She's coming... the Chief Data Officer The chief data officer is on the rise. The number of CDOs appointed by major organisations rose from 400 in 2014 to 1,000 in 2015, according to Gartner. By 2019, 90 per cent will have a CDO, the analyst says. Their rapid emergence raises important questions about the role and position of the CDO in organisations. More …
This is partly due to the requirement which the new Data Protection Regulation will introduce (which requirement already exists in some countries e.g. Germany) that organisation must appoint a "Data Protection Officer", that could be done by in-house Legal, or indeed within the CIO remit, but given the legal/privacy nature of the duties, the CIO may not be the best person/team to manage this function. Also, because the Regulation is going to introduce competition-law levels of fines for data protection breaches (e.g. 3% of annual revenues) there is a serious incentive to manage these risks, up to C-level.
<quote>Who thibnks (sic) a speechwriter and someone who hangs around shoreditch and 'innovative' wannabe's are dangerously under qualified to be called CIO's and just waiting for the revolving door to move a Trebuchet to launch them into another CxO role career trajectory?</quote>
FTFY!!!
I know the world supply of TLAs is rapidly becoming exhausted, so we have to recycle old ones. But "CDO" hasn't really had time to shed its toxic associations. The first Google page of results is almost entirely about Collateralized Debt Obligations and how they landed us all in Carey Street,
Heh. My first DPM (Data Processing Manager) was a cost clerk promoted sideways by his peers as a scheme to get rid of him. Computers, you see, were going to be " a passing fad".
The guy could have been the model for Dilbert's Pointy Haired Boss. The early drawings even looked like him.
Where I worked back then, IT for admins, sales, etc. came under HR. The computers used in Engineering came under the Engineering Manager. The mainframe people (real IT back then) came under Finance and they wouldn't touch a PC to save their lives. It was a real clustertruck when the company decided to network all the PC's, etc.
Still rare to see them in public sectors, head of IT.. usually but at director level? Usually lumped in with something else and increasing the IT department is leading on all projects which is probably why projects go titsup so often as they have no executive level representation.
<still confused a bit>
So, the CIO is in charge of the people in charge of the hardware, while the CDO is in charge of the people in charge of the data?
In other words, CIO = Medium, while CDO = Message.
And both are encouraged to be Propaganda Ministers, Judas Goats, and/or headsman's ax catcher as required by the business model du jour.
I have never met a CIO that actually did the 'Information' part. More aptly described as CTOs. Often very interested in technology for technology's sake. Sometimes the technology even coincides with what the organisation wants to do...sometimes not.
If you want someone to help you out with this vast resource of information that you have, what are you going to do?...you can't rename the CIO position to err... CIO.
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