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.

We were recently on a panel at a conference discussing how to harness value from data – we've changed the discussion topic slightly so as to not identify the conference, event or other participants; to protect the ‘not-so-innocent’. This topic, or a closely related one, has been a regular feature of the panels and discussions we've been involved with over the past two years. It seems everyone is trying to get to the heart of that question and find the answer. Data has been seen as such an inconsequential thing, that just seemed to be there, in the past; but there is a growing respect for data as a really fundamental asset – which is a great thing.

Everyone knows, because we've all been told many times recently, that data is the new oil. The question that then leads out of this is the one we have been facing: if data is the new oil, how does an organisation get value out of it? It is all very well having struck oil, but if you don't know how to get it out of the ground, or how to refine it into useful products, or that it can be transformed and manufactured into valuable products or consumed to create energy – what use is the oil in the ground?

On that recent panel we began by responding to some prepared questions. There were some great and experienced minds on the panel: leaders in their respective fields and all practitioners from the hard edge of industry, business and commerce. We each took turns to discuss the great value that could be derived from data. We each provided stunning examples of what could be done with data to transform, disrupt and innovate organisations and industries. It is interesting to note that the topic was definitely worded as ‘digital assets’ but we all spoke about ‘data’, and used the term data and not digital asset.