(US and Canada) Steve Muskopf, Director of Data and Advanced Analytics at IGS Energy, speaks with Kensu CEO Eleanor Treharne-Jones in a video interview about CDOs’ technical skills, the reporting structure, data quality, and creating a data governance culture.

Muskopf says that without some technical aptitude, chief data and analytics officers must be tightly partnered with their technical partners. He adds that CDOs are expected to sell data-related projects to other executives. It can be challenging to articulate technical vision and value or respond to questions without proper understanding.

Sharing his experience regarding CDO reporting structure, Muskopf says that including the advanced analytics area in the IT department provided a lot of backbone. He maintains, however, the business side, not IT, should drive that project exploration.

Continuing, Muskopf discusses data governance and data quality. He emphasizes that having quality data is only possible with data governance. He describes data governance as being good stewards of data assets and says that the assets are valuable if they are low quality.

Next, Muskopf highlights the following critical data governance and quality challenges he plans to tackle this year:

• Implementing a modern data modeling tool to show data lineage and incorporate it with the data catalog.
• Creating a list of data owners and users along with their classifications.
• Revisiting data retention policies for new additional data.
• Revamping the data portal and how people run reporting.

Muskopf’s team is currently working on building a community of practice that encompasses the whole data organization to establish a culture of data governance. He says that the community — including members outside the data organization — will review the data catalog and other governance tools as they are introduced.

Muskopf also mentions enabling citizen developers. Stakeholders will be exposed to tools that will make it easier for them to understand the data without becoming technical. According to Muskopf, failing to do that exposes companies to data and operational risks.

CDO Magazine appreciates Steve Muskopf for sharing his insights and data success stories with our global community.

See more from Steve Muskopf

We’re Supposed To Be Good Stewards of Our Data Assets