The Chief Data Officer has never been a more necessary role in the organization than it is today. Organizations capture and store more data than ever before, and it’s growing exponentially every year.

Not only is business data growing, but we are seeing new types of data continually entering the mix. Data is structured, unstructured and semi-structured. It’s stored in big data lakes, in business applications, in file shares, and other places across the organization. There’s so much data that even the CDO isn’t completely aware of what’s out there.

And then there’s the external data. CDOs are becoming aware of the need to bring in external data sources that provide relevant, and sometimes essential, information to support decision making.

Despite Gartner’s observation that 41% of organizations are unsure if their Big Data ROI will be positive or negative, they remain keenly interested in investing in Big Data technology so as to take advantage of data-driven use cases in an effort to improve predictions and forecasts, exploit IoT opportunities, identify new products and services, and improve operational efficiency. Other tactical business drivers include real-time decisions and insights. It’s tempting for organizations to climb on the Big Data bandwagon while overlooking the unique set of corresponding challenges attributable to the: