 Live from Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's The Cube at the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium with hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly. Massachusetts, this is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Jeff Kelly. We're here at MIT at the Tank Center. This is the second year that The Cube has been at the MIT Information Quality Symposium. The information quality symposium is probably the world's leading forum for thought leaders and chief data officers around data quality and it's certainly got a boost in the last several years with all this talk about big data and data analytics. But sort of that role of the chief data officer, even though maybe that term has not been around forever, has really been around in terms of the function for quite some time. A lot of data governance, a lot of issues around information quality, certainly touches along security and other factors. So we're here covering the symposium for the next two days. We just heard a number of keynotes. Jeff and I were in there as well as Paul Gillan who's also going to be co-hosting or try hosting with us this week. We've got a great lineup, a lot of academics, a lot of thought leaders, a lot of chief data officers, consultants, analysts, maybe some bloggers and coming at you as they say for two days, over the next two days here, live from Cambridge, Massachusetts. So Jeff, I want to turn it over to you. We were here last year. The big question on the table is do you need a CDO? Should that chief data officer have a role that's separate from the Information Technology Department from the CIO? We saw that there were several industries where that CDO role was emerging, certainly healthcare, financial services, government and other regulated industries, but it hasn't gained broad acceptance, at least at the time had not gained broad acceptance in most commercial marketplaces. Has that changed over the last 12 months? Well, I think we're moving in the direction of it being more acceptable, more routine position in the enterprise. I wouldn't say we're at mainstream adoption when you see those enterprises having a chief data officer at this point, but I think that's the direction we're moving. The idea that if data is a strategic asset and you need to treat it as such, the idea of having a C-level executive kind of oversee that function does make a lot of sense. Now the question, of course, is the CDO a permanent position? Is this something that's going to be with us 10 years from now? And that's something you've got to think about. You don't want to create a C-level position just for the sake of it or based on a kind of passing fact. I would argue that based on what we're seeing in terms of, as we just heard in the keynote here from Dr. Rick Watson, talking about the digitization of capital, I would argue that the CDO position is a critical one and one that most organizations are going to look to implement over the next, it's going to be a longer period of time, 5, 10, 15 years. The question is, there are a number of questions. Where will that role, the CDO, fit in the larger enterprise in terms of the organizational org chart? What specifically will be their mandate? Will it be around data governance and managing the flow of data within an organization? Does it also include actually taking advantage of and utilizing that data for competitive advantage? The analytics component, is it a little bit of both? And so what role specifically will the CDO play? And how will they interact with both the IT side, the business side, and the operations side? So a bunch of unanswered questions that I think we're going to try to sort out today. As you mentioned, we've got a number of CDOs on. We've got academics who have been doing a lot of academic research in this area. We're here at MIT. So we've got some of the smartest minds, of course, to help us sift through some of these questions. So looking forward to it. So you can see maybe some of the logos behind us here. We've got a lot of contributors to the MIT Information Quality Symposium. Obviously the MIT IQ part that is run by Rich Wang. The Sloan School is involved. We've got MIT SSRC. We've got IQ. We're going to have Stuart Madnik on. He's going to explain who the contributors are. And we'll be unpacking that over the next two days. We also just went through the keynotes. Rich Wang introduced sort of the program. And then we had Peter Anlan, who's a consultant and one of the co-chairs, talking about the two days that we'll be here. And then we had the sponsor Lovefest. I think the sponsors came up all the 30 seconds to give their pitch, which is fine. And then the meet of the morning was Rick Watson, who gave a great talk on capital and how to maximize capital and digitize capital. Real quick, would you make of that discussion? Well, it was interesting. I mean, he argued essentially that capital, which comes in multiple forms, whether it's economic capital, social capital, human capital, et cetera, the goal of any organization is to transform existing capital and to essentially maximize that and transform that into new capital, whether that's revenue, profit, however you define that. So he argued that digitizing capital is a way to actually accelerate that process of driving economic value. And he tied that into the CDO position. The way he outlined it is he looked at kind of three key duties he thought that the CDO should have in this kind of world of where you're looking to digitize capital. Those were link organizational strategy to the digitization of capital, to implement a plan to digitize that capital and, of course, promote the exploitation of digitized capital, i.e. analyze that data to make actual, insightful decisions. I would say those are three pretty good uses of a CDO's time. I would argue there's also another component around minimizing risk around the use of that digitized capital. We've seen a number of instances of organizations over the last several years analyzing data and reaching out to customers doing marketing campaigns that maybe cross some ethical lines and some other risks associated with collecting, storing, and analyzing customer data. So I would argue that there's another component as well, and we'll talk to Dr. Watson today about that on theCUBE. Okay, so stay tuned, everybody. We'll be going, as I say, wall to wall. This is theCUBE. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is Dave Vellante here with Jeff Kelly and Paul Gillan. We'll be right back after this work.