Shabel Enterprises
Fractional Chief Data Officer
CDO-level knowledge, direction and policy, for a company that does not need a full-time CDO.
Fractional Chief Data Officer.
The knowledge, direction and policy a Chief Data Officer brings, for a company that does not need one full-time. We assess where your data stands, set the direction with your stakeholders, hand you the plan and the requirements, and then come back on a schedule to keep the implementation honest.
The Seat Most Companies Don't Need
Most companies do not need a full-time Chief Data Officer. There is not forty hours a week of executive data leadership in them, and a full-time seat hired before there is would spend most of its week looking for something to own.
They still need the decisions a CDO makes. Who owns the customer record. What “active” means when finance and sales both report it. Which standards are enforced and which are merely written down. What an AI initiative is allowed to touch, and on what data. Whether the vendor's roadmap is the right roadmap. Without someone accountable for those calls, they get made anyway — by default, one project at a time, by whoever happens to be closest — and nobody reviews them until a number fails to reconcile.
A fractional CDO supplies that level of knowledge, direction and review, for exactly as long and as often as the work actually needs it.
How It Works
- Assess the current data environment — the platforms, the data flows, the ownership, the controls, and where they have quietly drifted apart.
- Meet the stakeholders — the executives who consume the numbers, the teams who produce them, and the people who get the phone call when they disagree.
- Set out the best practice that fits — not a maturity model, but what good looks like for a company of your size, sector and appetite, and why.
- Deliver a report and an implementation plan — findings, priorities, and a sequence ordered the way the dependencies actually allow.
- Write the project requirements — specific enough for your own team to build from, or for a vendor to bid against.
- Come back on a schedule — to review progress, answer the questions implementation raises, and make the policy calls as they come up.
What You Have at the End of the Assessment
- A written assessment of your data environment as it is, not as the architecture diagram says it is.
- An implementation plan with the order of work, the owners, and the decisions each step depends on.
- Project requirements ready to hand to whoever does the building.
- The standards, and the checks that enforce them — written so they are the requirement rather than just a suggestion.
See What You Get
Page 2 of a sample assessment for a fictional company: the scorecard and the findings. The scores were produced by our assessment toolkit from a synthetic set of stakeholder answers.
Fictional company. Full sample sent on request.
How It's Priced
There is no retainer. The assessment is sized to your company, because assessing a fifty-million-dollar business and a five-billion-dollar one are different jobs. Assessments start at $17,000, and we quote the exact figure once we have seen the size of the job. After a short scoping conversation you choose: a fixed quote for the whole assessment, or draw it from a prepaid block of hours at the published rate for that block.
The scheduled reviews during implementation are drawn from a block. They are booked in advance, so they never compete with anything else for time.
Where It Ends
It ends when the plan is in place and your team owns the standards, or when your company has grown into needing a full-time Chief Data Officer. When that day comes we will say so, help you write the role, and hand the seat over to the person you hire.
Start a Conversation
Tell us which data decision nobody currently owns. That is enough to begin.
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