Data Strategy Framework & Who Should Lead It

Written by Charlotte Whitehouse

As boardrooms grapple with building a genuinely data-driven business, the real risk is believing the need for change sits outside the boardroom.

Practicus data leadership expert Pete Williams explores what a workable data strategy framework looks like, and who should actually be responsible for it.

There’s a common mistake in business management: the belief that capability can simply be bought or hired. Buy a new platform, hire a few CVs with the right buzzwords, and the shareholders get their update. It’s a reassuringly expensive approach and if the ambition is to genuinely transform how the organisation competes, it rarely delivers more than comms-worthy quick wins.

The good news: transforming competitiveness through data-based decision-making is very achievable, and it doesn’t necessarily mean an expensive platform overhaul or a trendy new job title. It does mean investing in how the board thinks about data, and in flowing that thinking through the rest of the organisation.

What Is a Data Strategy, Really?

A data strategy is not a technology roadmap, and it’s not a data governance policy, even though both feed into it.

At its core, a data strategy defines how an organisation’s data supports its business objectives: what questions the business needs answered, what data is required to answer them, who’s accountable for data quality and access, and how insight reaches the people making decisions.

The mistake many organisations make is treating data strategy as an IT deliverable, when it isn’t. It’s a decision-making discipline that happens to depend on technology, not the other way round.

A Data-Literate Mindset Is Key

To genuinely leverage data assets, an organisation needs a data-literate ecosystem. Technology matters, data scientists’ matter, and the data itself matters, but the greatest value by far comes from the strategic questions fed in, and the ability of decision-makers to understand the insight that comes out.

That’s why building data literacy among leaders is the highest-value investment an organisation can make.

A persistent myth is that exponential growth is hiding somewhere in the systems, dashboards and spreadsheets an organisation already has. It isn’t. What unlocks growth is surfacing the right questions in ways data can answer, a curiosity-led mentality that drives sharper, timelier decisions.

Technology is a component, not the answer. Chasing the newest, shiniest platform isn’t what creates competitive advantage, the mindset and behaviours around the technology are what create value.

Defining the right processes, making them slick and embedded, and turning that into a repeatable culture is where the advantage is sustained.

What Is a Chief Data Officer, and What’s the Role For?

Many organisations appoint a Chief Data Officer (CDO) once they recognise the business lacks that data mindset internally. The CDO’s job is to be the data evangelist, educating the board, leadership team and wider workforce on where data-driven options should be part of the conversation.

It’s important to recognise that data isn’t a subset of technology. A well-positioned CDO is a partner to the CIO, not a subordinate, inspiring commercial growth using the data collected and the technology the CIO maintains.

Fundamentally, the CDO role is a decision-making discipline. It asks: what precisely do we need to know, and how do we best draw on relevant data to answer that question? Perhaps the role is better understood as the Chief Decision Officer.

The role has moved on since this framing first took hold. By 2026, Deloitte’s CDAO Survey found 63% of Chief Data and Analytics Officers now describe themselves as the primary drivers of data and analytics decisions in their organisation and 94% expect their influence to grow further over the next year, with 78% saying AI has already increased their decision-making power. AI hasn’t replaced the need for this leadership, it’s raised the stakes on getting it right, a shift playing out across sectors, including in pharma and life sciences.

CDO vs CIO: Where Should Data Strategy Actually Sit?

Given the two roles form an effective partnership, it’s a mistake to place a CDO below the CIO, or to fold the CDO’s responsibilities into the CIO’s role.

The skills, experience and outlook required are genuinely different, our Chief Data Officer guide breaks down exactly where the two roles diverge. Doing so brackets data inside technology and pulls it further from the commercial decisions it’s meant to inform.

Few organisations have carved out board-level space for a CDO, though more should. In the absence of that, the role needs a natural home under an accountable senior sponsor.

Of the standard C-suite options, reporting into the CFO tends to work best: finance already understands the need for quality data and sound decision-making, without competing on commercial strategy with other C-suite functions.

The CDO needs to operate horizontally, across the pillars of what’s usually a vertically structured business, not get pulled into serving one function at the expense of the rest.

The 2026 Reality: Rapid Adoption, Short Tenures

The CDO role has grown fast 84.3% of organisations now have a CDO or Chief Data and Analytics Officer in place, up from just 12% in 2012. But adoption hasn’t translated into stability. The same research found only 47.6% of organisations consider the role “very successful and well established,” and more than half of CDOs last less than three years in post.

That gap matters for how the role gets set up in the first place. A CDO hired into a vague mandate, buried under the CIO, or expected to fix data quality single-handedly rarely lasts long enough to deliver the transformation they were brought in for.

The same pattern shows up in public sector transformation more broadly, programmes stall not because the technology fails, but because the wrong leadership was in place to drive it.

Getting the reporting line, remit and executive sponsorship right from day one is what separates organisations getting long-term value from the role and those re-hiring it every two years.

A Data Strategy Framework: 10 Steps to a Data Mindset

Recruit a true specialist

A commercially oriented data evangelist who can constructively challenge the board on data in their decision-making and organise the resources to support it.

Map your data

Know where it comes from, how and when it’s transformed, where it’s stored, who uses it, and the quality it’s in.

Correlate data with business strategy

Understand where more, or different, data is needed to deliver the strategy.

Meet the decision-makers

Focus on the common, horizontal challenges that drive strategic value across the business, rather than siloed departmental fixes.

Educate the organisation

Help people understand the decision opportunities data presents, and how to ask the right questions to benefit from them.

Test and learn

Be scientific: test hypotheses, measure outcomes, amend and try again and be willing to stop what isn’t working.

Establish clear data governance

Start from an open-data position rather than restrictive legacy constraints. Apply legal, commercial or personal-sensitivity limits where genuinely necessary, not by default.

Build a question-led, not statement-led, culture

Create reusable data products that support self-service, so people can find answers themselves.

Stay outcome-focused

Data strategy supports the business and customer strategy; it doesn’t replace or outrank them.

Don’t let data quality fears stall progress

The business is already running on this data. Nothing improves quality faster than putting it to high-frequency use in real decisions.

Don’t Have to Work This Out Alone

Deciding who should own data strategy, and getting the structure right around them, isn’t a decision most leadership teams make often, which is exactly why it’s easy to get wrong. If you’re weighing this up, it can help to talk it through with someone who’s faced the same question before, rather than starting from scratch.

That’s the thinking behind the Advisory Network, Practicus’s free, confidential service connecting you with someone who’s faced the same challenge.

Whether you’re weighing up reporting lines, defining a CDO’s remit or questioning whether the timing is right, we’ll connect you with an experienced leader from our community who’s genuinely been there. No pitch, no sales process, just practical, independent advice from someone who’s solved the problem in a real organisation.

If you’re weighing up how data strategy leadership should sit in your organisation, or need support finding the right person for the role, get in touch with the Practicus team.

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Data Strategy Framework: Who Should Lead It, CDO, CIO or CFO?