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
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.
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.
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]
Given this definition, we started out by creating a ready-made template for the CDOs to utilize as a standard business process document that could be customized to the needs of the individual, role and corporation. This template, a MS Word Document entitled “isCDO MIT CDOIQ - CDO 90 Day Action Plan DRAFT.docx”, can be found on the isCDO website under Members – Share Materials.
Consider our government: not always the most efficient in terms of planning and executing. They learned from the fire in California (with much loss of life and property) that the integration of many resources into a functioning and well-oiled machine required a framework. They called it the NIMS – National Incident Management System and was based off of:
⮚ Common Terminology
⮚ Modular Organization
⮚ Management by Objectives
⮚ Incident Action Planning
⮚ Manageable Span of Control
⮚ (Incident) Facilities and Locations
⮚ Comprehensive Resource Management
⮚ Integrated Communications
⮚ Establishment and Transfer of Command
⮚ Unified Command
⮚ Chain of Command and Unity of Command
⮚ Accountability
⮚ Dispatch/Deployment
⮚ Information and Intelligence Management
Consider that we as newly hired Chief Data Officers will have to handle incidents - so we could look to other best practices for our introduction. Notice that the first element is a common terminology – if I say ‘boot” and one person is thinking of a western wear shoe and the other the trunk of a car, we have failed as data leaders. If a person in the organization cannot find the data, we have also failed. The first and foremost job of the Chief Data Officer is to create a common terminology from which the entire organization can work from. That is why one of the deliverables for the first 90 days is a data dictionary – it defines the data and its location(s) along with terminology used.
Consider in the insurance industry that an incoming CDO must consider placing data governance around the master data of CPT and ICD-10 codes – the primary mechanism for billing and income for the corporation.
Consider also the last bullet above, ‘information and intelligence management’ – that is our role in the organization and the trail route to get there must be a clear and concise plan to get to the bottom of the list starting from the top.
The isCDO shareable best practices document contains the following sections which will serve as an outline for our article.
(Refer to Image 2)
We have identified previously and at the MIT CDOIQ Symposium that CDOs can have vastly different organizational roles and responsibilities – but we all have the same mission. We represent and manage the data independently of who we report to, how many resources we manage, and what our title is. Now let’s start with the first 30 days and how we must introduce our plan to the organization.
There are a number of industry standards and best practices with respect to data and these industry practices and standards should be considered when we enter the first 90 days – which we are going to implement or focus on.
(Refer to Image 3)
Robert Abate has over 30 years of experience in Data Management and is considered by his peers as an industry thought leader. As a hands-on, accomplished IT and Big Data professional, Robert has been credited with building teams that develop and implement revolutionary solutions to complex challenges faced by the business. He is credited as one of the first to publish on Services Oriented Architectures (1996), and is a respected IT thought leader within the field of Big Data Analytics & Real-Time Information Integration. He holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Electronic Engineering, and is a Certified Business Intelligence Professional [CBIP] and Certified Data Management Professional [CDMP] in four disciplines. Mr. Abate chairs and presents at global conferences and authored the DMBoK chapter on Big Data & Analytics. He was previously Global Director of EIM & Analytics at Kimberly Clark, and prior Director of Enterprise Information Architecture and later Enterprise Information Management with Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. where he and his team architected and delivered the first Big Data integration, visualization and analytics immersion environment for the business (called the “Data CAFE”) which he and his team received the Wal-Mart Technology Project of the Year in January of 2014. In August of 2020, he was cited twice in “The 97 Things About Ethics Everyone in Data Science Should Know” – ‘The collective wisdom from the experts’.[3]
[1] Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_practice
[2] Credit to: - CDOIQ Symposium Presentation 2018
[3] “The 97 Things About Ethics Everyone in Data Science Should Know”, Bill Franks, ISBN: 978-1-492-07266-9