More than a third of UK CDOs lack visibility and understanding of their data

Informatica reveals over a third (36%) of UK Chief Data Officers (CDOs) lack a complete view and understanding of their data estates, at a time when data sources are predicted to grow further. 

Informatica’s annual global research report - CDO Insights 2023: how to empower data-led business resiliency - surveyed 86 CDOs and Chief Data & Analytics Officers in the UK. It revealed over half (57%) believe there are more than 1,000 sources of data in their organisation and predict data sources will continue to grow due to analytics (92%), cloud (88%) and business applications (87%). However, 31% say this increasing volume and variety of data is one of the main obstacles to achieving their organisation’s data strategy. 

“For organisations to truly build a competitive advantage, the role of the CDO and their ability to bring data to life throughout the business is critical,” explained Greg Hanson, VP of EMEA and LATAM at Informatica. “But with ever-increasing volumes and sources of data, comes greater proliferation and fragmentation. This makes it difficult to get a holistic view of data and extract value and actionable insights. As a result, organisations increasingly need a platform that can deliver well governed, high-quality, trusted data - bringing discipline and resilience to data management.” 

Top priorities and areas for investment 

As CDOs focus on optimising supply chains (42%), strengthening the customer experience (40%), enhancing collaboration (39%) and improving business agility (38%) in the year ahead, data sharing and data governance have emerged as top priorities for data strategies. Nearly half (49%) of UK CDOs rank the effective sharing, democratisation and use of data as a chief priority, alongside improving governance over data and data processes (48%).   

Reflecting these priorities, CDOs cite the following as top areas for investment in 2023: 

• Data quality capabilities (52%)  

• Data protection (45%)  

• Data marketplaces (42%)  

UK CDOs are also optimistic about the outlook for data and cloud investments in the year ahead despite the turbulent outlook - 94% of UK CDOs expect cloud expenditure to stay the same or increase and 92% expect data expenditure to stay the same or increase.   

Maturing data strategies  

In a sign that data strategies have matured and aligned to wider business strategies, 80% of UK CDOs believe that data strategies are prioritised on the same level or more than other business objectives. The survey also revealed that UK CDOs are the most confident in Europe about the effectiveness of their data strategies. In total, 82% of UK CDOs rated their current data strategy model as very or completely effective. In comparison, only 63% of those in France and 62% of those in Germany said the same.  

The top metric for measuring the effectiveness of data strategies in the UK is the ability to influence decision making. The most commonly used tactics to measure data strategy effectiveness are:  

• Improving the quality of analytics used for decision making (52%) 

• Improving the timeliness of data delivery (51%)  

• Improving how data is used in business decision making and operational processes (49%)