Announcing Business–Value Focused Co-learning for Chief Data Officers

Linking data challenges to business outcomes is top of mind for almost every chief data officer we meet. At Informatica, we pride ourselves on being the champions of the CDO and in that vein, we are thrilled to announce a brand-new program: the Informatica CDO Academy.

This executive enablement and co-learning opportunity for data leaders such as yourself will cover a range of high-impact topics and focus on how you can deliver business value—fast. Time is of the essence. What can you do now, and in the next 100 days, to make a difference and have a clear path to success?

Barriers to Success

As a CDO, you are excited about the impact data can have on our businesses and lives. You have a strong vision and see the opportunities, but you are also acutely aware of the many challenges that need to be overcome to realize your vision. With digital transformation initiatives abounding at organizations across the globe, you have one of the most important roles, but arguably also one of the most difficult ones.

What is impacting your success? Many CDOs lack the following:

• A clear mandate and realistic expectations on what can be achieved in the short and long term. According to a recent Harvard Business Review article,¹  the CDO role is often poorly defined, with unclear priorities.
• The ability to build relationships and drive change with strong conviction. Change is about people. Therefore, we hear successful CDOs emphasizing the need to build relations across and outside the organization, to evangelize and enable. In a recent McKinsey article², Sonia Boije, who leads Ericsson’s Data Enablement Office, highlights several success factors. These include going deep into the organization to share knowledge, investing time in multiple stakeholders, and broadly sharing the vision through meetings and video.
• A data strategy and architecture that address the pervasive problem of data fragmentation and complexity. The IDC Global Chief Data Officer (CDO) Engagement Survey 2021³ shows that data leaders spend most of their time in day-to-day management activities, diverting focus away from innovation. Optimized data organizations that are resolving data fragmentation and complexity issues are able to generate more than 2x the business value compared to less mature organizations.

Even as a strong strategic thinker and accomplished change agent—and with full alignment with key business imperatives—you probably have days when the challenges pile up. You may also be hampered by technical debt, as well as technology and data fragmentation and complexity, and a lack of automation.

The CDO Academy is designed to help you develop strategies and build a data-driven culture to overcome these hurdles.

Evangelizing Data Culture—and Spurring a 96.5% Engagement Rate

One example of a CDO creating remarkable engagement in her quest to foster a data-driven culture is Sonya Crosby of Westpac New Zealand, one of the region’s oldest and most established banking institutions. When Crosby joined as CDO in August 2020 amidst the uncertainty of the first COVID-19 lockdowns, she needed to elevate data maturity across the organization and modernize over 160 years of data morphed across multiple systems and coding languages.

Through roadmap discussions with over 200 company stakeholders, Crosby’s team formed a comprehensive data governance program, including the creation of a central, user-friendly catalog and glossary. They also developed innovative formats like “MakerSpaces,” where teams collaborate on machine learning projects incorporating data science, engineering, software development, security, and customer experience design.

In just one year, this program has powered over 35,000 unique sessions and achieved a remarkable 96.5% engagement rate among data owners and users.

How Can We Be the Champions of Your Success?

The CDO Academy features six packed and fast-paced hours over three sessions, where we will discuss topics like:

• Data challenges
• Steps to data democratization with user experience
• Establishing a framework for achieving business outcomes
• An approach to building a case for your data initiative
• Setting up an organization charter (centralized, de-centralized, or federated model)
• Technology quick wins to match the business needs
• And much more!

Why not invest a few hours at the start of the year to get together with your fellow CDOs? We are convinced that our domain expertise along with your experiences will make for very valuable learnings and give you concrete tools for your next few months, as well as validating your longer-term strategy.

We will dive deeper and cover more than you can get from a conventional roundtable or webinar. At the same time, we’re not asking you to block a full week or even a full day. We will keep the group small to make room for discussions and sharing across the team. Upon completion, you will be awarded a training certificate.

Here’s where you can enroll. Looking forward to (virtually) meeting you soon!

_{¹ https://hbr.org/2021/08/why-do-chief-data-officers-have-such-short-tenures
² https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/how-a-tech-company-went-from-moving-data-to-using-data-an-interview-with-ericssons-sonia-boije
³ IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Informatica, “Driving Business Value from Data in the Face of Fragmentation and Complexity,” (Doc#US48293521, November 2021)}