How chief data officers can navigate the COVID-19 response and beyond
Chief data officers play a pivotal role in enabling data-driven decision making that will help their organizations respond to COVID-19 and emerge from the crisis in a position of strength.
This article is written collaboratively by global leaders of McKinsey Technology including Kevin Buehler, Holger Harreis, Jorge Machado, Satyajit Parekh, Kayvaun Rowshankish, Asin Tavakoli, and Allen Weinberg. We integrate deep expertise and thought leadership from the best of McKinsey’s experience in this unprecedented COVID-19 crisis to explore how data leaders can act across three horizons to shape the way forward: ensure data teams—and the whole organization—remain operational, lead solutions to crisis-related challenges to come, and adapt to the next normal.
As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across the globe, so too does its extraordinary impact on nearly every country, business, and individual. Each day, the world wakes up to rising case counts and reports of unprecedented government efforts to both keep citizens safe and stem economic impacts—efforts that rely on access to trusted, quality data.
Industries at the forefront of the crisis are also relying on data in innumerable ways to inform their response to the crisis. Healthcare providers, for instance, are leveraging data from countries that were affected earlier by COVID-19 to forecast needs for hospital beds, masks, and ventilators. Grocery chains are using sales data to help distributors identify and ship the items most important to their customers. Meanwhile, the sectors we rely on to keep the wheels of the economy moving are using data to inform their operations. Telecom players, for example, are using network traffic data to decide where to upgrade capacity in response to the tremendous demand for bandwidth from an increasingly remote workforce.
Chief data officers (CDOs) in every industry will play a critical role in crisis response and the next normal that follows. In today’s high-stakes environment, where misinformation proliferates and organizations must make decisions at a rapid pace, there’s arguably never been such an imperative for CDOs to provide organizations with timely and accurate data.
Senior executives will need ready access to both new and newly critical data to make unprecedented decisions in the short term and inform adjustments to their business strategies and operational plans in the medium to long term. Banks, for example, will need to rethink credit models. Manufacturers will need to reconfigure supply chains. CDOs must not only lead the way in sourcing, storing, and serving up the necessary data but also work alongside business and functional heads to identify and drive these new priorities. All the while, they’ll tackle other mission-critical responsibilities such as enabling rapid reporting, mitigating new data-related risks, and helping their organizations shift to a predominantly digital operating model.
In this article, we highlight three waves of actions CDOs should consider to help their organizations navigate the crisis and the uncertain landscape that lies ahead:
-ensure data teams—and the whole organization—remain operational
-lead solutions to crisis-triggered challenges to come
-prepare for the next normal (and execute soon)
These insights are based on our discussions with data leaders across industries over the past few weeks and our experience from previous crises, both financial and health related.
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Πηγή: mckinsey
