Gartner: CIOs & CDOs must ‘digitally remaster’ organisations

Digitalisation has created disruption in many industries and as the digital revolution progresses, it is likely to create a greater need for CIO’s and CDO’s in order to harness the digital opportunities of big data.

Gartner belives that CIO’s and CDO’s should take the lead in anticipating and capitalising on digital remastery.

Despite data being vital to business growth, the outcomes are unlikely to be positive if there is no executive focus. While many business units such as R&D and marketing are rushing to exploit data-based digital opportunities, others such as legal and HR are displaying more concern.

Gartner believes that the IT organisation, led by the CIO, must play a role in both enabling digital business and ensuring security and compliance.

The CDO’s will become more critical to the effective management and control of data, as the modern CIO’s job becomes increasingly overloaded with additional responsibilities relating to digital innovation, change management programmes and transformations.

Gartner has predicted that 25% of organisations will have a CDO by 2017, a figure that will rise to 50% in heavily regulated industries such as banking and insurance.

Debra Logan, vice president and Gartner Fellow, said: "CIOs do not own the CDO’s responsibilities. CIOs and CDOs should have distinct and separate roles in the digital era, and they will need different skills and capabilities."

Gartner has estimated that the poor quality of data costs organisation $13.5 million on average per year. Despite this high financial price, Gartner believes that the data governance problems are worsening. Key factors that are responsible for this are, organisations not using a consistent, common language for business information, instead, divergent and conflicting definitions of the same data creates problems.

Debra Logan, said: "The CDO is a peer of the CIO, but practises a different discipline. The CDO also becomes an advocate of information, not just a governor of it. Increasingly, successful information governance is about advocating the use of information as a source of value, not just controlling and monitoring it."

The Gartner 2014 survey, which included 410 CEO’s and senior business executives, found that 20% of large organisations’ CEO’s have already involved a data officer in leading their organisation’s digital innovation.