The meteoric rise of data and analytics has become something of a poisoned chalice for chief data officers and their teams, with greater recognition and increased investment piling on the pressure for them to achieve outstanding results – and fast.
So says a new Gartner report, which quizzed 500 data and analytics leaders globally and found less than half (44%) of them believe their team is effectively delivering value to their organisation.
Data and analytics budgets have risen steadily as organisations seek to deliver greater value from data, streamline operations, and enhance operational agility. The average budget now stands at £4.4 million, Gartner found, while 44% of data and analytics teams also increased in size over the past year.
Even so, while soaring budgets reflect increasing confidence in the data function, this is leading to huge pressure to deliver impactful results, resulting in a negative impact on both teams and leaders, the report claims.
Gartner senior director analyst Donna Medeiros explained: “The demands being placed upon data and analytics, as well as increased investment, reflect a growing confidence in chief data officers’ abilities and recognition of the data office as an indispensable business function.
“However, this leads to more work as pressure grows for data and analytics to achieve tangible business results.”
Gartner’s study found that data and analytics functions are receiving increased investment across a range of areas. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of leaders reported increased investment in data management, while 63% said data governance spend had risen and 60% reported budgets for advanced analytics capabilities had gone up.
CDOs now find themselves tasked with an expanding range of responsibilities within their organisation, with 60% now responsible for defining and implementing data strategies, and a similar proportion (59%) also taking responsibility for oversight of these strategies. Management of data-driven culture change was also a key responsibility highlighted by 54% of respondents.
This widening array of responsibilities means that some CDOs are struggling to meet increasingly complex leadership demands, however, with leaders who committed time to their own professional development found to be far more effective than those who did not. This, the report claims, highlights the critical need for continual learning and evolution to accommodate the changing demands of the role.
Nearly half (43%) of “top-performing” data and analytics leaders reported increased effectiveness in both their own ability and the broader team by committing time to professional development, compared with just 19% of “low performers”.
Difficulty meeting the complexity of demands placed on data and analytics teams is being exacerbated by an acute shortage of talent, Gartner maintained, with more than a third (39%) of data chiefs saying that a lack of available talent had become a major impediment to success in the data function, with poor data literacy across the broader organisation and culture change acceptance among the other key challenges.
Gartner distinguished VP analyst Alan Duncan concluded: “Successful CDOs must be elite leaders. Top-performers invest in their success by developing skills to thrive in ambiguous circumstances, articulate compelling value stories and identify data and analytics products, and services that can drive business impact.”
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