Recently, countries like Canada, Estonia, France, Spain[1] and the United States have established this position of Chief Data Officer.
There are ongoing efforts advocating for this role to be more prevalent within government structures to oversee the data strategy and ecosystem of the respective nations.
The chief data officer has a significant measure of business responsibility for determining what kinds of information the enterprise will choose to capture, retain and exploit and for what purposes.
It can be achieved by knowing the team members and activities performed, the stakeholder values and understanding customer needs.
With the rise in service-oriented architectures (SOA), large-scale system integration, and heterogeneous data storage/exchange mechanisms (databases, XML, EDI, etc.
This person has the responsibility of measuring along various business lines and consequently defining the strategy for the next growth opportunities, product offerings, markets to pursue, competitors to look at etc.
[5] Following the 2008 credit crisis, many major banks and insurance companies created the CDO role to ensure data quality and transparency for regulatory and risk management as well as analytic reporting.
CDOs were originally appointed to focus more executive attention outside the traditional compass of the chief information officer (CIO).