Is a three-year tenure sufficient time for a CDO to transform their organization? Charles Holive, managing director of SiSense Strategy Consulting, believes so.
Holive explains why in this commentary published in Information Week:
A CDO’s most important job is identifying opportunities to monetize data across an enterprise, and then activate them. The good ones start adding value to their organizations fairly quickly, and turn traditional cost centers into lucrative profit centers in the first 100 days of their tenure.
Do these data opportunities go away after two or three years? Of course not. So, why does the CDO need to go away?
I give that non-scientifically determined timeframe because of the CDO’s second most important job: moving their companies towards a mindset of optimizing data-driven insights to add value with its clients, and also to make more money.
Once the CDO creates that mindset, and builds out the channels for actuating it, the firm itself should have embodied the approach well enough that the CDO is no longer required. It’s then that the talented CDO, after transforming their organization, should probably transform themselves to an employee of another company.
[…]
…the role of the CDO is relatively short term. The need for the CDO, and the digital transformation that he or she brings, is now a permanent feature of business. Companies that embrace the CDO function can benefit greatly from new sources of revenues. Management at the ones that don’t need to get their houses in-order, or their resumes ready, as data becomes either an essential part of their product, or the product itself.
