Continuing from the first?part of the article The Pivotal Role of the Chief Data Officer in Driving Data-led Business Innovation Agenda, the second part of the article takes a view of the CDOs’ evolving mandate to craft a forward-looking approach to nurture data culture quotients and deeply invest in building team capabilities to be ready with a resilient data organization of the future. All the while their eyes are fixed on data maturity and platform augmentation drives not to miss the alignment with prioritized business goals.
With the rapid proliferation of AI waves reshaping the enterprise data ecosystems, one thing is becoming certain that unlocking business values requires more than deeper anchoring of an integrated data foundation and a streamlined data operating model. It brings the CDO’s role in the spotlight to orchestrate the data-focused gameplan, while evangelizing for deep-rooting data culture, data literacy and democratization ethos across organizational layers and augmenting the capabilities of the future-ready data organization.
AI-driven ecosystem influencing business priorities and reshaping the CDO’s agenda
Driven by AI-led innovation ambitions, firms’ drive to harness new business values exclusively relies on stronger alignment of data and AI strategies with strategic business priorities. Augmenting the frame of a futuristic data construct in an uncertain environment, a CDO’s data-led business agenda is shaped by a few critical themes to boost the foundational pillars of the enterprise data landscape. Some of the dominant themes in an AI-driven ecosystem include:
As CDOs gear up to play a multifaceted role in driving the prioritized themes of the data-centricity agenda, a progressive upshift on the data maturity scale requires an intense focus and collective organizational efforts. Thus, charting the transformation roadmap to overhaul the enterprise data ecosystem – typically operating at lower reigns of data maturity scale to move up to higher strata of data-savvy or data-driven levels – requires deeper involvement of business and IT stakeholders across the stages of the transformation journey.
Importantly, these themes and ensuing endeavors are not narrowly concentrated on data platform transformation or exploration of data-focused business use cases pipeline alone. These embrace a whole gamut of data-driven innovation enablers – including data quality standards, governance mechanisms, self-discovery and experimentation paradigms, advanced analytics tools enablement, and open ecosystem partnerships.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast: Nurturing Data culture quotients
AWS For Data survey conducted in summer 2023 (CDO Agenda 2024: Navigating Data and Generative AI Frontiers) highlighted the challenges faced by the CDOs were mostly organizational and behavioral, rather than technological. The survey findings underlined that creating a data-driven culture is the greatest challenge for the CDOs. Difficulty in changing organizational behavior and attitudes was the most frequently mentioned challenge in the role, with 70% facing it. The related issue of the absence of data-driven culture or data-driven decision-making was selected as the challenge by over half of them (59%).
Disregarding the ambitious goals articulated in a business firm’s data strategy, the realization of aspired business outcomes from data and AI strategies is feasible only through an unrelenting desire to foster data literacy, and data democratization tenets and realistically imbibe data-centricity in business practices. While senior leaders can point the direction of travel on this drive by setting the tone at the top, it is ultimately organizational practices and collaborative ethos that can sustain a data-driven culture or data-driven decision-making across organizational echelons. Thus, it requires teams across functional groups – business, data, technology - to come together to think and act beyond their siloed boundaries. Such a setting creates a fostering ground to cohesively frame data discovery canvas and formulate business contextual solutions with an ‘art of possible’ mindset.
Unmissable people dimension: Investing in data organization of the future
While data occupies the position of the fulcrum of the AI adoption strategy, it has also pushed boundaries of data and business – which have gradually started fading in organizations in recent times. For long the data landscape of the business firms has been afflicted with the challenges of the availability of the right skilled resources to form a multi-disciplinary team to drive data and AI strategies. The changed situation demands a shift away from traditional data roles –focusing on standalone data technology competencies like data modelling, ETL, database administration etc. Evolving role requirements in the AI ecosystem necessitate the availability of a new breed of talent with a blend of strong data, technology, and business domain-focused proficiencies and exploratory mindset. Such a team with multi-skilled abilities can develop a better understanding of business domain contexts to fulfill business needs more comprehensively.
The good thing is that with data-driven business appearing prominently in the agenda of the Board. As a result, the people dimension comes into sharp focus with requisite resource provisioning and organizational support. At one end, increased managerial attention puts focus on shaping the contours of data democratization and data literacy drives and amplification of the data-culture tone. On the other side, it has enhanced the interest level of business groups to collaborate and come together to build teams with multi-disciplinary capabilities and entrepreneurial spirit to explore possibilities of data-led values in a wide business spectrum. Also, an infusion of new genres of talent– including data science, AI/ML modelling, statistics, data analysis, data engineering, data architecture, and business domains – not only augments data organization with multi-skilled teams but also ably equips them to engage with the business and technology groups to passionately drive data innovation initiatives.
The rising trajectory of a CDO role: Ascendancy of data across business domains
While the CDO title is a new addition to C-level roles, their job profile and span of responsibility are increasingly becoming expansive. The rising job profile encompasses influencing organizational and behavioral practices to promote a data-driven culture while dealing with the complexities of data environments and driving the business outcomes relating to data technology platforms.
As organizations embark on the AI-led innovation journey, CDOs will be increasingly looked at in the combined role of a crusader and a steward to navigate through uncharted terrains during the stages of the AI adoption path. Mind it, their mandate grows beyond establishing a self-reliant foundation bed to support data-led business ecosystems. Active promotion of the spirit of joie de vivre of data culture in each part of the organization becomes an added responsibility of a CDO’s role. More importantly, while delivering their ambitious data-led business agenda to realize the business goals, CDOs need to exhibit a realized stream of tangible and intangible business values attributable to their innovator mantle.
About the Author
Indra is a Senior Industry Advisor in the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) unit at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). With 28 years of global experience in business and IT consulting, he spearheads CXO advisory, strategic planning, design and implementation of digital and data led transformation initiatives and innovation-focused thought leadership engagements. Apart from his extensive expertise in financial services domains, he also maintains a keen interest in sustainability, corporate governance and organizational culture issues.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/indra-chourasia-bfsi-business-architect
Twitter: @ChourasiaIndra