What we're reading this week...
A round-up of articles that have caught our eye in the last few weeks
By Michael Lenczner and Jesse Bourns
This article on the tenure of Chief Data Officers (CDOs) which looks at why the lifespan of CDO’s at a company tends to be so much shorter than their C-level peers. The author argues that a “failure to articulate from the very start how a CDO’s work differs from that of other executives” may be part of the cause. The non-profit sector tends to believe that the for-profit sector “knows how to do” data, so if we can adopt their approach, it will work out. The article makes it clear that this is not true - CDO’s are the people who supposedly have the recipe for driving things forward, but even for them it is still difficult to make things happen.
This reminds us of this Sean Boots article. If your leader is going to be gone by the time the project is completed, then they are not going to care as much about the project (that probably means the project won’t go well).This article by Louise Adongo (warning, paywall) is not a normal thing we see talked about in the non-profit space. Rather than assuming the positive impact of projects, the article talks about the potential harm these projects may cause too. The rhetoric in the nonprofit sector about social R&D usually assumes either positive impact or at worst neutrality. The reality is that experimentation creates risk - which can mean harm, too.
We lied. Contrary to the title of this post, we haven’t read this book yet (aren’t we cheeky). But we have ordered it and are super excited to delve into it. The authors of Digital Transformation at Scale have a lot of experience doing this work in complex social environments. Generally, digital transformation is done on a smaller scale (individual organization level) rather than at the level of multiple institutions and agencies (e.g, governments). We can’t wait to see their take on doing this work on such a large scale.