Once you've designed your organizational structure, the real challenge begins: making it work in practice. Ways of working are the operational mechanisms that enable teams to collaborate effectively, coordinate across complexity, and turn structure into productive action.

Establish Operational Coordination

The Chief Data Officer ensures the data strategy's different components work together and progress at the right pace, managing various highways—technical, decision-making, and reporting—each with its own timeline and complexities.

Orchestration and program management allow each team to work according to the most effective methodologies, connecting different timelines and anticipating how one area impacts another.

Formalize expectations, especially for new product development, to mitigate complexity and ensure manageability as the business scales.

Coordinate Global Data Teams

Global data operations face unique challenges navigating varied regional markets and business divisions. Strategic hub placement in key locations like the US or China is typical, but even within a country, location choice significantly impacts team effectiveness and business integration.

Leaders must determine whether data teams should be part of a specific business unit or function centrally. Ensuring critical data functions, such as customer data management, are properly owned and managed is essential.

Choose battles wisely. Influential leaders may create their own data initiatives. It's more effective to guide them towards best practices gradually than to confront them directly.

Manage Complexity

Flexibility is a friend to global data operations; uncontrolled complexity is an enemy. Organizations must be cautious about launching too many products or initiatives simultaneously. Anticipate and contain complexity before moving to the next growth stage.

Coordinating global data teams requires careful planning and orchestration. Understanding regional and business unit needs, building the right teams, and orchestrating efforts through effective program management turns the complexity of global operations into successful data-driven enterprise.