The 90-Day CDO Execution Roadmap
Incoming data executives face dual pressures: demonstrating immediate business value while addressing years of accumulated technical debt, fragmented data silos, and spiraling cloud compute costs. The CDO operating plan provides a structured sequence for establishing credibility and governance:
- Days 1–30 (Discovery & Audit): Inventory all data assets, active SaaS subscriptions, cloud compute capacity (Fabric, Snowflake, Azure), and report usage. Identify and decommission zombie workspaces that have had zero active viewers in the preceding 90 days.
- Days 31–60 (Alignment & Quick Wins): Meet with business unit heads to define top 3 revenue-impacting decision metrics. Deliver one high-visibility, certified executive dashboard with verifiable ROI.
- Days 61–90 (Operating Model & Chargebacks): Publish the enterprise data governance charter, implement automated capacity chargebacks, and establish data quality SLAs.
Capacity Chargeback and Allocation Math
When multiple business departments share a centralized Microsoft Fabric capacity (e.g., an F64 or F128 reservation), central IT must avoid subsidizing inefficient department queries. Chargeback models allocate monthly capacity invoices based on verified Compute Unit (CU) consumption seconds tracked by the Fabric Capacity Metrics App:
Department_Charge = (Dept_CU_Seconds / Total_Capacity_CU_Seconds) * Total_Monthly_InvoiceIf Marketing consumes 1,200,000 CU seconds out of 6,000,000 total CU seconds on an F64 capacity costing 5,000 per month, their allocated chargeback is (1.2M / 6.0M) * 5,000 = 1,000. This transparency incentivizes department developers to optimize slow DAX measures and prune unnecessary data refreshes.
