To say that for us this book has been a bit of an adventure would be an understatement. It has been a wonderful experience, thinking about and examining the role of the CDO and committing all this to paper. We have enjoyed and been privileged to beg and borrow knowledge from our fellow data professionals, who have been most generous with their time and ideas, and we both know we have added massively to our own experience and learning through this process. There were also times that we both wondered why we thought this would be a good idea in the first place, but thankfully they were relatively few and far between! On the contrary, we have found this a rewarding and stimulating exercise.

We hope that we have given the more business-oriented among you the case for why you need to take your data seriously and why an investment in a Chief Data Officer will pay you dividends. Such a fundamental asset to your business as your data can't be expected to look after itself. Filling in all the steps to understanding how to find the right CDO for your company and how to set them up to succeed, as well as helping you understand what (roughly) to expect from them, should help you remove a few hurdles and increase the speed on the return of value you get from your nice new shiny CDO.

For the already converted ‘data cheerleaders’ we have aimed to give you clues as to how to answer the question quoted in the Preface – ‘I would like to know how my organisation gets from where we are now to be in a position to exploit the opportunities in our data; to extract the sort of value which you have all been talking about.’ – which is what started this in the first place. We haven't given you a handbook because we have tried really hard to make sure that we weren't being pre - scriptive. There are so many different organisations across many sectors that there really is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution that will make everything better. On top of that, we are all different and we will bring our own personalities, skills and experiences to our roles.