Deloitte Chief Data Officer Survey 2022

Guest blog by Lukas Kruger, Director at Deloitte LLP

In recent months, we have spoken with Chief Data Officers (CDOs) and senior data leaders from across multiple industries to answer a key question: “What is a CDO, and how does the CDO create value?”

What is a Chief Data Officer?

Whilst we found surprising diversity in our interviews, a consistent theme was that a CDO is a leader who creates value from data, overseeing data enablement and control.

CDOs lead a range of data-related functions, most frequently data management and governance but also insight-generation, typically owning data science and analytics capabilities. With both business and technology facets to their role, they make an important contribution to guiding strategy and performance.

CDOs frequently bring together a unique set of characteristics, including high data and technology expertise, business acumen, experience in risk and governance, curiosity, problem-solving and team-working. Perhaps most importantly, CDOs collaborate with a range of other senior leaders (see below) to apply data to business performance and improvement.

How do CDOs work with the wider organisation?

CDOs support organisations and C-level colleagues by providing capability, capacity and expert knowledge into development and improvement of data intensive activities. All functions in an organisation can benefit from making better use of data in decision-making and daily operations.

CDOs are working to define their own roles, and educate others on this, as well as grappling with challenges in recruitment, skills and culture as much as they are with technology and data itself.

Key Findings from the survey:

Survey participants confirmed that there is no typical CDO role – for example, the understand of the CDO role still varies greatly across industries.
CDOs typically have a very broad set of internal stake holders, spanning front-end and back-end office functions and technology teams.
Most CDOs do not report to an Executive Committee (ExCo) member or board member, which can limit CDOs’ ability to drive change.
Many CDOs are concerned with changing the organisational data culture and lack of broader data literacy remains a barrier.
CDOs are looking to shift their balance towards more strategic and less operational focus.
Over 80% of CDOs do not identify as technologists - and rely on IT teams to support data platforms and vendor relationships.
CDOs are looking to develop their business case for funding data transformation.
CDOs are growing their teams, to support a wider range of business and capabilities areas, but face challenges in a highly competitive market for skills.
Developing their teams’ skills - CDOs are focusing on developing skills in house as much as they do on recruitment and third parties - including for data architecture, analytics, engineering, data governance and cloud.

Key Data Points -> Of the CDOs interviewed:

71% do not have a direct reporting line to an Executive Committee member/ to the board

71% reported that the level of data skills in their organisation was one of their top three challenges

68% are focused on improving the use of insights and analytics as one of their top three priorities.

61% placed delivering their data strategy as one of their top three priorities

54% stated the level of data literacy in their organisation is one of their top three challenges

50% reported that developing the organisational culture to value data more highly is one of their top three priorities.

Want to know more?

This post is the executive summary of the full report which can be found here: https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/risk/articles/deloittes-chief-data-officer-report.html

The next iteration of the CDO survey is due to launch in Spring 2023, if you would like to participate in this survey and get access to the report directly then please sign up here.