A new role that has entered executive teams is that of the Chief Data Officer (CDO). Today’s data landscape and the digital transformation in companies have influenced the importance of this role, especially in business success. Many companies appoint a CDO with an information technology background and experience pretty much like that of a Chief Information Officer (CIO). The CDO generally assigns tasks related to data collection, governance, protection, and access. However, more accurate would be to have a Chief Data Monetization Officer (CDMO) whose role is to focus on deriving value and monetizing the data assets in the organization.

What Does a Chief Data Monetization Officer Do?

A Chief Data Monetization Officer is a senior executive responsible for transforming an organization’s data into profitable opportunities. Their role involves developing strategies to generate revenue by utilizing data assets to create new products, enhance services, or provide valuable insights. They focus on maximizing the financial potential of data while ensuring compliance with privacy regulations. By leveraging data-driven innovations, the CDMO helps drive new revenue streams and strengthens the company’s competitive edge.

Responsibilities of a Chief Data Monetization Officer

Here are the key responsibilities of a Chief Data Monetization Officer:

1. To document business use cases

The CDMO must implement a methodology to identify, validate, prioritize, and document the key business of the organization and the operational use cases. They must specifically focus on use case financial drivers and implementation risks.

2. Capture and reuse data and analytic assets

The CDMO must create a methodology that facilitates the capture, refinement, enhancement,t and sharing of the data assets in an organization. They must have tools and methodologies that can help capture, version control, regression testing, and sharing of the analytic assets in the organization.

3. Collaborative value creation platform

It is the responsibility of the CDMO to create a repository of all the key digital assets in the organization comprising of the data and analytics. They must also work on the ownership of analytic and data management tools. At the earliest, a data science exploration and testing process must be put in place.

4. Data Governance

CDMOs are responsible for the data strategy in an organization. They drive the development of frameworks, control policies, and help employees understand data usage. The CDMO is single-handedly accountable for data accuracy, validity, regulation compliance, privacy, and security.

5. Operations

CDMOs must oversee the data use operations. They are responsible for ensuring that the data is available and usable. To extract value from your data, you must be efficient with this process. This also includes keeping and saving data that can be used later and deleting data that is no longer useful.

6. Data management and analytics

Managing the data and analytics operations, which includes the architecture, user requirements, software development, and AI and ML integration, is the responsibility of the CDMO. Data-related insights must be delivered on time, which will impact the organization’s responsiveness, profitability, and business processes. It is the role of the CDMO to demonstrate the value of data. Monetizing the data assets of an organization has become a critical role in organizations today.

7. Innovation

The time has come for every organization to embrace a data-driven culture. Data and analytics must be accepted and embraced across the organization. The success of a CDMO depends on how they foster this culture. The team must be ready to accept and be receptive to the ideas of the CDMO.

8. Value creation and work culture

The CDMO must derive tangible value from all data. To do this, they must bring together various business functions and encourage sharing of data. They must be an evangelist and champion the leveraging of data. To do this, the CDMO may have to use various communication channels, do a lot of planning, and use their skills to reach various members of the organization. In order to get people to use data to make decisions, a lot of change is required in the way people work. It is difficult to change the work culture,e and to do this, a CDMO must demonstrate the value that data brings. This can be a big challenge for CDMOs. They can use data, for instance, to demonstrate how a competitor is spending less to acquire a customer and make a case for a changed way of working.

Several organizations are productizing their data to drive topline growth and mine new revenue opportunities. Many companies are not leveraging data monetization and giving it the importance it deserves. Organizations focus on building advanced analytics capabilities and modernizing their data infrastructure. There is hardly any focus on monetization.

A good CDMO must put in place a monetization system. It is all about deriving commercial value from data. Every organization must have a monetization team. The CDMO must build the capacity – people and tools. Monetization objectives must be driven through the entire company. This can become difficult because most of these matters are normally under the domain of the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).

End Note

It is important that the CDMO is armed with all the tools necessary to drive the organization’s data monetization efforts. Organizations today need CDMOs who will not only manage and govern the data but also use emerging technologies to leverage the data. This can generate not only analytical insights but significant and tangible monetary benefits for the organization. The CDMO must work on exploiting and monetizing data for competitive advantage.