How does your organization manage Data and Analytics?  Is Data managed outside of IT? If outside of IT, who has the responsibility of the technology, data security, data governance, data quality, reporting? (CIO or Head of Data?)

In our organization, Data & Analytics is truly a cross‑departmental responsibility. While IT plays a critical role, we believe data quality and governance cannot be owned by a single function, every department has a stake in ensuring that data is accurate, secure, and meaningful.

We have a Director of Data Management who, somewhat atypically, reports to our CFO. This structure grew organically: our initial focus on Business Intelligence was driven by financial use cases such as ROI calculations, budgeting, scalability, and financial reporting. Over time, reporting expanded to cover operational insights and even customer‑facing dashboards.

This year, we conducted a feasibility study on moving toward Master Data Management, rather than continuing with fragmented data spread across more than 400 applications. It’s a complex journey, the potential impact is significant, the costs are substantial, and the infrastructure requirements are considerable. We are carefully weighing whether to strengthen and extend our current setup or take the leap toward a centralized data lake.

Strategic investigations like these are led by IT, specifically our Lead Architect reporting to the CIO, with input from myself and others on infrastructure and licensing. But the guiding principle remains: data is a shared responsibility across the enterprise. Finance, IT, operations, and customer teams all contribute to the integrity and value of our data. We see collaboration across departments not as optional, but as the foundation for trustworthy analytics and sustainable growth.

While Data & Analytics is a separate function for IT, there is an important partnership we recognize with IT, our business partners, and finance. AI is being championed by D&A from an enterprise perspective, but deep experimentation within each area of in-app AI as well as our own development of Agents. D&A is a new function (about 1 year old) and we expect to continue to mold and develop responsibilities of each of these areas.

Hi Sally, at BASF we have a central data area - i.e. Data and AI Powerhouse - which is responsible to centrally support the complete organization. This structure is composed by three areas: Data Foundation, Data Excellence and Analytics and AI. We are responsible for central platforms (DW, Data Lake, Data Fabric, Data Integration, ML and AI platforms, Data Catalog, etc.) and central services (Data Governance and Group Data Office). The divisions had divisional data offices, data stewards and data owners - they are more in the responsibility to deploy data products and manage their data domain activities, but under central platforms. With rare exceptions we have Operation Units with independent services - in those case very tailored to support the OD needs.

Data, Business Intelligence and analytics and Data Science are separate teams from IT in our organization. IT owns the source data and the data pipelines. BI owns the ETL and DW. Analytics owns the reporting and dashboards. Data Science owns model building. IT supports all teams as they learn deployment skills.

Data and analytics are part of a technology function. 
In larger organisations, data security remains the responsibility of Head of IT but data governance, data quality and reporting may sit with a Head of Data where there are regulatory requirements or if it requires a cross collaborative effort.