(USA and Canada) Dr. Inderpal Bhandari, Global Chief Data Officer at IBM and Advisory Board Chairman & Strategic Advisor at CMU’s New Chief Data Officer Certificate Program, and Dr. David Steier, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Lead Faculty at CMU’s New Chief Data Officer Certificate Program, together with Mark Johnson, Editorial Board Chair at CDO Magazine, discuss the evolution of the CDO role. Bhandari explains that the role has been around for some time, but the actual "CDO" (Chief Data Officer) label is more recent. This transformation began when awareness of the strategic role of data could play started to be recognized, specifically within the C-Suite.