As we’ve seen in the winning formula, CDOs must cultivate a diverse set of hard and soft skills. Critical hard skills include technical expertise and a deep understanding of data management. But “softer” qualities — like leadership skills and the ability to facilitate collaboration between technology teams and end users — are just as important.
Even with the right set of skills, many leaders have underestimated the challenges in applying the winning formula, which has led to high turnover in the role. A Gartner survey and Harvard Business Review article says a CDO’s average term is only two and a half years, while the average tenure for other C-suite positions is twice as long.⁴ Almost 60% of organizations report that the CDO function is still in the early stages of development.¹
EY teams have advised CDOs across the globe and in multiple sectors and have witnessed first-hand the common pitfalls data leaders often fall into. We’ve also seen how leveraging the winning formula leads to success.
Policy over flexibility. A long-serving public servant was elevated into a data leadership role in a public sector organization. The agency had grand visions of breaking down data silos and setting up the foundations for a data marketplace. Unfortunately, the data leader focused solely on defensive strategies and ran the data organization as a policy shop concentrated on processes, policies and checklists. This approach led to gridlocks in the data value chain.
In our winning formula, they lacked the balance between offence and defence and could not become the enabler the organization desperately needed.
Business units sought ways to work around this structure, and the CDO eventually lost their relevance and influence at the organization.
New data silos. Another CDO inherited a common problem: The organization had lost trust in its data. Different business units had their own “trusted” data repositories and executives could not trust that their metrics were accurate.
The new CDO created a data governance program to combat this lack of trust. Unfortunately, they underestimated the power of democratizing trusted data and approached the program as a tool for the data office to tightly control the organization’s data. Although this control-centric approach gave the organization better control over the security and privacy of data, it accomplished little else and lacked the balance advocated by the winning formula. Teams were forced to find alternative ways to use the data they needed, leading to process inefficiencies, spreadsheet proliferation and a wave of territorialism over data stewardship.
The CDO left after only a year with the organization.
Innovation without trust. A newly appointed CDO was determined to show value quickly. Unfortunately, by focusing purely on short-term wins at the expense of developing a strategic roadmap, this data leader could not create foundational, lasting changes.
There’s no question that data governance should be established on a prioritized use-case basis. But achieving quick wins without also understanding the intricate details of the data problems at play, their root causes and the systematic changes needed to be solved before moving forward with offensive strategies didn’t yield the necessary momentum or ROI.
For this CDO, over-indexing on innovative monetization opportunities and not building data trust severely diminished the overall value of data — and the CDOs’ value to their organization.
Trust + monetization to the power of innovation, multiplied by democratization = CDO success. A forward-thinking Canadian energy company hired a CDO who is applying the winning formula to successfully rebuild and execute an ambitious new data strategy. The organization is on a transformative journey to increase its business performance and meet an ambitious free cash flow generation goal. It has determined that being “data informed” is foundational to meet these goals. The CDO has held multiple leadership roles in their 20-year career and leverages their business knowledge and relationships to relentlessly pursue monetization opportunities.
Additionally, the CDO has been instrumental in convincing senior leaders to take ownership of critical data and drive data democratization. This allowed the CDO’s data team to establish a data stewards network to take data quality seriously and drive initiatives to improve data trust.
This CDO is flourishing because their passion for innovation and their out-of-the-box approach to solving business problems is matched by their desire to solve foundational data challenges.
