Many organizational leaders instinctively turn to the office of the CIO to deliver business insights. But, usually, CIOs are not responsible for delivering business insights. Rather, they are responsible for managing the overall IT infrastructure and the information systems in which the data is captured, processed, and made available to the business. For delivering business insights, an organization can appoint a Chief Analytics Officer who is responsible for managing information, people, processes, and technology.
Role of a Chief Analytics Officer
The Chief Analytics Officer (CAO) is an emerging role that is critical for organizations that want to treat their information as an asset as well as capitalize on and create value from it. CAOs may have worked for analytics software vendors, thereby providing industry thought-leadership for raising the analytics quotient of prospects and customers. Thus, corporations can learn to take advantage of their expertise by bringing analytics talent onto the executive leadership team.
The CAO is a business strategist who knows about the flow of information, understands its context, and is aware of how that information links across the enterprise. He or she uses analytics for capitalizing on the data for making sound decisions and achieving better outcomes for the business. Even though this role may traditionally gravitate towards IT, it is not purely an IT role; rather the role of the Chief Analytics Officer is to connect business and IT.
If you’re planning on appointing a CAO, you should make sure that your organization is really ready for one because the role can fail if it is prevented from making the kind of changes the organization needs. A successful CAO requires the support of senior management, along with this; a CAO also requires authority, responsibility, budget, and people skills. For using data to fulfill business intelligence initiatives, CAOs utilize web analytics tools, data warehouse architecture, and predictive analytics methods.
Experts have predicted that with CAOs there are 60% more chances of achieving higher business agility from Big Data initiatives than those organizations without a CAO. However, the Chief Analytics Officer role is still in a nascent stage. There is a significant promise in this role, which will wrangle the often-fragmented analytics systems and strategy for organizations. The CAO may represent an inflection point in an organization’s digital journey.
Many companies spanning across a wide range of industries are now hiring chief analytics officers to deal with the influx of data and make data-driven business decisions.