Your First 90 Days As CDO

The purpose of this article is to have an open dialog around your critical first 90 days as a CDO and to explore the isCDO shared document which offers a template of best practices.

We have created a draft industry standard process by which CDOs, who first enter an organization, can have a best-practices guide which contains a blueprint of concerns, deliverables, and considerations. It is intended to aid individuals in fulfilling the role of the CDO position – which is in itself a conundrum in that CDOs can have vastly different organizational roles and responsibilities.

This article's purpose is to enable and empower CDOs with the primary requirements of the position and establish a cadence with business decision makers.  Just as the Federal Government employed consultants to learn how to better handle incidents (NIMS), it was realized that the best practices require a number of fundamentals – communication, organization, etc.

This article should provide for a number of benefits to a data leader and this will include the following topics:

⮚     Starting Position

⮚     Considerations

⮚     First 30 Days Best Practices

⮚     First 60 Days Best Practices

⮚     First 90 Days Best Practices

We expect that should you utilize the best practices document as your starting point for development of a ‘CDO Commencing Plan’, you will benefit from the experience of industry thought leading CDOs who contributed to this document including:

Todd Harbour MSc, MScM, PgMP, PMP, CDMP, DGSP

Managing Partner

Core4ce LLC

Board Member IsCDO

Michael Servaes

Business Partner

Go Wombat

Exec. Dir. IsCDO

Robert Abate CDMP, CBIP   

Founder & CDO

Band Jam LLC & Industry

Doc. Editor & Member

Consultant

Dr. Peter Aiken

Professor

Virginia Commonwealth University

Board Member IsCDO 

Starting Position

If you fail to plan, you might as well plan to fail…  I wanted to start with this cliché as we can all learn from each other’s failures. This document is at best a guide to start you on the road to planning and at worse, may not match the position you are taking – but will at least give you thoughts and considerations that the test of time has uncovered.

Your First 90 Days Are Critical

It is an essential activity to establish relationships, ascertain the current state of the corporation and environment which you are entering, identify the gaps rapidly, and propose a future state within this time period to be considered successful.

Communications & Best Practices

In order for your communications as a CDO to be clear and concise, we often suggest that one of your first background projects is capturing the organization’s glossary of terms (unique to the company) and systems.  At the isCDO, we have created a industry standard glossary of terms and this can be accessed online on the isCDO website. 

Today we rely upon the standardized definition of things, let’s consider what we refer to as best practices:

“A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to any alternatives because it produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing things..

Best practices are used to maintain quality as an alternative to mandatory legislated standards and can be based on self-assessment or benchmarking. Best practice is a feature of accredited management standards such as ISO 9000 and ISO 14001…

… in the area of best practice and offer ready-made templates to standardize business process documentation. Sometimes a best practice is not applicable or is inappropriate for a particular organization's needs. A key strategic talent required when applying best practice to organizations is the ability to balance the unique qualities of an organization with the practices that it has in common with others.”^[1]