Chief data and analytics officers are becoming more common in Canada, and around the world, as data and analytics become more closely tied to business outcomes, and as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more integral to business operations.Getty Images
The pandemic may have temporarily disrupted travel and tourism, but it gave the sector an opportunity to reinvent itself for the modern era. Destination Canada took full advantage.
In the summer of 2020, the country’s national tourism agency hired a new CEO, Marsha Walden, and the following year it added a new role to its C-suite: chief data and analytics officer (CDAO).
“We were right in the middle of the pandemic when I came to Destination Canada, and they really saw the opportunity to bring data to the forefront for an industry that was disproportionately impacted,” explains Meaghan Ferrigno, the organization’s first CDAO.
“We were first hit, hardest hit, and last to recover, so there was an opportunity as we emerged from the pandemic to use data and analytics and insight to build back differently, and better.”
Ms. Ferrigno, who holds a Bachelor of Sciences in information systems, an MBA with a technology specialization, and a CPA designation, says she was keen to combine her backgrounds in technology, business and finance.
“I was accountable for putting the data strategy together to maximize the competitiveness and resilience of the Canadian tourism sector,” she says. “It was very clear that I needed to use data to uncover insights, to shape strategy, and drive innovation.”
Though a relative newcomer to the C-suite, CDAOs are becoming more common in Canada, and around the world, as data and analytics become more closely tied to business outcomes, and as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more integral to business operations.
“The role has really taken off, irrespective of industry,” Ms. Ferrigno says. “Good AI is going to require good data, so having the role, the focus, is going to be critical going forward.”
Unlike chief information officers, who typically focus on internal IT systems, and chief technology officers, responsible for developing technology products and services, CDAOs are tasked with using data to improve internal decision making and strategy. They’re also charged with empowering employees to use that data to their advantage.
“Having data analysts, data scientists, all that is great, but if you’re able to also produce data literacy across the organization you can have anyone within the organization bring forward potential projects or ideas for where analytics could help with decision making,” says Dan Carpenter, an innovation and technology research associate at Conference Board of Canada, and leader of the organization’s Council for Chief Data and Analytics Officers.
Mr. Carpenter says the council was established in 2020, and at the time was largely made up of members from the country’s finance sector, but it has since expanded to other industries.
“We’ve had a lot of interest from large retailers, pharmaceuticals – I mean, especially right now, there’s just such a massive AI opportunity in pharma, and health care more generally,” he says. “They’re often looking to find out, ‘where’s the cutting edge? Where are the unique places and ways that AI is being leveraged?’”
CDAOs were once only found in the country’s largest organizations, but Mr. Carpenter says the role has begun to gain ground at smaller businesses, a trend he anticipates will only accelerate in the years ahead.
“So much of our economy is small to medium-sized enterprises,” he says. “To compete on the global stage, those organizations will have to look at how they can be more productive, how they can make better decisions from data, so that they can be globally competitive.”
Destination Canada, for its part, sees itself as responsible for getting its smaller industry partners up to speed on the data revolution. That is what inspired the organization to establish the Canadian Tourism Data Collective, which gathers nine billion data points from 175 unique data sources to provide insights into 5,000 distinct regions across the country, and it makes those insights available to its 200 industry partners.
These insights allow the country’s local tourism organizations, hotels, restaurants, tour operators, and other interested parties make better decisions about everything from marketing to inventory to spending trends to product offerings.
“Many of them are telling a story about the economic impact,” Ms. Ferrigno says. “Others are using it to examine comparative data and to support conversations with their boards, and anecdotally we’ve seen it start to enable some rural tourism development. One of our townships had different development opportunities, and they were able to use the data to inform their investment perspective and get that off the ground.”
Ms. Ferrigno adds that having data and making it available and accessible to industry partners has not only made Canada’s tourism industry more efficient, it’s also made it more resilient, and better prepared for whatever challenges come next.
“It’ll let us look at the downturns, lean into opportunities, and really navigate through with resilience as we go forward. When you don’t have that information, it’s just a lot of questions and guessing. Now that we have this information, we can move forward with confidence.”