By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

In his February 2015 keynote at the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum R. Ray Wang author and analyst told the audience of technology luminaries that CDOs – Chief Digital Officers - will only be around for three more years. In doing so, perhaps the author of Disrupting Digital Business: Create An Authentic Experience In The Peer-To-Peer Economy was simply cautioning us not to “Over-C” our path to digital transformation – a too many cooks in the kitchen situation. Author Wang’s provocative comment does point us toward an area every organization needs to pay more attention to. Who is paying attention to how we pay attention to data? What positions, what roles and what skills do we need to create if we are to succeed in a data-driven economy?

In 2006 Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO at General Electric told his top executives “The business book that can help you hasn’t been written yet.” This is definitely true about how organizations should structure themselves to take full advantage of the data that defines the modern economy.

Many executives view the “what should we do about Big Data” question as a classic hiring issue. “Let’s hire someone to hire her someone’s to get this done.” Viewed through this lens one bumps into the predictable human resource issue associated with any hot new technology – demand far outstrips supply for staff knowledgeable in the  new technology. McKinsey tells us that in the United States alone those who try to hire themselves to Big Data nirvana face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the analysis of big data.

I think a bigger framework needs to be brought to bear. Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane give us a good place to start with The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market [2004]. They open their book writing:

“On March 22, 1964, the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution sent a fourteen-page memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson. The signers included chemist Linus Pauling [recipient of two Nobel Prizes], economist Gunnar Myrdal [a future Nobel prize winner], and Gerard Piel, publisher of Scientific American. In the memo, the committee warned the president of long-run threats to the nation beginning with the likelihood that computers would soon create mass unemployment.”

There is a new division of labor in the modern workplace. In addition to deciding which human does what executives have to determine which tasks are best conducted by smart machines/algorithms. Is this the role of the COO, the CDO [chief digital officer], the CDO [chief data officer], the CHRO [chief human resource officer] or the CIO?