Communication and collaboration between chief data officers and chief marketing officers

To deliver a seamless, personalised customer experience, marketers require high-quality, complete and accurate data. In practice, however, data are frequently dispersed throughout the enterprise, locked away in siloed applications, in inconsistent formats or of poor quality. Ownership is not centralised, making it very difficult to remedy the situation and unlock the full potential of state-of-the-art industry tools and technologies. The magnitude of the challenge is beyond the scope and capabilities of the chief information officer. For this reason, some organisations have created a new role: the chief data officer (CDO). This paper explores a number of issues including the role of the CDO, the responsibility of the CDO compared with that of the chief information officer or chief digital officer, how organisational data maturity correlates to use of the CDO, how the chief marketing officer (CMO) has yet to leverage this new function, the challenges associated with such a collaboration and how various organisations are viewing the marketing data challenge. The paper goes on to describe the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation as a catalyst for data-quality initiatives and models for collaboration between the CMO and CDO. This paper forms the preliminary framework for a larger research initiative to be completed in the second and third quarters of 2019.