do we intend to use it? Irrespective of how ethical our intentions are, what about the unintended consequences?

Advances in data and how we use it can and have provided us with huge opportunities to improve our public and private lives. This, coupled with the gradual reduction in human oversight and the growing awareness among the public about the use of data in their everyday lives means these opportunities come at a price: the increasingly significant ethical challenges we face in this area. It's important to find the balance between allowing and even encouraging innovation and facing some really regrettable consequences. We need to be able to build on data, share and collaborate, but to do so in an ethical and sustainable fashion.

Regulation and legislation has also become much more aware of the consequences of the misuse of data; and legal measures around data protection, intellectual property, data storage, anti-discrimination and confidential information all strive to tackle areas where data meets ethical concerns.

A definition of data ethics was formulated by Luciano Floridi and Maricrosaria Toddeo for the Royal Society in late 2016:

Introduction

This chapter looks at the imperatives for the CDO after the first 100 days in post. It stresses the importance of getting back to the strategic. This chapter is very much aimed at the CDO; however, it can also be a useful read for the early members of the CDO team to help understand what is going to happen next.

You’ve now got through the first 100 days, settled into a new business, met your new colleagues, got a first impression of the data environment and the state of the nation and carried out your own assessment of the maturity of the data environment. You’re probably bursting with ideas and plans. In our experience you will have spoken to more people than you can remember and been in a lifetime of meetings and will have many notebooks full of writing. That is the only way to throw your arms around what is going on and to make a true assessment of the data estate and processes. You will also have spent 100 days listening carefully so as to understand the direction and aspirations of the business.

While things will obviously look different depending on what generation of CDO you are, the steps are the same. An SCDO might be able to skip through some of them faster, but if you miss the steps altogether, how confident can you be that you are standing on firm foundations? The FCDO Replayed may need to take longer over some of the earlier steps, such as … assessing data maturity or building a data governance framework to meet the challenges of either the earlier failure of a CDO or a reset of the organisation's data journey.

The next three steps

This is the moment to do three things, and they are sequential. First: draw a breath and take a moment to pull all the thoughts and those meetings together, review the notes you have taken and make an assessment of the state of the data maturity and what needs to be done. The following are the points to measure against:

• 1 Reporting and analytics. Is this efficient, how many reports are produced and who for? It is a good idea if possible to calculate the FTE hours expended on reporting, the number of reports and cost per report.

Introduction

This chapter explores the tensions that may exist between data and IT, the boundary between IT and data, and the role of the CDO as a technology evangelist. The differences between ‘information’, ‘digital’ and ‘data’ are discussed, as well as the importance of shifting the conversation from ‘systems’ to ‘data’.

Understand the context

This is an interesting topic, and so much will depend on a number of factors:

• • the background, experience and technology expertise of the CDO

• • the organisational structure that the CDO has been dropped into – do they report directly to the CTO/CIO, do they sit alongside these roles, or are they quite a long way from them reporting into Finance or the CFO or even the General Council?

• • the state of the current technology estate

• • the maturity of ‘data’ technology in the organisation

• • ownership of business systems, e.g. the CRM or the asset management system

• • the maturity of data ownership

• • the data literacy of the leadership team.

Whatever the context, there are some common threads.

The CDO should have some ‘data technology’ understanding or, if not, recruit a senior colleague or partner to provide the cover. What ‘data technologies’ are we talking about? Without naming any individual brands or suppliers, the CDO, or someone close to them in their team, should be well versed in the ‘art of the possible’ in the technologies of master data management, metadata, data storage, data encryption, data lineage, reporting tools, dashboarding tools and analytics tools. But, this book isn't about these technical applications, it is to help the CDO, and perhaps the CTO, to understand the CDO's role and relationship to technology. It is also about understanding that some roles and responsibilities will shift and change.

Introduction

This chapter examines why the CEO might need advice about a CDO and provides seven pieces of advice about that relationship. It also looks at how to recruit a CDO, which could be extended to include other senior data roles, and some good advice is provided by front-line recruitment professionals.

Does the business need a CDO?

This is an easy question to answer if you are having problems with data or there are massive opportunities that require a strong focus on data, but maybe not as easy to articulate in other circumstances. Just like as you originally start a business you tend to be doing all the roles and bring in other people as you can to support you when the time is right – i.e. they pick up an area that you know you need help with or you don't have the right skills to fully capitalise on – you can think about it that way in your organisation.

So, do you have a highly literate data workforce, senior leaders who are really owning data and no problems? If so, then maybe you don't need to think about a CDO just yet. If your business relies on a great deal of data and is struggling with the complexity of what it is facing, then you need to jump on the bandwagon.

Let's be honest, it is simply not realistic to say that every organisation must have a CDO in order to work. If you are a small charity with 40 people working for you, we wouldn't advocate for a CDO to be one of those 40 (a competent data person, yes, but not a CDO). If you are a multinational company who knows its competitors are doing things faster, more easily and more innovatively, then absolutely yes. And let's face it, the title (CDO) may be a challenge for some organisations. What they may need, and call it what you will, is a data leader, someone to be accountable and responsible for the leverage of value and insight from data.

We can't tell you definitively if you need a CDO or not, but we can help you to think about the factors that make one useful or even essential.

Introduction

This chapter is aimed at all parts of our audience: the CDO, the data community, C-Suite colleagues, business owners and recruiters. So the ‘you’ in this chapter is everyone. We put forward some scenarios that many of you will recognise and some symptoms to look for. Not all CDOs will be successful, so we try to get to the bottom of why some will fail and, linked to this, how to measure the success of a CDO. Perhaps most importantly, once an organisation has realised that it needs a CDO and has recruited, how do you get the best out of the CDO? We believe that this chapter is ever more relevant now in 2020. The case for the CDO is now emphatic, and an increasing number of organisations have appointed a CDO over the past three years; but even where this has happened the question still gets asked ‘do we need a CDO?’ Understanding who is asking this question and why is now very important. Even though more CDOs are being appointed there are some organisations which are still to get there. Why is this and what will be the consequences?

Why organisations need a CDO

So why does any organisation need a CDO? If a CDO is hired at the right level, it will be a big investment and they aren't going to just come on their own; they will bring a team of some sort, even sourced from positions within the organisation, they will cause disruption and potentially add cost, and the company got along just fine without one before. Right? Some of the core capabilities required in a CDO team are not present in many organisations. This is especially true of the senior roles, such as head of DataOps, head of data governance, chief data architect. Many of the other functions and more hands-on roles may well be filled in the team by the redeployment of existing data-literate people or up-skilling existing staff. A CDO who is tasked to leverage insight and value from the data will also wish to recruit data scientists.

As we talk about the first 100 and 300 days and I have completed this cycle a few times now, I thought sharing what I have learnt during the more recent iterations would be useful. A while ago I found that the LinkedIn algorithm had been sending out notices to my friends and colleagues informing them that I was celebrating my first anniversary at Southern Water. First, thank you to everyone who sent me best wishes on this event; and second, it was a celebration. I thoroughly enjoyed my first year at Southern Water, a fascinating and exciting place to work, which is going through many positive changes. For me as Southern Water's first CDO it was a challenging year, full of opportunity and learning.

It was a busy year. It now seems odd to reflect that halfway through the year the first edition of The Chief Data Officer's Playbook was published and I am now writing a chapter in the second edition. Several of the chapters in the first edition were pertinent to my first year at Southern Water:

One of the key things a new CDO should do at the end of the first 100 days, before they embark on the next 300 days, is to reflect. So here goes.

My first reflection is that things (change/transformation, call it what you will) take time. By that I mean some things do have their own natural pace, whether that is procurement, technical delivery or perhaps most significantly cultural change. The cultural change is most important, because this is the thing that builds the data vision/data strategy. The story of the vision has to be repeated throughout the business and that takes time – there is the natural rhythm of booking meetings, getting into people's calendars, management meetings, leadership meetings, board meetings … and then the story has to be understood and adopted … and then repeated over and over again. It takes time to understand how a business works as an organisation, and also to understand what a business does. I was not from the water sector, or from utilities, so I had a lot to learn, and learn quickly.

Introduction

This chapter looks at the importance of listening and asking questions during the first 100 days, but also filtering what you hear. The chapter explores some of the critical tasks of the first 100 days: making the ‘case for change’, assessing the level of data maturity, defining the destination and the scope and establishing the data basics. It is aimed at the CDO, so the ‘you’ in this chapter is the CDO.

There is little scarier when you are starting a new role than having a blank piece of paper in front of you. The chapter aims to help you over that hurdle. It covers what you need to focus on when you start your nice, new CDO role, how you understand where you are starting from and where you want to get to, as well as the steps to get you there. What makes a good case for change, and why is ‘coffee and cake’ so important? What do you need to do about your ‘information basics’ of governance, architecture and engagement, and what are the tangible examples of how to communicate your visions to people? Why are quick wins so important? All of these questions are covered in the first 100 days.

Starting out in your new role

How do you climb Mount Everest? One step at a time. It can seem like a completely overwhelming task at times, but just by focusing on the next step you can look back at the end of your first 100 days and see how much you have achieved.

When you take on this role expect to spend a lot of money on coffee, cakes and biscuits! Such a large part of being a CDO is based on relationship building, so get ready to spend a lot of time meeting people – hence the coffee and cake budget!

Gartner predicted that by 2019, 90% of large organisations would have hired a CDO – but only 50% of these would be a success, and this seems to be what really happened.

Introduction

This chapter explains why the CDO needs a team, who is needed in that team and the skill sets that are required. The shape and size of the data team are discussed, and the balance in the team between science and arts.

The basics of the team

Let's assume that you have the right support structure in place, such as any administrative or project support roles. We think those roles are pretty well documented, so you probably don't need us to tell you what works for you in that area. Equally, there are already well-documented descriptions of what makes up an information security or data protection team, or what you need in order to focus on records management, so we have focused only on the new roles that complement the CDO area and form the core components of what could be a new team to the organisation.

We know that right now there are different types of CDO, which we have labelled first and second generation (we discuss those again later in the book), but, for now, imagine the first generation is focused on being risk-averse and the second generation is focused on value-add. In this chapter we are talking about what an FCDO needs to form their team and what a generation SCDO needs on top of that structure.

The basics that you need to put in place are the same for both teams. Only you can decide the balance of people you want in each role across the team, but our advice would be to start small, make sure you have coverage of each of the following areas and then grow at a pace that works for your business.

Introduction

This chapter suggests that while change is inevitable it can be managed. How we can help to get the best from the changes is explored and a model to help with creating lasting engagement is proposed.

Sustainable change

Lots of words have been written on paper about the data revolution and the impact that it will have on society, with predictions ranging from ‘the sky is falling’ to ‘AI will lead to scenes from the film Wall-E becoming our new reality (where we become so used to having everything done for us that we lose the ability to do anything for ourselves)’. We tend to think about that being the external data revolution, i.e. what is happening outside our organisations, and we’re not sure that we have a great deal to add on this one, other than that, with every other social revolution on record, while it was a bit of a rollercoaster ride as you went through it, what came out at the other end meant more jobs – albeit jobs that hadn't even been thought of before it happened. However, the world we live in is constantly evolving – we obviously don't remember our careers advisors at school telling us we could be a Chief Data Officer someday if we worked really hard – so that is part of the rich tapestry of life.

Though that may be what is seen as the external data revolution, what we want to focus on is the internal one. While talking about an internal data revolution may seem odd, it makes perfect sense when you think about it. As CDO, you have been brought in to convince the company that it has an asset that it has not yet valued and it now needs to modify its behaviour in order to look after it appropriately.

The most important thing to remember is that change is about people. Too often we get caught up in making a technical change work, making sure people know about using the practical aspects of the technology, or the way it looks from the outside. Too many organisations are doing a wonderful swan dance – looking calm, serene and totally in control while under the surface everyone is paddling for all they are worth. Real change is about people, and this is where everything we talk about regarding hearts and minds comes into play