VIDEO | Caserta Founding CEO: CDOs are Mandatory for All Businesses

(US and Canada) Joe Caserta, McKinsey & Company Partner and Caserta founding CEO, speaks with Ben Beshear, CEO and Private Wealth Advisor, LiveWell Capital of Northwestern Mutual, about the transition of the data space, the need for a CDO, and Caserta’s acquisition by McKinsey.

Speaking on the shifts in the data space over the years, Caserta says that Chief Data Officers are no longer just an option, they are mandatory. Having a data leader at the board or C-level will help organizations better understand data, customers, products, and employees.

Caserta mentions that data is going to get more complicated and interesting. Drawing a comparison with the past, Caserta says that most organizations used to get data from their internal systems. Today, he says they get data from outside the organization, which requires cleaning, conforming, consolidating, and integrating different disparate data sources before analysis.

While speaking on the shifts and trends, Caserta highlights the possibility of selling products and services to people in the virtual world, and the buzz around non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

According to Caserta, companies should think of having a CDO at every level, whether they are startups, mid-tier organizations, or large global corporations, to develop and implement the data strategy.

Caserta goes on to share the rationale behind the acquisition of his company by McKinsey. He says that Caserta, the data consulting organization he founded, would follow up with management consulting firms as one of their key recommendations involved data strategy, and his company was hired as the consulting firm. He mentions that the investments that McKinsey has been making in data over the last few years exceed other firms by far.

With the acquisition, Caserta explains that the management consulting and the data consulting firms no longer have to pass the baton between the two firms. The challenge that Caserta solves is that many organizations do not have data, they do not know what to do with it, or they do not know who to get it to. He adds that other challenges include safe access to the data, data quality, the engineering part, and the people.

Concluding, Caserta suggests that organizations need to come up with data literacy and governance programs, so that the governance does not feel burdensome and is built into the organization’s fabric.