Each year, Informatica’s CDO Awards spotlight the enterprise leaders who are quietly reshaping how data and AI operate at scale. Now in its fourth year, the awards have evolved beyond celebrating technical excellence alone. They now reflect a broader transformation that blends data governance, AI readiness, culture, and business outcomes into a single leadership mandate.

In Part 1 of this three-part series, Jim Kruger, Chief Marketing Officer at Informatica, explored how the definition of a modern Chief Data Officer has changed, what separates good programs from great ones, and why AI readiness begins long before any model is trained.

In Part 2, Kruger rejoins Robert Lutton, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Sandhill Consultants, to go deeper into what award-winning performance actually looks like in practice. From enterprise-scale governance transformations to workforce-wide data literacy programs and AI-ready data strategy execution, the conversation reveals how today’s top CDOs are converting vision into measurable business impact.

Performance Organizers: Turning complexity into enterprise-wide value

When asked to provide concrete examples of how Performance Organizer award winners are transforming their organizations, Kruger points directly to the intersection of technology, governance, and executive alignment.

“Performance is key and that category team tends to lean a little bit more towards the technical side of things,” Kruger explains. “That is really a nod to the tight relationship that our CDOs have with their CIO counterparts.”

One award-winning team, he notes, tackled a sprawling, decentralized data environment by building a unified enterprise governance model.

“They built a unified data governance framework and they aligned IT data, the business teams, and shared standards, ownership, and KPIs,” Kruger says. “They also implemented a modern cloud-native master data management platform to support standardization and reliability of core domains such as suppliers, customers, and products.”

The impact went well beyond data hygiene. The company achieved meaningful improvements in procurement, finance, and operations by dramatically improving data quality and accessibility. Their governance modernization also accelerated environmental, social, and governance initiatives by enabling traceable master data for sustainability reporting and supplier transparency.

Perhaps most importantly, Kruger stresses, the transformation was not just technical.

“They built a cultural shift across the organization, embedding data stewardship roles and fostering accountability for data at every level,” he says. “This CDO’s ability to transform a complex, decentralized data ecosystem into a structured value-driven program, while securing buy-in from top management and operational teams, demonstrates outstanding leadership and long-term vision.”

Literacy Luminaries: Closing the skills gap at enterprise scale

As AI adoption surges, data literacy is emerging as one of the most urgent capability gaps facing large organizations. The Literacy Luminaries category, Kruger explained, recognizes leaders who focus on people just as much as platforms.

“This award is for the CDO that understands the intersection of people, process, and technology,” he says.

One standout example involved an organization managing more than 90,000 enterprise data assets across 12 business domains.

“They categorized and classified all of those assets, creating a single source of truth,” Kruger says. “They also trained and onboarded more than 60 data stewards and analysts, increasing metadata engagement by over 300 percent in just six months.”

The literacy program extended deep into the business. The team built a glossary of more than 220 business terms and directly linked technical metadata to business KPIs. That linkage fundamentally changed how quickly teams could work with data.

“They reduced their data discovery and lineage validation time from three days to under 30 minutes,” Kruger mentions. “That accelerated AI and analytics delivery in a very real way.”

The lesson, he emphasizes, is that automation alone is not the answer. “You can automate much of the heavy lifting, but empowering data stewards to focus on higher-value tasks sets them up to better serve business needs.”

Data Strategy Gurus: Proving that trust, cost, and AI readiness can scale together

When the conversation turned to the Data Strategy Gurus, a clear pattern emerged across industries and regions.

“A common theme we hear from CDOs is that they need to get the right data into the right hands at the right time,” Kruger shares. “And these winners exemplified just that.”

One North American award winner delivered a trio of results most enterprises struggle to achieve simultaneously: trust, efficiency, and AI enablement.

“They enhanced their data quality for trust assurance, achieving a 30 percent improvement in data accuracy across systems,” Kruger says. “For cost efficiency, they reduced data management costs by 25% through automated data governance processes.”

At the same time, their improved data lineage and observability directly fueled AI-driven outcomes.

“They enabled AI-driven insights by improving data lineage and observability, contributing to a 20 percent increase in actionable analytics for business decisions,” he explains.

The net result was not simply better dashboards or faster reports. It was a structural improvement in how reliably the business could operate.

“They significantly increased data reliability and transparency across their organization for better business outcomes,” Kruger concludes.