KPMG Advisory Chief Data Officer: Data Concierge Professionals Have Advanced Skill Set

(US and Canada) Bob Parr, Advisory Chief Data Officer of KPMG International, talks with Robert Lutton, Vice President of Sandhill Consultants, about the newly coined term "Data Concierge" in this video interview series. The freshly-minted term is new ground for CDOs, and many in the field might not be familiar with it.

Parr discusses the skills needed in this role. Fundamentally, data concierge professionals are not deep data scientists or IT professionals. They tend to have advanced business-intelligence (BI)-type skill-sets and are students of organizational data assets. They understand an organization and the broader market for public, open-source, and paid data sources. Data concierges consult with teams within the organization.Their work helps them navigate the data assets that would be of most significant use to the organization to achieve their goals, like an internal consultant to your teams.

Parr shared he would ideally hire individuals for this newly created role and position from a mix of internal and external talent. He shared that KPMG, a global network of professional firms providing audit, tax, and advisory services, started with an internal team because they believed that these individuals needed the domain knowledge of the teams working in the fields, and could be taught about the assets. However, the volume of people needed for the role outstrips the internal supply sometimes. During those times, KPMG was able to pull people from outside, and that has worked well so far for the organization. However, he still thinks that the first place he, as a leader, would look for this role would be from within the company.

When asked where KPMG is headed, Parr says, as a leader, he focuses on content and data moving, rather than the boxes and wires. It might be public data, open-source, or internal assets that are relevant to the use-cases they run.

Ultimately, operational processes like finding, selecting, refreshing, curation of self-service catalogs, are what enable transparency in their storefront, and allow the teams to do their best work. The need for a platform that brings all of this together is worth the cost for an organization. Rather than build it, they look at requirements to connect together many different software packages and technology components.

So the whole flow -- from acquisition, exchanges, to the catalog itself, and deployment of those assets that come together into almost a protected bubble that houses confidential information, the experience, the requirements, and the operating processes to populate it, keep it clean, curating it, are all in Parr's domain. It's very much a hand-and-glove effort with their technology crew.