D&A skills and capabilities are integral to data-driven decision making. To avoid common pitfalls while creating your D&A strategy, identify the right operating model and create cross-functional teams to support it.
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The Gartner Priorities Navigator represents mission-critical areas where Gartner provides supportive expert advice and tools to chief data and analytics officers (CDAOs) and their teams.
Gartner provides insight, tools and guidance to support four key needs of CDAOs: lead a word-class D&A organization, drive quantifiable value with D&A solutions for the business, build trust and mature D&A culture, and evolve technology and process capabilities to support D&A.
Learn more about how Gartner supports your priorities.
By 2026, the CDAO’s ability to deliver data and AI literacy, culture change and a skilled workforce will be a top three determining factor in supporting business strategy.
By 2028, the use of AI will result in 50% of all new employees having backgrounds other than science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
By 2026, 70% of job titles will shift from a portfolio, program, project (3Ps) hierarchy to role-based descriptors due to the increase of AI in strategic portfoloio management.
By 2026, 75% of CDAOs who fail to make organizationwide influence and measurable impact their top priority will be assimilated into technology functions.
Attract D&A talent from outside the organization by applying nonconventional approaches and creating an attractive corporate culture that prioritizes attributes like work-life balance, skills development and emotional well-being.
Retain D&A talent by creating more balance in the D&A team via diversity of people, roles and development paths.
Transition from a predominantly labor-based approach for simple and repetitive tasks to a more automated one, effectively freeing up talent for more challenging endeavors.
Determine the goal or objective for the community to work toward.
Secure a sponsor who champions the effort and communicates directly with the core stakeholders.
Invite associates from cross disciplines who can bring a broad range of experience and skills.
Bring in a D&A expert with proven soft skills from the core D&A team to facilitate the operation of the community.
Set a budget for any resources the CoP may need.
Measure the impact on individual employees and the organization as a whole.
When determining a model for D&A, organizations often split into two factions:
One favoring centralization and “control” (that is, consistency, efficiency and shared best practices)
Another valuing decentralization and “freedom” (that is, autonomy, agility and innovation)
However, this dichotomy presents an impossible and false choice. CDAOs need to create an organizational model that delivers on both options. They need to build a distributed, hybrid organizational model. In this model, a core centralized team — a D&A center of excellence (COE) — collaborates and coordinates with multiple decentralized communities in a cross-functional approach.
CDAOs need to not only empower the decentralized communities, but also support coordination, collaboration and consistency across those communities and the central IT department. Decentralized efforts may be driven by “citizen” roles, such as a citizen data scientist. However, in some cases, organizations can seek out, assign or formally recognize local or distributed functions or initiatives, such as marketing or supply chain analytics.
The goal is not to push too far in either direction, but to establish strong multiway collaboration between a D&A COE and decentralized communities distributed throughout the enterprise.
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