The need for an executive responsible for an organization’s information assets today may seem obvious. But some organizations still struggle with making a business case for the role. And even existing chief data officers can be confounded about how to formally justify their existence. This session will share eye-popping findings and analyses from Mr. Laney’s study of hundreds of organizations with and without a CDO. 

As any good scientist knows, and any good data scientist should know, most discoveries begin with a hypothesis. We see a lot of surveys about the CDO role but don’t really have much of a point to make or look at the impact a CDO makes. This study examined over 500 organizations to determine how businesses with a CDO operate differently.

 Drawing from the study's conclusions, attendees will learn about the benefits of a CDO, and how having one affects data quality, governance, data democratization and monetization. We'll explore whether having a CDO affects an organization's ability to value its data and how investors perceive it, and look at the career path of CDOs to better understand what makes an actual C-level CDO.

Increasingly, IT and business executives talk about information as one of their most important assets or "the new oil." But few behave as if it is. Executives report to the board on the health of their workforce, their financials, their customers, and their partnerships, but rarely the health of their information assets. And corporations typically exhibit greater discipline in managing and accounting for their office furniture than their data.

In this session, Mr. Laney will share insights from his best-selling book, Infonomics, about how organizations can actually treat information as an actual enterprise asset. He will discuss why information both is and isn’t an asset and property, and what this means to organizations themselves and the investment community. And he will cover the issues of information ownership, rights, and privileges, along with alternative data challenges and opportunities, and his set of generally accepted information principles culled from other asset management disciplines. 

This session will be beneficial for those looking to help their organization move beyond the trite “data is an asset” or “data is the new oil” lip-service to begin acting that way. You'll learn how to monetize information assets in a wide variety of ways, including a number of real-world examples; how to manage information as an actual asset by applying asset management principles and practices from other asset domains; how to measure information’s potential and realized value to help budget for and prove data management benefits; and how classic microeconomic concepts can be applied to information for improved data architecture & management, and economic benefits.