Role Analysis: Chief Data Officer (CDO)

August 18, 2020

Below is my response to an assignment associated with the online course, Business Analytics Executive Overview, by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  It was a good exercise to clarify the role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO).

Assignment Purpose
The purpose of this activity is for students to apply the information discussed in the previous modules to a real-world scenario. This is a required activity for this module. The activity is peer reviewed, so after you submit your responses, you need to review and evaluate other people’s submissions.

Instructions  
You will choose any company or organization that is looking to hire or already has a chief data officer (CDO) [or similar, e.g. Head or Senior VP of Data or Information Management], and a data scientist. Research the company and search the job description or interview the staff of these positions. Then devise a set of interview questions for hiring someone in these positions. Use your knowledge from this class and follow the instructions to complete the required assignments. 

Deliverable 1: Roles in the enterprise 

  • Define the responsibilities and other requirements of the position in the company you choose. 
  • How do you think the role is well-defined or lacking in terms of key responsibilities, deliverables or other ways? 
  • How well do the responsibilities connect to the stated mission and/or vision of the company or organization?  

Deliverable 2: Interview questions 

  • What questions would you ask when interviewing someone for a chief data officer (CDO) position?
  • What questions would you ask when interviewing someone for a data scientist position? 

RESPONSE

Context
Wellington Management Company is a private, independent investment management firm with client assets under management totaling over US$1 trillion. The firm serves as investment advisor to over 2,150 institutions in over 60 countries, as of 30 December 2017. 
According to its web site its mission is, “to exceed the investment objectives and service expectations of our clients worldwide.”

Chief Data Officer Position
Wellington Management views data as a critical asset that needs to be effectively managed to allow us to continually exceed the investment and service expectations of its clients.  It is an important goal that our clients and employees be able to readily access and utilize its critical data. The Firm has made the strategic decision to create a Chief Data Officer position and collect responsibility for data under one single, senior, accountable person.  
The responsibilities and expectations of the Chief Data Officer include, but are not limited to:

Data Strategy – Provide bold strategic vision and leadership for all aspects of the data lifecycle at Wellington. Strategy will encompass the design, implementation and technology for data management and governance, including data acquisition, data maintenance, analytics and insights, and reporting. Ultimately the data strategy should yield tangible business value, including enhanced client service, business growth, timely response to data queries, data security, and reduction of risk due to inaccurate or mis-used data.

Data Catalyst – Seek to instill innovation through data and analytics to generate business insights that result in tangible benefits for its clients and the firm.

Data Governance – Oversee the Enterprise Data Governance team and effectively prioritize, budget and manage timelines and expectations.

Data Technologist – Partner with the technology team and other stakeholders to assess technologies and design cloud-based data and technical architectures to increase business agility, reduce costs and manage complexity. Explore opportunities to rationalize data feeds, data management and data analytics tools.

Stakeholder Management – Develop and maintain collaborative partnerships with business and technology leaders across all business units, the risk and compliance teams, and key stakeholders to ensure a strong understanding and adoption of the standards and expectations of the enterprise data program.

Data Sourcing – Provide expertise in sourcing and managing total spend for external data.

Data Operations – Oversee a team responsible for managing critical firm data.

​Industry Network – Establish an external network of peers to inform the strategy and influence negotiations.

Analysis
I think the role is well-defined in terms of key responsibilities. It could be further clarified via stated deliverables as well anticipated business outcomes (e.g., increase in revenue, improvement in client retention, improved business value of data, etc.) 

I think the responsibilities connect well to the stated mission and/or vision of the company particularly in that investment management is heavily based on having high quality, precise data.  

Question 2
Deliverable 2: Interview questions 
What questions would you ask when interviewing someone for a chief data officer (CDO) position?
What questions would you ask when interviewing someone for a data scientist position?

CDO Interview Questions:

  1. What are the biggest data trends currently, and how should we prepare for the future?
  2. What is your strategy for organizing data structures?
  3. What is the best way to train employees to be more data and digitally savvy?
  4. What is a data culture? Do we need one?
  5. How can we measure the value of our data?
  6. In the case of a data breach, what steps would you take to resolve this?

Data Scientist Questions:

  1. What is the difference between supervised and unsupervised machine learning?
  2. What is bias, variance trade off?
  3. What is exploding gradients?
  4. What is a confusion matrix?
  5. Explain how a ROC curve works?
  6. What is selection Bias?
  7. Explain SVM machine learning algorithm in detail.
  8. Explain Decision Tree algorithm in detail.
  9. How is logistic regression done?