Ep 114 | The Rise of the New C-levels with Dave Mathison from CDO Club

This week Dave Mathison who leads the CDO Club for Chief Digital and Data Officers (and more) joins Allison Hartsoe in the Accelerator to talk about the new C-levels. These new C-levels are tasked with one thing: gaining value from data, particularly digital data. Dave shares how the role of these senior executives has evolved from fad titles to future CEOs and the core 4 responsibilities expected of them now.  

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Allison Hartsoe: 00:00 This is the customer equity accelerator. If you are a marketing executive who wants to deliver bottom line impact by identifying and connecting with your revenue generating customers. Then this is the show for you. I’m your host, Allison Hartsoe, CEO of ambition data. Every other week. I bring you the leaders behind the customer centric revolution who share their expert advice. If you’re ready to accelerate and let’s go!

Allison Hartsoe: 00:28 Welcome everybody. Today’s show is about the rise of the new C-levels, and I’m talking about CDOs, CROs and other creative title changes charged with extracting business value from data. To help me discuss this topic is David Mathison. Dave is the CEO of the CDO summit and the CDO Club. He is the world’s leading expert on CDOs and CAOs, and he’s been quoted by CNBC, the financial times, Forbes, MIT Sloan management review, and a whole bunch more. Dave, welcome to the show.

Dave Mathison: 01:05 Thanks so much for having me on Allison. I appreciate it.

Allison Hartsoe: 01:07 Now, I understand that you have a very interesting background where you saw this coming perhaps before any of us did.

Dave Mathison: 01:15 Yeah. It’s kind of interesting. I started incubating the CDO club when I was managing director at an executive search firm in New York city around the 2010 timeframe. At the time, there were only a few dozen people with that exact title, chief digital officer, or chief data officer. And of course, now there’s all kinds of hybrid titles and chief analytics officers and CDAOs and CDBOs. But at the time, there were very few. So when you say not many people were paying attention, I think the big groups that should have really been paying attention to this one would be the analyst. So the Foresters, the Gartners, McKinsey, et cetera of the world. The other big groups should have been the executive recruitment firms, mostly for the latter because they like to bring on new searches, new employment searches in the C suite because those people usually get 500,000 in salary end up with salary and bonus.

Dave Mathison: 02:03 So, a recruiter typically makes 30% of the first-year cash comp. So with $150,000 incentive, if you can carry 10 or 12 searches a year, you could bring in over a million dollars for your firm. Now, if you’ve got ten employees at your firm, that’s a nice little paycheck at the end of the year. So we were a little bit ahead of the curve at that firm. And basically what I did was I told the headhunter, principal, Hey look, there’s a trend happening here. I really think you ought to pay attention to it. I’d really like to focus my search practice on it. And they completely encouraged me. They were really supportive. And by the way, so is Gartner, you know, if it wasn’t for Gartner, Gartner, the first call I made when I saw this trend, which is my old friend, Dave Aaron and Peter Sondergaard over at Gartner, and they knew that well, their CIO base, their CIOs were at risk if they didn’t reach out and grab these new opportunities.

Dave Mathison: 02:51 And by that the responsibilities of digital transformation, number one and number two, data and analytics. Then they were going to be because all of IT was being outsourced at the time to the cloud and to India and to other places in the world. And a lot of the responsibilities of the CIO were disappearing. So this is a great time for Gartner to actually galvanize their base. So in combination with us and the partner and with the blessing of that recruitment from Janet Selig and the ELA group, I jumped out on my own when I realized this was exploding. And by the way, the real test for me was in 2011 I did a pres, I was invited to the Harvard club to do a presentation through group of fortune 50 CHROs at the Harvard club. And it was so well received that at that point I just decided to, with their permission, I jumped out of ELA group and I started my own company.

Dave Mathison: 03:40 And it really has exploded since then. But we’re at the point now where we went from just a few dozen people in the world with that exact vital. So now, there are thousands and thousands of people throughout the globe with that title as well. So the timing goes wide, and we certainly were a little bit ahead of the curve, and we did get a little bit lucky Allison the acronym for chief digital officer and chief data officer is both CDO, so we got a little bit lucky in that the chief data officer growth has now, but since 2015 chief data officer growth has far outpaced the growth of chief digital officers and we can dig into all that if you’d like later.

Allison Hartsoe: 04:12 Oh yeah. Well, did you know there was a difference between chief data officer and chief digital officer when you started the CDO club?

Dave Mathison: 04:20 Yeah. Well, in the beginning, it was really focused more on digital because there was a lot more happening at the big incumbents on digital transformation. They were hiring these people like crazy. We all know that there have always been data scientists in the tech world and in that field for quite a long time. But they didn’t galvanize around the chief data officer title until around 2008. So for those two big groups, chief digital officers and chief data officers, just to answer your question directly, we targeted the growth of chief digital, but I was always seeing that the data was growing faster than digital and that turning point, those two curves kind of inflected around 2014 when she stayed officer’s just exploded and there has been no letup at all. Whereas chief digital officers may play off and we’re seeing a little bit of the sectors that were disrupted later are now hiring chief.

Dave Mathison: 05:05 They don’t put the check sectors that were disrupted early, like media publishing and music. We see they’ve already brought in maybe one, maybe two, maybe even three rounds of chief digital officers, but now they’re pretty much digital from the ground up and so we’re seeing in some companies they’re not relying on digital. And then a lot of places we’re seeing chief digital officers become CEOs. On the data side, the real growth there took place in 2008 when the world financial crisis hit. And at that point it was pretty clear that it wasn’t this, the limitation on digital is that they’re really only being hired by incumbents that are faced with disruption. On data, the market is huge, right? Because it’s not just incumbents. Every company in the world, every local government, city, state, even federal needs people who are in charge of their data program. So that’s why we’re seeing tremendous growth on the data side.

Allison Hartsoe: 05:52 Got it. So let’s just clarify for everyone who doesn’t know, what is the CDO club?

Dave Mathison: 05:57 Yeah. So I started the CDO club in 2011 on LinkedIn, and we received so much demand that we brought it out on as a web portal in 2014, and right now at the time, it was the world’s largest and first-ever group for chief data officers and it continues to be the biggest in the world. So the community consists of mostly C-suite groups, right? It’s the titles include mostly chief digital officer, chief data officer, chief analytics officer. We also have all the hybrid titles in a CDAO, CBDO, as well as CTOs, CIOs, CMOs, CEOs and board directors. We have a bunch of sort of aspirational people at the senior level, like senior VP or EVP for trying to become CDOs, but we don’t go too far down the stack. Like we don’t have a lot of operational people or VPs and under managers and directors. It’s mostly C-suite and it is global. Our database is strong in North America, Europe, UK, Australia and Asia. And it’s weak just like in every country that has a weak tech sector. We’re not seeing too much of this title being adopted in like, for example, Africa, except for Northern Africa and South Africa. We’re seeing limited exposure in the middle East. Although, some of those countries are exploding now and we’re seeing very little in South America. But other than that, pretty much every other region is exploding, especially on data and analytics.

Allison Hartsoe: 07:15 So, would it be fair to say the purpose of this group was to form a community that could learn from each other?

Dave Mathison: 07:20 Yeah. So we’ve created the community first, and then that’s the first event in 2013. We were the first to ever do an event for chief digital and data officers. It was at Reuters. I can say that the overall resounding refrain and head between all the delegates was, thank God we’ve got a place where we can empathize where we can learn from our peers. We can find out the best practices. In those days, there were no real communities or even events where you could pull all those people together and it was a real relief, I think to those people to find out that there is a group that’s kind of making heroes out of the people that are doing well and explaining their best practices and the kinds of things that they’re working on as exemplars, sports, the rest of the people in the community.

Allison Hartsoe: 07:57 So, it would be fair then to say that the group was set up to bring the community together.

Dave Mathison: 08:01 Exactly. There was no community for chief digital or data officers. So we created the community first on LinkedIn, brought it over to the web and it still is the largest community of these C suite executives in data, digital and analytics. And I think our events to help to do that, you know, as a place to bring people together where they could actually share best practices, commiserate and learn from each other. And it’s been very successful.

Allison Hartsoe: 08:24 People love to learn from each other. There’s nothing better than creating a community. So kudos to you for doing that. But I have to say that I saw this Forbes article that was essentially saying, and it was several years old, so it was probably 2015 2016 maybe, and it said the role of the chief digital or chief data officer was basically an undefined mass and impossible role that would soon disappear as when companies figured out where that role really belonged and the fact that bringing in a CDO wasn’t really going to solve any particular problem for them. So I imagine you have a lot of opinions on this, but maybe tell us why the role is still here.

Dave Mathison: 09:08 Sure. I mean, the interesting thing is we send out a monthly update on CDO hire, and I started doing that in 2014 that’s six years ago now. The reason I did it was really the throat and face of the analyst. So we’re basically saying, you don’t need to hire a chief digital officer. I fought that fight in 2013 and 2014 and 2015 really because I was a tiny company, we’re a little bit on the defensive and I wanted to really show the world this position is important and it does have legs. And Gartner was very supportive of this. As I mentioned before, there were other analysts who weren’t. So what I did was I said, well, I’m going to put up a monthly update that shows all the companies that have hired CDOs and all the companies that are looking to hire them, and also where these CDOs have gone.

Dave Mathison: 09:50 If they’re disappearing and some analysts are saying they’re not that important, well then stop tracking them. But for me, I tracked them and now they’re becoming CEOs and board directors, they’re becoming even more important. So I don’t go into those battles, and by the way, you mentioned it’s on Forbes, but anybody can be a Forbes author now you don’t have to have the, the imprint behind it, but it could be anyone that’s trying to get it clickbait headline to get them to click on an articles. So I stopped responding to those kinds of articles because I used to have authors and journalists and analysts like CMS wire every time Forbes come out with a report, they’d say, Dave, do you want to refute this or give your opinion on it? And it got to the point where it was just ridiculous because that author, I would guarantee you, if you go back to that Forbes author and you say to them, can you give us an update on the CDO situation?

Dave Mathison: 10:33 They didn’t have any data before. They haven’t tracked it like we do. We track it every single day and the fact is just one supporting document is that in the month of January alone in a very slow month, you had chief digital officer hires at Microsoft there, pharmaceutical, Panera bread, Chubb. These are not small companies. Ellison. And if that articles four years ago, why did Microsoft hire an CDO in 2020 you know, why did Panera hire a CDO in 2020, they’re still being hired. So I kind of ignore those articles only because the authors usually have no accountability. They have no facts. They’re trying to click bait headline to get people to link on to their article and then five years later they don’t go back and say, Hey, we made a mistake. There are still CDOs out there. So we just continued to churn out the updates, show anyone whose work was interested in looking into it. They can look into it if they want to do a click bait article. Certainly, up to them. But I ignore it because why give power to people who are not doing the actual research? We’re doing the actual research, so it’s just not worth our time anymore to refute any of that stuff. Just go to our website. You could see the companies that are being hired.

Allison Hartsoe: 11:36 So, I want to talk about what kinds of companies are hiring CDOs, but before we do roughly how many CDOs and CDO proxies do you think there are out there?

Dave Mathison: 11:45 It’s for chief digital, you know we’re tracking at least 5,000 people with that exact title and hybrid, so that could be chief digital marketing officer, chief digital information officer, chief information and digital officer, chief digital and data officer. And there were all kinds of hybrid title and so on data it’s even bigger. So, we’re tracking about 7,000 people with the titles of chief data officer chief analytics officer, chief data scientist. The majority of those are chief data scientists and that’s the scientist title entails that they don’t have any management responsibilities. We track the CDO title because they are usually responsible for a whole team of analysts and data people underneath them. And that’s the group that’s growing like wildfire. As I said before, the limitation on hiring new chief digital officers is that they’re mostly being hired by companies that are being disrupted for as on the data and the analytics side. Every size company is hiring people to manage data and it doesn’t have to be an incumbent. It can be a startup as well as the federal, state, local governments and nonprofits. They all need data people. So, there’s a real challenge on the data side to continue to get seasoned executives who’ve got experience in that role. So, we don’t see that going away anytime soon.

Allison Hartsoe: 12:51 And so, if you were going to say that you mentioned these are companies that are being disrupted, some of them are government, some of them are public companies. If you had to break it into a graphic pie chart, I only say that because we all know that pie charts only are allowed so many pieces of pie. What would be the density for different types of companies in different areas? Like if you had to say government has what percentage? Just roughly.

Dave Mathison: 13:12 Yeah, it’s always a photo though. It’s a snapshot, not a video. Right. I mean, I could take a snapshot of what it looks like right now, and I have been asked this question at every period through the history, right? In 2013 it was mostly for digital. It was mostly media publishing, music, entertainment, right? MTV was the first ever company to hire a chief digital officer in 2003 right? And they were feeling disrupted by Napster and peer to peer and NBC universal hired the second ever chief digital officer hired that was in 2004, that is right after MTV because they just figured, okay, if music was first to be disrupted, long form entertainment is next. But now as I mentioned in January, you had companies like cognizant Chubb, Bare, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Pinera, and Sainsbury’s. You can see a difference. There’s no media companies in that group. If these companies there in retail and food and beverage, McDonald’s, Panera, Sainsbury’s, a grocery store, right?

Dave Mathison: 14:04 Chubb insurance, Bare pharmaceutical. It’s all those companies that were a little late to disruption and didn’t really feel the impact into 2013 2014 2015. So now we’re free to take a snapshot on data, digital. It would look a lot more like tech, sports, things like insurance, all the regulated industries. They weren’t affected because they were regulated by digital, but now they’re getting disrupted like crazy. So banking, insurance, pharmaceutical, they’re all hiring digital. I can give you that same snapshot for data cause it’s a little different. And interestingly, so on data, if you, you’d ask me, in 2013 the real hires and data were the opposite of digital. They were all in the regulated industries. Why? In 2008 we had the world financial crisis. Government stepped in to all these companies that said you need more oversight and governance over your data. You saw a requirement that Chief Data Officer’s we hired in not only companies but in federal, state, local governments.

Dave Mathison: 14:54 So we saw tremendous growth in those field. And it’s only now though that we’re seeing the data officer’s being hired in some of the unregulated industries. Right? So media, entertainment, they’re all struggling to get these qualified data people on board. But it was the bigger growth in that market was in the municipal space in the early days. So interesting difference. But now it’s all come together and that we’re seeing both digital and data people being hired at just about any company. And by the way, I said that most digital people are hired by incumbents. Now we’re seeing even YouTube, and you know companies like Pandora. What you think of startups and disruptors, they’re actually being disrupted, especially by blockchain. So I believe that if I were to forecast ahead, I would argue that we’ll probably see a lot more uptake in chief digital officers, at the startups as well. Quote unquote, stuff.

Allison Hartsoe: 15:41 Yes, definitely. I think there’s a lot of startups. We had the CDO from Poshmark Barkha Saxena on the show not too long ago, and I think that really gave them a lot of juice when they put that role in early, allowed her to build out very strategically and then leveraged everything that was built for just the hockey stick of growth that they went up. So I would agree with your forecast there, but could you talk a little bit about the responsibilities? You alluded to this before, but the responsibility of a chief digital officer versus a chief data officer. And one of the things that you said that I think was particularly important was the management role. And that’s different from a chief data scientist.

Dave Mathison: 16:21 Right. So on digital core responsibilities, and again it’s kind of like how long is a piece of string? It all depends on the company, the sector, their competition, and what the president of time digital called the turning radius. You know, if you’re in a ship, how quickly can you turn that ship without capsizing it? Right? So for digital, I would say the core four responsibilities would be they need to be number one, in finding products with new revenue streams, usually dragging analog concepts to the digital online world. Number two, they need to cut costs using digital for improved communications, efficiencies, et cetera. Number three, they want to improve customer service, to be everything through chatbots, online attendance, et cetera. And number four is operational efficiencies. So that’s maybe for Cisco was improving the supply chain. So for every one of those four, you’re usually finding companies bringing in a chief digital officer for all four of those.

Dave Mathison: 17:11 But it all depends on the company that they’re parachuting into. And a good example is when our media, they do rolling stone, us weekly mentioned they brought in three CDOs in the course of three years. Then they all failed. The first one they brought in when they brought him into CEO Yon Winter said publicly, very famously, I’m not going to support the iPad. So how do you drag a comfortable company like rolling stone from a print magazine to a digital platform? And they’re not even going to when the CEO says they’re not going to support the iPad. So he left after a year and then they brought on another one for you. And so every company is different, and at every sort of stage in their evolution, that’s going to be different. So Cisco’s a good example of number four, they don’t really have their customers or their suppliers and their partners.

Dave Mathison: 17:53 So, for digitization to them and improving the supply chain, the IRS is going to have a completely different set of requirements for CDO who hops in there and tries to digitize the IRS just like they did with HMRC in the UK. But those would be the four core. The difference between digital and data is data people are generally brought on for a number of different reasons and, again, depends on how far the company has gone in their data implementation. But usually, they’re coming in to number one, get a data strategy in place and set. So that means they’ve got to get data architecture, the correct data governance, they gotta do this all within the regime of privacy and security regarding everything from GDPR to the California privacy policy that’s been enacted by the state. And then once they’ve got their data architecture governance and strategy set, then at that point, usually a year from now or whatever it might be, they’re really bringing in all the real-time insights and analytics on to that data.

Dave Mathison: 18:45 And that could be a whole new different set of skill sets that you’ll need. Or maybe you have those skill sets internally and I’ve seen a lot of chief data officers take on the hybrid title of chief data and analytics officers because what I feel is happening and what I think they’re seeing is the real strategic role is going to be an analytics and not so much data. Data are going to get kind of boring once you get the governance, and the architects are set, there’s nothing there to do except to keep the lights on. It’s real-time analytics and insights. It’s going to create competitive differentiation.

Allison Hartsoe: 19:12 Well at least until the next blockchain thing comes out, I can see that, and you know, in a way I can almost see an existence of both roles or maybe a fluidity between the hybrid being what happens when a company has the data dial then and is looking to move up and become stronger from the data. But then I think it’s almost an agile process where new tech comes out, new innovations come out, new data systems come out and all of a sudden you have to kind of tilt back to that side of the coin and say, Oh, are we going to be on the iPad or not?

Dave Mathison: 19:47 Yeah, I completely agree, and it goes back to these roles. I think when we originally discussed, there were a lot of C-suite roles out there, chief innovation officer, chief revenue officer, chief sales officer. How do you differentiate, and how do you clearly define what the roles and responsibilities are for everyone in the C suite? So people don’t feel competitive, or they don’t feel there’s a threat that they’re all working together for the same common goal. So we do see these hybrid titles pop up Chief digital and data officer. In my mind, Allison, the people who are best suited to become CEOs in this digital world are people who have those three core skills. One is they understand digital transformation. Two, is they understand data-driven culture, and three is they understand insights and analytics. That’s what that sort of hybrid role of chief digital data and analytics is so important. Then those people are not, this isn’t a forecast is really happening. Those people are actually becoming CEOs and board directors of publicly traded companies. So that’s why I think it’s important to track the careers of these people and see what roles are taking on at their organization. Because I agree with you a hundred percent, you really can’t get a core digital transformation strategy if it’s not built on a solid foundation of data insights, analytics and also I would argue privacy and security.

Allison Hartsoe: 21:00 Yeah, and I’m so glad that you mentioned that because I always think that’s a really good sign in that when a CDO is moving up to the board level or to the CEO role, there’s a certain amount of sensitivity that comes into the organization. I forget if it was Gartner Forest or that was going on and on about the age of the customer, and now we’re in the age of the customer, and so often we see this come out as customer experience, which always bugs me because it’s not very specific. It’s as if just having a great experience walking into a lovely store is enough to hit the bottom line. And what I think at CDO brings is that laser-like focus that says, now we’re going to think about this as yes we want a good customer experience, but let’s think deeply about the second and third-order operations that drive really good quality for our customers according to the things they need and where they are in their relationship with us. Would you agree with that?

Dave Mathison: 21:57 I totally agree. And it also explains those movements. Not so much of CDOs, the CEO and president, but CDO is publicly traded board slots because there’s a lot of investor and shareholder scrutiny over putting a new person on the board, and you really have to prove you’re going a few days. And so right to your point, why would somebody like Adam Brotman? So, Adam Brotman, he was chief digital officer and EVP at Starbucks for years, and it’s seven or eight years, and he joined the board of Neiman Marcus. So how does a guy on retail or food and beverage become a board member of a clothing company? I mean, it shows the strategic value that these people have and some other examples. Charlie Cole, he was at CDO at Tommy, Tommy bought up by Samsonite, and now he’s CDO at FTD. I mean it’s very rare that a C suite person can move from sector to sector with such agility that I’ve seen CDOs move and I think it’s a reflection of the fact that if you can bring an analog company digital in one sector, you could probably do it in another.

Dave Mathison: 22:55 Another good example is Jacquelyn, right? She’s currently CDO at Microsoft. She just joined the board. James Kuffner keeps charge of CDO at Toyota auto robotics. He’s now a board director at Toyota and even at the startup, Sheila Jordan is a CDO chief digital technology officer, Honeywell. She just joined the board of Slack, and by the way, we saw of the 13 CDOs who became board directors last month, nine of them were women. So the majority of the board directors were women and CDOs. We just love this, and again, I think it shows the importance of this role. It goes beyond the company, beyond the sector they’re being brought on board specifically for their strategic value in helping companies rise to the challenge of the digital and data age.

Allison Hartsoe: 23:34 Yeah, I think that’s exactly right, and that’s a really amazing insight that at the executive level, you have almost that it might even be a 50 50 balance. I don’t know. I haven’t counted. Maybe you have, but it sounds like there’s a lot of traction. It’s not about whether you’re a man or a woman, it’s about what you’re able to get done.

Dave Mathison: 23:50 Exactly. By the way, if you, while 101 CDOs become CEO, it doesn’t sound like a lot, given that they’re only a couple thousand, 10,000 people with that exact title, compare it for the hundreds of thousands of CMOs and CIO who never make that leap to CEO. What’s different about the CDO that prepares them for that leadership role? And so what I did was I just scratched the surface. I looked into every one of those hundred CDOs who became CEO and board director. I looked at all their LinkedIns and their CVS, and in fact, if you scratch the surface, they were all previously president or CEO before, so it’s not like they came up from a marketing track or they came up from a tech track. These people are business builders, so it’s only natural that they went from CDO to CEO. They’ve actually been CEO already. In the majority of cases, I would say 65% of them were previously president, CEO or executive director.

Allison Hartsoe: 24:39 Oh, that’s really interesting. And kind of continuing along that line, I think it’s interesting that you mentioned CMOs because I think CMOs is one of those roles that has a very high turnover rate. Is there also a similarly high turnover rate for CDOs? I mean, you mentioned rolling stone before and having three CDOs over the course of three years. It doesn’t sound like that’s typical. What is typical?

Dave Mathison: 25:04 Yeah, so I did that. It’s a good question. I’m glad you asked it because again, we were battling, I won’t mention the names of some of the analysts, but they were basically saying there’s a turnover in CDOs. So I went and I did the research, and I found we had a three to five for chief digital officers. He had a three to five-year tenure at incumbent, and some of the outliers were like, you know, the guy, uh, Adam Brotman at Starbucks. He was there for seven years. Ellie Hirshhorn was CDO at Simon and Schuster for six years. The guys, the BBC was there for six years, and then you see the people were only there for like one year stent. I would say that while it’s not as bad for CMOs for a time there, it was like 24 months, it was getting, the revolving door was really, really quick.

Dave Mathison: 25:38 I would say that I think the reasons that the tenure was low and is slightly low as well in CDOs are completely different than the reasons for the load CMO tenure. Right. I think CMOs are being challenged because they aren’t hitting their numbers. With CDOs, there’s a lot of reasons they’ll leave after a year and like the one with which Liner Media was a good example. Who would want to stick around when you’re a birthright, it’s digital native, and all you think about is disruption, and your CEO is saying he’s not going to play ball. I mean, you’re not going to stick around. And also there is the shell game where CDOs are moving because there are higher paid opportunities, there were a few of them, and so the demand decides the supply is low, they’re going after the golden rain. So a lot of them are just grabbing the next best job and moving up and up.

Dave Mathison: 26:16 Not necessarily because they didn’t fulfill their mission, but most of them do stick around for three years. Most of them are brought on in the contract. They have a budget. They have a head count. They’re dedicated, you know head count. They’re directly reporting to the CEO. There’s no threat for them to leave, and they’d like to see that the job gets done. But there is, I would say too, there is an even quicker turnaround. What we’re seeing in chief data officers, chief data officers are jumping around really, really quickly now because there’s so much demand and salaries are going through the roof. Now there’s gotta be some kind of certification process, I would think, or validation process that comes in over time because everybody’s throwing the title on their LinkedIn resume, whether they have the experience or not because it’s just clickbait for executive recruiters. We really want to make sure that we’re getting those people that are ten years, 15 years experience underneath them before they start throwing the title around. That’s how crazy it’s getting.

Allison Hartsoe: 27:02 Yeah, that makes sense. And you’ve mentioned the importance of CEO support a couple of times, and I imagine if you’re a chief disruption officer, meaning CDO of digital or data or any of the hybrid titles that CEO support is maybe more than valuable, maybe critical. Is that the number one challenge for this role, or are there other challenges that a person coming into that role would really have to be careful with?

Dave Mathison: 27:28 Yeah, for the biggest challenge is the culture. Technology’s easy. The culture is the hardest to change. You really want people in this role of strong IQ, strong managers, team leaders, people can tell the teams, let’s go take that Hill. No questions asked. They follow them wherever the lead. But the core requirements for the job description, I would say I do not advise any CDO to take a role where they’re reporting to CMOs or CIO is or CTOs, you basically you’re flying. If your job is the requirement is that you get certain things done, you have to borrow money from marketing or if the bar and park Allen from IT, you’re probably going to have less likelihood of getting your job done. Then if you have a direct reporting line to the budget of say the CEO and the board and you have your own budget, your own head counts and so that’s what we usually in our job descriptions when we write them up for our candidates, we always bake that in and there’s a direct reporting on it and we’ve seen that from so many examples. I don’t want to give them, cause I’d be naming names of the companies, but the ones that have been most successful have a direct reporting line, budget head count. The ones that aren’t as successful have been frustrated because they’re in another line of vendors they don’t have.

Allison Hartsoe: 28:29 And when they come in, is that direct report to the CEO also enabling their own fresh based team, or are they still matrixing and pulling across?

Dave Mathison: 28:38 Right. So some people are matrixing like especially with analytics teams, right? Analytics teams may be reporting into sales. Another group may report into marketing, another group they report into tech. We always see data as a service level organization for the whole company and not necessarily right up to one line of business. So we do see some CDOs coming in and having to get some matrix reporting from other groups. But we also see their core group is dedicated to that know their, their team and their mission.

Allison Hartsoe: 29:03 Got it, got it. Well, you know we oftentimes talk about customer lifetime value, customer centricity, everything customer on the show. And I wanted to ask you, you highlighted the importance of this role reporting directly into the CEO, and I agree with that, but what about somebody who’s a chief customer officer? Is that a role that can help ease the cultural change or help make a CDOs job more successful? Or, if they reported to a CCO, would they have more leverage?

Dave Mathison: 29:34 The more clearly you define the roles and responsibilities on the job description know the better so that the doesn’t feel this is a threat, but they’re out there to help. We generally see these groups working together hand in hand. For example, you know we did our biggest deal in our eight-year history this quarter with IBM, and one of the partners in the IBM I X organization, their agency is doing a personalization CX webinar with Forrester, and we’re promoting that for them. They’ve won the access to our base because a lot of our digital and data people are either responsible or have hybrid reporting lines into CSO, CRO, CCO, and they’re really trying to uncover leads. So our base does include that as well. And again, I think if you think about the core strategy for a company, I can go both ways on it, but I have to say that around 2014 or 2015, we gave out two CDO of the year awards.

Dave Mathison: 30:23 I’ll be very brief on this, but the guy we gave it to in London was a guy named Mike Bracken. He turned digital government on its head, right when he started at 5,000 websites in government. He brought it down to one. You know what it’s like to do that in government and it’s gov.uk, right? So instead of going to a website, if you’re a business and you want to open up a company, and you need a permit, or you need a license, or you’re a fisherman, you want to get a fishing license instead of waiting through all these websites to try to figure out where to go, and you see all these pictures of politicians kissing babies and cutting ribbons. Instead, it’s like Google. His goal, Mike’s goal was to make government service as easy to use as Amazon. Let’s make a government website as easiest to use as Google.

Dave Mathison: 31:00 And he did it. That’s customer, and I gave him that award. It’s a CDO of the year for Europe that year because his was a relentless and obsessive focus on the customer, who’s the customer in government service, every citizen. So he had to deal with the elderly and handicapped and visually impaired and think about it. That’s a massive brief, and he did it with a relatively small budget. That, to me, is a chief digital officer who understands putting customers first, and I wish that every CDO in the world and every CX person was as relentlessly focused on making their products as simple to use as Google and as Amazon. I think we’d have a lot easier navigable websites than we do now. But maybe I digress.

Allison Hartsoe: 31:34 I think we’re probably on our way there, especially as the data systems get to be tuned underneath. There’s little excuse for why can’t that stronger customer focus take flight, but that is an incredible achievement of 5,000 government websites to one. I can’t imagine.

Dave Mathison: 31:51 And by the way, one of the pillars we talked about, we talked about three pillars. One was for CDOs and CEO. One was a solid understanding of digital to data three is analytics. You talked a little bit about privacy and security too, but I would argue that identity management is also another huge issue that has to be resolved and thought through before you really go through a massive digital transformation process. If it’s not built on a solid foundation of identity management data and analytics, then the digital transformation will likely fail because then you’re just repainting your websites. Right?

Allison Hartsoe: 32:21 Exactly. And let’s dig into that a little bit. So we talked about the pillars, but let’s say I’m convinced that I want to put a CDO in my company, and I want them to deliver on all of these priorities. What should I expect them to deliver? And for example, our goal is to improve the efficiency of acquisition and increase the uptake of our products and improve the loyalty of our existing customer base. Right now, I’ve got like lots and lots of goals all at once. What should a CDO be trying to deliver when they come in?

Dave Mathison: 32:54 Get the goal set, make sure that you’ve had conversations with everyone else in the C suite and select the board members. Then prioritize that list. And then I would say after you prioritize the tick, a couple of quick wins first. Get the quick wins first in a couple of different departments. Also, by the way, while you’re talking with your C suite gears, find out who the cheerleaders are. And a good example is the old pothole app, right? Every city has a puddle. Hey, why isn’t anybody fixing it? You could take a picture of it and your phone, upload it to the new york.com portal, and the next thing you know, they’re out there tarring the street, right? Well, the problem was when Rachel jumps into New York City as a CDO under mayor Bloomberg, she found that a couple of different departments had pothole labs, but they weren’t.

Dave Mathison: 33:31 The problem with axes. It’s great when you launch them, but you got to continue to update them, and somebody has to monitor them, right? To keep them going. So the devil is in the details. It’s great to have a list of priority. But the reality is once you start getting stuff done. So at Rachel’s case, she found out the person who had the most successful app, the one that was being monitored and being taken care of, and she just reemphasized it and really anointed that person as the person in charge of that app, she found her cheerleader. Right? And you need to find all those cheerleaders that will make your job a lot easier. But the reason I think is those quick wins first is you want to show some wins quickly. You know, you’ve got a longterm goal over a year or two years to generate X amount of revenue in digital versus print. And I think if you look back in 2013 and 2014 at companies like the BBC, that was their goal. Like, let’s move everyone from print to digital. Let’s also reimagine our editorial process and re-engage our editors worldwide with a simpler system. Those were his two big goals. He couldn’t accomplish them in two months. I was going to take two years. So let’s get some quick wins while we’re going down the path of the bigger goal.

Allison Hartsoe: 34:29 Yeah, and that makes sense. And I love what you said about how Rachel in New York City echoed the power of somebody else inside the organization and brought that to light. Now that might be a great example of either a quick win or something that can get more progress. Something almost like clearing the hurdles for the goodness that’s already inside the organization. And I always believe this, every organization has a lot of unlocked goodness people who are just killing it, and for one reason or another, they’re just stuck. And perhaps the CDO is the one who comes in and says, Hey, I’ve got a gold nugget over here and let’s make something out of this. It sounds like that’s what she did.

Dave Mathison: 35:08 Yep. Rachel made her a hero, and she felt wanted and loved by the government agency. This is great. And by the way, let’s not underestimate, you said how important it is to report into the CEO. Same thing is true in municipal, right? Like Rachel was super lucky that she reported into Bloomberg. You had arguably the leading technologist mayor in the world running the city, right? This guy blew out Reuters. I mean he basically with the Bloomberg hurdle, he was the only competition Reuters had for decades. The guys are brilliant technologists. So knowing that you’ve got a technology-driven CEO made it a lot easier for Rachel to get some of that stuff through. So that may be why other cities and other mayors have not seen the success that New York did. Rachel is also a really good example of somebody who went beyond digital.

Dave Mathison: 35:51 I think that’s why I brought it up in the first place. Rachel also understood data. So her goal in the first iteration was to get 200 data sets out to the public. She ended up getting a thousand data that’s out. And then lastly, she also is really, really strong in social media. Most CDOs, they don’t do a lot of Twitter or Facebook, right? But Rachel is really, really popular online. She had it all. She was digital. She was data. She’s analytical. She started up, and by the way, she also brought together the communities of Cornell and NYU. So if you want to reimagine a city, you can’t do that in a vacuum. You’ve got to pull together government entrepreneurship as well as education. And she did all of it. So I wish she was still in the public sector. Now, doing some private stuff, but a really good example of somebody who gets digital data and analytics and so forth.

Allison Hartsoe: 36:35 Yeah, exactly. And wanna mentioned one more thing about the problem of being in the public sector is when she gets those datasets out to the public, you’ve also got a PR problem in that moment that you release the data. And that’s a very tricky thing to do, right? Most private companies or even publicly traded companies don’t regularly release their data sets.

Dave Mathison: 36:57 Right? So you really want to know where the most violent crimes are rapes or murders, but in fact, it ends up turning into a positive. Although while those numbers look kind of scary, it keeps people away from certain areas that you shouldn’t be going in. And you never had that map of that data until Rachel distributed it to the public to allow people to do acts on it. You know, hackathon or Jolie’s hackathons and now all of a sudden you’ve got really interesting visuals of all that data that was just sitting in the silos somewhere.

Dave Mathison: 37:21 In the basement of Walton. Yeah.

Allison Hartsoe: 37:23 Well Dave, this has been a really great discussion. So if people want to reach you or find out more about the CDO club or the CDO summit, what is the best way for them to get in touch?

Dave Mathison: 37:33 Thanks Allison. Our websites are CDOclub.com, and our events are at cdosummit.com, and they can always reach me. Email is best david@cdoclub or cdosummit.com and on LinkedIn. I’m just linkedin.com/davidMatt.

Allison Hartsoe: 37:47 Great, and I think you do have an event coming up soon at the end of May 2020?

Dave Mathison: 37:52 Yeah, thanks. We actually had a physical event coming up next week. We can say May 6. I think the recording of this will probably be too late, but we are doing something for a Forester and IBM IX on personalization and customer experience on and it’s a free webinar. Anyone can join on May 27th.

Allison Hartsoe: 38:07 Great, wonderful. Well, we can certainly include that link with our show notes, and as always, links to that webinar as well as everything else we discuss are at ambitiondata.com/podcast. Dave, thank you so much for joining us today and bringing the insights about this new role and the ways people are really gaining traction. It’s been very valuable.

Dave Mathison: 38:28 My pleasure. Thank you, Allison. Please stay safe and well?

Allison Hartsoe: 38:31 Remember when you use your data effectively, you can build customer equity. It is not magic. It’s just a very specific journey that you can follow to get results. See you next time on the customer equity accelerator.