Friday, November 25, 2016

The Position of the CDO in the Organization

Many companies over the past few years have developed the position of Chief Data Officer (CDO), often placing that position in the C-suite. However, exact organizations vary, as one would expect, since organizations vary in their need for data management.

A common aspect of data management in modern business, though, is that data, including big data, along with the infrastructure needed to handle and analyze and, most importantly, put it to good strategic use, is a growing and even critical phenomenon.

Nevertheless there has been debate about whether CDO's should even exist, whether they should report to the CIO, CFO, or the CEO. The roles of the CIO (chief information officer) and CDO have been evolving, particularly in terms of their relationship to the strategic aspects of the business.

It has been obvious that technology has pervaded all aspects of business over recent years. That being the case, the activities of the CIO directly affect all strategic and operational areas of the business. Accordingly some activities that at one time were traditionally CIO activities have been spun off into the functional areas, with the CIO acting as coordinator. At the same time, the CIO has assumed more of a strategic role, working with various functional areas, such as marketing and finance.

Along comes the CDO, with a knowledge of data management, data sources, data infrastructure needs and the importance of data to particular functional areas. Clearly the CDO needs to operate at a strategic level in cooperation with the affected functional areas. One challenge, therefore, is to avoid duplication of effort.

To some extent duplication is not an issue, since the CDO is focused on the data more than the infrastructure and the CIO is more focused on the infrastructure rather than the data. There is a role for both, therefore, at the C-suite table, but their roles need to be clearly defined. And they need to work together.

To have the CDO report to the CIO will likely take away some of the benefits to the organization of advanced data management, so both should report to the CEO.

According to a recent report by the Gartner Group, this is the dominant trend.


Thursday, November 17, 2016

An Era of Machine Intelligence

Gartner Group recently released their annual list of the top ten strategic trends in business. These trends focus on new technologies and how they are being used. They tell us a lot about how technology is shaping our world.

One of the major underlying themes in the list they produced this year is that of intelligence. It is clear that your technology is going to be much more intelligent in future and be able to interact with users on a much more intelligent basis.

By intelligent, they mean an ability to receive input and draw conclusions from it, make decisions and recommend courses of action.

Artificial intelligence plays a big role in this trend and is already being embraced by many companies. So we will see smarter devices in the world of the Internet of Things, as well as smart apps that can make decisions on the basis of data and other input. With the growing usage of oral input to computers, where it is predicted that in the relatively near term, most interaction with computers will be oral, combined with the greater intelligence of computers, we will see the prospect of being able to discuss problems with our computers and come to better decisions. Add in virtual reality and it is possible to foresee an ability to interact in such a way that all sensory perception is used to help in analyzing data, something that could be a big help in coping with big data.

As always, there are pros and cons of these developments. Technology has already replaced a lot of jobs but smarter computers will be able to replace a lot more. So far, most of the jobs replaced have been of the menial variety - repetitious and simple. However, as the intelligence of computers grows, more complex jobs ill be replaced, including some of the traditional professions, like accounting, architecture, many aspects of law and even medicine. But new professions are being created. We already see a strong demand for data analysts. And we are beginning to see a demand for machine trainers - devoted to providing direction to that intelligence.

The question one has to ask is - when will computers be given the right to vote (sic)??

Tuesday, November 08, 2016

Next Generation Technologies for Mobile Commerce

Mobile Commerce has been one of the fastest growing aspects of electronic commerce. It involves the use of smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices to conduct commercial transactions.

While mobile commerce has been growing, often smaller companies are unaware of the potential for enhanced marketing techniques or if aware, are fearful that such techniques will require too much of an investment in technical IT resources.

Enhanced marketing techniques depend on adopting mobile apps that enable some interaction with the customers, such as trying out products in some way, perhaps on a virtual basis, or enabling location based services to gain certain benefits.

The idea is that the mobile devices generate data that can be revealing about the actions and preferences of the customer.

Collecting such data is becoming easier with the development of new apps that involve some such interaction.  However, the issue that arises is how to make use of these data. That's where big data analytics, particularly predictive analytics.

The ability to implement predictive analytics on big data gathered from a wide variety of mobile devices is something that takes some preparation but is becoming increasingly important to the success of mobile e-commerce and therefore to the success of most companies selling products to the public.

Customers will expect marketing efforts directed their way to be customized to their needs and habits, and this is only possible by having the company adopt mobile apps that can collect big data and develop the ability to use analytics to generate those customized marketing techniques.

Frost and Sullivan recently released a useful research report titled "Next Generation Technologies for Mobile E-commerce" which explores these issues and provides some useful guidance. Some interesting summaries of this report can be found at Information Week and on the Frost and Sullivan website.

Mobile Commerce, big data analytics and customized marketing are coming together to create important changes in customer relations.

Thursday, November 03, 2016

Scotland to Start Stock Exchange Using Blockchain


Scotex, The Scottish Stock Exchange, is seeking to raise as much as 15 million pounds ($18.4 million) to start a new regulated equity market next year, according to a statement on Thursday. Executed trades will be processed by Blockchain, the distributed-ledger technology that drives bitcoin. For more on this, click here. And here.