CDO Magazine • 03/20/2025

What Does it Take to Be an Impactful Data Leader?

Clearly, there is no prescribed set of skills, experiences, attitudes, or behaviors that when consistently exhibited will guarantee a data leader any measure of success. Ask a group of high-functioning data leaders what it takes to engender success in their role.Although they may appear to disagree on the surface, their insights — forged in battle, refined in loss, and verified in victory — gravitate around common themes.Depth of fieldFor a CDO, vision is not merely an attribute or an exercise,...

CDO Magazine • 02/04/2025

Metadata Chaos? How Cloudera and Octopai Are Bringing Order

As someone who works closely with data professionals every day, I watch them forecast trends, predict outcomes, and prescribe actions that lead to informed decisions and business success. From analyzing customer behavior to identifying risks like fraud or cyber threats, to guiding product development priorities, their impact is felt across the organization. But none of this is possible without strong metadata management.When data professionals can quickly access trustworthy information, they can...

CDO Magazine • 12/10/2024

A Guide to Building a Modern Data Architecture

Adopting modern data architecture is a matter of necessity. With the volume and complexity of data expanding exponentially, data estates are sprawling over a multiplicity of environments. Most organizations operate multiple data environments in multiple form factors, including cloud, data center, and hybrid cloud (which is trending multi-cloud). Only modern data architecture can unify such disparate data for data-driven innovation and real-time, cross-domain insight generation. Modern data archi...

CDO Magazine • 10/22/2024

The State of Enterprise AI: Highlights from Cloudera's 2024 Survey

AI is at the forefront of every C-suite leader's mind, as the technology continues to dominate IT budgets, media headlines, and consumer interest. It holds immense value — only some of it fully realized — to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and safeguard businesses from threats. I recently wrote about AI barriers, but want the opportunity to expand on the data from Cloudera’s recent report: The State of Enterprise AI and Modern Data Architectures, which surveyed more than 600...

CDO Magazine • 09/26/2024

Overcoming Barriers to Enterprise AI Adoption — Insights from Cloudera’s 2024 Survey

IT leaders are revisiting their data architectures to adopt and leverage artificial intelligence (AI), but most find they are met with common barriers.   Cloudera’s report, The State of Enterprise AI and Modern Data Architectures, is a global survey of 600 IT leaders regarding AI. It dives into how organizations view the technology in relation to their environment, the barriers they face preventing AI adoption at scale, and their biggest concerns with AI. It is no secret that AI has incredible p...

CDO Magazine • 08/20/2024

Maximize Interoperability, Minimize Refactoring — 5 Key Differentiators of True Hybrid

Hybrid clouds are proliferating because they bridge public cloud-native generative AI (GenAI) models with the private cloud data on which they must be trained. For massive, complex data estates, hybrid architectures are necessary to bring AI models to the data where it safely resides.

CDO Magazine • 06/27/2024

The Top 5 Approaches to AI Data Privacy

While proper use case selection, data quality, and ethical responsibility remain important considerations for employing generative AI (GenAI) apps in your data community, data privacy is still the most critical criterion and essential concern. For most of us the question isn’t whether we will deliver AI applications, but using which approach, or with which architecture. There are a myriad of options to answer those questions, but ultimately, the relative need for data privacy is what will dictat

CDO Magazine • 06/18/2024

Your CEO Gets in the Elevator – You Have 22 Floors to Articulate Your Value to the Organization

No pressure. If the topic were your kids or last night’s game, there wouldn't be any pressure, but do you know your value to the company? How do you define and quantify it? How do you articulate it? For one type of CDAO, this will be an easy elevator ride — the CDAO who understands that the value of a data leader is measured by the business value that data and analytics generate across the enterprise. That CDAO continually tracks the success of the company as a whole and can confidently quantify

insideBIGDATA • 05/28/2024

Pandora’s Box or Lockbox? The Top 3 Barriers to Implementing Generative AI

Months ago a seminal event occurred in industries around the globe that is causing disruption and displacement. Aspirants are positioning themselves to be leaders and unsuspecting dominators are scurrying to catch up so they won’t be left behind. The event was merely an answer to an urgent question that companies gave or failed to give: how will we use AI to our competitive advantage?

A friend of mine launched LLMs to monitor regulatory changes so he can be the first to be compliant; afterall,

CDO Magazine • 05/02/2024

Top 5 Lessons Learned from CDAOs Successfully Implementing GenAI

As reported by Gartner in 2023, out of the 70% of organizations exploring generative AI, only 19% had piloted or productionalized models. Although 68% of those executives believed that the benefits outweigh the risks, Gartner Group Chief of Research and Distinguished Analyst Frances Karamouzis cautioned, “Initial enthusiasm for a new technology can give way to more rigorous analysis of risks and implementation challenges. Organizations will likely encounter a host of trust, risk, security, priva

APMdigest - Application Performance Management • 04/30/2024

The Disconnect Between IT and the Business

Ask the business what IT does and you might hear "they implement infrastructure, write software, and migrate things to cloud," and for some that might be the extent of their knowledge of IT. Similarly, IT might know that the business "markets and sells and develops product," but they may not know what those functions entail beyond the unit they serve the most.

The disconnect is understandable because individuals in IT and the business have different skills,

Onlineportal von IT Management • 04/27/2024

5 Gründe, warum Unternehmen einen CDO brauchen

Viele Unternehmen haben sich in dieser Hinsicht auf punktuelle Lösungen für die Datenverwaltung und -analyse verlegt. Während solche Tools bei der schnellen Lösung spezifischer Datenprozesse effektiv sein können und die Illusion einer schnelleren Wertschöpfung vermitteln, schaffen sie in Wirklichkeit mehr Komplexität und erhöhen die Ausgaben, einschließlich der Vorlaufkosten für das Onboarding der Tools sowie für ihre Integration in das IT-Ökosystem. Fast drei Viertel (74 Prozent) der deutschen

MIDRANGE • 04/26/2024

5 Gründe, warum Unternehmen einen CDO brauchen

Viele Unternehmen haben sich in dieser Hinsicht auf punktuelle Lösungen für die Datenverwaltung und -analyse verlegt. Während solche Tools bei der schnellen Lösung spezifischer Datenprozesse effektiv sein können und die Illusion einer schnelleren Wertschöpfung vermitteln, schaffen sie in Wirklichkeit mehr Komplexität und erhöhen die Ausgaben, einschließlich der Vorlaufkosten für das Onboarding der Tools sowie für ihre Integration in das IT-Ökosystem. Fast drei Viertel (74 Prozent) der deutschen

Security Storage und Channel Germany • 04/25/2024

CDO dringend gesucht - Desperately seeking CDO

Viele Unternehmen haben sich in dieser Hinsicht auf punktuelle Lösungen für die Datenverwaltung und -analyse verlegt. Während solche Tools bei der schnellen Lösung spezifischer Datenprozesse effektiv sein können und die Illusion einer schnelleren Wertschöpfung vermitteln, schaffen sie in Wirklichkeit mehr Komplexität und erhöhen die Ausgaben, einschließlich der Vorlaufkosten für das Onboarding der Tools sowie für ihre Integration in das IT-Ökosystem. Fast drei Viertel (74 Prozent) der deutschen

CDO Magazine • 11/30/2023

Is the CDAO a Tech Leader or a Business Leader? (5 Vital Questions for Every Data Leader)

As tech leaders, we have the luxury of being laser-focused on departmental goals that are fully aligned with data strategy but as business leaders, our sphere of influence widens and our depth of field extends beyond the department. Our shared service organizations become characters in a larger drama so we cannot be content to merely meet quarterly objectives.

Many of us may not be directly accountable for achieving corporate objectives but we certainly are more than mere facilitators. As busin

VentureBeat • 05/20/2023

The CDAO Art of Storytelling

“My CDO has a lot of resources, but I don’t get much out of them. I’m not sure what value they really provide.”

If you’ve never heard murmurs like these, you’re either awesome or beyond earshot of the rumor mill.

In a previous life, before I was a chief data officer (CDO), I was a screenwriter (that’s a common career path, right?). As a screenwriter, I told stories to get films made. As a CDO, I tell stories with data to demonstrate real business value before the rumor mill starts.

Incredibly

Datanami • 04/12/2023

Data Governance: Simple and Practical

In 2022, the global data governance market grew to $3.2 billion, a figure that’s dwarfed by the significant cost to operate data governance programs. In spite of the spend, many programs fail to generate high business value because they lack practicality and simplicity: the art of maximizing the amount of work not done.

Where data governance programs often get off track is right before they get on, by defining the charter and roadmap too broadly. The key question is which elements of a data gov