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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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.
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.
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!
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.
I am the CDAO for my organization and I have architects and data engineers in my office. I think that these roles within the CDAO umbrella are critical - and that the CDAO office should be outside IT.
From my perspective, it has been easier to bridge the gaps between business and IT by literally occupying a middle space where the CDAO office has both business and technical knowledge domain leads, and where the data flowing through the system is monitored and operationalized from a business/research perspective.
When these function sit in IT, or when business and IT remain as wholly separate entities, the focus (both skills hired and attention given to the products) tends to be on operational uptime and efficiencies and not on the value and accuracy of the data itself.