A recent study from Gartner suggests nearly one in five business leaders expect to recruit a chief digital officer by 2014 and about 17 percent foresee appointing a chief data officer within the same time frame.
The development of the CDO position today is akin to the development of the chief information officer position a decade or more ago. A quick comparison between wikipedia’s full description for CIO and the sparse description for CDO shows just how new these developments are. While many CDOs work for content companies and are tasked with digitizing analog businesses, I expect the position to evolve to also encompass digitizing and monetizing business models that didn’t (and couldn’t) exist in the analog world.
