Top Data Management Trends for Chief Data Officers (CDOs)

The role of chief data officer (CDO) is becoming essential at forward-thinking organizations — especially those in financial services — according to “The Evolving Role of the CDO at Financial Organizations: 2021 Chief Data Officer (CDO) Study” just released by FIMA and sponsored by erwin.

The e-guide takes a deep dive into the evolving role of CDOs at financial organizations, tapping into the minds of 100+ financial global financial leaders and C-suite executives to look at the latest trends and provide a roadmap for developing an offensive data management strategy.

Data Governance Is Not Just About Compliance

Interestingly, the report found that 45% of respondents say compliance is now handled so well that it is no longer the top driver for data governance, while 38% say they have fully realized a “governance 2.0” model in which the majority of their compliance concerns are fully automated.”

Chief data officers and other data professionals have taken significant steps toward a data governance model that doesn’t just safeguard data but also drives business improvements.

erwin also found this to be the case as revealed in our 2020 “State of Data Governance and Automation” report.

However, while compliance is no longer the top driver of data governance, it still requires a significant investment. According to the CDO report, 88% of organizations devote 40% or more of their data practice’s operating budget to compliance activities.

COVID’s Impact on Data Management

FIMA also looked at 2020 and the pandemic’s impact on data management.

Some financial organizations that were approaching a significant level of data management maturity had to put their initiatives on hold to address more immediate issues. But it led some sectors to innovate, moving processes that were once manual to the digital realm.

The research team asked respondents to describe how their data practices were impacted by the need to adapt to changes in the work environment created by COVID-19. “Overall, most respondents said they avoided any catastrophic impact on their data operations. Most of these respondents note the fact that they had been updating their tools and programs ahead of time to prepare for such risks, and those investments inevitably paid off.”

The respondents who did note that the pandemic caused a disruption repeatedly said that they nonetheless managed to “keep everything in check.” As one CIO at an investment bank puts it, “Data practices became more precise and everyone got more conscious as the pandemic reached its first peak. Key programs have been kept in check and have been restarted securely.”

What Keeps CDOs Up at Night

Financial services organizations are usually at the forefront of data management and governance because they operate in such a heavily regulated environment. So it’s worth knowing what’s on those data executives’ minds, even if your organization is in another sector.

For example, the FIMA study indicates that:

• 70% of CDOs say risk data aggregation is a primary regulatory concern within the IT departments.
• Compliance is secondary to overall business improvement, but 88% of organizations devote 40%+ of their data practice’s operating budget to it.
• Lack of downstream visibility into data consumption (69%) and unclear data provenance and tagging information (65%) are significant challenges.
• They struggle to apply metadata.
• Manual processes remain.

The e-guide discusses how data executives must not only secure data and meet rigorous data requirements but also find ways to create new business value with it.

All CDOs and other data professionals likely must deal with the challenges mentioned above – plus improve customer outcomes and boost profitability.

Both mitigating risk and unleashing potential is possible with the right tools, including data catalog, data literacy and metadata-driven automation capabilities for data governance and any other data-centric use case.

Harmonizing Data Management and Data Governance Processes

With erwin Data Intelligence by Quest, your organization can harness and activate your data in a single, unified catalog and then make it available to your data communities in context and in line with business requirements.

The solution harmonizes data management and governance processes to fuel an automated, real-time, high-quality data pipeline enterprise stakeholders can tap into for the information they need to achieve results. Such data intelligence leads to faster, smarter decisions to improve overall organizational performance.

Data is governed properly throughout its lifecycle, meeting both offensive and defensive data management needs. erwin Data Intelligence provides total data visibility, end-to-end data lineage and provenance.

To download the full “The Evolving Role of the CDO at Financial Organizations: 2021 Chief Data Officer (CDO) Study,” please click here.

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