Introduction

Summary

The position of Chief Data Officer (CDO) is relatively new in the business world and has not been universally adopted. As a result, not everyone understands what the responsibilities of the role are, when you need one, and how to hire for it. In this episode Tracy Daniels, CDO of Truist, shares her journey into the position, her responsibilities, and her relationship to the data professionals in her organization.

Announcements

• Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management
• When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their new managed database service you can launch a production ready MySQL, Postgres, or MongoDB cluster in minutes, with automated backups, 40 Gbps connections from your application hosts, and high throughput SSDs. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to launch a database, create a Kubernetes cluster, or take advantage of all of their other services. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show!
• Atlan is the metadata hub for your data ecosystem. Instead of locking your metadata into a new silo, unleash its transformative potential with Atlan’s active metadata capabilities. Push information about data freshness and quality to your business intelligence, automatically scale up and down your warehouse based on usage patterns, and let the bots answer those questions in Slack so that the humans can focus on delivering real value. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today to learn more about how Atlan’s active metadata platform is helping pioneering data teams like Postman, Plaid, WeWork & Unilever achieve extraordinary things with metadata and escape the chaos.
• RudderStack helps you build a customer data platform on your warehouse or data lake. Instead of trapping data in a black box, they enable you to easily collect customer data from the entire stack and build an identity graph on your warehouse, giving you full visibility and control. Their SDKs make event streaming from any app or website easy, and their state-of-the-art reverse ETL pipelines enable you to send enriched data to any cloud tool. Sign up free… or just get the free t-shirt for being a listener of the Data Engineering Podcast at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudder.
• The only thing worse than having bad data is not knowing that you have it. With Bigeye’s data observability platform, if there is an issue with your data or data pipelines you’ll know right away and can get it fixed before the business is impacted. Bigeye let’s data teams measure, improve, and communicate the quality of your data to company stakeholders. With complete API access, a user-friendly interface, and automated yet flexible alerting, you’ve got everything you need to establish and maintain trust in your data. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/bigeye today to sign up and start trusting your analyses.
• Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Tracy Daniels about the role and responsibilities of the Chief Data Officer and how it is evolving along with the ecosystem

Interview

• Introduction
• How did you get involved in the area of data management?
• Can you describe what your path to CDO of Truist has been?
  • As a CDO, what are your responsibilities and scope of influence?
• Not every organization has an explicit position for the CDO. What are the factors that determine when that should be a distinct role?
  • What is the relationship and potential overlap with a CTO?
• As the CDO of Truist, what are some of the projects/activities that are vying for your time and attention?
• Can you share the composition of your teams and how you think about organizational structure and integration for data professionals in your company?
• What are the industry and business trends that are having the greatest impact on your work as a CDO?
  • How has your role evolved over the past few years?
• What are some of the organizational politics/pressures that you have had to navigate to achieve your objectives?
  • What are some of the ways that priorities at the C-level can be at cross purposes to that of the CDO?
• What are some of the skills and experiences that you have found most useful in your work as CDO?
• What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen the CDO position/responsibilities addressed in other organizations?
• What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working as a CDO?
• When is a distinct CDO position the wrong choice for an organization?
• What advice do you have for anyone who is interested in charting a career path to the CDO seat?

Contact Info

• LinkedIn

Parting Question

• From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today?

Links

• Truist
• Chief Data Officer
• Chief Analytics Officer

The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA