 Hello and welcome, my name is Shannon Kemp and I'm the Executive Editor of Data Diversity. We'd like to thank you for joining the current installment of the Monthly Data Diversity Webinar Series, Real World Data Governance with Bob Seiner. Today Bob will discuss corporate data governance. The CDO is the Data Governance Chief. 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. If you'd like to chat with us or with each other, we certainly encourage you to do so. Just click the chat icon in the upper right for that feature. For questions, you'll be collecting them by the Q&A 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 RWDG, Real World Data Governance. 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 speaker for today, Bob Seiner. Bob is the President and Principal of KIK Consulting and Educational Services, and the publisher of the Data Administration newsletter, TDAN.com. Bob has been a recipient of the Damon Professional Award for significant and demonstrable contributions to the data management industry. Bob specializes in non-invasive data governance, data stewardship, and metadata management solutions. And then joining Bob today is a special guest speaker. And with that, I will give the floor to Bob to introduce our guest in today's webinar. Hello and welcome. Thank you very much, Shannon. Thank you, everybody, for taking time out of your schedule to participate or to listen to the webinar today. As Shannon mentioned, I have a special guest as a participant in this webinar, my friend Anthony Aldrin from U-Turn Data Solutions. And I'll tell you a little bit more about Anthony in a minute here. I'm glad to have him on the call. This should certainly be an interesting, very lively, energetic webinar for you today. Just to give you as a quick reminder, the webinar in December, always on the third Thursday of the month, is using Agile to justify data governance. And I look forward to having you there. Please, you can register online at DataVersity at TDAN.com or at kikconsulting.com. A couple quick notes before we get started. As I typically provide at the beginning of this webinar, I just want to introduce myself if you don't know me. There are ways that you can get to know me, and as Shannon mentioned, the non-invasive approach to data governance. I published a book, Non-Invasive Data Governance, The Path of Least Resistance and Greatest Success in September of 2014, and it's available at your favorite bookseller. Please visit kikconsulting.com. KIK stands for Knowledge is King, and that is the Home for Non-Invasive Data Governance. I also wanted to make you aware of a couple conferences that are coming up, events that I'm working with DataVersity on. I work with DataVersity quite a bit. The first one that's coming up is the Enterprise Data Governance Online Conference, and I will be doing the kick-off session, picking the right approach to data governance, as well as Enterprise Data World, EW 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia in April. I will be giving a presentation, a tutorial called, Comparing Approaches to Data Governance. I believe my friend Anthony will also be at Enterprise Data World, so please look us up if you are there. And last but not least, two more items, one which is brand new announcement to share with you. First of all, most of you might know of the data administration newsletter, tdan.com, produced by DataVersity. It is a publication that's been around for many, many years. We're looking forward to celebrating our 20th anniversary at EDW in Atlanta. And also, and this is really important, just announced through the DataVersity Training Center, there is a non-invasive Data Governance Learning Plan, seven courses of online learning that's produced by DataVersity that you can learn more about at DataVersity.net. And without further ado, I want to introduce my guest today, Anthony Altman. And Anthony, as it says here, helps businesses to use data to get better at what they do best. And he is a chief data officer, and he is the person that I go to when I'm looking for information about the chief data officer role, and he was a perfect person to have attend and participate in this webinar today. Anthony, anything else you want to say hello and tell people anything else important that they need to know about you? Yeah, no, thank you, Bob. You are too kind. I'd say the important thing for me is, I have had the privilege of being a chief data officer at a sizeable organization in the Chicago Transit Authority. I have worked in a variety of hands-on technical positions throughout my career on the industry side, and I've also spent many years in consulting. And so I've seen the kinds of challenges that we're talking about with data governance, with chief data officers, with data and technology and innovation in general, from a variety of different perspectives. And I think hopefully I'm bringing some unique ideas to the space and to the conversation, and hopefully we'll kind of dive into some of those, because I can guarantee one thing that during the course of this webinar, you will hear something, probably many things, that are not necessarily our kind of standard, this is how we view things in our data community. And I'm definitely going to kind of push some buttons on that and hopefully generate some thought on what we're talking about. Is the tenor of the conversation that we've been having around chief data officers and data governance, is it really the conversation we should be having? I want you all to think about that as we go through today's conversation. And one of the reasons why I picked Anthony to be the person to assist me on this webinar is that Anthony is not shy. He has a lot of passion, and I'm sure that his non-shininess and his passion will come out throughout the webinar today. So again, thank you Anthony for participating in this webinar. In fact, I'm going to be turning a lot of things over to you. I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say about the chief data officer role, who they should surround themselves with, all of those fun things that we need to think of as our organizations start to add the chief data officer role to our management, especially our top-level management. So the abstract for today's webinar was that the CDO is a relatively new role and it's an evolving role. There's a lot of different job descriptions associated with data governance responsibilities. The ones that I've read for the chief data officer role, it's very interesting that they seem to be data governance from beginning to end. So a lot of the responsibilities they're asking for from the chief data officers are data governance responsibilities. So a lot of us who are practitioners in data governance, that's a great thing to know that at some point within our organization we may grow to the point where we could become the chief data officer if in fact that's something that you're interested in doing. So some chief data officer job descriptions, like I said, read data governance through and through. It's become obvious that basically the chief data officer is the new chief for data governance, which is the name of the webinar today. So the five subjects that Anthony and I are going to talk about are we're going to provide a detailed chief data officer job description. We're going to talk about why the chief data officer is the data governance chief. We'll spend some time talking about the makeup of the chief's tribe and who that person needs to surround themselves with in order to be most effective. We'll spend some time talking about lessons learned from the CDO's office and we'll provide some suggestions for new and existing CDO roles within your organization. So the first subject that I want to talk to Anthony about, I want to get Anthony's opinion and then hopefully get some questions from you folks that are listening to the webinar. You know, people need to know what the chief data officer is and providing a job description for the chief data officer seems to vary from organization to organization. Could you help us to understand better what the chief data officer job entails and what might be put into a job description for a chief data officer? Absolutely. And I certainly have a perspective on this and one thing I think, you know, and this tends to be true in any situation where you have this new construct, like a chief data officer where none, the title didn't exist before, this role didn't never kind of came together before. You're going to see in the early days, which we're still in relatively the early days, you're going to see a lot of variance in that and then certainly when you go and look at the job descriptions out there, you're going to see a lot of variance. And so what I'm offering today, my perspective is just that. It's my perspective on it. It's what I think it is or what it should be or how I think it does really fit in. But you take this ideal or you take this anchoring and then you go out into the world and look at it, you're going to end up seeing an enormous variety. But we're going to try to level on what we think as quote-unquote data experts or practitioners in space, what we think it really should be and how it should evolve. So the first thing I would talk about, and I have to tell a little story, but I think it was two weeks after I got the Chief Data Officer job at Chicago Transit Authority, I went to the people that hired me and I said, you know, guys, I don't actually really think the Chief Data Officer should exist the way it does. And they looked at me like I was crazy. And they're like, Anthony, we just hired you to this job. Yeah, they're like, you don't get this job and then tell us this. And I'm like, hold on, hold on. It's necessary in our current organization. And this is going to be true in a lot of organizations. It's necessary, but I also don't think it should really exist the way we've had to create it. So let me back up. What does the Chief Data Officer even mean? And I like to, and I don't know, Bob, you might know better than I do. But I give Peter Aiken credit for this because he's always talking about the top data job. And I like that. The Chief Data Officer is the top data job. Well, granted that you're calling a Chief Data Officer, you know, a Chief Analytics Officer, sometimes the Chief Digital Officer is another recast of the state that whatever we're talking about, we're talking about the top data job. And in my mind, that can also be a few different things. It is certainly going to be the pinnacle of the data governance organization, but it's going to be the data innovation leader. It's going to be the person who ultimately connects the business success to the data and information contained within your organization. And I think that that's an incredibly important thing. And we're going to add a C to this. It better be a pretty big role. It better be a pretty pervasive role and a pretty measurable impact to the business type of role. Otherwise, we're calling it entirely the wrong thing. All right. So let me move on, and we can certainly address some questions because I imagine there will be some by the time I get done with this. But how does it compare to the CIO? So the first thing is that I think, and this gets back to my little micro story from a moment ago, I think that a lot of the reason we're talking about Chief Data Officers today is that our CIOs have let us out. I feel like this is stuff the CIO should have been doing for a long time. This is stuff that, hey, we need to connect our businesses to data and information. Well, first off, we have to connect that via technology somehow, right? And so we need to think about what the CIO really is and what it should be in our organizations. First and foremost, it's a business executive. The CIO, there's no such thing as IT and the business. IT is part of the business. If you are a C-level executive, you better be a key component of the business organization. You should have a PNL. You should have a meaningful contribution to the overall success of an organization. That is what a C-level executive is. So the CIO's specific functional role is around technology and data and how do we do all of the things with bits and bytes of information and electronics to help our businesses be better? Fine, that's what they've been focusing on. But really, you can't be a Chief Data Officer in the absence of technology. So these do go together somehow. And my argument would be that the Chief Data Officer responsibilities when it comes to data and information sharing and definition and metadata and all the things that we talk about in data governance, really, it should fall within the purview of the CIO's office, which is kind of a blasphemous thing to say in our data circles right now because we kind of realize that our IT organizations, our Chief Information Officers, are presiding over a section of the business that is often not fully considered a critical piece of the business. So the key is that if we have a CIO who's focused on technology, instead of being part of the business, well then we have to do something different. That's exactly what happened to me at the CTA is that we needed the Chief Data Officer to roll up to somewhere outside of the technology organization because the technology organization wasn't capable of having the impact that a Chief Data Officer needs to have. So this is where we result. Can I ask you a question then? Does it make better sense that instead of calling them Chief Information Officers, they'd call them Chief Information Technology Officers, CITOs? Because again, you're right, that they have a lot of things on their plate. They are responsible for a lot of things. One of the things that's in their title is the word information. But the fact is that a lot of them spend a lot of their time focusing on the ability to be able to deliver the data, the pipeline, the architecture, the infrastructure, and those types of things. So should we call them Chief Information Technology Officers and then have Chief Data Officers, and that would pretty much draw the distinction between the two? Well, I think that you have, you know, we've had Chief Technology Officers. We've had, you know, we wanted to call them a Chief Information Technology Officer. Fine. But really, the moment we're dicing these up into Chief Data Officer, Information Technology Officer, you know, Chief Technology Officer, it really, we've lost the meeting of Chief. We were director level at that point. We don't really have the kind of enterprise-wide purview that you really have to have in a Chief-level role. You can only have so many Chiefs in one organization that are real Chiefs, and the proliferation of these C-level roles has caused a lot of confusion. But so I agree with you, Bob. I think that that's, you know, really the current role of the CIO is actually a director-level role. That's why they don't have a seat at the table in most leadership teams. And that's the problem. And so if we combine what the CIO is actually doing with what the CBO needs to be doing, maybe with what a separate Chief Technology Officer or some sort of, you know, customer-facing technology type role, those become directors. You have a true C-level executive above that. Now you're talking. Now you're talking about enough scale to justify a full-blown seat at the table. The challenge is we can't find people for these roles. We have not asked, and my upcoming article in your TDAN newsletter is going to address this, we haven't been able to, we've never asked technology people to be strategic in their careers. We go into requirements gathering. Well, here, business, tell me everything I'm supposed to build. Well, that doesn't teach me how to be strategic. That teaches me how to take an order. Well, you know what? Your comment about, you know, we've got so many Chiefs. Well, the way I've always been told, you know, the more chefs you have, it spoils the broth, right? So if you have Chiefs, it basically have too many Chiefs versus chefs, you know, it kind of dilutes what it is that people have the capability of being able to do. But I think it's very important that the role needs to be defined in such a way that it's doable within organizations and that it differentiates between who has responsibility for the technology and who has responsibility for the data itself. Yeah, and one of the things, so I've talked about this in some of the conference talks that I've given, and I think anybody who's on the line should really look this up. So everyone's familiar with the Atari 2600 and the incredible success it was when it was released, brighteningly almost 40 years ago, that led Atari down a path of saying, let's do that again, and let's do it even better this time. And so they ended up creating this monstrosity called the Atari Jaguar, and it has a controller with a full-blown number keypad on it. Like this thing was so designed by committee and took so long and was so behind where it needed to be when it was actually released. That tells you everything you need to know about designing things by committee or having too many Chiefs in pseudo leadership roles without the actual hook. And one thing we'll talk about later as I preview to this is if you're going to become a Chief Data Officer, the most important thing you can do in that role is before you get the role, make sure it's positioned in a way to be successful. You can fail at a CDO role before you ever set foot in the job, and it's all about making sure that you have positioned it in such a way that you're taking on a position and a role that can be successful within the context of your organization. And so what I want to move on to, you know, okay, we've talked about the CIO. We can't change that quickly. Like that's just going to be how it is. We're going to have CIOs that are really too focused on technology. Fine. What we have to do now, and this is why in the data circles and in the data community, we've often said that CDO needs to report up to the business because we say, hey, the CIO, they're focused on technology. The data side, the CDO is really addressing a need around applying technology and data, especially data, to the business and business success. And so we've said, hey, we have to have that report up to the business. It has to have the minimal amount of friction between its role and the functions that it's performing in the business itself. I agree with that as a cause of impracticality that's the best way to put it. That's what we had to do at CTA. That's what a lot of our organizations are going to have to do, is find a place in the business. The thing to keep in mind about that is that you're going to have a lot of challenges around accomplishing things with data if you're further away from the technology organization because that's where the leverage is when it comes to the technology tools to make data more accessible, making data more powerful to aggregate things, to plug in BI tools. All of those things become further away. So you have to maintain that balance somehow. And so that's something very important to consider. So when we talk about what the role is mostly about, really, regardless of where it is, and we're going to assume that the CDO is a actual C-level executive. It is like the CIO is today in terms of where it is in the organization. So really, that's the kind of role that's going to be successful with this. But it's really about removing the impediments between the potential value of data and the realized value of data by the business. What does that mean? When we do things like data governance, we create potential value of data. We give the business an opportunity to do something of value. It only becomes realized value when the business actually does something better. When you increase top-line revenue, or you decrease costs, or you manage your risk more effectively, that's really what matters, is that we as chief data officers need to be that linkage between the ever-increasing potential value of data and the need to increase a realized value of data. So in thinking about that, that's the primary role of the CDO. When we talk about the specific responsibilities, first and foremost, a chief data officer needs to drive organizational strategy through data. They need to provide a vision for the ways data can ultimately contribute to the value of the business, totally in line with that. Secondly, the CDO needs to manage an organization of professionals, from data scientists to DBAs and security specialists. Anybody who's touching data, typically you need those people rolling up to the chief data officer. And this is why this needs to be a pretty substantial role in an organization. You can't just have a CDO. How many times have you talked to a CDO at a conference and they have three people reporting to them? They don't usually have teams of people yet. It's not there yet. Right, and so their ability to execute is hampered because of the organizational structure they find themselves in. So it's important to realize that a true chief data officer needs to have the ability to execute because the fact is their day-to-day job is going to be coordination, executive level test rules, lots of meetings, and we'll talk more about that in a little bit. But so then the third main responsibility of chief data officers to lead the collaborative efforts around data governance beyond the direct reporting line. So if you think about it, the second point is to manage an organizational chunk that has a lot of people that do stuff with data. The third around data governance is to say, hey, you're going to wrangle cats throughout your entire organization to try to achieve certain goals tied to data. So that's an important responsibility of the CDO and really talks about the data governance time. So we'll talk more about that as well. And then fourth, finally, it's to ensure compliance with the appropriate regulatory mandates or self-imposed privacy or security policies. Hey, you're the ultimate responsibility when it comes to data in your organization and it is important to acknowledge the heightened need for privacy, security, all of the things that can cause big problems as it pertains to the asset of data in your organizations. That mismanagement can cause a tremendous amount of trouble. Now, it's forced for a reason, in my opinion. I do not believe that regulatory mandates or privacy compliance things should drive your data innovation function within your organization. It's a thing that must be accomplished, but if that's where you're setting your sights and that's why you do data stuff, then you're going to miss out on where I believe for nearly every organization out there where the real value of data and analytics and the role of the Chief Data Officer comes into play. So if we talk about the balance between strategic and operational emphasis, hopefully it will make sense. Given today's reliance on data and the complexities of the challenges that are getting more and more difficult, more and more challenging, bigger and bigger volumes, nearly 100% of the direct contribution a Chief Data Officer makes in their role is actually strategic. However, the CDO spends most of their time managing the operational considerations with leverage. That means you end up spending most of your time as a Chief Data Officer. You're in meetings trying to rally different initiatives, trying to do strategic things, make decisions, they're talking to other executives, but any minute you're not at a meeting, you're probably dealing with personnel and helping them figure out what they need to know to be able to carry out the operational aspects of their job. This is an executive role first and foremost, and the fact is that you need to accomplish operations as any executive through the people on your team. And what happens is if you have these Chief Data Officers, like we've seen plenty of, that have only a couple of people on their team or some have none that just start with, you have to realize that they're going to be in a tough position to do all the strategic stuff, to rally all the people, to be in meetings all the time, to grow a team, to do the technology, to plug in here and there. It's too many things. And so that, at the end of the day, if we want our Chief Data Officers to be successful and we don't want to go and recast our CIOs, we have to figure out how do we position them to accomplish these very ambitious goals within the context of our already complex and large organization. Wow, I knew you had a lot to say on that subject matter. Talking about detailing what's necessary in a Chief Data Officer role and position. So everybody that's out there on the webinar, just to let you know, I'm sitting back and listening to Anthony talk about the detailed TVO job description. And then I'm remembering, hey, wait a minute, I play a role in this webinar as well. So it's great to have Anthony as the person to be the person to talk about the Chief Data Officer role, basically because of his experience and his knowledge of organizations that have this role and having been in that role himself. So the next question that I want you to address, Anthony, if you would, is the typical question of why, we're talking about this webinar being called, the Chief Data Officer is the Data Governance Chief. Well, why is that true? Why is the Chief Data Officer really the role? Why am I seeing job descriptions that are data governance beginning to end and they're associating those with the Chief Data Officer? Why the connection? Right, so this first bullet point, I think starts to hit on that and then I'll kind of expand, but there's two kinds of businesses out there. Those that are data driven are moving towards being more data driven and then they're failing business. We now live in a quantifiable world. It's becoming more granular, you're getting Internet of Things, you're getting faster measurements of stuff, but every business has an opportunity to leverage data to improve what it does and if any individual business chooses not to, I can assure you your competitor will choose to do so and will leave you behind. So the key is that I think part of the answer to what you just asked Bob is that we need to understand what we mean by data governance and man, I spent a long time in consulting trying to sell data governance projects and I went to these companies and I said, hey, company, you need to do a data governance project because it's really important and man, things will get better down the road and they kind of looked at me and they're like, yeah, we agree with you, thank you for your time and then we moved on and the fact is that you can't sell a lot of work and you can't really measure a lot of impact if you just focus on the thing you want to do, which is data governance is a thing that we do as data professionals and it's really important to understand that yes, it can impact a business in a lot of ways and everything that we said was absolutely true, but we have to move beyond talking about working and get to actually working and that's really what our data governance organizations need to learn how to do, is how do we go from things that we know we want to accomplish as a business today that are difficult for us to accomplish as a business today, how can making some better understanding around our data and doing some things differently with how we're managing our data, how can that contribute to a measurable, realizable business outcome and we need to tie our data governance organizations to that and so when you hear me talk about things like a chief data officer needs to be an innovator, it's because that's the only way you're going to actually get any traction within your data governance efforts. You're going to have to have something to show for it and you can't ask people for more than a month or two to do things on behalf of others without seeing some benefit for themselves and so if we are chief data officers and we're like, hey, we need to create a sustainable, measurable, constantly reinforcing, impacting data capability within our organization, we need to figure out how can we connect to the things that matter so we think about what data drives and then we look at the second point here, we've got data drives innovation so we can do entirely new things as a business but it can also and it should also drive operations. It should help us understand where are there inefficiencies and the things that we're already doing. How might we do something slightly different? One of the things that my company now does, we help businesses say, hey, what's the weather going to be like tomorrow and should I manage my headcount differently? Should I order different amounts of supplies because I can predict something about what's going to happen and it has one degree removed from my bottom line and so thinking about things that way and how you can connect the information you have access to to your betterment as a business, that's exactly the kind of thing a chief data officer needs to do and then the chief data officer is going to think through this and say, hey, we don't understand what this piece of data is or means or what have you, we need some data governance around that and there you have to be the ones who can say, hey, there's going to be a roadblock as we go down this path. Let's resolve that before we get to it. But it's got to be measurable. It's got to be meaningful and that's something that the chief data officer is in the perfect position to do because if you think about the things we were just talking about with what the CDO does most of the time, that's how they connect to what is capable in the data. So it's easy to say, hey, let's create a bunch of reports but if those reports don't drive a new behavior of the business, well then they have no realized value. So it's all about understanding how can we drive change tracked back to data and then how did data governance allow us to get to all the steps we need to get to to drive the change we desire to change? And you know what, it's fascinating. I just had a conversation with a client this week and they're basically a manufacturer of electronics and they said, we are no longer a manufacturing company anymore. We are a data company that ships things that we manufacture. And so they realize that they are a data company and that everything that they do focuses on the importance of the data. So tying it back to not only innovation, operation, sales, and those types of things are extremely important. And typically providing a framework around data governance is what's going to guide you towards, and I know we say this more often than we should probably, you know, managing data as an asset. Well, you know, it's past the point where organizations need to realize the data as an asset that they need to actually manage it that way and have somebody who has the responsibilities that you're talking about. I often expand the data as an asset analogy and to say data is actually more like energy because you need to direct it. It needs to accomplish some sort of goal for it to really be useful. And so the CDO is about directing that data energy in the most productive, least destructive manner possible. So let's talk about that, directing that energy. So obviously when we're directing the energy, we need to direct it towards someone. And so I talked a little bit earlier. I just mentioned that, you know, who do we surround ourselves or who does the chief data officer surround them with themselves with? And so basically that's my next question to you. What is the makeup of this data governance chief's tribe? Right. So it's a challenge because every chief data officer is going to be bringing a different set of personal skills to bear. And so I think about it, and I try to think about it less about how I brought my skills to this and this is how everybody should do it. It's more recognizing, hey, a lot of different kinds of backgrounds are going to find themselves to a CDO position. And so what I thought about is saying, okay, well, we talked now about some of the responsibilities that a chief data officer has, and I wanted to break it down into something that was somewhat actionable and somewhat scalable, small and scalable large. So I landed on, you need at least three wizards. And I chose the term wizards because a wizard and most of us in the data space do something where other people think it's magic. And that's where you need people in these three domains, process, technical, and political, and you can substitute some different words potentially there. But you need somebody in each of these three to kind of start to complete that. And if I think of it as kind of a circus and each of these wizards is like a tent pole, right? It's holding it up. And so you have your process wizard, and so the process wizard needs to be focused on some of the traditional project management stuff, but also how do we fold in things like DevOps or continuous deployment? How do we fold in things like data governance structures? Or how do we make metadata capture efforts? Or how do somebody who can think through a variety of kinds of problems from a process-focused lens and come up with good solutions on how it should be done? So then the second is that technical wizard is somebody who can build the technical systems to do these things, whether you're talking data, application, whatever that is, you need somebody who's really, really good at the technology, because ultimately any chief data officer is going to have to rely on technology to get done what they need to get done. And then third, a political wizard. I chose that word intentionally, but I think others may choose different words, but that's more around how can you navigate through all of the context of an organization and understand the various political and cultural things within your organization to get stuff done as a collaborative group. So you need to be able to reach out beyond people who report up to you and say, how do we help you help us help you? How do we help get the things that we need from the various other stakeholders in a business while not asking for too much, while always delivering more in aggregate than what we've been asking for? And so it's how those kinds of things, and under most circumstances, a CDO is going to carry a lot of that torch themselves. It's almost inevitable. But I do think that when especially you start thinking about business analysis or if you have a highly technical, like in some healthcare organizations, that political wizard might be a doctor or somebody very deep into the research side of the business because that's what you need to really be fully conversant with the others in the organization. So it can really take on a lot of different forms. But between those three, a technical specialist, a process specialist, and kind of a business collaboration, and political type specialist, those are going to be the things that you know you're going to need to have. But like everybody, we all have strengths and weaknesses and resume gaps, and you name it, that once you start holding actual people into it, it'll never be quite perfect. But those are a couple of things to think through. Yeah, I love the idea of the political wizard and being able to conduct that kind of magic. And the first thing that comes to mind is Harry Potter as being a wizard, right? So it's important for people to realize that them working with you is really working for them, is working to help to make them successful. So, all right, continue on. Tell us more about the makeup of the Chief's tribe. Right, so like I had mentioned before, a lot of what you accomplish as a Chief Data Officer is through leverage. So by leverage, I mean, and some people use this term a lot and some people don't use it at all, what I mean is that you have to accomplish what you need to get done through the activities of others. You have to have alignment on a shared vision and you have to have enough knowledge to understand what your specialists are capable of, though you don't have to know enough to be able to do it all yourself. And it's really an important leadership challenge where you have to learn to let go. And this is an important thing for anybody who's listening to this who's thinking about, man, I'd love to be a Chief Data Officer someday. Be careful what you wish for, and we'll talk about this in a little bit more detail later, but recognize that to do this job, you don't get to be and to keyboard-building stuff most of the time. And if that's what you love most about working in data today, you're going to really need to think through the evolution between where you are now and where you're going and whether that's a journey you really want to take. So the second part of this is to understand that, you know, a lot of us, when we're in a Chief Data Officer, when I came in to the CTA, I sat in the organization at the exact same level as the CIO, and we did that very strategically, and I'll leave behind why we did that. But the key is that I had three people reporting to me, and our CIO had over 100 reporting to her on day one. And so that's where I had to grow this team. I was never going to get a headcount parity, but I also had to recognize that I had to be very careful with each hire. I needed to be able to demonstrate to this 11,000-person organization that with each hire, they are too exponentially more capable as a team, and that's why they should keep investing in that. And that's what you're going to have to do in any organization if you're growing this thing organically. So in keeping an eye on the time and realizing that I'm looking and seeing that a lot of questions are coming in, we're going to need to go through the last couple of subjects pretty quickly to leave at least 10 minutes for Q&A. But, you know, one of the things that's really important since you've been there and you've been in that role and you've obviously able to speak to it quite well, why don't we share with the listeners to the webinar what are some of the lessons that's learned basically from being in that role within the CDA's office? Right. And so you can all read what's on the page. But the key is, you know, the couple of patterns that you see is that first off, you have to accomplish a lot through others. And second, you know, a lot of people don't understand what data is really about. There's not a culture of data-driven decision-making in most organizations even today. And so that's your, you know, key of your role is to start getting people to understand and to change their behaviors and start leveraging data to get better at what they do. And sometimes you have to overcome irrational fears. You have to, you know, when I implemented cloud technology at the Chicago Transit Authority, there were huge unfounded concerns around, you know, data security or you name it when it came to the cloud. But you have to think about, okay, what are the things and what are most important to the organization and how do you pick your spots to achieve those goals and then build upon those? You can't win every battle, but you have to figure out, okay, what are the ones we're fighting? And so some of the irrational fears, you know, the fact that anything that ever happens with data anywhere, anytime in your organization from huge data breaches down to the numbers on true reports not matching, it's all the chief data officer's fault. And you're going to have to apologize from time to time. And you're going to have to be earnest about it. You know, you're going to have to shoot for perfection and you're never going to reach it. And so it's understanding that you have to deal with that. You're going to have some unpleasant phone calls. And that's, you know, it's tough because a lot of the time we get into these roles and we do things with data because we see the power and the capability that can bring to our businesses. But when it gets to that executive level, it's not all, you know, meetings and pontificating and strategic stuff. There's a lot of detailed work that, you know, sometimes you have to deal with a lot of situations that even if they weren't caused by you and even if they weren't caused by your team, they're going to be up to you to pick. Yeah, you know, it's an enviable position to be in, but it's also to be an unenviable position to be in because, I would say, the sins of our past, so to speak, there's a lot of things in organizations don't think data is the first and foremost. They think about a lot of other things, but organizations more and more these days are putting data at the forefront of what they're thinking and that's the need to have somebody to direct these efforts. So you've told us what's stunk or what's thinks about being a Chief Data Officer. Can you share with us what you think is great about the role? Yeah, and, you know, being a Chief Data Officer was the second best job I've ever had. And for somebody like me, it was fantastic. And the only job that I've had better is being a consultant that can bring this to multiple organizations, but it's the same kind of mindset. The key is that you get to do this and it's often within these organizations the first time it's being done. It's not going down the data governance journey for the fifth time the same way. You get to take a new approach to helping an organization ultimately be successful and that is fantastic. And so to be able to have a vision that you can execute on, that you can coach and build a team around, and you can all get together and do that. For me, especially having been in consulting for a long time where I'm always arm's-league, reach away from my clients, here you're inside an organization. You're taking that and taking this group and this business on a journey that ultimately will lead to a better organization and that is an incredible responsibility but it's an incredible opportunity. If you are like me or like Bob, you do get to talk about data constantly when you're the chief data officer and people are generally interested in it. Yes, all the time. Granted, you're in meetings for nine or 10 hours a day talking about data constantly, but hey, if that's what you like to do, that is awesome. And so you do, and if you do this job well, you can have a seat at the table to drive business strategy and that really, as data professionals, should be where we're looking all the time, saying I'm doing all this stuff with data, I know it matters, but I really want to connect to the business and how the business operates because that's where I make a difference. As data folks, regardless of level, we only add real value to our companies through the execution and the behaviors of others by driving different activities or different decisions on the business side. We add realized value. The CDO value is also good because the cool data toys are fine, right? Yeah, that's how they say the cool data toys and the higher compensation don't hurt, but realize that there's a lot of work that goes on behind the roll. There is, and I think that's what appeals to a lot of us when we think about the CDO as a position that we want to have, and there is something to the data toys and higher compensation and the impact you can have on an organization, but it is a fundamentally different kind of job than what a lot of us find ourselves in on the steps to get there. Yeah, I like the idea that you just might save or you might just save your organization with helping them down the path of improving the value that they get from their data. All right, so we're coming towards the end of the webinar part, and then we're going to take some questions. Let's talk about providing some takeaways. Let's provide some suggestions for new and existing CDOs. I know you've got a lot to say about that, so please have at it. Right, so I've often said, and I give entire talks on this first bullet point, but there are really two paths to the Chief Data Officer, either business or technical. You know, tick one and table stakes are be great at it, be very good. You're a technologist, be a great technologist. If you're doing business like doing project management, data governance stuff, be great at it. To become a Chief Data Officer, to get the job in the first place, and to be a good one, be better at the other path than anyone else on the path you chose. So the key is that you have to cross over business and technology, grow the roots in both directions. As far as you can, be the best technical person, the best business person you possibly can be, because it's only true that you're going to develop a functional capability of being a good Chief Data Officer, but you're also going to develop the empathy that is required to be a good Chief Data Officer. You'll have to care about the business side if you come from the technology side. You're going to have to care about the technology side if you come from the business side. It is absolutely essential that you become, you know, the torch bearer for empathy when it comes to data and its impact in organizations. I cannot stress that enough. The other bullets, I think, we've already started talking about it. We talked a lot about them, so in the interest of time, I'll skip over them, but understand where value comes from and understand that your job's to maximize that. At the end of the day, we can talk about all the ways you can do how to let that guy do if you won't go wrong. So additionally, your job as a Chief Data Officer doesn't revolve around data, it revolves around people. It revolves around getting stuff done on the business side. You're always, you know, you're kind of consulting within the organization and you have to accomplish things through the actions of others, whether it's the people in your organization and the people reporting up to you, or the people in such a business to you. You know, the fact is you could have all the right ideas, but if you don't sell it and you don't convince people and you don't get buy-in to these things, it won't go anywhere. And so that's where when it comes to being a Chief Data Officer, priorities need to follow the order that's there. Leaders have a vision, be able to sell that vision, be able to get people to rally around that. Manager, work with the personnel in your organization hire correctly, focus on the people, help them be successful, and they, in turn, will help you be successful. And then finally, don't shy away from being a data geek. Like, let's face it, we like data stuff. We like technology. Have the conversation. Get into an argument at the water cooler around, you know, Inman versus Kimball. Talk about those two things different. That's an important piece, because if you have those conversations at your level, then that's going to be okay for others and you're going to be teaching the rest of the folks in your organization that that's important to the success, not just of your organization, not just of your data people, but of your business as a whole. Yeah, it makes sense to me. I mean, a lot of good discussion areas around Chief Data Officer, and I'm glad that we were able to go through them. A couple of the things that we talked about in the webinar so far before questions is we talked about the detailed Chief Data Officer job description. We talked about why the Chief Data Officer is the governance chief, and that's basically the label for this webinar. We talked about who the Chief Data Officer needs to surround them with, the different types of wizards that will be effective within the organization. We talked about lessons learned from the CDO's office and suggestions for new and existing Chief Data Officers. At this point, what I'd like to do is I'd like to turn it back over to Shannon, and I've been watching, since I've had the luxury of being able to sit back and listen to Anthony talk about Chief Data Officer role to see that there's a lot of questions that are coming in. So I'm going to turn it back over to Shannon and see if she can help us to get through the questions today. Thank you, Bob, and thank you, Anthony. As expected, it was a very energetic and informational webinar, and as you mentioned, Bob, we do have a ton of questions that are coming in. They start coming in the moment that you guys started speaking, I think. It's awesome. We love that very much. We may not be able to get through all the questions today, but do please keep them coming, and we will get you written answers in the follow-up email. I will send out by end of day Monday with links to the slides and the recording and everything else requested throughout as well. So let's dive in here. Data governance is considered a program. What would you call initiatives of governing specific subjects, for example, datasets, data domains, et cetera, under the same umbrella of data governance programs? So programs? Well, Anthony, I'll take that first and then throw it over to you. So if you're starting with a specific domain or a specific area that you're focusing in, a project has a beginning and a middle and an end. And just because you're going to govern the heck out of your customer data doesn't mean that you're only going to do that for a defined period of time. So I define the difference between project and program. Anthony, I'm going to ask you what you think of this, but it's going to be a program no matter what subject area or what domain that you're working in. Because I had a chief financial officer come up to me one time and asked me how many stewards he was going to need and how long he was going to need them for. And since I knew the gentleman, I was able to kind of ask him back, well, how long do you want to have quality data? Well, how long do you want to have quality data in one of those specific domain areas? I think it's just a program from beginning to end. You might have a project of starting up your program, but what do you think, Anthony? Yeah, I agree with everything that Bob, and rather than just rehash that, I often will draw the analogy that notion of being done with data governance is like the idea of being done with HR. Like no one would question your need for ongoing HR. Data is very similar in that context. Yep. Moving on, and add CSO CISO to the group of chiefs that are functioning in the director level and the director level and possibly should report to a true CAO that is responsible for the information. I would agree with that completely. I think the CSO has reached a level of importance and security and privacy, those kinds of aspects to it. I think that justifies a complete director level full responsibility within the CIO's purview. I like his answer. So, can you do data governance without a CDO? I would argue that every organization is doing data governance somehow. It often is not a very organized manner and not a very formal manner, but one way or another you're using data somehow and you've created certain norms around that. So absolutely, you could do data governance without a chief data officer, and in many smaller organizations, especially a chief data officer would probably be overkill. It's going to be a sub-component of responsibilities for somebody in your organization. But I do think data governance is often about saying where have we gone wrong or where do we need a little bit more formality in things that haven't been working out for us without additional attention. And I'm with you 100%. I mean, when I talk about staying noninvited in the approach to governance, it's to look to what levels of governance are already in place. The one thing that I find is that a lot of the times it's very informal or inefficient or ineffective in adding that level of formality around it oftentimes comes back to the chief kind of leading the way, leading you down that path. So I agree. I've seen a lot of organizations that don't have chief data officers that have done data governance so I don't think it's a given that you have to have one with the other, but I think that's a direction that we're heading. And I would add to that. You don't need to be called the chief data officer to act like a chief data officer. You can really start making an impact without the title, and that's often where the title comes up, is, hey, this guy's really been the chief data officer. This guy's been doing this for a long time. Let's formalize it. Okay, I agree. So how would you perceive the CDO working within a government framework or any such framework since sales are a very small part of a government business? I'm not sure I fully understand the question, but I think I understand where the question may have drawn from. So I don't think that sales is necessarily an important aspect in and of itself as it pertains to a chief data officer. I do feel like a chief data officer will need to sell ideas and what they're doing under any circumstance, government, you name it. And so the sales component of it is really about an internally-facing sales side. Your organization, from an output perspective, may not be as concerned with sales, but make no mistake, in government and public organizations, there is a tremendous amount of selling ideas that need to happen to get anything done. Tremendous amount, right? And as you described it, that's a very important responsibility, even as you called them political wizards. Trying to get things done and government can possess certain, or can pose, possess might be the right word, but can pose certain types of challenges and it certainly is great to have somebody in a position who is able to be able to navigate that landscape and be successful in a government environment. Definitely. I love these next couple of questions. Anthony, this is directed specifically at you. Can you give some examples of strategies and likewise? What are the coolest data toys you've had the opportunity to play with? Well, yes, absolutely. So let me take you to one of the things that we were doing, the Chicago Transit Authority, was really an important thing that I hope they continue to carry on in my absence. And the number one complaint of people in that ride, the buses and trains in Chicago are bus bunching. When two buses get too close together and one doesn't come for 20 minutes and then you have three that go by, well, that happens because anything that causes the bus in front to slow down, it starts causing the buses to kind of magnetize towards each other. As the bus gets slower and slower in front, the back bus has fewer and fewer people to pick up, they inevitably come together, right? Well, you can use data analytics to directly counteract that. You can understand what kind of circumstances causes to happen, which is pretty much everything, but you can start to take action. You can tell the bus in back to start slowing down. You can use data to do all of those things. It's an interesting case study for a chief data officer, too, because you can see, hey, we have the data. We actually had two or three different systems on the bus that could tell us where the GPS coordinates were. We had the knowledge that this was the number one complaint understood of the people that wrote the system. And it was actually not a very expensive proposition because we already had the mechanism to talk to the bus drivers and tell them what to do. All we had to do was kind of put that thing together. Well, that was a strategic opportunity that only came about because we were able to connect the insights from three separate areas of the organization and start having a conversation to address a fundamental business challenge. So that kind of thing that is tremendously valuable to a business is when you start just understanding, hey, these are some of the things that we have access to. Here's some of the things that we could do. Now, to talk about some of the cool data toys, to me, the cloud technologies are completely revolutionizing how we do data. And I think a lot of the application side of the house is far in front of what we're traditionally known on the data side, things like DevOps and Agile and that kind of process enhancement. I think there's a lot of opportunity for our data teams to do more with that. But the advent of the cloud allows us to rethink how we store and then serve up our information itself. The notion of data lakes and how you can take data and you can actually create data warehouses on the fly like we used to create data months. We can think about how we can provide information in wholly new ways to different organizations or pieces of the organization that we couldn't have done before because there's now no administrative burden of purchasing infrastructure and having this stuff. You can spin this up in moments whereas in the past you had to have weeks lead time to get the appropriate hardware. So the ability to innovate quickly using cloud technologies regardless of your particular flavor. I'm a huge fan of AWS Redshift and all of that. There's plenty of others out there in the market so figure out what might work for your organization. But to be able to do that is tremendous. And I think it's too understanding some of the new kinds of technology. If like me you came from a set-based relational database background, I think it's tremendously important to understand what is NoSQL really? How are things like data lakes or other high-end technologies? How do those impact what I think I know about data? I think it's important for us to get outside of our bubbles of our own little data teams and realize that there's a lot of things out there that we might be able to bring in. But I think a lot of that comes from giving people an opportunity within our organization to learn, to think and expand beyond what they're doing day to day from an operational perspective. And that really gets back to a leadership and management challenge more so than a technical one. I think that, you know, technologists want to learn technology, but if they don't have time because they're doing all their normal day-to-day work, you're going to end up over time causing a less innovative organization. Just a couple minutes up, but let me try to sneak in one more question. There's so many great questions. Is this, I'm just going to keep going down the list because it's too hard to choose. And we'll get, again, you know, keep those questions coming in because we'll get them, and we'll get some answers to written for you. Is it fairly, is it really fair to say that CIOs have failed their business and that has given rise to the CDO role? I'd like to think that the proliferation and the digitization of data information has created the opportunity for new discipline and specialization. Do you care to comment on that aspect? I do. Go ahead, Bob. I was just going to say quickly that I don't know, I mean, failing the businesses. I don't know if I would necessarily go that far. Maybe you would, Anthony, but the idea is they've had a lot of responsibility. And to think that they would, some of the CIOs that have addressed data specifically, data and information and metadata and those types of things have been forward-thinking, have said that this is the asset of the organization that we need to take and they have focused on it. But not all CIOs have done that. So again, I'll turn that over to you, Anthony, and see what do you think have they failed? Failed the organization? I think in a macro perspective, I think that there's a misalignment between what CIOs need to be doing and what they've been doing. But in an individual perspective, I find it really difficult to blame the CIOs for things that no technologist, technologists aren't historically asked to be strategic until they get into the CIO role. So I can't blame them for not being fully equipped to handle that aspect of what that role should entail. And so I really think that they've done the best they can and they're trying to be responsive to the requests that are coming their way. But I think the dynamics between the business and the technology pieces of the organization have been flawed for a long time. I think our CIOs are struggling as a result of that. And I think that ultimately the long-term solution to this is to change how we're interacting between the traditional business side of the organization and the technology teams within them. But I do think that CIOs should at least acknowledge and understand the challenges that they face and try to be better internal pieces of the business as opposed to just being the order takers that they've been asked to be most of their peers. You know what, I appreciate your answers, Anthony. I appreciate your time on the webinar. I guess I'm just going to turn it over to Shannon to wrap up for a sec. Indeed. And we are just a little past the hour here. Thanks to everyone for joining us. And Bob and Anthony, thanks for this fantastic presentation. Again, just a reminder, I will send a follow-up email by Entertainment Day with links to the slides, the recording of the session, as well as getting those answers to all the questions we didn't get a chance to get to today. And thanks to all of our attendees for submitting all those great questions. We just are so happy that we have such an engaged community and really appreciate it. And with that, I hope everyone has a great day and we'll hope to see you next month. And happy Thanksgiving, everybody. Yeah, thanks, everybody. And I would encourage anyone who's interested in having additional conversations to reach out to me. I'd love to follow up directly as well. Thanks, everybody. Thank you.