Conclusions/Suggestions
• CIO function is already hugely demanding!
• Unique and/or context-specific DM challenges require development of specialized disciplines with unique knowledge, skills, and abilities!
• Educational institutions are not addressing the challenge!
Reconsider and reevaluate these roles in your organization. Most will opt to start moving in the direction of the CDO and address the lack qualified personnel and/or organizational focus. Organizational strategy increasingly depends on your organizational data assets.
The need for a newly defined executive level role for data/information ownership is clear, and is distinct from the role of leading IT. CDO success depends on the factors described – including:
• Making data separate from technology.
• Maintaining a data focus – having the CDO begin as a full time position with the right tools/methods.
• Ensuring that the CDO’s activities, processes, methodologies and work products are subject to continuous improvement according to some agreed upon roadmap.
• Ensuring that DM work products are stored and employed in a manner that supports development of increasing integration.
• Formally defining, implementing and following DM’s key process areas.
• Ensuring that the CDO operates mainly from the business functional side of the organization so as to build the data leveraging practices.
• Understanding the five DM practices areas are necessary but insufficient prerequisites to organizational data leveraging applications (aka self actualizing data, or advanced data practices shown in the green portion of Figure 6.1).
This last is the biggest lesson organizations have learned over the years. Successes at the top of Figure 6.1 take longer, cost more, and delivery less than successes built on top of foundational DM practices. The CDO (reborn as a business focus) can help organizations maintain a singular focus on: leveraging data as strategy!
The data advantage is best realized through tangible measure such as increased productivity/quality, and decreased cost/risk. Virtually all business information systems have large data overlaps. This produces the common dimension for most business information systems is the data they share. When business information systems are accomplished via data-centric approaches, there can be fewer components to implement and maintain. Further, business information system generators can be brought to bear thus making business information system development efforts almost a ‘silver bullet’ (i.e. 7–10 times) quicker.