How to get by in a Startup without a CDO
Although a CDO can help guide the development of data-handling processes and infrastructure in the early stages of a startup, there usually isn’t enough work to keep a full-time CDO busy until you have a successful product or service - with real user data that needs to be kept safe, and analytical data ripe for insight-harvesting.
However, the responsibilities that a CDO will one day fulfil still need to be met from day one. What are they, and what can a startup do about them?
Regulatory and Ethical Compliance
Everybody involved in a startup knows (or should know!) that there are regulatory (as in: enforced by laws) and ethical (as in: required to meet users' expectations of an organisation they trust) standards for data processing and storage. However, the details of the regulations can be subtle and the technical details of the data processing being performed can be complicated. Somebody needs to be able to bridge the legal and technical details to be able to confidently judge legal risks; and somebody needs to be able to step back from discussions about how to generate revenues from data and say “OK, I think that’s legal, but will our customers hate us for this?”; customers, partners and investors have been sensitised to issues around ethics and intellectual property infringement after scandals like Cambridge Analytica and the training of AI models on data without the owner’s permission.
The CDO would be the person on the executive team who handles this kind of thing, so in their absence, unless somebody else takes this responsibility up, the buck for this will probably fall to the CEO.
Data Infrastructure Management
As a startup builds its product, and starts letting external users in, it will build data infrastructure: transactional databases, backups, analytical data warehouses, snapshots of data taken for testing and experimentation, external data held by service providers such as Google Analytics, data processing tools, and so on. When the team is small enough that everyone is aware of what everyone else is doing it’s not too hard to spot duplication of effort and opportunities to share resources between different functions, and if anybody needs to know if some data are already held somewhere - and if so, where - they only need to drop a message to @everyone in #development on Slack.
However, as soon as things get beyond five or so technical staff, and things start to split into separate teams, the cracks can begin to show: discarded experimental databases and snapshots start to build up, attracting ongoing storage costs and the very real compliance risks of them being leaked. It starts to become hard to say which databases are currently in production, which have suitable disaster-recovery plans, whether anyone still needs the database snapshot we took before the migration - a growing pile of technical debt that slows down delivery and drives up infrastructure costs.
Without a CDO to keep track of the overall data infrastructure and make sure that everything is properly managed, the buck for this will probably fall to the CTO.
Spotting Opportunities
By being aware of all the data a startup captures, stores, and has access to via external partners, and the capabilities of the data processing tools available, a CDO is the best placed person to spot missed opportunities to do something good with data, and to be able to give “It’s possible, and here’s what we’ll need to build to make it happen” answers when somebody else has a data idea.
In their absence, there might not be anybody with the complete understanding of the startup’s data landscape to do this - many of the “Could we do this?” questions that come up will require somebody to go off and find out. The CTO should understand the “big picture” of data resources in the organisation, but probably won’t have time to keep up with all the fine details in the way that a CDO would; so while the CTO (and maybe the COO, if there is one) will probably take on the majority of this responsibility, they will often have to go off and find the right people to answer questions, and many ad-hoc opportunities might just not get noticed.
Building Culture
While a CDO is eventually responsible for all of the above, they will struggle to succeed if they don’t delegate day to day data decision making to everyone involved with data in the entire organisation. They should be educating workers with the data skills they need, and setting good examples - so that most routine data-related work can be confidently done by the relevant people in the relevant teams. The CDO is then free to focus on big-picture oversight, supporting the board in decision-making, being available for advice when people need help with data, and doing enough light-touch supervision of routine data operations to make sure their policies and processes are sufficient, and to maintain their understanding of data-related activities; and staff are free to work with data without needing to knock on the CDO’s door all the time.
In the absence of a CDO, the CTO needs to do what they can to facilitate this, and perhaps the most important thing they can do is to make sure there’s a place for a data community to get together. A #data channel in Slack to announce things and ask questions, and a data section of the internal wiki to document policies and resources, is a good start. These will hopefully be a place where the teams can share and build their own culture around data, and when you do grow large enough to get a CDO, they will have a good foundation to build on - and a great resource to help themselves get on board quickly!
Get Help
Trying to do all of the above without a CDO is necessary for most early-stage startups, but it’s a strain for the rest of the team to cover for a CDO - and this means many functions of a CDO will only be partially fulfilled. Startups need to realise when they’re falling behind and their data maturity gap is widening, and bring in outside help to close it again. Our CDO As A Service offering can provide one-off data maturity audits, data culture workshops, or ongoing regular checkups and support as required to enable you to keep on top of your data needs. It is a way to build data capability, bring in data resources and work with an experienced CDO, who can guide, strategise and also implement and execute data projects for you.
Want to learn more? Read our article on CDO As A Service: The Next Data Evolution or contact us to talk to one of our Startup Specialists and Expert CDOs now.
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