 from the campus of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering the MIT Chief Data Officer and the Information Quality Symposium. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Paul Gillan. We're back, theCUBE streaming live from the MIT Information Quality CDO and Information Quality Conference in Cambridge. This is Paul Gillan with my colleague Stu Miniman. We're kicking off two days of live streaming coverage with many of the speakers and some of the attendees from the event and great way to kick off our coverage today with the two gentlemen here who joined us from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock and have been instrumental in founding the organization that was announced here today, the Institute for Chief Data Officers. I guess our Lawrence Whitman, Larry Whitman, who is the Dean of the Donahue College of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock and John Talbert, Professor of Information Science at the College. Welcome, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having us. I think, Larry, you got up today and asked how many people in the audience had been to Little Rock. You were somewhat surprised by the result. Yeah, I was pretty excited to see that probably about a third of the people there and a third to half of the people there had already been to Little Rock and our jobs are going to come back and learn more about Chief Data Officers. And maybe they're there to see the Clinton Library. I don't know. Tell us how the organization, the Institute came about. This is a big development, it seems to me, in trying to bring some structure around the CDO role. How did you, out in Little Rock, hook up with guys in Cambridge and figure out if you want to do this together? Well, that's a good question. So about 10 years ago, Rich Wang was brought down to Little Rock to meet with John Talbert, Dr. Talbert on my left here. And together they developed the Information Quality Program at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock. So there's both a 12-hour certificate program. There's a 33-hour master's degree program in Information Quality, as well as the PhD that's offered. And so that program's been going on for about 10 years. And as the Chief Data Officer Symposium and now the International Society started getting going, it's time for an institute. And so what really we decided to do was to bring all those things together, form a board, and how can we help advance the body of knowledge of Chief Data Officers? That's really good to have best practices from other people. I would like to get some of the theory and prepare the next generation of Chief Data Officers and equip those that are already there, both with trainings on-site as well as interacting in the community. So talk about what a CDO gets by joining the organization. I mean, what is in it for them and how did you find CDOs in the first place to recruit? Well, of course, the key there is Rich Wang. Rich Wang has plugged in very well to the Chief Data Officer. Rich Wang, the organizer of this conference. Correct. And one of the starters of the New Society for Chief Data Officers. On Tuesday, there was a meeting made this announcement. A lot of people are interested by being involved, making people aware of what's going on. Really gets people a part of this. There's a lot of interest in trying to really take this to the next step. Some movements come from industry and then academia comes onto that later on. Some movements come from the top. And so really the question is, do you have a fad or do you really have something that's gonna be entrenched for years? Will Chief Data Officers be around for 10 years from now? And really part of that is, when you get people to become a Chief Data Officer, what is their background? And so a lot of people are in that position because of where they are, who they know, and then they kind of learn by being thrown into the water and learn by coming to events like this. We'd like to make some training to more formalize the knowledge, to develop a true body of knowledge of Chief Data Officers and then pass that out onto current people like we're involved with now. A lot of people are very interested in what we're doing. They say now is the time and we believe now is the time and a lot of things came together at the right time for this to happen in little while. John, I'm curious, you know, I think back, I studied engineering as an undergrad, you know, both of you were in the engineering school. Talk about kind of the pipeline, kind of the career path as to, you know, how students, you know, first get involved in data because I know as an undergrad, data wasn't something I ever thought about. It was later on in my career where I started to run across it. You're certainly not alone. So I've been in this long enough to kind of see the evolution. I mean, we talked about the information age coming in many years ago, but it was really just the technology age. Our focus in information technology has been heavily on technology. You probably remember people talk about, you know, this is data that belongs to, you know, this is payroll data, this is accounting data. We thought of data as being sort of belonging to the application, to the technology application, but there's been a realization over the last few years that it really is independent. It belongs to the organization overall and it really needs to be managed as an asset the same way that people would manage employees as an asset or inventory as an asset. And so that's caused a big change in thinking and there's been an evolution, for example, it started with, you know, you need to pay attention to the quality of data. And MIT's always been on the forefront of these things. Stu Madnick talked this morning about, it was 25 years ago that they started applying manufacturing quality principles, TQM principle to data systems and they came up with this total data quality management program. And then there was a saying, well, it's not only the quality, but then it needs to be managed at the enterprise level. And so we saw the emergence of the discipline of data governance, to govern it. And so finally now we're at the step where they're saying, well, it takes more than a program, it takes leadership. So the CDO is sort of a natural evolution of from data quality to data governance to leadership of people who are going to guide the enterprise and data strategy. Do you see any trends forming around what this role really encompasses? Because it seems that in some organizations it's a more technical, it's more down in the trenches, in some organizations, it's strategic. Are there any trend lines emerging there? The, there's been some work on that and what's called the cubic framework for the chief data officer that does recognize that data officers are for different kinds of enterprises and applications have a different emphasis. Some are more externally focused, some are more internally focused, some are more focused on structured data, some are on unstructured data as well. So one of the things that we wanna try to do through the institute and through the training is to come to consensus about more of this, exactly what is the role and we know that it'll have some variation in it but try to come to common principles around that role. Also, I think it depends a little bit on the size of the organization as well. Because you see that the CDO role is different when the CDO has to do more of the actual operation details of an enterprise. So small to medium enterprises, CDOs are starting to, they're starting to be CDOs at that level now, not just at the big organizations. And so that role's a little bit different depending on what they have to do to meet the demands of their company. So I mean, talking again about the organization, what is your first year goal and what does say your three year goals? So the first year goal is simply to assemble a board of advisors and meet and define where we are and where we should be from that perspective. We wanna be an industry driven organization so we're an academic institution, we have some requirements on that end but we also want to get together and make sure. As I already mentioned, we already established a certificate, a master's and a PhD. And then Rich is bringing down some training for both new CDOs as well as retooling existing CDOs. So what we need to do is make sure our current offerings are relevant to industry, relevant to the demands and needs of both now and the future. And then beyond that, we'd really like to get PhD students equipped in possibly a membership type environment where companies come and sponsor a PhD student and they go and do real research with real theoretical underpinnings but also that's really applicable to the current problems industry seeing both in the large companies and in the small companies. So that would be more of the two to three year goal there on how to advance that. Cause really we want both to serve the current needs and then to advance the future. And really that's a part of really what that would be the progression of what we did. Yeah, I agree, I think longer term we want to take these definitions of the role and responsibilities of CDO as sort of a model and drive that back down into our curriculum. I mean, we've been, we're celebrating 10 years of the program and we've tried to evolve our curriculum to keep up with the trends. But I think it's we're getting ready to have a major refresh with this new emphasis on enterprise governance and leadership around data. So the other thing that we want long term is to revamp our curriculum, make it relevant to this area. And as Dr. Whitman said, we have produced not that many PhDs so far. The PhD program is one of the newest that we've added. We've got almost 20 graduates now but almost all their placements have been in industry. They've been very good placements, you know, Google and IBM and Sydney and those places. But what I think Rich will bring is that theoretical underpinning that will create really research oriented PhDs that we can also place at some of the major universities. And that I think will really help promote this in the long term. And what you're referring to Rich Wang, the organizer of this conference who will be joining us on theCUBE tomorrow over 20 years at MIT. Now, moving to, it's up to the full professorship at University of Arkansas, we'll be out there. Boy, nobody can understand what he says here in Cambridge. I wonder how they're going to do how they're going to do in your neck of the woods. But we're really excited for him. I do want to ask you just before we have to wrap up here, 10 years ago you started this program. Hadoop was still in incubation. There was big data was data warehouses. We've had this explosion of unstructured data, as you mentioned, John, all kinds of different data types that we're dealing with now, machine learning, predictive analytics. I mean, the whole field has changed. How are you evolving your program in quality to accommodate all these technical changes? Well, our program from a curriculum standpoint is very flexible in the sense that almost all of our courses have labs that go with them. And so that makes it very flexible. The principles are not going to change that much. So the way we adapt to that is the tools that we use in our labs that accompany our courses. So yeah, so we're addressing all the issues that you just talked about, about unstructured data. We have students that work now on the Hadoop MapReduce platform for their exercises, thanks to the availability of all these tools through the cloud. One of the people here at supporting this conference, Calibra, that produces data governance tool, they've provided access to their tool for our students. SAS has provided access to their data management platform. So we get a lot of support from industry to keep abreast of the changes. I think that's important to have the theory for the chief data officers, that the chief data officers understand the theory, as the technology will continue to evolve and change, if you're tied into one technology for the basis of what you do, you're in trouble when that next revolution happens. Five years ago, who would have thought the cloud would have the impact on all of us? It does now. And so if you understand the theory of the basic principles of good data makes good decisions, and then the same kind of information quality we've talked about all along, applying it to the same total quality management principles that have been around for a long time, then that makes these future technology tools transitions much more palatable in the chief data officers. Sounds like a wise way to approach it. We have to wrap up here. Larry Whitman, John Talbert, both of the Donahue College of Engineering and Information Technology University, Arkansas, Little Rock, we'll be looking forward to seeing your progress with these two chief data officers. Maybe next year you'll come back and give us progress report. Thanks so much for joining us. Well thank you. Thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Is the Cube, we'll be back in a moment.