A slide taken from one of the speakers at the CDO Summit in London illustrating business drivers and capabilities and how they related to the CDO job. Apparently, it is a new role born in a lighter form straight after the financial crisis springing from the need to have a central figure to deal with technology, regulation and reporting. Therefore, the CDO is basically the guy who acts as a liaison between the CTO(tech guy) and the CAO/Head of Data Science (data guy) and takes care of data quality and data management. Actually, its final goal is to guarantee that everyone can get access to the right data in virtually no time. In that sense, a CDO is the guy in charge of'democratizing data' within the company. It is not a static role, and it evolved from simply being a facilitator to being a data governor, with the tasks of defining data management policies and business priorities, shaping not only the data strategy, but also the frameworks, procedures, and tools.

Apparently, it is a new role born in a lighter form straight after the financial crisis springing from the need to have a central figure to deal with technology, regulation and reporting. Therefore, the CDO is basically the guy who acts as a liaison between the CTO (tech guy) and the CAO/Head of Data Science (data guy) and takes care of data quality and data management. Actually, its final goal is to guarantee that everyone can get access to the right data in virtually no time. It is not a static role, and it evolved from simply being a facilitator to being a data governor, with the tasks of defining data management policies and business priorities, shaping not only the data strategy, but also the frameworks, procedures, and tools. In other words, he is a kind of'Chief of Data Engineers' (if we agree on the distinctions between data scientists, who actually deal with modeling, and data engineers, who deal with data preparation and data flow).

It has been said that this new wave of exponential technologies will threaten a lot of jobs, both blue and white-collar ones. But if from one hand many roles will disappear, from the other hand in the very short-term we are observing new people coming out from the crowd to lead this revolution and set the pace. These are the people who really understand both the technicalities of the problems as well as have a clear view of the business implications of the new technologies and can easily plan how to embed those new capabilities in enterprise contexts. Hence, I am going to briefly present three of them, i.e., the Chief Data Officer (CDO), the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (CAIO) and the Chief Robotics Officer (CRO). Sad to be said, I never heard about a'Chief of Data Science', but for some strange reasons, the role is usually called either'Head of Data Science' or'Chief Analytics Officer' (as if data scientist won't deserve someone at C-level to lead their efforts).