 Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Chief Digital Manager of DataVercity. We'd like to thank you for joining this DataVercity webinar, Confessions of a CDO, the evolving role of a Chief Data Officer, sponsored by Experian. Just a couple of points to get us started. Due to the large number of people that attend these sessions, you will be muted during the webinar. For questions, we'll be collecting them by the Q&A section in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights or questions via Twitter using hashtag DataVercity. As always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days containing links to the slides, the recording of the session, and additional information requested throughout the webinar. Now, let me introduce to you our speakers for today, Sean Coombs and Kevin McCarthy. Sean leads Thought Leadership for Experienced Data Quality and Management Business. He is passionate about helping organizations of all sizes unlock the power of their information through better data management and data quality practices. Kevin is a Director of Product Marketing at Experian Data Quality. He leverages his vast experience with data quality technology and customer implementations to help clients achieve their data management objectives. Kevin has spent more than 20 years in the data management space versus professional services consultant and later developing product management and product development functions, responsible for development, testing, documentation, and customer support. And with that, I will give it over to Sean to get today's webinar started. Hello and welcome. Hello. Thank you very much, Shannon. Hi, everyone. I'm excited to be here today because we're going to talk about a subject that's really near and dear to Kevin and I's hearts. And that's the Chief Data Officer and their evolving role within organizations today. So Kevin and I are going to be presenting key findings and statistics from a unique study that we conducted earlier this summer. So during today's webinar, we'll be taking some time to answer your questions. So as Shannon mentioned, please feel free to submit those as they come up using the Q&A box on your screen. See if I can... This one's the next slide. Here we go. So during today's presentation, we're going to be talking about some of the methodology that we did for this research, really get our bearings for how we conducted this study. And then we're going to talk about the data dilemma that we face today as enterprises and as organizations. We're going to talk a little bit about how organizations today are looking to their data to really exploit it, to really monetize it and make business value out of it. You know, that naturally segues into the conversation of the value a CDO adds to many organizations, right? So we're going to talk about some of the findings and the data that we have to back up this value that CDOs bring. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the profile of a CDO. Basically, what does a CDO today look like? What do they care about? What's on their minds? And then we're going to talk about... wrap up with some key trends and then the questions towards the end of the webinar today. So with that, you know, I really wanted to talk, you know, at the very outset about the methodology for the study that we conducted. So many of you on the lot might remember that two years ago we conducted a similar study, what we called the Chief Data Officer, bridging the gap between data and decision making. At the time, the role of the CDO was really in its early stages, and we predicted that CDOs would become this central role to unlocking data as a business asset. You know, what we've learned since that time, however, is that the CDOs really have... had to pioneer their role and role at their organization. And, you know, we've heard time and again from CDOs in the field that, you know, they felt that they needed to improve their value to fight for a place at the table with their C-level colleagues. You know, given some of these challenges, Kevin and I were curious to really know, you know, how the role of the CDO has evolved over the last two years. So we surveyed more than 200 Chief Information Officers, C-Chief Data Officers across the United States to really get to the bottom of this question. And those we spoke to represented a variety of sectors, so things like information technology, of course, telecommunications, a big proponent of financial services, retail and healthcare as well. So kind of across the board, a good cross-section of folks that we spoke to. You know, and without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to Kevin. So now that we have a little bit of the methodology under our belts to really talk about this data dilemma I mentioned earlier. Thanks, Sean. As we jump into the data, I think it's important to keep in mind that businesses talk a great deal about being data-driven. This has been going on for years, but we still haven't been able to crack the data code, as it were. Organizations today are at the center of a data dilemma. They're often plagued by inaccurate and non-standardized data, information that's scattered across disparate systems, and a lack of a defined process and, frankly, a big lack of skilled employees and investment. But even with a lack of trusted data, they still want to be able to leverage it. In fact, when you look at many industries, their ability to use data as part of their digital transformation efforts is what is going to set them apart from the competition or, frankly, even keep them in business. Our research reveals that 90% of chief information officers and 96% of chief data officers say that business users at their organizations are demanding greater access to data than ever before. But as data demands increase from the business, organizations without a CDO role tend to rely solely on the CIO to manage their data. The challenge is that the CIO role is already overloaded. They just can't manage effectively the growing responsibilities around data. Yeah, Kevin, you know, I think that's a really interesting point you just made. As we're all really looking to our data as a business objective, right, it's putting a lot of, we're kind of getting pinched on both ends. There's this need to be expeditious and to have quality data, but then there's also kind of this other side to it, right, that we don't have the infrastructure necessarily in place to scale with that demand. So this is kind of the data dilemma that we talk about. Absolutely, and the roles, and not only the strain on the CIO, but other roles, and we're going to get into a little bit of that as well. Because not only do we hear from many businesses that they aren't effectively using the data, but we see it in our own research. The stat on screen is one example. Only 11% of chief information officers and 10% of chief data officers see their ability to exploit available data as excellent. If we drill into the stats a little bit further, we see that actually the problem isn't getting better with increased demand for data, it's actually getting a little worse. The last time we conducted this study in 2015, we asked CIOs to rate the quality of data in their organization and their ability to exploit that data. When we compared the responses to our most recent study, we found that organizations' confidence in the quality of their data as well as their ability to exploit available data has gotten worse. You can see 67% rated themselves as having excellent quality data within their organization compared to 11% this year. That's a pretty significant drop. And in terms of exploiting data, we went from 36% excellent to 11% excellent. So why are we seeing those changes? My feeling is that as we're digging into the data much more and trying to use it, we're finding faults with the data. It may not be fit for purpose. We're also seeing that the volumes of data are increasing dramatically, which is causing a lot of challenges for the business. Data is also distributed in so many places across the business that's also causing challenges. Yeah, that's a really good point, Kevin. I love this slide, because it really just shows in two years' time the vast changes to the data landscape from any organizations. For me, this really gets down to the issue of trust. Do you trust your data? I think more and more we're seeing that organizations, once they start to peel back the layers and really open the hood and see what's underneath, they're really starting to not trust what they're starting to find there. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's part of it. Peeling back the layers and making use of the data is exposing some of these issues. And it's funny, more so now is the trying to leverage data more than even back just a few years ago. So we have additional data to back up some of these findings. This graph is a list of the key barriers that organizations face when using their data assets. The top purple lines are CDO responses, and the bottom blue lines are CIO responses. You can see that the ability to access data is the most prevalent issue identified by CDOs. In fact, more than 50% of them see accessing data to be an issue. Likewise, CIOs are most likely to see the volume of data as the number one barrier to exploiting data assets. Both roles also see limited budgets as a major barrier to the utilization of data. You also see a lack of strategy being a problem. Overall, we see an under-investment in data right now within businesses. And we'll get more into that thought of empowering the CDO a little bit later. But essentially, we're not managing data properly because we can't access it, deal with the volumes, and don't have a strategy around it. And the limited budget isn't helping either. Yeah, just build off of that, Kevin. You know, one of the things I think is really interesting is we talk about this role of the Chief Data Officer as being kind of this hybrid, right? They sit between IT, they sit between the business, and they really facilitate the use of data as a business asset. And where we see the ability to access data is the number one barrier to exploiting data. I think that's really interesting, right? Because we see kind of that business mentality start to come through, right? Being able to give business users access to data assets a lot more quickly than we're used to being able to do. I think that's kind of an interesting stat that I pulled out when I saw this. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, now we lead into some pretty big data management challenges. So we found on this slide that 67% of CDOs see their data capture and validation processes to be a significant challenge to their data management. As big data and technologies advance, like the Internet of Things, we see organizations collecting data through more channels than ever before. Whether data is entering the organization through online forms or call centers, smartphone apps, other connected devices, the reality is that organizations are collecting data in more ways than ever before. And while all the data holds great promise, it needs to be managed if we're ever going to make any sense out of it in a business context. The second biggest challenge to data management is data quality issue resolution. While it's true organizations understand the importance of having quality data, many of them lack sufficient processes and knowledgeable staff to remediate bad data or even identify when they have data quality challenges. In many cases, data quality fixes are only made after the data has caused a problem. So it's not being proactive where issues are solved before they affect business processes. Some of these challenges are also around workflow tracking, data profiling, the variety of data. One that's of interest to me and to CIOs, obviously, is real-time processing. Data is coming in so fast and turnaround is so quick. Many of the batch process methods for managing data in the past aren't going to be as effective in the future. You know, I'm hearing this a lot from industry analysts and the challenge is definitely going to get greater as data is proliferating more. Yeah, Kevin, even within our own organizations, we think about being able to do real-time data processing from a data quality data management perspective. What do you think about customer expectations, right? Our customers are actually expecting us to be able to respond to them and to deliver services in real-time. I know even just from an experience perspective, very in perspective, being able to offer credit, offer loans of credit, offer mortgages, being able to participate in that economy in real-time, things like rocket mortgage nowadays, really are just starting to really reshape the industry and being able to have your data ducks in a row, so to speak, to enable those processes and to be able to fulfill that customer need is really going to be critical in the future. Yeah, absolutely. A lot more API-driven transactional processing going on. Great. One more chart. And I want to point out here some of the key business challenges that are coming in for CIOs and CDOs. So first, you'll see data security is of utmost importance. I think that makes sense. We've all seen what can happen when data falls into the hands of bad actors. So we see CDOs today really focused on safeguarding their organization's data. And when you think about how data is increasingly becoming commoditized, it's really valuable to your strategy. So whether fraudsters are trying to gain access to proprietary corporate data or employees are handling sensitive information in unsecure ways, CDOs are working to ensure that the policies and technology are in place to safeguard the data. Furthermore, as the pace of technology continues to increase, organizations are trying to keep up. There's a lot of advances in the market, especially when you think about IoT and machine learning and artificial intelligence. Organizations are trying to figure out how to leverage some of these new technologies and make sure they're not missing anything that would hurt them from a competitive perspective. Finally, you see increasing customer expectations, just as we were talking about. I think this should be higher on the list because the customer, after all, that's the most important part of the business. Their expectations are changing in the digital economy. They want things quicker, and data is really going to help adjust to these expectations. In light of these business challenges, the CDO is really set up to contribute greatly to organizations in the coming years. To talk a little bit more about this, I'm going to hand things back to Shawn. Great. Thank you, Kevin. Across the board, we're really starting to see the chief data officers contribute to their organization's data program and really start to influence corporate strategy at a high level around data. As businesses continue to rely on their data to achieve some of the challenges that Kevin mentioned earlier, CDOs are really feeling both an increased responsibility for data management and a sense of value that they're able to contribute to their businesses. On this slide, you'll see one of the biggest trends we've seen lately is this idea of digital transformation. I think if you had a pulse the last few years, you've heard this phrase many, many times. As organizations are really starting to see business models disrupted by this increasingly digital world we live in, they're looking to their data as the next frontier of innovation and business strategy. The chief data officer has really seen it as critical to enabling data-driven business. According to our study, we found that 89% of chief information officers believe that the chief data officer plays an important role, a really critical role in keeping their companies on track with digital transformation plans. No, it's interesting. I think that also corroborates the relationships that are being built between the CIOs and CDOs. I think they both realize they've got a dependence on each other in some respects. Right, exactly. On the next slide, you'll see that furthermore, more than three-quarters of the chief information officers that don't have a CDO in place currently believe that their current role does not cover a majority of the responsibilities that a CDO would or should have. So really, what this tells us is that things are starting to fall through the cracks a little bit. Certain areas, certain responsibilities aren't being covered or they're being picked up by people around the business. I think there's a lot of organizations where people are kind of the de facto CDO, if you don't have one, because there might be a chief information officer, and then there's a lot of data citizens, people who just work with the data are picking up these responsibilities. We're finding more and more CIOs saying that they simply don't have the bandwidth to pick up a lot of these growing data responsibilities that really should be covered by the chief data officer. So on the next slide, you'll see kind of the top motivations around wanting a CDO. So why are organizations really looking to hire? Well, anything nowadays, it starts with big data. You see that at the top here. You can see that 48% of organizations say that their top motivation for hiring a CDO is to capitalize on big data opportunities. As Kevin mentioned before, the growing volume, variety, and velocity of data that organizations collect is really through increasingly diverse channels. It's creating a situation where data is almost unusable because there's so much of it. We talk about data as the new oil. Oil is pretty useless unless you can refine it, which I think is kind of at the heart of that statement. We have so much data. We have a lot of valuable asset at our disposal, but we really need to be able to manage it and be able to extract the value from it and really refine it. So the chief data officer, I like to call the wrangler in chief because they're really wrangling and implementing data management processes, policies, tools to really make their organization's data more usable, right? Turn that oil into something a lot more valuable and usable. I like to talk about data diamonds over here. But coming off the back of big data, about 40% of organizations here we spoke to say that they're looking at data to help create competitive advantage. Organizations really sit on a wealth of information about customers and prospects, and the CDO can help to unlock that data to really improve things if you think about targeted marketing efforts or delivering better customer service experiences. I know in our business in particular we often see organizations looking to integrate or migrate data to gain better view of their customers to gain reliable customer insight. And, you know, in today's hyper-competitive market your customer experience with their brand can really make or break the relationship. So being able to harness your data to offer customers superior experiences or being able to personalize your offers to them can really be a true competitive advantage. And it's one that we're seeing more and more in the market through our research. So really the opportunity to use your data to be competition or limitless, right? As long as your data is good, right? You have to have good, clean, reliable, trustworthy data. And that's where your CDO comes in. Another motivation we see for hiring CDOs is to de-risk data-driven projects. What's interesting about this one to me in particular is that it reflects this idea that the CDO is always kind of expected to play offense and defense at the same time, right? I think we all can kind of fill that pinch at time. But despite the opportunities around data being able to capitalize on big data opportunities, being able to drive innovation, there's always the opportunity and there's always the downside that if data is not accurate or if it's taken out of context, right? If it's not good for purpose, you can make the wrong decision. You can add a lot of risk to your organization. So the CDO is really seen as kind of the referee here ensuring that data is used correctly and safely during data-driven projects. But given these drivers that we just talked about, it makes sense now that 82% of CIOs believe there's a compelling case to hire a CDO today. So Kevin, you know, if that sounds good, I'm going to hand it back to you to kind of talk a little bit about what today's CDOs look like. Sure. So the CDO is a relatively new role. And, you know, with the study, we tried to paint a picture of what the average CDO looks like. So we've got a few kind of fun statistics to let you know around the CDO. You see that there's a guy pictured here, but we didn't ask gender. It could be a guy, it could be a woman, you know. Regardless of that... Yeah, in my experience, it's a pretty mixed bag. It's a very diverse group of C-level people. Yeah, yeah. So what we've seen is the average CDO has been in the role for about two years. And they're typically the only one in the organization, although there are some instances where there's multiple CDOs running large divisions within big enterprises, so depending on how large the company is. The typical reporting structure is either to the CEO or the CIO. You know, my perspective as the CEO is, frankly, a better choice, you know, at least from an authority perspective. And, you know, sometimes we worry a little bit that reporting into the CIO may limit the CDO in being able to enact changes. But however it can work, if the CIO and the CDO have a good working relationship, and this is kind of the point we were talking about, there needs to be a good relationship between the CIO and CDO. We also see that the CDO has wide ranges of sort of resource availability. So they may have a budget between half a million dollars to five million dollars. Their team can range from eight to 50 people. And depending on, again, the size of the company, you might even get a little bit bigger budgets and teams, but that's sort of the average. So an interesting part of this study, and what we ask CDOs is what they like and what they struggle with as part of their jobs. So in terms of items that they like about their job, some of the comments were, you know, they get to deal with the latest technology, they have control over the utilization of company data for the betterment of their customers, ensuring a digital transformation, and they're constantly learning, you know. Some of the struggles have been around planning and staying within a budget, keeping up with the evolution of technology, things are changing so fast, knowing how to interpret the information to solve business problems. So again, there's a difference between accurate data and the context of that data. And then also finding the right people to staff a team. So there's always going to be ups and downs of any role, but I think this paints a nice picture of the CDO and some of the struggles that they face. Yeah, you know, I always find this slide really interesting because especially those open-ended questions are on their likes and their struggles, right? I think, you know, it's very interesting because what stood out overwhelmingly is their passion about learning and their passion about being able to be part of the newest technology, being able to lead their company kind of on this data path but, you know, the struggles were really stood out with staffing. A lot of times, like I said, it's people who are kind of the de facto CDOs of their organization to take on kind of a lot of responsibility and eventually they're promoted to the chief data officer role might not necessarily have management experience. And suddenly they have chief in their title and everyone expects them to kind of know exactly what to do and so I think a lot of times it's really interesting that that came through as being able to staff a team, being able to have those management skills was one of the struggles for them and an area I think that, you know, organizations can look to invest in their CDOs potential. Yeah, no, absolutely. And also, you know, I find that the CDO role from a management perspective, it's interesting. In some ways, it reminds me a little bit of a product manager in the fact that they really have a lot of... they have to handle indirect authority over things. So if they have authority over the data, you know, they're not really controlling IT or the machines or the infrastructure there. They're not really controlling the customer service reps and how they're inputting data into the systems and coming in, you know. So they've got to work with those other teams and be able to have good working relationships to manage if data needs to be stored a little differently, if data needs to be coming in a little more standardized or formatted in a different way. So, you know, it's almost an esoteric management that data, you know, is kept in a lot of different places. It's touched by a lot of individuals, but the CDO has got to manage corralling or wrangling, as you said, all those things together. Yes, definitely. In the next slide, we've got a little insight on when the CDO role was created. So you can see from the charts, the CDO role hasn't been in place that long. The role is still new, evolving. We've got a long way to go before it's a standard title in many businesses. I think there's still a lot to go there. Yes. Some of that will depend on how they're able to integrate with the business and gain authority. Again, it comes down to having that authority to make changes. So to talk about where we see CDOs working in the business, I'm going to turn things back over to Sean. Yes, thank you. Before we leave this slide, I always just think that this one's really fascinating. If you look at it longer than 36 months ago, we're only at 20% of companies, about a fifth of companies there. This really goes to show you that the role of the CDO is pretty new in perspective when you think about the other C-level roles out there. So no wonder why there's so much kind of ambiguity and trailblazing having to be had, even when you think about the tenure of people at their companies today as well. One of the interesting findings that's not in the slides themselves, but it's actually part of the report, talks about the number of CDOs in organizations. And I was very surprised to see that, I think it was about 75% of companies have one CDO, but there was about 20% of companies that have more than one CDO. And I think 20% had two, and then there was a small number, like three or four percent actually have three or more. So that was an interesting finding, and I was quite surprised to see that. And in our conversations, what ended up happening was a lot of them just happened to report at departmental levels. They happened to be within a specific business unit of a company. So I found that really fascinating as we started to think about how data kind of evangelized and used across the organization. Sometimes there can be specific departmental CDOs or someone in charge of specific data. It goes to talk to the volume of data is increasing. Enterprise companies, different departments may have parasites of data that they get to deal with, so I can see that happening. Exactly. All right. So now we're into the juicy part of today's webinar to really talk about some of the CDO's relationship with their organization. So the mainstream adoption of the CDO role, as Kevin mentioned, has really spread within the last couple of years, maybe the last five to 10 years, more so recently. Yet despite the value that they bring to organizations looking to be data-driven, CDOs tend to be the least understood of all of the C-level executives, right? You know, in addition, not all CDOs have the same responsibilities or even the same reporting structures. You know, it's kind of a mixed bag, depending on who you talk to. So in fact, we found that the role of the chief data officer can vary very significantly between organizations. So on the slide here, one area of the CDO's role that we chose to focus on is the reporting structure. And this can have far-reaching implications on how data projects are prioritized and how organizations approach them. So we often talk about the CDO being the sort of centralized data role that influence corporate strategy. So for the most part, we assumed that the chief data officer would report to the chief executive officer, to the CEO, you know, as most other C-level executives would. But what we found was that about a third of them actually did. The other ones, you know, reported to other line of business or IT executives. So about 63% of the CDO's in our study reported into IT or line of business. And you can see 37% of the CDO's report to the CEO, followed by the CIO, the CTO, and then by the CFO and CMO. So kind of a big diversity of companies here. But we also asked as part of this question who CDO's would ideally like to report to. So without too much surprise, many of them said that they would ideally report to the CEO, which was about as much as the same number that currently do. But what surprised us, though, is that the number of CDO's who say they would like to report to the chief information officer actually went down by 5%. And those saying that they would report to the chief technology officer increased by 13%. So it's really an interesting finding there. And it really goes to show how CDO's really want to be at the forefront of technology, right? They really want to be driving this innovation. They want to be adding business value. So they really thought it was interesting that they aligned themselves close to the technology side, the CTO, to really be able to kind of drive this innovation ahead. Do you have anything to add, Kevin? Yeah, no. I think between the CTO and the CEO, the two sort of sides of the coin, they want to make sure they are up on the technology driving the latest trends, and they want to make sure they've got the authority to enact changes. So either one of those in some ways is preferable than the CIO. Yeah, I found that really fascinating. And the other thing I thought was interesting was, while some of the CDO's today report to the United Business Executive, so people like the CMO or the CFO, hardly any we spoke to you, so that they would ideal your report to them. So I thought that was kind of interesting. You know, given that we often talk about the CDO bringing data assets to business users, right? It's interesting to see them aligning closer kind of with the IT side of the house with the technology rather than with specific business lines of business. Just a little interesting tidbit there. So on the next slide you'll see kind of the breakdown of responsibilities with the CDO and the CIO. So it's a little bit of an overwhelming slide to look at. There's a lot going on here. But given the variety of reporting lines CDOs can have, sometimes they have a bit of overlap, right, when it comes to the responsibilities, especially with the Chief Information Officer. So he does a little further into the breakdown of these roles. And what we found was there's not always a clear division, right? There's a lot of kind of shared responsibility here, a lot of back and forth between these roles. So what I thought was interesting, and you can actually see this stat pulled out in the report itself, that only 47% of Chief Information Officers, so less than half of them, are given a clear remit or objective when they start their role. Which is kind of crazy, right, Kevin, to think about it, that Chief Data Officers tend to be going in blindfolded into the events when they're starting their role. And they kind of have to figure out their responsibilities and negotiate their responsibilities on their own. And I think when we think about kind of the diversity between organizations, right, and it's not always the same across organization, it could have to do with a lot of this having to, you know, figure it out as you go. I think you're absolutely right. And I think the CDO role has sort of organically grown in these enterprise companies that it's really been someone who's probably inherited that role and part of becoming the CDO is defining what the CDO should be responsible for. So in essence, that part of their charter is come up with your own charter. Yeah, exactly. And interestingly, we found that only a quarter of the CDOs we spoke to are actually given authority over enterprise-wide data assets when they join their organization. So when you talk about having to fight fear right at the table and having to really create your own role and, you know, get the authority, they're fighting an uphill battle when they start, which is something not a lot of people are aware of, right, when, you know, talking to a CDO. A lot of times it's really trailblazing. And so obviously a lot of this can lead to some natural tension. So as you can see, the CDO holds greatest responsibilities here when it comes to defining a tactical data management strategy and then implementing it. They also describe themselves to be the guardian of data quality throughout the business, which I thought was kind of cool. The t-shirt waiting to happen. You know, but there are some areas here where the division of responsibilities are a little less clear. So for instance, when it comes to providing platforms and technology to support analytics, the CDO and the TIO, you know, they maintain fairly equivalent responsibilities. Yet only 32% actually see it as a joint responsibility. So there's a little bit of conflict there. We see a similar theme at PR when it comes to measuring and ensuring data quality throughout the business. So we think that these are, you know, represent some common areas or points of tension between the CDO and the TIO, you know, that we should really aim to kind of iron out as time goes on and, you know, swim lanes are established. I also think that points to, as we saw in the previous slides, you know, the CDO, you know, would rather be with the report into the CEO or the CTO. I think reporting into the CIO probably exacerbates the tension a little bit in some ways. It kind of gives the CIO the final veto or final approval stamp when the CDO is under that organization. I think, you know, CDOs are looking for that independence and that authority on their own. Yeah, that's actually a really good point I hadn't thought of. All right. So as part of our study, we also asked CIOs to describe their relationship today with our CDO, and we asked CDOs to describe their relationship with the CIO. So, you know, we actually really, we just wanted to get to the bottom of this. What is your relationship like, you know, in all candor? So, you know, what we found is that CIOs are much more likely to describe their relationship as being largely positive. Alternatively, CDOs are more likely to describe their relationship as distant, and both are equally likely to describe it as generally negative. So, you know, if we reflect on this for a moment, less than half of CDOs, about 40% of them said that they actually have a positive relationship with the CIO at their organization. You know, going back to Kevin, your comment earlier, you know, I think that's a pretty staggering number and probably does indicate a little bit why they align a little bit more with the CTO at their organization. Yeah, no, I think so. And I think, yeah, this is right in line. I think if, you know, they're reporting into the CIO, the CIO probably thinks everything's great, and the CTO is probably saying, boy, I wish I had a little more authority to kind of get things done. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it's funny, you know, the negative sentiment is about the same for both. So, what we really see here is an increase, kind of in the neutral or the no relationship with the CTO and the CIO, you know? So, we're not saying that it's necessarily gotten worse, but it's gotten more distant, or CDOs at least perceive it to be a little bit more distant. And I think that, you know, has to do with them having to be a little bit more scrappy to have to fight for larger teams, to have to fight for budget, to have to fight for authority over data. So, there's a little bit of tension there. So, clearly we have a long way to go to improve this relationship. But, you know, while we can spend all day unpacking this, we believe that the disconnect really represents, you know, this high level tension for resources and authority. You know, and, you know, given that CIOs really can't keep up with the growing data demands that the organizations are putting on them, right? As the responsibilities for data grow, they really see the CDO as helping to shoulder some of that responsibility, I think. So, you know, they're taking a little bit of that pressure off of them, and then I think CDOs on the other side are just feeling unempowered. You know, they're really happening to be a little more scrappy, they're distant franchise, they're fighting for their spot at the C-suite. So, I think that there's a lot to unpack here around these sentiments, but it's certainly one of my favorite areas of this study and one that I think is pretty cool. So, to really overcome this disconnect, we think that CIOs and CDOs really need to come together. They really need to discuss these issues and, you know, or even, you know, explore talking to the Chief Technology Officer. It's certainly something that I'm going to be looking at a little bit more closely as we do our next study to really unpack that area and understand a little more. But, you know, to talk a little bit about how CDOs spend their time today, what projects they work on, what projects they'd like to work on, I'm going to pass it back to Kevin. All right, thanks, Sean. Yes, CDOs, they certainly have battles to fight in terms of how they fit into the business. That's a running trend. But let's take a quick look at how they're spending their time today. So, much like any senior role, CDOs get a wide range of responsibilities. On one hand, they're tasked with protecting and safeguarding the organization's data assets. On the other hand, they're expected to drive revenue through data innovation. So, in an ideal world, the amount of time spent between these two areas would be balanced. However, we find that CDOs spend much more time on reactive projects rather than on innovation. The chart you see shows where CDOs are spending their time and where they would like to spend their time. It clearly isn't always aligned. We found in 90% of the cases, the top three areas where CDOs spend their time versus where they would like to spend their time varies. The CDO isn't spending time where they feel it would be the most valuable. Yeah, Kevin, I really love this slide. It goes to show you that there really is a disconnect between kind of that reactive and proactive mentality. So, right now, project taking up the most time. The highest one it looks like is cost savings. So, they're spending the most time doing cost savings. But what do they want to be doing? They want to be doing data innovation. They want to be working on efficiency projects. It's kind of this idea of they have to play both sides. There's this proactive innovation side, and then this reactive working on the cost savings side for the business. Yeah. In some ways, it's the maturation process of these companies. They're going from feeling like data is a responsibility and burden in some respects. And how can we save more money on this burdensome work we have to do around data to really seeing the data as a treasure chest? And this is where we should be trying to innovate and leveraging this information to try to get more value and help our customers more and drive more revenue. So, I think that's the change that companies are going to have to go through. And the CDO is going to have to drive that to say, listen, we've got to stop looking at this as a burden and look at it as a way to drive revenue. So, CDOs are also spending a great deal of time hiring members of the team. So, as I said before, they can have large teams depending on the organization. The roles of these data professionals are very widely, but we see data analysts and data scientists as popular hires. We also see data protection officers coming up a lot. Well, these roles are traditionally associated globally with GDPR compliance. It's our belief that some U.S. organizations are hiring these roles around data privacy, either deal with global GDPR issues or to handle customer data privacy in general. I mean, I think everybody here understands all the issues around data privacy and how important that is to organizations. So, that's becoming a big factor in hires as well. So, CDOs are certainly busy and there's no shortage of tasks and areas for them to focus on. Great. Thanks, Kevin. So, now I just wanted to cover off on some key trends before I hand it back to Shannon for questions. So, you know, just at a really high level, we're starting to see in this research that CDOs are feeling increased value. They're starting for really the first time to understand that what they do and what they do for being able to, you know, improve the quality of data to improve the management process around data so that data becomes a true business asset is really, really valuable today. And they're feeling that. They definitely know the value that they bring. CDOs are ushering in digital transformation. So, we're seeing, you know, chief information officers really acknowledge the importance that the chief data officer plays in helping companies take their operations into the 21st century being able to really improve customer experience, being able to digitize processes. You know, the CDO is really integral to that. CDOs and CDOs have a complex relationship. You know, I think that that was one of the key findings from this study as well. You know, it's not always, it's not always paradise. So, I think it's important to kind of acknowledge where those gaps are, where there's conflict and kind of figure out why different roles may or may not be stepping on one another's toes. Are there, you know, clear swim lanes in place or is it just a lack of direction? And then CDOs' responsibilities can vary very significantly. You know, and I think we see that a lot through just their having to trail blaze their own positions at their organizations and also the newness of the position, right? It hasn't been around for a long time. It's not standardized across every organization. And then the CDO role as value to data management, I think that goes without saying, you know, data management really is about being able to take your data and make it valuable and be able to maintain the quality of that data, be able to maintain that over a period of time. And the CDO is really responsible and sees themselves as the guardian of data at their organization. And they truly do bring a lot of value to those enterprise data management programs. So with that, I'm going to turn it back over to Shannon for some questions. Sean and Kevin, thank you so much for this great presentation. Such a great topic and so interesting. We do have lots of questions coming in already. If you have a question, feel free to submit it in the bottom right-hand corner in the Q&A section. And to answer the most commonly asked questions, I would just reminder I will be sending a follow-up email by end of the day Thursday for this webinar with links to the slides and the recording. And with that, let me just dive right in. Sean and Kevin, these first couple of questions came in fairly early, but in the presentation. So is there a correlation between cloud computing, in other words, deployments, and the accessibility issues cited as a key barrier? Yeah, I'm not sure if that specifically relates to cloud computing. I think the accessibility to data is really sort of within the organization. So, you know, as we're talking about, the CDO has to have a very sort of broad-reaching role. They're responsible for data, but the systems could be all over the place and varied, and varied departments might have varied systems in place. So the accessibility is not, you know, I would state it's not so technical as it's a cloud or on-premise installation. I think it's more around organizationally how it's being managed by the company and, you know, can that CDO get access and authority to not only have access to the data, but be able to instantiate changes if they see they need to take place. So it's more of a higher-level statement, I would say, around the access. Love it. A question you touched on a bit later in the presentation, but let me ask you, if there's anything additional you want to add and there's a specificity to this. Do you find that the Data Governance Office usually reports up through the CDO and do most of the survey respondents already have a mature Data Governance Office in place? So I can take this one. We didn't actually ask organizations if they have a governance office in place. But I would say, just for the most part, organizations are in varying stages. So I wouldn't say all of them have a mature governance office in place at all. Although, you know, of course, the organizations we did talk to with CDOs, you know, a lot of times the CDO happens to kind of be the head of the Enterprise Data Management Office, you know, so kind of sitting across all the data management for the office. And then Data Governance is typically a component of that Enterprise Data Management Office. And so of the organizations we spoke to, typically it kind of does roll up to the CDO in that fashion. Does that make sense? Indeed. And I can certainly have the questioner define or ask for more in-depth if they need. And so what kind of work experience should a CDO have to be first-time CDO? Oh gosh, this is a loaded question. So, you know, this one just makes me think back to the slide on, you know, kind of the profile of the CDO and really thinking about what they struggle with. So I think having business acumen is actually really important for a CDO. Being able to bridge the gap between IT and business really means like they should have, be able to speak the language of the business, right? Because that's always the pitfall, is that one side of the business isn't able to communicate the needs to IT or vice versa. So being able to speak the needs, speak the language of the business, I think is really important. And especially when it goes to showing the value of your data program and being able to show quantifiable results back to the business, how you're able to, you know, how changes to your data dictionary and your data glossary and all the rules that you built, how all of that work that your team is doing on the data side, how that in the end of the day influences the business. So I think having a business background is, you know, important. You know, I think it's also important for that role to have a little bit of the technical background as well. So, you know, being able to know what the people you're managing do in the trenches every day, I think that's important. But they don't necessarily need to be the ones in the trenches doing that every day. They don't need to be the SQL or R, you know, expert on coding, but they should at least have some familiarization with it. But I think, you know, of all the things that come through is the challenges they face. It's kind of those administrative things that tend to be the toughest. Managing budget, being able to manage a team, being able to, you know, keep projects on track. A lot of those came through as some of the biggest challenges that they face. And so that's why I kind of lean towards, like, having a lot of those doctor skills under their belt, because, you know, you could be very, very talented as, you know, as an IT leader, but if you can't advocate for your team and can't translate it back to the business and business terms, you know, you're not going to get very far in the long term. And actually, just to build on that, too, I agree with everything Sean had just said. And it does remind me, I mentioned this a little early in the presentation, it reminds me of a product management role in some respects, where, again, you've got to be able to balance both technology and business. You know, the same way a product manager has to be able to work with the programmers and work with the salespeople in, you know, driving technology forward. You know, in some ways, the CDO is building a product, but this product is data, and usable fit-for-purpose data. And they've got to be able to work with the technologists on how they design it. He or she doesn't have to be actively, as Sean said, writing the R scripts or designing the database, but they've got to be knowledgeable enough to understand what's going on with the data and in tune enough with the business to understand the context of that data and what it means and where the value is and where it's going to drive results. So that same kind of balancing act that a product manager does, I think a CDO has to do that on a higher scale and, you know, definitely needs to have had some data roles, I think, in their background in order to really make the most of it. Yeah, you know, and even just as you were saying that, I was just thinking back to some conversations I've had with CDOs recently, you know, and often they're just homegrown. They're people who've worked for companies for quite some time. They've done the role without the title and now they have the title. And so really they know the business. They know the data. They've done the work. But they don't have those business skills. They don't have that, you know, senior level skills. And, you know, whether it's public speaking, presenting, storytelling, I think that's a big component of it, right? A lot of them have that technical knowledge. They just need to gain those business skills to be able to bridge that gap and communicate it better back to the business. Yeah, Sean, you also mentioned earlier in the answer, you know, you were talking about measurable results and quantifiable results. The next two questions are just exactly on that, you know, and they came in about the same time and asking the same thing, you know, is there a measure of asset, a data appreciation that can be used as the performance indicator for a CDO and how do you measure the value of the impact of the CDO? What are the KPIs for a CDO? Yeah, that's actually a really good question because at the end of the day, right, you're going to need to kind of tie it back to some kind of metric. So I would say there's kind of two parts to this. The first one I would say is that to measure kind of the appreciation of your data is really getting at the fact that when you start a data program or you're working on a data program, you should really do an assessment of your data, your data strategy today. Where are you? What's your data quality, your data management sophistication? And there's online tools where you can really just, you know, answer some questions and figure out where are you today, where do you need to be, and then, you know, you can do those assessments, you know, more often and kind of benchmark where you are kind of on your sophistication. So that's one way at a high level. I would say you could prove, you could show and demonstrate kind of how your organization is maturing along that curve as a result of having a CDO. I think there's other tools that you can use to do things like data profiling, right? You can set up business rules. You can do, you can monitor fields. And so, you know, if you have a set of master data that's really critical to your organization and say part of that master data happens to be addresses or, you know, security numbers, you can set rules and you can monitor the quality of those fields and actually see if they improve over time or, you know, they're getting worse over time and you can actually track that master data, that very important data for your organization and you can say, you know, as a result of the processes that we put in place for data quality, you know, we've improved this master data field by X percent and guess what? You use that master data field every day for customer service. You use it every day for marketing and, you know, here's that number associated with that. So that's one way that you could do it as well. And then I think there's a lot of kind of intangible things, right? Obviously with being able to tie a number back to it. So there's things like not only being able to relate to, you know, specific fields, but tying back to, again, those business drivers. So, you know, if the business has a goal to reach, you know, 20 percent customer satisfaction by next year, how can you show, like, with the changes that you're making and the data and the processes that you put in place, how can those then be tied back to that goal or that strategic initiative, whether it's increasing revenue, improving experience for the customer. Every organization has, you know, goals for the year and how can your program align back to those goals. And in doing so, you're automatically monetizing it. You're automatically proving the value of it by helping move along. Do you have anything to add, Kevin? I think that's great. Yeah, no, I think, you know, what you mentioned around data quality metrics is a given. I think any CDO, you got to put that in place and instantiate, monitor that. And that's sort of the reactive work that needs to be done on your data. And then proactively, yeah, you got to start monitoring campaigns and seeing, you know, are we generating more revenue this year, both the last year when we're using the data and putting those programs in place. So it's a little bit tougher on that end, but, you know, that's where a lot of that measurement is going to have to come from. Yeah, I think a lot of the benchmarking is what you're going to have to do, compare what did we do this year versus last year and, you know, where those are results for the changes that we made. Well, I'm afraid that does bring us to the right to the top of the hour. Clearly a great webinar, both of you, as we have so many questions that we didn't get a chance to get to today, but I'll get those over to you to take a look at. And thank you so much for this great presentation and thanks to our attendees for being so engaged in everything we do. We just love all the questions coming in. Again, just a reminder, I will send a follow-up email by end of day Thursday for this webinar with links to the slides and the recording of this presentation and anything else that we can get out to you as information from Experian. Thanks to Experian for sponsoring today. Again, Sean and Kevin, thank you so much, and I hope everybody has a great day. Great. Thank you so much, Shannon. I too.