My letter to our data leaders community - The CDO Hub

Thank you to our growing data leader community.

The Chief Data Officer Hub community was set up to help you, as world class data leaders, to maximise your potential and support your professional development.

We wanted to facilitate this through community collaboration, inspirational discussions and peer-to-peer mentoring. The bar for this data community is high, with "invite or recommendation only" making it exclusive to a senior data leader group.

This last year we have ramped up the community, and curated some fantastic events with amazing feedback from you. Our core focus has been on maintaining peer-to-peer conversations, engaging in open discussion and learning as a group.

With such a high calibre of individuals, every member has experience worth sharing - and I believe these collective experiences help drive the overarching development of our craft in the industry. 

As this community is all about data leadership, we’ve tried introduce wider discussions of leadership principles and considerations in data. In particular, we want to give thanks to Keith Goldthorpe and Ryan Moriarty for sharing their experiences; delivering commercial business value driving use cases from data in the media, entertainment and retail industry.

Likewise, we want to thank Johanna Hutchinson (the Data Doctor) for her interactive talk around delivering transformational change alongside business as usual activities. We also had Miranda Wheatley Price lead an exciting discussion on leading change, from strategy through to activation, looking at disruption, culture change and principles to underpin change programmes. 

We definitely can’t forget the session on managing personal stress, wellbeing, mental health, and on building teams that feel supported. We were honoured to have Greig Trout tell his own frankly unbelievable yet inspiring personal story that has led him to the forefront of helping people in this space.

Most recently we flicked back to data and more specifically data excellence (not data governance), led by the inimitable Roberto Maranca, who brought energy, humour and philosophy to helping us discuss minimising data debt, building trust into your agenda, thinking about ethics on a global scale and how data excellence supports the CDO agenda.

Alongside this, our Slack group is starting to help facilitate day to day discussions and questions between the community. This led to the running of our first lunch and learn session, where Edward Wynn talked through his experiences of data virtualisation technology and projects.

We ended this year with our first CDO Hub Christmas Party, coupled with our first 'open mic' night - the community got to sing, dance and talk their way through the evening, surrounded by friends, colleagues, drinks and food. Thanks to Ross Simson for his brilliant edit of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, If, and Tim Carmichael for his version of Im Dreaming of a White Christmas, which is now the CDO anthem of 2018.

Through this whole experience, I've personally been so inspired by the discussions we’ve had and engaging content shared and I of course thank everyone of you for your time, support and active participation in this shared experience.

In summary, 2018 was an exciting year for the CDO Hub (nicely picked up by the press earlier this year). 2019 promises to continue the evolution and growth of the community as we learn what works and what would be most valuable to you. With that we will see pilot sessions run in the North and West of the UK, plans for international growth and some exciting partnerships.

We thrive on your feedback and thoughts on how we make this the best it can be and look forward to hearing from you more.

Finally, thanks to the whole Cynozure team for their continued focus and efforts to generate a market leading community.

Wishing you health and happiness in the coming festive season, enjoy the remainder of the year.

Jason Foster