Introduction

This chapter looks at the imperatives for the CDO after the first 100 days in post. It stresses the importance of getting back to the strategic. This chapter is very much aimed at the CDO; however, it can also be a useful read for the early members of the CDO team to help understand what is going to happen next.

You’ve now got through the first 100 days, settled into a new business, met your new colleagues, got a first impression of the data environment and the state of the nation and carried out your own assessment of the maturity of the data environment. You’re probably bursting with ideas and plans. In our experience you will have spoken to more people than you can remember and been in a lifetime of meetings and will have many notebooks full of writing. That is the only way to throw your arms around what is going on and to make a true assessment of the data estate and processes. You will also have spent 100 days listening carefully so as to understand the direction and aspirations of the business.

While things will obviously look different depending on what generation of CDO you are, the steps are the same. An SCDO might be able to skip through some of them faster, but if you miss the steps altogether, how confident can you be that you are standing on firm foundations? The FCDO Replayed may need to take longer over some of the earlier steps, such as … assessing data maturity or building a data governance framework to meet the challenges of either the earlier failure of a CDO or a reset of the organisation's data journey.

The next three steps

This is the moment to do three things, and they are sequential. First: draw a breath and take a moment to pull all the thoughts and those meetings together, review the notes you have taken and make an assessment of the state of the data maturity and what needs to be done. The following are the points to measure against:

• 1 Reporting and analytics. Is this efficient, how many reports are produced and who for? It is a good idea if possible to calculate the FTE hours expended on reporting, the number of reports and cost per report.