The chief analytics officer (CAO) is a senior-level executive that heads up a company’s data analytics operations, transforming data into business value, and drives data-related business change. The chief analytics officer often reports to the CEO.
The chief analytics officer oversees an organization’s collection of data and its use to create analytics and business intelligence models. The CAO works closely with the CIO to establish the infrastructure required for analytics. The CAO may also be responsible for the creation of data warehouses, formula data governance and management frameworks, and reporting and visualization tools.
Naming a chief analytics officer sends a powerful signal to the entire organization about the importance of data analytics. Chris Mazzei had been at consulting giant EY for almost 20 years before becoming the company’s first chief analytics officer in 2014.
“EY was in the process of launching a new global strategy,” he says. “We had a new chair and a new CEO. It was more and more obvious to the leadership team how important data and analytics were going to be to the future and also how they were already starting to affect all our existing businesses.”
At the time, he says, many of EY’s business leaders were using data in various ways, but “they weren’t joined up in a way we thought made sense,” he says. “We didn’t have a high degree of confidence that we could move as fast as we wanted to.” Although most analytics functions still take place within EY’s business units, Mazzei now leads a global team charged with providing analytics tools throughout EY and helping to accelerate the movement toward a more analytics-driven company.
Bringing analytics into decision-making will quickly prove its worth, he adds. For example, a private equity company that was planning to buy a consumer food business hired EY to perform due diligence before the deal was finalized. Because Mazzei and his team believe social media analysis can add valuable insights to that process, the company deployed two teams, one doing a traditional financial analysis, the other doing a social media analysis as well.
The social media analysis turned up a big problem. “We saw in a couple of categories there was starting to be increasingly negative sentiment around the taste of some products,” Mazzei says. “We dug into it a little, and it turned out they had a major quality issue at a couple of their plants. That led the private equity company not to do the deal, and we would never have found that in a traditional financial due diligence because it hadn’t worked its way into the financial results yet.”
The chief analytics officer role is often viewed as interchangeable with that of the chief data officer. When surveying about the role, research firm Gartner makes no distinction between the chief analytics officer, chief data officer, and chief data and analytics officer roles.
“The word ‘analytics’ is misunderstood,” explains Andrew White, research vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. Different organizations mean different things by it, and some use phrases like “business intelligence” or “knowledge management” instead, he says. As a result, “the chief analytics officer can come from two places. Either the role is interchangeable with the chief data officer or else the company wants an analytic strategy function that provides reports to everyone. In some companies that’s a function of the chief data officer; in others it might be a separate body.” In the long run, he predicts, “the titles will all roll up into chief data officer.”
Others make the distinction that the chief data officer’s responsibility is managing data, a technology role, while the chief analytics officer’s responsibility is leading data analytics, a business role. Chief analytics officers often have a data science background, whereas chief data officers may not.
