The State of the Data Nation: Why Your Roadmap Is Already Behind | CDO Matters Ep. 101
CDO Matters PodcastShow Notes
The data and AI landscape shifted more in the last six months than in the three years prior and most data teams are still operating off roadmaps that predate it. Malcolm Hawker goes solo to give data leaders an honest read on where things stand and what to prioritize for the rest of the year. 📌 In this episode: Why Gartner's keynote message — that it's okay to be a late AI adopter — is advice Malcolm thinks is negligent, and why you don't have three more years How agentic AI and tools like Microsoft Foundry and OpenAI Studio are finally connecting the dots between data foundations (MDM, data quality, governance) and real AI business outcomes What SAP's acquisition of Reltio means for MDM customers and who should be paying close attention Profisee named a leader in the new Gartner Magic Quadrant for MDM: what it means and why it took four years to get here 💬 The takeaway: "If you don't have some idea of how you need to adapt your governance model to support AI, you don't have three years to figure it out because you already had three." About the host: Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters on Substack, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast. 🔗 Watch other episodes + read the transcripts on the CDO Podcast page Follow Malcolm on LinkedIn
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Agents are about to hit data systems and governance frameworks at a volume, velocity, and variety they were never designed for. Bolting AI onto the old model may turn out to be the riskier bet. 📌 In this episode: Why agents bring back the three Vs of big data, and why even Google-scale systems weren't built for that much concurrency Winfried's first-principles view of governance: negotiation, direction, and accountability Why longer guardrail lists make agents worse at following rules, and why "human in the loop" is too passive a role Why data governance belongs inside corporate governance, not beside separate AI, IT, and risk frameworks 💬 The takeaway: "So much of what we've built over the last thirty years has become so monolithic and so big and so inflexible... I think we may be better off just starting from scratch." — Malcolm Hawker About the host + guests Malcolm Hawker is a former Gartner analyst, Chief Data Officer at Profisee, Editor-in-Chief of CDO Matters on Substack, and host of the CDO Matters Podcast. Guest: Joe Reis is [Owner, Data Engineer + Architect ] at ThinkQuick, LLC. Author of Mixed Model Arts, which rebuilds data modeling from first principles for both humans and AI agents. Guest: Winfried Etzel is [Sr Specialist Data Management and Podcast Host with DAMA Norway] at Equinor. Author of Data Governance in the Wild, which rethinks governance from first principles. Subscribe to CDO Matters Monthly → https://profisee.com/cdo-matters-community/#join-community Follow Malcolm on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/malhawker/ Guest → https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephreis/ Guest → https://www.linkedin.com/in/winfried-adalbert-etzel/
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