Chief Privacy Officer Role and Organizational Transformation in the Digital Economy

With increased digitalization and the evolving digital economy, consumers, regulating agencies, and business partners alike demand more transparency for organizational privacy practices, generating increased pressure on organizations to establish privacy programs and initiatives. The Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) role is central to the development of these privacy initiatives and is becoming more strategic. However, the role of the CPO appears to vary significantly across organizations. This study aims to investigate how an organization's privacy initiatives implementation influences the CPO role and understand how an organization needs to transform to support the emerging CPO roles in the digital economy. We present our initial findings and elaborate on a transformation model that shows the stages an organization follow to support the CPO role strategically.