An effective CDO needs to have multiple skillsets to fulfill the demands of the job. At the minimum, the CDO should be tech savvy, customer-driven, security conscious, visionary, and a change-manager, according to Richard Y. Wang, executive managing director of the Institute for Chief Data Officers at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Lisa Rabasca Roepe enumerates the roles a CDO must take to heart in this article from Dell Technologies:
People Person — Without question, the CDO needs to have strategic vision to help the organization increase revenue and market share, said Wang, who is also the director of the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium. But the CDO must be smart with people, otherwise he or she won’t prevail.
Evangelist –The CDO’s role is to talk about the best practices for data management and help people to understand what you mean when you say that data is important, said Jarrel Jimmerson, managing director of data governance at Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. in Austin, Texas.
Broker — The CDO often spends a fair amount of time being a data broker, making sure that data is accessible across departments as well as deciding when it is responsible to share data with other organizations.
Storyteller — The CDO should have an innate ability to stitch data together from various sources with different formats and bring out the relationships between them to tell a data story.
