Gartner Coins CxO 5.0 For Digital
Leadership
April 28, 2022
Chief Data and Analytics Offices
Should Focus on Five Components to
Help Drive Digital Capabilities in
their Businesses
The
Gartner Research Board has
identified a new model for digital
leadership that binds together data,
analytics, digital technology and
transformation capabilities onto
business. The Gartner Research Board
said that data and analytics (D&A)
leaders are uniquely positioned to
drive this change that will make
their companies behave like digital
natives.
“The most advanced and successful
D&A leaders are driving new
opportunities to use digital
capabilities – often data and
analytics products – to capture
value. Those opportunities should
directly connect to the business
priorities,” said
Mario Faria,
VP and program director at the
Gartner Research Board.
“At the same time, some D&A leaders
are using digital and D&A to create
whole new business models. These
leaders – the CxO 5.0 – are helping
businesses reconstitute by adopting
an operating model that grafts
native digital capability onto their
existing non-digital native
businesses.”
The Gartner Research Board’s Global
Chief Data and Analytics Officer
(Global CDAO) offering provides
additional insight on this new
operating model and the CxO 5.0
through a community of Global CDAOs
engaged with their true peers at
comparably sized organizations.
“After we identified how the most
successful companies are doing
digital reconstitution well, we
worked with their CDAOs to create a
blueprint of the operating model for
others to use, and a maturity tool
to identify where a company is on
their CxO 5.0 journey,” said
Tom Stanton,
director of research at the Gartner
Research Board.
The CxO 5.0 operating model is based
on the idea of grafting, where D&A
leaders bring to their companies a
way to behave and act like digital
natives using five core components
(see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The New Operating Model
for CxO 5.0
Five Core Components
Founder Mindset
A founder mindset prioritizes
solving a problem with minimal waste
(time, meetings, etc.). When mapping
out strategy, a founder mindset
means aligning roles and
responsibilities clearly with goals,
objectives and incentives clearly
explained. “Ensure that there aren’t
too many siloed startup mindsets by
having a “north star” on the team,”
said Faria.
Business Outcomes
Organizations should have a clear
business strategy with defined
alignment to their digital strategy.
Leaders should communicate the
purpose of data as service to the
whole enterprise. To be a
data-driven organization, everyone
must own the data and a culture of
accountability and alignment must be
fostered.
Strategy for Disruption
To identify disruption,
organizations should operate under
the mindset that someone else is
already working on a better way. Use
data to help create the strategy. Do
not use data to try to prove your
strategy. CxOs should leverage
strength across the organization for
scalability and have the courage to
change or cut ties with people,
processes and relationships that do
not align.
Organizational Changes
The
goal is to encourage a more
decentralized organizational
structure that allows for the
infusion of skills across the
business. To do that, the CxO should
start building an organization that
is resilient to frequent people
changes and learn how to take
advantage of it, such as
incorporating on-the-job learning to
break down silos.
Digital/D&A Products
Organizations should try to enable
operations in real-time from
resources to insights and create a
shift to consistent cross
communication. This means moving to
a multicloud/cloud agnostic strategy
by looking at process and
methodology needs to select the
platform and build out detailed
procedures based on the platform’s
capabilities. This will provide the
ability to mature and discover new
products enabling evolution with new
insights
