For those of you who work in an organization with a named CDAO (or someone acting in a CDAO role), does the CDAO team include data engineers? As opposed to data engineers being in IT only? How is that working for you? Can the CDAO function succeed without engineering talent to execute their priorities?

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Director of Product Management6 months ago

I currently work in CDAO team. My team manages data and ML infrastructure and data engineering. In my prior roles, I led data engineering teams within IT. In my opinion, CDAO can succeed without having engineers on the team provided CDAO and rest of the organization including IT has great collaborative working relationship. CDAO office should be able to make decisions at company level, not just limited to data engineering and analytics.

It’ll be helpful for CDAO to have a small engineering team to perform quick PoC independently.

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VP of Data in Healthcare and Biotech6 months ago

"provided CDAO and rest of the organization including IT has great collaborative working relationship"
I think that's the key.
aligning on priorities and quickly turning around requests

VP of Data6 months ago

I lead the CDAO function and both Data Engineering as well as Analytics Engg/MLOps functions report to me. So far no concerns and having them under one leadership has helped define common OKRs and break any functional silos.

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Chief Data Officer6 months ago

As CDO, I have three "teams" working for me. Data Engineering is one of the three! Requirements flow from the stakeholder to the Analytics team for data products, which creates requirements for our BI team, which in turn, creates requirements for our Data Engineering team. This is not to say that there isn't another group of data engineers working for IT teams, also, but having my own DE team has been very beneficial and efficient!

VP of Data in Software6 months ago

Data engineers continue to be on the IT side, However data citizen role on the business side is critical. CDAO function is crital and has to lead from the front setting the direction so engineering talent continue to deliver value to business.

Chief Data Officer & VP, Enterprise Data Management & Analytics6 months ago

I report into IT (our CIO/CTO), the data engineers, data modelers/architects, Data Governance Administration Team, and data and analytics platform admins and engineers report into my org. We also have Data Scientists on my team, and a team of Analytics Consultants (who develop training/learning paths for business analysts – teaching them to “fish”). None of the business analytics/reporting teams report into my org; instead my org focuses on enabling the business with curated data for their teams to consumer and do self-service analytics. We are creating communities of practice w/these teams and implementing the Analytics Franchise Model and Data Literacy. The business teams share data management responsibilities with my team, most of the data stewards sit on business teams.

The biggest challenge I face is executing change management over teams who do not report into me and who often get direction from their leaders that make enterprise alignment around D&A roles, practices, skills, data governance challenging. My job would be easier of those business teams remained embedded in the business but reported into me.