Date of Award

3-27-2019

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Information Science

First Advisor

John Talburt

Abstract

With the advent of the Big Data era, Chief Data Officers (CDOs) take on the task of managing all types of data. However, as an emerging position, the roles and responsibilities of CDOs in the organization, and the relationship between the CDOs and firm performance are not yet completely clear. The research in this dissertation provides an analysis of the CDO development stages, the different types of CDO roles and responsibilities, and explores the relationships among the CDO’s presence, the CDO’s characteristics and the firm performance. First, the research shows the development of the CDO can be divided into five stages: the generation stage, the growth stage, the rapid development stage, the prosperous stage and the recession stage. Second, the research combines the data from the reality and the literature to show that the CDO mainly undertakes 5 different roles and 28 job responsibilities in the enterprise. Third, the research uses the Wilcoxon signed-rank test to analyze the performance differences between treatment firms and control firms, and uses the Hierarchical regression method to test the moderating effect of the firm size. The result indicates the CDO’s presence can improve the firm performance. The firm size moderates the relationship between the CDO’s presence and firm performance indicator, ROS, in the same direction. Fourth, the research analyzes the relationship among CDO’s characteristics and the firm performance. The result shows the work experience and education level of the CDO have a significant influence on firm performance (ROS, OI/S, OI/E, OPEXP/S, SGA/S). It also shows how CDO’s duality and gender moderate the relationship among the CDO characteristics and the firm performance. In summary, the research described in this dissertation helps executive leadership understand the importance and impact of the CDO. It also provides evidence to support the establishment of the CDO role in an organization.

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