Once the 'super baron' of every self-respecting large company, the CDO - pronounced Chief Digital Officer - will soon disappear from many organisational charts: what's the point of keeping a digital director when the whole structure has to be digital, as some experts snidely point out?
A great organiser, or facilitator, the CDO co-ordinated activities that had developed in an anarchic way, sometimes in places where they were not really expected.
For example, web listening - which in the not-too-distant past was known as "monitoring" or "listening" - is often attached to community management. Of course, this team has a duty to monitor the conversations that take place on the web on an ongoing basis, but are they the best placed to carry out an e-reputation assessment?
In other words, to judge the effectiveness of their... own action: a bit like if, in other times, advertising managers had been asked to carry out their own advertising post-tests: some people would - quite rightly - have doubted their objectivity.
More recently, Data Scientists have appeared on the scene: where should they be positioned in the hierarchy? Some companies have solved the problem by having them report directly to general management, which can avoid a lot of ego conflicts... without, however, generating any real efficiency - or raising the question of any pre-existing expertise, for example within the research departments!
Having been stripped of part of their remit, the latter have constantly changed their names to further blur the landscape: from consumer insight to market intelligence, new names abound, often more encompassing to better delimit a perimeter that is increasingly under attack.
Among other things, the CDOs were tasked with bringing some order to all this, for example by preventing several departments from acquiring redundant resources and quickly stepping on each other's toes: research, community management and after-sales services often work with data from the same social web.
If the CDO more or less disappears in the future - and loses some of his or her power - how will such arbitration take place in the future? The age-old territorial conflicts will once again multiply: how will market research be able to hold its own?
Not by taking refuge in yet another name! But by becoming a proactive department, one that blazes trails, shows the way, pioneers trends - the real trends, the ones that are useful to the company: to marketing, of course, but not only: to engineers, to sales, to customer relations... By fully becoming the department that puts the customer at the heart of the company!
Insight : Society is changing so fast that marketers, engineers, etc. are struggling to grasp the complex reality of consumers.
Proposal: A proactive research department that pushes the right information to the right people at the right time.
Justification: researchers are the only ones with a 360° view of consumers and the ability to give meaning to all this data.
Nestled at the heart of the company, providing useful information to all departments, the design department will also be at the heart of the issues, a partner with essential knowledge and expertise.
