The Chief Data Officer’s Playbook

2nd Edition

data
management
leadership
business

1 Listen to The Chief Data Officer’s Playbook Summary

2 Book Summary: The Chief Data Officer’s Playbook

This playbook provides a practical guide for current and aspiring Chief Data Officers (CDOs) to navigate the complexities of the role, establish a data-driven culture, and deliver tangible business value. It covers everything from the essential skills required to the critical first 100 days and beyond.

2.1 Your First 100 Days: Listen, Plan, and Deliver Quick Wins

The initial period is critical for setting expectations and building foundations. Success or failure is often determined in these first few months.

  1. Pre-work: Listen, Listen, Listen: Before implementing anything, understand the business. Meet with peers and stakeholders. Ask about their problems, priorities, and what keeps them awake at night - not just about data. Use open-ended questions to uncover the real, often data-related, root causes of company-wide problems.
  2. Make the Case for Change: You need a clear, compelling, and easy-to-describe case for change. Frame it around risk (the ‘burning platform’) or massive benefits. Define your scope realistically, clarifying what you will not be doing to manage expectations.
  3. Assess Data Maturity: Conduct a data maturity assessment to establish a baseline. This helps set expectations and demonstrates progress over time. Key areas to assess include Strategy, Leadership, Governance, Policies, Risk, Architecture, and Skills.
  4. Develop Vision and Strategy: Create a high-level, visionary strategy. It should be memorable, concise, and meaningful to the business. This isn’t a detailed project plan yet, but a treasure map pointing toward the destination.
  5. Secure Quick Wins: Identify tactical, high-value fixes that demonstrate the value of data early on. This builds credibility and momentum for your long-term strategy. Don’t expect to deliver them in 100 days, but have them identified and ready to go.

The book highlights common traps that lead to the predicted 50% failure rate for CDOs. Avoiding these is crucial for success.

  1. Absolution: The company thinks hiring a CDO absolves everyone else of data responsibility.
  2. Culture Change Resistance: The CDO is a disruptive role. If the organisation is not ready for change, the CDO will fail.
  3. Unrealistic Expectations: Expecting world peace in week one. The scale of the challenge must be understood by the C-Suite.
  4. Wrong Level: Giving the role a ‘Chief’ title but burying it deep in the organisation without authority or budget.
  5. Lack of Investment: Many organisations are faced with years of under-investment in data. Moving the dial requires a proper budget.

2.2 The Secret Ingredients of a Successful CDO

The role requires a unique blend of skills that go far beyond technical expertise.

  1. Communication: The ability to translate complex data concepts into appropriate language for every level of the business. You must be a storyteller who can paint a picture of the data utopia the organisation is heading towards.
  2. Relationship Building: A CDO must be a master at building relationships and trust across the C-Suite and the entire business. You’ll need support and allies to deliver the data strategy.
  3. Credibility: Much of your credibility will be founded on specialist data knowledge (governance, management, quality, science), but it must be earned and maintained within the new role.
  4. Passion and Resilience: You must be the cheerleader for data, maintaining boundless energy and passion. You must also be resilient to setbacks, understanding that changing a data culture is a long-term campaign.
  5. Strategist / Tactician: The ability to shift gears between big-picture strategic planning and the tactical delivery of incremental value to avoid the ‘hype cycle’.

To manage expectations and deliver value amidst ‘Business As Usual’ (BAU), the book advocates a two-part approach:

  1. Immediate Data Strategy (IDS): A tactical approach to deliver support for BAU, gain quick wins, and apply temporary fixes. These are ‘initiatives’, not ‘projects’, and should address immediate data pain points.
  2. Target Data Strategy (TDS): The strategic, long-term approach. The CDO uses the IDS to demonstrate the ‘art of the possible’ and build the narrative and buy-in for the TDS.

2.3 Other key ideas

A new CDO arrives with great expectations (the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’). If value isn’t delivered quickly, the organisation falls into the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’. To avoid this:

  1. Manage Expectations: Use a data maturity assessment to set a realistic baseline and communicate the scale of the journey.
  2. Deliver Incremental Value: Use the Immediate Data Strategy (IDS) and “vertical strikes” on the DIKW pyramid (Data -> Information -> Knowledge -> Wisdom) to fix immediate issues and show progress.
  3. Educate the Business: Take stakeholders on a journey from a ‘Peak of Expectations’ to a ‘Table of Enlightenment’ and down the ‘Cliff of Reality’, where they understand the challenges and their role in the solution.

No CDO can succeed alone. The playbook outlines the core pillars of a modern data team:

  1. DataOps: An agile team that works with the business to deliver sustainable data solutions, from compelling visualisations to data products.
  2. Data Governance: Establishes the rules of the game. Includes Governance Specialists who untangle existing policies and create a clear, simple framework.
  3. Data Proposition: The business development function that defines data products, manages the roadmap, and demonstrates the value being delivered.
  4. Data Architecture: Works with enterprise and IT architects to establish a data landscape that supports the business strategy. Includes Information/Data Architects.
  5. Data Stewards & Analysts: The ‘data army’ on the ground, improving quality, investigating root causes, and acting as data cheerleaders within the business.

The role is evolving, and CDOs can be categorised by their focus, which exists on a pendulum between risk aversion and value-add.

  1. First-Generation CDO (FCDO): Often the first CDO in an organisation. Focuses on ‘getting the basics right’ - governance, architecture, and building capability. They are innovators who stabilise a fragile data environment.
  2. Second-Generation CDO (SCDO): Builds on the foundations created by the FCDO. The focus shifts to driving value, innovation, and monetisation from the data asset. They can be disruptors.
  3. Third-Generation CDO (TCDO): Operates in a data-mature organisation where the role is professionalised and established. They may be true value-adders, like Chief Analytics Officers, and are often future COO/CEO candidates.

2.4 Key Questions for a CDO to Ask

  • What business problem are we trying to solve, and why?
  • Where are our biggest data-related risks and opportunities?
  • What does our current data maturity look like?
  • Who are the data champions and sceptics in the organisation?
  • How can we deliver tangible value in the next 90 days?
  • Is our data treated as a strategic asset? If not, why not?
  • What does our data hoarding pattern tell us about our culture?

3 Summary Video

4 Practise

A key task for a new CDO is to create a compelling case for change. Based on the book’s principles, try to outline a 100-day plan for a fictional company.

  1. Week 1-4 (Listen & Discover): Who are the 10 key stakeholders you would meet? What three open-ended questions would you ask each of them?
  2. Week 5-8 (Analyse & Strategise): Based on your discovery, what is the ‘burning platform’ (the biggest risk) and the ‘shining city on a hill’ (the biggest opportunity)? Define a one-sentence vision statement.
  3. Week 9-12 (Plan & Communicate): Identify two potential ‘quick wins’ that could deliver value quickly. How would you communicate your initial findings and 100-day plan to the C-Suite?

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