 Live from Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. At the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium. Dave Vellante, Jeff Kelly and Paul Gillan. Okay, we're back for a wrap up. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly and Paul Gillan. We're here at the MIT Information Quality Symposium. It's been two days of Kool-Aid injection on the Chief Data Officer. It's been great guys. I mean, this is the second year we've been here. I think MIT's done a great job of bringing together different constituencies to study the opportunities around data, data governance, data standards, information quality, and the emerging role of the Chief Data Officer. We heard from two CIOs this week that the CIO role could vaporize within the next 10 years. They were both within healthcare, so maybe it's unique to the healthcare field, but essentially we heard John Holomka and as well, Jim Noga, who's with partners, say that the CIO role is a lot of operational role. It's like a COO role, essentially. Holomka said, hey, I started coding. No CIOs are coding this year. That's a technical role. So the CTO role is really what Jim Noga said would emerge as the vector being COO and a CTO role with the Chief Data Officer also reporting into the COO with responsibility for data governance. That was one of the most interesting comments that I heard. I mean, it was fascinating, it was fascinating. And I think it was also fascinating that we didn't detect any regret, right? They didn't seem to be upset about this. They were saying, well, I don't have to worry about infrastructure nearly as much as I used to. I don't provision servers anymore. I don't stay up at night worrying about downtime. I'm doing mostly governance and strategy right now, which I like better anyway. So what if that traditional role goes away? I didn't really like it to begin with. I didn't get the sense that they thought that they weren't marketable, but rather that the skills, maybe their job evolves into a COO type of position. Maybe these aren't the future COOs, or maybe they're the future CDOs. But they're getting rid of a lot of the scut work that CIOs have traditionally done. Well, Amazon calls it non-differentiated, heavy lifting, and I'm very strongly of the opinion that Amazon is going to be provisioning infrastructure better than anybody else in 10 years. And you're seeing companies like Amazon generally, but specifically Amazon step up in compliance. We heard that today. We heard that a couple years ago, maybe not so much, but Amazon's really checking the boxes on compliance, doing the things that are making us comfortable. We heard from Halamka that Dropbox won't take certain risks, but Box will. So you're seeing cloud providers realize if they want to get into the enterprise, they've got to adopt certain security policies. And again, specifically in the case of Amazon, you're seeing them bring up more and more and more innovation that is becoming acceptable to more enterprises. Now, there's still a big chunk of folks that will tell us, public cloud, no way. I won't do that. Particularly, you hear that a lot in financial services, but surprisingly, we didn't hear that in healthcare. And I'm very strongly of the belief that the marginal economics of the public cloud are going to be so compelling over the next 10 years as to overwhelm the business case. Absolutely, and you're seeing a price war going on in the public cloud right now, and it's only going to get worse, or worse or better if you're the customer. So why should you worry about investing in hardware that you're going to have to depreciate and you're ultimately going to lose a lot of that money when you can pay a monthly fee and the prices will just keep going down? And so that leaves application development. And certainly, most organizations are moving to commercial off the shelf applications for years, maybe doing some customization. So where's the differentiation? It's data. It's data, it's analytics and how you're using data. So I agree with this shift. I mean, I think the cloud is really pushing this shift for the role of the CIO. They're becoming much more portfolio managers, managing an array of services rather than provisioning infrastructure and making sure everything's connected and running well. Well, you're right. I agree completely. The differentiator is going to be increasingly how organizations monetize their data assets, simple as that. But there's also the compliance and governance aspect of that as well. So you're really seeing the CDO role emerge with kind of a dual mandate, one on the governance and compliance side, but also their mandate is to help the organization better make use of that data, show them new ways they can leverage data as an asset. So it's both the governance, compliance and the analytics and insights. So it's a pretty big role. So that's what I say. So where's the dissonance here? So we got a lot of agreement, but where's the dissonance? We've got that wide scope that you just described. I mean, a lot of organizations are saying, well, it's the sort of individual business unit and they're data scientists that are going to drive that value. They're really not going to have to rely on some central service organization from a CDO. What do you have thoughts on? No, I would agree. I think the CDO role should focus more on the governance issues and creating a foundation where an empowering business units and data scientists and analysts within business units to then take advantage of that data. So providing business units with clean actionable data that they can then leverage, because it's the business units that know their particular business problems better than any centralized person. And Paul, we heard the guys from State Street talk about standards and the promise of standards. And then of course, Bill Emman was rolling his eyes. So there were some points of disagreement this week. Well, I don't think Bill Emman was rolling his eyes at the idea of standards. He was rolling his idea at the ideas of standards committee. Standards are great. And John Lampka, his great quote at the end, he said, there are forest people and there are tree people. Standards committee people are bark people. So it can be very frustrating for people who think big to get bogged down in the standards. But standards themselves are a good thing. I think most of these speakers would agree. Now David Saul, who is a very impressive guest this morning, a very smart guy, chief scientist at State Street talking about the importance of metadata and having standardized ways that financial institutions can exchange data with each other and regulators can access that data and just streamline the whole regulation process, making everything more transparent. It just makes sense. And it's good to hear, it's good to see smart people like David Saul and David Blazkowski from both from State Street are working along these lines. You know, you asked about dissonance, David. And I think the dissonance here is internal to organizations and silos and the data ownership and the way organizations tend to favor individuals concentrating data and hoarding data and hiding it from their colleagues because data is the source of power. What CDOs are going to confront as they move out as this role grows is they're going to have to bust apart this mindset that says that it's my data because it's my, you know, that's what makes me valuable to the organization. Yeah, we heard from several interviewees this last couple of days about the need for people out in the business units to start thinking more about the value of data to the overall organization and less about specifically to them and their unit or department. And you're absolutely right. The inclination and the way things have been, the standard operating procedure for so many years has been, well, this is my data. This is my little project. I know it better than anyone else. And I personally can relate. You know, I've got spreadsheets and I've got data that, you know, we size markets and, you know, somebody wants to look at that and they say, well, what do you want to look at that for? What do you want to look at my data for? I know I can interpret this best. So I can really relate to it. So, you know, and that is- You want to see the sausage. Right, that's a big, you know, that's a cultural shift and that gets down to, you know, that's like hand-to-hand combat. You got to get down there and convince people and that is not an easy thing to do. Okay, so we, what do we see evolve this year? The chief data officer role still confined within regulated industries primarily but has momentum. I don't think there's any necessarily more significant definition around scope if anything is widened. But I also feel like there's momentum in a tailwind certainly within regulated industries. And I think in general, there's a sentiment that there's a lot of promise in terms of bringing data standards to organizations and leveraging data and the chief data officer is somehow some way going to be fundamental to that. So a year from now, what do you guys expect? Is the chief data officer role going to seep into non-regulated industries? Is going to momentum continue within these regulated industries? What do you guys think? Well, I'm ancient. So I remember when the CIOs first came when that concept of CIO first came online which was in the late 80s and we went through much the same process where it was sort of, well, is this real? Is this a new title? It's a new role. Is it going to last? Does it have legs? And then, you know, five years later it was just everybody was doing it. I think we're moving that way with the CDO title. I was interested, just parenthetically, though this conference was originally called the Information Quality Conference. We had very little discussion about information quality across two days here. However, Stu Maddick came in toward the end of the day today and he had some very compelling points to make, I think, about not taking data at face value and how we have to, the role of the CDO and the whole organization will be to question data. Is that good data? Is it valid? Is it actionable? Because it's so easy to make bad decisions based upon data that looks like it's good. Yeah, I think in one of the roles or one of the jobs of the CDO is going to not just do that themselves in their department but to foster that mindset in people out in the business units. That's one of the, I mean, really the CDO is a teacher in many ways. They have to teach the rest of the organization how to start thinking about data. And one of the things you've got to think about is take a step back. When you're analyzing some data and you get the results that are just perfect to your hypothesis, then you got to take a step, that's the time to step back and say, okay, am I missing something here? Something, is it my bias in the way I'm looking at this? So that mindset of thinking about questioning your data, questioning the way you look at it, that's something the CDO has to educate the rest of the organization about. Well lies, damn lies and statistics. I mean, I don't know, do you guys think that dynamic is going to change as a result of the big data initiative? I almost feel as though, those that can become data savvy, independent of data quality. I mean, a lot of times data quality is secondary to the data itself. And we talked about this, Paul, is sort of advancing a political agenda. I mean, when I say political agenda, I mean, within an organization, for example, or a public policy agenda, it is, will that change? Will that dynamic change as a result of? I don't know. I'm kind of a research geek. And so when I read surveys, the first thing I don't want to do is look at the methodology. How many people were surveyed? What were they asked? You know, how, when, how were they surveyed? And so- Where's the bias? Yeah, so bias. And so often you see research that makes headlines in the news. And when you dig down on how the research is conducted, it's totally bogus. It's biased, it's just bad research. And there's more of that out there than ever now because it's so easy to conduct research. So the trend over the last few years has been that the quality of data is getting worse, at least in terms of our, the data is, we are applying fewer filters to data because we tend to sensationalize, we tend to be attracted to that which validates our point of view, kind of human nature. Yeah, data quality, I feel as though you made the point that wasn't a lot of talk about data quality. I feel like data quality in the aggregate is it's Don Coyote chasing windmills. I think in general, data quality has gone way down as a result of the amount of data that's in the types of data. However, for specific initiatives, data quality is critical. And I think that's really the big takeaway here in terms of actually getting value out of data, you have to have some kind of data structure, data architecture and data quality initiative. So we are seeing areas where that's changing as John Halamka pointed out. Electronic health records have gone to 80% adoption right now. That's pretty high quality data for the most part and that's going to improve the quality of healthcare. And you know, look, bottom line is for an enterprise, you can overlook data quality at your own peril. If you're going to develop, because we hear from a lot of speakers today who are not necessarily data chief data officers or data scientists themselves, but some of the academics who are focused on their research on really ways to transform the enterprise, talking about business transformation, these big theories around transforming enterprises to take advantage of data. If you're going to transform your enterprise in a fundamental way on bad data, well, your enterprise isn't going to be around for a lot longer. So you're going to see some of these companies and initiatives weed themselves out if you're basing it on bad data. I mean, the bottom line is you're going to see the results in the revenue and profits of these companies. So when Facebook, you know, derive X amount of data from X amount of revenue from their, you know, their mobile advertising initiative, that's because of data that's using it in a way that's providing value. If it wasn't providing value, they wouldn't be driving that much revenue. So in the end, it'll take some time to shake out, but you're going to see really the companies that succeed are the ones that do it the right way. Absolutely. And I can go back again to Stuart Madnick. He dodged the question of whether MIT would get into the data science business. In fact, he said they won't. That's not really their orientation. But he did say this is an engineering school and what engineers do, engineers have to see truth because engineers have to build things that work. And so what he was saying was, I think, you know, the future belongs to engineers because they are the ones who will figure out what's good data and what's bad. All right, final thoughts, gentlemen. Jeff Kelly, you know, any takeaways or things that you saw at this conference that excited you, what do you take away? Well, I mean, just generally speaking, I think we saw this year over the last year, I think we're seeing the role solidify a little bit, the chief data officer role. We heard a lot about some emerging best practices, maybe not set in stone at this point, but things around communicating with the rest of the organization, getting executive buy-in, some other kind of best practices. So that's encouraging to see those things starting to take shape. That means, to me, that means this role is really becoming a real thing. And as I mentioned a moment ago, it's really being tied, the CDO role is being tied to really large strategic initiatives. So to me, that implies this is a strategic role. This is not a tactical role. This is not a keeping the lights on kind of role. This is not a kind of a science project, as we've heard a lot of big data projects described that way. And both of those things are encouraging to me. As we see this kind of, not just the role develop, but the use of data in the enterprise and government organizations as well. So overall I think we're moving in the right direction. It will be really interesting next year to see if we've got a few more of our guests here on theCUBE or maybe from other industries. I suspect we might see some in more of the commercial-facing industries. Certainly companies that have a consumer-facing business are ones that are going to, I think, look to adopt the CDO role. So looking forward to next year as well. Paul, final thoughts? Last two years, for the last two years this conference has been heavy on healthcare and financial practitioners. Next year I expect we're going to see more retail, maybe some manufacturing, transportation. I think we're going to see more success stories next year. I want to see more tangible examples of how big data is changing businesses. Yeah, for me it was one of the keynotes. Richard Watson, when he talked about digitizing your assets and driving essentially ROI return and capital. And I think that, I came out of this with several ideas as to how to do that. I think about CUBE videos. I think about the metadata around the CUBE videos. I think about translation around CUBE videos, diffusing overseas. I think about all the Twitter data that we've captured and how to enhance that data. Those digital assets, I think, are something that I know we as an organization are very excited about. So that was my big takeaway. I'm going to actually apply some of the things that I heard. Do something different. So hopefully a year from now I can share some of that with you. All right gentlemen, thank you very much. It was a great event. Thank you everyone in the audience for watching and listening and tweeting. Mark Hopkins, I appreciate you coming in and Andrew Lowe. You guys with the scaled down crew here. I knew you could do it, so appreciate that. And of course Art Lindsey, doing everything in the back end. A lot of the stuff that you see is because folks like Art actually make it happen. Kristen Nicole, the editorial staff, really appreciate it. John Furrier giving us advice on different questions to ask. So thanks for that. We miss you. Love to see you in Boston this summer. Have some chowda. That's a wrap, thanks everybody. This is theCUBE. We're live from MIT. Check out SiliconANGLE.tv for all these videos. You'll have the playlist up there. Check out SiliconANGLE.com. You'll see blogs. Check out Wikibon.org for all the research. Wikibon.org slash Big Data is a lot of Jeff Kelly stuff. It's all there, it's all free. Check it out. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. Live broadcast will be in Boston again in August at the Vertica user event in August. So check us out there and until then, have a great day.