The Three Roles of the Chief Data Officer: ADP’s Jack Berkowitz

As chief data officer of payroll and benefits management company ADP, Jack Berkowitz has three primary responsibilities. One is to oversee the organization’s data overall, ensuring that functions like data governance, security, and analytics, are running well. Another is to build ADP’s data products, such as people analytics and benchmark tools. But the responsibility that’s of most interest to our hosts is Jack’s oversight of the organization’s use of artificial intelligence.

In this episode of the podcast, Jack describes how focusing on the outcomes the organization wants to achieve leads to better processes and results. He also dives into the topic of AI ethics and outlines how other organizations might consider assembling an AI ethics board. Read the episode transcript here.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Sophie Rüdinger.

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Guest bio:

Jack Berkowitz is chief data officer at ADP, where he leads the company’s data security and governance, data platforms, and analytics/machine learning operations. His role also involves partnering with stakeholders to develop new data initiatives to improve clients’ experience and ADP’s competitive position.

Berkowitz joined ADP in 2018 as the senior vice president of product development for the DataCloud people analytics and compensation benchmarking solution. Before that, he was vice president of products and data science for Oracle’s Adaptive Intelligence program. Previously, he spent 20 years in product development and the implementation of intelligent information systems. He has been on the executive team of four startups involved in search, reasoning, or metadata-driven applications, and he cofounded Edapta, which enabled dynamic user interfaces and personalization for mobile and web clients.

Berkowitz has a master’s degree in industrial engineering and operations research from Virginia Tech and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the College of William and Mary.

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