Technology job titles and specialist role designations are many, various and not always clearly illustrative of the function that a person might carry out in the workplace.
While badges like ‘specialist systems consultant’ or ‘user engagement facilitator’ might be among the more woolly of the job titles we use today, at least we know that ‘software programmers’ generally program and ‘database administrators’ generally do what it says on the tin.
Among the roles we are still working to get to grips with is the CDO, the chief data officer.
The birth of the CDO
Unsurprisingly and understandably, the first CDOs (that may have been around as early as the Jurassic period, which in this case is probably the 1990s) were mostly focused on the state of enterprise data from a security, privacy and storage perspective. Only the most progressive of this breed would be thinking about establishing data policy controls and fewer still would be thinking about data analytics, big or otherwise.
Where we sit today is at a more progressive point of data usage where we now think about the health and wealth of an organisation’s whole data value environment and ecosystem.