A blueprint for data strategy driven by business strategy

Business executives using data to drive decisions has only gone from 10% to 13% over a period of 20 years. The reason for such a small shift is that the key business people are still not brought up to speed on how focusing on data could improve EBITDA and other business metrics significantly. One of the ways that can be done is by creating a role of a data economist whose job is to create an economic model of a data initiative. Keyur Desai, former CDO of Ameritrade, became a CDO when the job was ill defined and focused more on the data governance aspects. In more recent times, the role of CDO has expanded and included even data science functions. Keyur’s prescription for a successful data strategy is to identify key business drivers and align data strategy to the business strategy that delivers those metrics.