 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and this is day two of theCUBE. We're here at the MIT Information Quality Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The heart of data, certainly on the East Coast. I'm Dave Vellante, and I'm really pleased today to have Paul Gillin as my co-host. Paul is an author and a social media strategist and somebody that I've known for decades. Paul and I actually used to work together at IDG. Back in the day, Paul was the editor and chief at Computer World, and he was of course employee number six at TechTarget, the media publication that really changed the online world. Paul, first of all, welcome to theCUBE. It's a delight to be here, Dave. I can't, it's been a couple years since you and I worked together and I can't tell you what a thrill it is to be back on safety. I love how our paths keep crossing, right? So we worked together, of course, as I said at IDG, but we spent a fair amount of time at the Mass Technology Leadership Council as well. And of course, I've been busy, you've been busy. I haven't been as active. I don't know if you have been, but they've been a great source of gatherings in this part of the world. Yeah, I've been very active in Mass TLC lately, just a lack of time, but you and I were at IDG together when you were at IDC. I remember running into you in a gas station, actually. I think that was how we sort of re-established connections a few years ago. I ran into you at a gas station and we exchanged cards and then we wound up working on a project at IBM together and then you've been off doing Wikibon and I just think the way you guys are reinventing publishing, you know, it belies the idea that the publishing world is dying, which a lot of people say publishing is a dying market. It absolutely is not. It's being reinvented by companies like Silicon Angle, Wikibon, SpiceWorks, have figured out new media models that are working. Well, we talked about this the other day, my friend Charlie Sennett who started the Global Post, they have such high quality journalists and young people who want to be journalists, so you as a journalist, I'm sure, you know, you must have a good feeling about high quality journalism. It's clearly not dead, people need great reporting, but so we're here, I was thrilled to get the call from you, whatever it was a couple months ago, about the MIT Information Quality Conference. As I said in my remarks this morning, Rich Wang was kind enough to give me five minutes to address the audience. We do a lot of stuff in big data here at Silicon Angle and Wikibon and there's not been enough discussion about data quality, a little bit, but very, very little. Security is just starting to, for example, hit the discourse, but data quality and information quality has not, but what I like about this conference, it's hardcore information quality practitioners. The big role here, the senior role, is the CDO, the chief data officer. And I don't know, I would say most companies don't have a chief data officer. No, I think it's something that's a luxury of the largest companies and we have some very large companies at this conference, a lot of big banks, big healthcare organizations, a lot of government, people from government, but generally large companies are the ones that have the luxury to be able to devote resources to data quality, which is a shame when you think of it because data quality is a problem at every size company, but it becomes, I think, an even more difficult problem with financially, with regulated companies and those that have the count their customers in the millions. Well, but here's the thing, so role-wise, everybody's focused on the data scientists, which is great, and a lot of people point out the skill shortage, but the other meme that you hear is that companies need to be data-driven. You hear that bromide all the time. If you're going to be data-driven, you've got to have somebody who's in charge, a chief data guy, whether you call him or her a chief data officer, it really doesn't matter, but somebody's got to be responsible for the data and the adjacencies. So we heard Mario Fabio today, who's the first chief data officer in Latin America with the Division of Equifax, he listed, I think it was 11 areas and disciplines that he owned as the chief data officer. So it wasn't just data, it was policy, it was governance, it was the architecture, it was acquisitions, it was operations, and on and on and on. So a wide-ranging organizational challenges, but if you're going to be data-driven, you would think you've got to have a data guru. So that's some of what we're going to be covering here today, and I think that, I don't know, you think this notion of a chief data officer is going to expand, given the fact that people want to be data-driven. You know, it doesn't feel right to me, and I think that's because data is such an organizational issue, and having someone in charge of data, you know, one of the problems with creating a title and putting someone in charge of a function is that other people can then forget about it. They don't have to worry about it because we've got a chief marketing officer, we've got a chief information officer, that's their job. What I keep hearing at this conference from these people who are CDOs is, data is an organizational issue. Data entry, data becomes corrupted at the moment it's entered, and that's just the beginning of the problem. So you have to solve problems at almost every level to get your data act together. And I would just worry about giving that task to one person, and other people simply think that they don't have to worry about it anymore. So that, you know, we heard today, so there's a panel, Derek Strauss was on yesterday, he's the CDO of Ameritrade, TD Ameritrade, had a panel, one of his panelists was Bruce Davison, he talked about quality metrics, and he talked about data supply chains, and we've talked here on theCUBE about the data pipeline, the data factory, and how that basically is what you're saying. It touches the entire organization. You can imagine water flowing through an organization, it's data flowing through an organization, so. Well, it changes the way organizations operate, too, and it changes the way they serve their customers. And I thought, I had a conversation yesterday with Dat Tran, who was the Veterans Administration, keynote speaker in the morning, from the Veterans Administration, and he was talking about, I thought he gave an example that sort of beautifully made this real. He was talking about the fact that a veteran now, to get benefits, has to take proof of military service to the VA, and show the VA that they're a veteran. In order to just get enrolled in the program. And then if they want to enroll in a, apply for a benefit, or enroll in an education course, or something the VA offers, they have to find out about that, then they have to go and apply for that course, or that benefit. And he was saying what should happen is, automatically, anyone who's honorably discharged from the service should become part of the, should enter our records. And then we should be telling people about the programs that they're eligible for, instead of forcing them to prove to us, that they have that eligibility. And when you think about how that would change, the whole relationship between the VA and its constituents, that example, I think, can apply to every business. Yeah, absolutely. And that was the thing about that trend that came on theCUBE yesterday. And I was just listening to him, and what he was describing at the VA, you could see in so many commercial businesses. So we're going to be unpacking a lot of those items today. Paul and I will be going wall-to-wall coverage. This is day two. This is theCUBE's Silicon Angles coverage. We're here at the MIT Information Quality, Symposium. Michael Nix is up next. He's the Director of Analytics at Fletcher Allen Healthcare. We've got a number of practitioners, consultants, and Paul and I will be opining and sharing our views, as well as the audience view. So I'm at D. Volante. He's at P. Gill and G-I-L-L-I-N, if you want to tweet us. Keep it right there. We're right back with our next guest right after this.