Mixed Deck — All CDO Topics Flashcards

A CDO finds that three business units define 'active customer' differently, causing conflicting KPIs. Which governance artifact most directly resolves this?

Answer: An enterprise business glossary with an approved definition and owner

A business glossary establishes one authoritative, owned definition for shared business terms.

Which U.S. federal law requires financial institutions to explain their information-sharing practices and safeguard sensitive customer data?

Answer: Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act

GLBA's Financial Privacy Rule and Safeguards Rule govern privacy notices and data protection for financial institutions.

A data program has a Cost Performance Index (CPI) of 0.8. What does this mean?

Answer: The project gets $0.80 of work value for every $1 spent

CPI = EV/AC, so 0.8 means cost overrun: each dollar spent produces only 80 cents of planned value.

Which metric measures the percentage of data records that pass all defined quality rules?

Answer: Data Quality Pass Rate

The Data Quality Pass Rate (also called conformity rate) measures the percentage of records that conform to all defined quality rules and standards.

What is an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) used for?

Answer: Capturing a significant design decision along with its context, options considered, and consequences

ADRs preserve the reasoning behind architectural choices so future teams understand why decisions were made.

A CDO discovers that 15% of customer records have duplicate entries. Which data quality dimension is most directly affected?

Answer: Uniqueness

Uniqueness measures whether each entity is recorded only once; duplicate records directly violate this dimension.

A retailer's MDM hub must merge customer records from five source systems while leaving each source as the system of record. Which MDM implementation style fits best?

Answer: Registry style

Registry style keeps data in the sources and maintains only a cross-reference index with matching keys.

A data steward discovers that 'Active Customer' is defined differently by Sales and Finance. What is the best-practice first step?

Answer: Escalate to the governance council to agree on an authoritative definition and record it in the glossary

Conflicting definitions should be resolved through governance and documented once as the authoritative standard.

Which metric best demonstrates the effectiveness of a data governance program to the executive board?

Answer: Reduction in data-related incidents and improvement in critical data element quality scores

Outcome-based metrics tied to risk and quality show real business value rather than activity.

A company is implementing a modern data stack with ELT. Where are transformations primarily executed in ELT compared with traditional ETL?

Answer: Inside the target cloud data warehouse after raw data is loaded

ELT loads raw data first and then uses the warehouse's own compute to transform it.

A disaster recovery plan states that no more than 15 minutes of data may be lost after an outage. Which metric does this define?

Answer: Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

RPO is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, while RTO is the maximum acceptable downtime.

What is the primary trade-off when introducing materialized views to speed up dashboards?

Answer: Additional storage and refresh overhead, with possible data staleness between refreshes

Materialized views precompute results, costing storage and refresh compute and potentially serving stale data.

Which statement best captures the difference between a data strategy and a data architecture?

Answer: Strategy defines the why and what (goals, priorities, operating model), while architecture defines how data is structured, integrated, and delivered

The data strategy sets direction and value, and the architecture is the blueprint that carries it out.

Splitting one large database horizontally across several servers by a key such as customer ID is called what?

Answer: Sharding

Sharding spreads rows across independent nodes by a shard key to scale writes and storage horizontally.

Which federal agency is the primary U.S. enforcer against unfair or deceptive data privacy practices under Section 5 of its governing act?

Answer: Federal Trade Commission

The FTC uses Section 5 of the FTC Act to act against unfair or deceptive privacy and data security practices.

Which practice best keeps data pipeline documentation synchronized with code changes?

Answer: Storing documentation alongside code in version control and requiring updates in pull requests

Docs-as-code ties documentation changes to code reviews so they evolve together.

Why does an ELT pattern often suit cloud data warehouses better than traditional ETL?

Answer: It uses the warehouse's scalable compute to transform data after loading

ELT loads raw data first and then transforms it inside the warehouse, using elastic cloud compute.

According to the 1-10-100 rule of data quality, what does the "100" represent?

Answer: The cost of a failure when bad data is used and acted on

The rule says prevention costs $1, correction $10, and failure from using bad data $100.

A CDO is evaluating whether to build a centralized data team or adopt a hub-and-spoke model. The hub-and-spoke model PRIMARILY offers:

Answer: Shared expertise centrally with domain specialists distributed in business units

Hub-and-spoke combines central expertise and standards with embedded domain knowledge in each business unit.

Which role is typically accountable for approving access to a dataset and defining its acceptable use?

Answer: Data owner

Data owners are accountable for their data's classification, access approval, and acceptable use.