back to article Sucks to be a... chief data officer, when they're being told: Boost revenues

Chief data officers are increasingly asked to help monetise the data companies hold, rather than purely managing and protecting that data, according to Gartner. The analysts firm has predicted that this focus on “value creation over risk mitigation” will grow over time, as companies look to data bring in new revenue streams. …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Quis custodiet

    You know all those drugs you confiscated? Now we want you to sell them.

    Users with no background in statistics or analysis being asked to analyse corporate data. What could possibly go wrong?

    Once upon a time I was asked to generate a sales forecast for production planning. I pointed out that most of the products were small volume high cost and had only a few months of sales history. As expected, the forecasting program wanted to hold stock of one of almost everything, which would be extremely uneconomic in production terms.

    We know that Australian politicians think the laws of Australia trump mere mathematics. I had an MD and sales director who simply wanted me to make the numbers come out different because they didn't like them. I forecast an awful lot of this.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Quis custodiet

      I've had similar experience - run a rough set of numbers for a specific purpose, before you know it some tit has shown them to the main board without caveats (and without even due credit for the rough work), and then they start asking for it to be modified for different and more favourable outcomes, and extrapolated far into the future. Even used with external investors to make an investment case based on this "market forecast", when all I'd originally done was a bit of short term extrapolation to establish whether we could potentially grow the business line over the next couple of years. But that's always been the way, and always will be.

      I reckon that Gartner are like my forecast - a bit right in the near term, guaranteed wrong in the longer term. And that's because their logic is correct that CIOs are being asked to monetise data without regard to the risks, but in the longer term, the value of data is fairly finite. In the grand scheme, data can save a few modest costs (with most of the low hanging fruit already gone), and then there's the advertiser/seller value of data. That's all priced in to a zero sum game at the moment, where Google get most of the money. No matter what you do with the data, analytics don't give consumers more money to spend, or advertisers bigger budgets. And all of the value is a subset of what wealth people spend, less the materials, less processing costs, less physical services, less administration, less financing costs, less tax less the delivery costs of advertising. Individually, in the UK the value of an average citizen's data must be about 1-2% of their actual spending, excluding VAT and other consumer taxes, I'm guessing about £300 a year, most of which is already being picked up. Gartner are wrong, there's going to be no big data monetisation bonanza for lard arse corporates - for them, the best outcome is single digit pounds to be made per customer, against a huge potential risk of GDPR fines.

      Take an energy supplier - plodding fuckwits for the most part, but they still know a fair bit about their customers, and can infer a fair bit more from energy use patterns. With smart meters they'll have about three orders of magnitude more data. But what value is that? Much of what can be known or inferred is already known by somebody else....if you've got kids, the energy use pattern can imply that knowledge, even the number and rough age, potentially. But Tesco (or others) already know that from you buying nappies of given sizes at given times. Or you gave the data away to somebody in an online survey, or when you signed up to get a Mothercare discount. DWP already know it - and have probably already welched your data to a credit reference agency and any marketing database company that came knocking. Google already know it from all the searches you've done. Facebook know it - and even if you don';t have an account, they'll still pick it up from your friends who do.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "according to Gartner"

    Move along, nothing to see here.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "according to Gartner"

      @Keef

      "Move along, nothing to see here."

      Exactly the oposite, 45% of data controllers top task is monetising your data. You'll sound like President Pillock if you continue vommiting statements like that.

  3. Version 1.0 Silver badge

    Easy to fix this

    We'll just put the data on AWS and run an analysis .... Oh, security? Oh, we'll get around to that but we need the analysis now ...

  4. VinceH

    'Logan said that many of the original demands of data officers had been accomplished, and the role was “moving from classically defence - risk mitigation and regulation - to one of offence”.'

    And when the inevitable breaches occur as a result of all of this, offences are what will have been committed.

    Ah well.

    Greed marches on.

  5. Whitter
    Unhappy

    monetising data

    Will new ideas for monetizing data changing the purpose for which that data was originally was collected? I guess the rest of the board haven't read the GDPR then.

  6. Pete 2 Silver badge

    A data protection racket

    > monetise the data companies hold

    Surely a CDO /. CIO can do far better than that?

    Just have a quiet word with the payroll team a few days before the end of the month. Something along the lines of: "It would be a pity if all those bank transfers were late ... so how about a little bit of cross-charge to make sure everything happens on time?"

    Or a similar approach when the VAT return is due.

    They could even "leverage" all the pr0n that users (aka employees) leave lying around to "persuade" them to not record all that overtime.

    Or ask other C-levels for a "small contribution" when a critical file goes missing, or needs to go missing.

    Since IT is at the very heart of almost every company, there should be no possible reason why they ever feel under threat from other departments or the top boss. Provided they learn how to use their position. Capisce!

  7. a_yank_lurker

    PHBs playing Statistician

    There must be no regard for what data was collected, why it was collected, and any rudimentary knowledge of statistics by the C-suite PHBs. One flaw about analyzing 'big data' is that is often actually very disparate data silos that are not easily linked together.

    1. Loud Speaker

      Re: PHBs playing Statistician

      One flaw about analyzing 'big data' is that is often actually very disparate data silos that are not easily linked together.

      You obviously have very limited experience of SQL and statistics.

      The big flaw is "people tell lies" - especially if they thin their data is, or might be, collected.

  8. Loud Speaker

    This should be illegal the same way anything that appears to incentivise truck drivers to go faster or skip on compliance with driving hours is illegal.There probably needs to be a requirement that a DPO is a "fit and proper person" the same way anti-money-laundering regs require it, and a similar regime for auditing as for the above (trained officers in an organisation actively on the prowl).

    I was going to stop short of the next one, but my wife just got a letter from Experian "You know your data we lost, well give us some more!": the enforcement officers should be permitted to conduct dawn raids on horseback, with drawn swords - Like the VAT and HMRC officers allegedly are.

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