The CIO in 2020: Facing Up to New Challenges and Embracing DataOps

DataOps is an emerging methodology that promotes cultural and technological change

To usher in a new year and a new decade, CBR has teamed up with Hitachi Vantara to host a series of Dining Club events looking at the changing role of the chief information officer, the growing importance of information value extraction and the reasons for championing DataOps as a methodology of choice. The first two events took place in mid-January in Frankfurt and London, respectively.

Kicking off the discussion on both nights Edelman London's Editorial Director Tim Weber shared some exclusive research into what makes IT leaders tick, as well as dipping into relevant parts of the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer. Expectations of the CIO have grown, said Weber. No longer just responsible for "the plumbing", the job now encompasses privacy, security, enhancing customer experience, aiding product creation.

Because the role pervades every organisational function, the CIO is becoming a face of the company and "the new guardian of corporate trust". In research, 91% of respondents agreed that a trusted CIO went hand-in-hand with a trusted business. Moreover, 'Company / Technical Experts' topped a list of those professionals with most credibility. "Success of technology rollout is always around culture," noted Weber.

While the opportunities for IT leaders are clear, 63% worry about the relentless pace of technological change. Less surprisingly, perhaps, 59% believe the rate of regulatory change in their industry is too fast.

Picking up the theme, Jonathan Martin, CMO at Hitachi Vantara urged IT leaders to embrace the potential of data, growing exponentially not least because of the emergence of artificial intelligence. Like oil, data must be "refined" and once it is "it never loses its value". Data extraction is complex, he said, because it resides in multiple locations, is maintained in deep siloes, and comes in diverse formats.

By way of example, Martin noted that the purchasing journey of a B2B buyer involved 112 unique interactions. So complex had it become, it was now a "machine learning problem". A way through the complexity and the pace of change, he said, was to adopt DataOps.

DataOps is an emerging methodology that promotes cultural and technological change to help deliver the right data to the right place at the right time to the right people. In short, DataOps is enterprise data management for the era of artificial intelligence.

To discover how Hitachi Vantara can revolutionise your DataOps strategy just click here.

The CIO in 2020: Facing Up to New Challenges and Embracing DataOps' - a CBR Dining Club series in association with Hitachi Vantara - took place at the Jumeirah Hotel Frankfurt on Tuesday 21 January and at the Ivy Market Grill, Covent Garden, London on Thursday 23 January 2020.