 Live from Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's The Cube at the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium with hosts Dave Vellante, Jeff Kelly and Paul Gillan. We're back. Welcome to Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is day one of the MIT Information Quality Symposium. It's a Chief Data Officer Forum. The Cube was here last year, it was our first year here. This is the eighth, I believe, MIT IQ Forum. I'm here with Jeff Kelly and Paul Gillan. We've been co-hosting all day, cruising around, checking out the breakout sessions, the key notes, talking to people, et cetera. So Paul, let me start with you. You actually, first of all, got us here last year. So thank you for that. It was great. You helped me more than I hoped you did. Yeah, we like to give more value than we extract, as they say. So we're happy to do that and it's been great. We've broken new ground with this whole CDO theme. We were talking, when preparing for the MIT event here, about the role of the CDO, how it's evolving. The data that I picked up today was, let's see, 2012, it was a single-digit penetration of CDOs. Then last year was a low double-digit, and now it's pushing 20% is the data that I heard today. Clearly it's got some momentum, particularly in financial services, health care and government and other regulated industries, but the big question we were asking internally is, does the role have legs? We heard the CIO partners today say he thought that the CIO role was in jeopardy and will be replaced by a combination of COO, CTO, and CDO. Maybe not necessarily a name, but certainly in function. So what's your takeaway from today? Any change in opinion, any crystallization of thoughts on that CDO role? I think that's a remarkable comment about the CIO role going away, because I think we just taken it for granted that organizations need a top technology person, top information person. But now with cloud, with BYOD, with people increasingly provisioning their own services, we're seeing the maintenance burden, the demand on CIO budgets to maintain, to pour money into maintaining existing systems. All that is in jeopardy now because of the cloud and the ability to move to a virtualized infrastructure where you can significantly bring down what has traditionally been a lot of the CIO's function, which is to keep the systems running, keep the backups in place, keep the data safe. So I can see the CIO and the CDO function perhaps collapsing into it more of the CTO function or CTO subsuming the CIO role. I think what matters, though, is the data, is the supremacy of data. We certainly heard that at the event today. This is all about corporate competitiveness, is all about data. And it's something Rick Watson kicked off the event this morning talking about, corporations have to move quickly to translate their assets into data because once you have data, once you're working with data about your assets, then there are so many more things you can do to achieve efficiencies, to achieve multiplications, to combine with partners and to derive more value out of the data about your assets than you do out of just the assets themselves. And this theme was continued through in speakers that we talked to. I was struck also by the comments from Jeanne Ross, who was one of our early guests today where she was talking about don't go too far with big data, don't go overboard. What we really need to do is just understand data better, learn to use the data we've got. And I think that was another overriding theme I heard here. It's not about big data, it's about data. It's about how we use it, how we combine it, how we make it accessible instantly to our mobile devices. And that's where the real opportunity is for businesses to change. Yeah, and I thought Joe McGuire, the former Gartner, Burton consultant, was pretty good as well. Talking about how when we go from what he called structured, unstructured, others called systems of record to systems of engagement, it becomes much more difficult a problem, data quality, that is. Metadata helps, but it's still the core of the problem is the data itself. And that's a challenge that people are attacking, but really haven't solved. So Jeff Kelly, what's your take? Anything you can add to the CDO discussion? Well I would agree with Paul about the, and Dr. Watson's comments about the critical importance of digitizing your, what's he called digitizing capital, digitizing your assets. If you think about a company like GE, for example, who is really putting a lot of effort into their industrial internet focus, and they're going to become, their real value is going to be less around the equipment they manufacture, more around the data coming off that equipment, and now they use that to help their customers. So I mean that's, I think that's a pretty good example of how really digitizing assets is critical. You know, in terms of the role of CDO itself, you know, I think we had a great segment with Eugene Coker from Seattle's Children's Hospital. A couple of things he said that really stuck out to me, that it was all about getting stakeholders engaged very early in the process, basically in the beginning of the process any kind of data led initiative, rather than kind of having your data scientists off to the side, do some analysis, determine we're going to change our process to this, and just, you know, basically tell the organizations how we're doing things now, but rather get all the different stakeholders, all the business-sized stakeholders involved from the beginning. And he talked a lot about storytelling and the need to be able to communicate the value of data to your constituencies, whether that's internal stakeholders or maybe customers, whatever the case might be. So I thought that was pretty interesting, and really my overall takeaway is that while, you know, I'm not sure the CIO role is going away, but I think for sure the CDO role is a strategic one, and not a kind of an operational necessarily one, keeping the lights on. That's really what the CIO is tasked with doing, and the CDO role is much more strategic forward-looking. And I'd say more of a business role, certainly, than a technology role. Well, I have one thing to that. We've heard a lot about culture today and about the importance to the CDO of influencing the way organizations think about data, and the potential for data to be misused. You know, Jeannie had a wonderful example of Ethna when the new CEO went into Ethna and found out that every single business unit was making money, but the company was losing $600 million. People can misuse data. They can massage it to make it look like what they wanted to say. And the CDO really asked me, the person who says, this is our one version of the truth. This is what we're going to adhere to. And that's tough because organizations tend to reject change, and they certainly reject any change that may reflect badly on them. I think of baseball. You know, I'm a huge baseball fan. How that was, how that game was revolutionized by Moneyball and the idea of data-driven, analytics-driven playing the game by the numbers, but it really has revolutionized the game. And that has swept through the game of baseball because the results were there. And I think we're going to see the same thing happen at companies. Maybe it'll be companies like GE that lead the way. Well, since we're on the Cube, love to talk sports, love baseball too. We were at the Vertica conference last year. Billy Bean was one of the guest speakers. We couldn't get him on the Cube. We invited him, but he had it run. The question I would have asked him is, first of all, why did you open your kimono? You had this competitive advantage, but it appears that that advantage has been sustainable. Why is that? This is sort of an aside, but I want to apply it to the business we're in, because everybody talks about Moneyball, the Red Sox, they won the World Series, potentially last year, playing a little bit of Moneyball. But many organizations seem to be going away from it, yet here at the Oakland A's, they're the only team in the majors with over 600 winning percentage. So they've been able to consistently sustain that competitive advantage. Why is that? And will that happen in our world? Well, I think that also goes back to the human equation. I mean, having the data is one thing, being able to use the data is another. So if you're drunk with money, as some teams are, and your tendency is to spend the money, regardless of the value of the data to your business, now, Oakland has always been a severely resource constrained team, and it has been forced to innovate and reinvent itself. What they have to do now is they have to consistently raise the bar. Sports Illustrated, the cover of Sports Illustrated a couple of weeks ago had a piece about the Houston Astros and how they're sort of doing Moneyball on steroids now, where they're attempting to reinvent that whole team around a statistical orientation or making some very strange decisions in the process, throwing away first round draft picks and such. But there's a method to the madness that they believe is going to pay off in a world championship in the next four to five years. So everybody is now doing Moneyball, but that means the people who, it requires continuous innovation on the part of the people who started their trend. And you're right, a lot of things that drunk with money, yet there's still, you see these $80 million deals and not a lot of them are paying off. I mean, the only one that's even close is Cliff Lee and that's even questionable, but anyway. What do you think? Do you think it's sustainable in our business? Well, or can people replicate the pioneer? I think what may be happening in Major League Baseball and potentially could happen in other industries is you see one company or one team apply this Moneyball method, it's working, and then of course you get a lot of other companies saying, other companies or teams saying, well, we've got to take the same approach. But what I suspect could be happening, and we talked about this, I can't recall which guest, but talked about this is not a technology problem at the heart of it. You can't just buy technology and throw it at this problem, which I suspect is what some of the teams, some companies tend to do. They think, okay, well we'll invest in a data warehouse, we'll invest in Hadoop, we'll invest in some data scientists and it'll solve the problem. Well, the people in the process issues are much more important. Clearly the Oakland A's took the time to build the people in process infrastructure required to make this effective. I think the Red Sox have done something similar. Perhaps other organizations have not taken those types of steps to change the culture internally in the organization to affect how people actually use data to go out there and make it a core competency of their employees. If you just buy technology and some high priced data scientists to crunch some data, that's not going to solve the problem. There's much more to it than that and I suspect that could be part of the issue. That's really, really key. It's not a top down function and as Jeanie again talking about the 7-Eleven, the Southline 7-Eleven example, what they achieved with that company, the advantage they achieved was not from having lots of data, but from giving each one of their 200,000 employees the understanding of how to use the little bit of data that they had. So it's not about a big data issue. Again, it's about understanding the value of data and evangelizing that throughout the organization. So the CDO role continues to evolve. Is it Jeff Kelly evolving outside of those regulated industries? We don't see it cropping up too much outside of those regulated industries at this point. I think it's going to take a long, this is a multi-year process before we kind of, for organizations at large to really get the value of data and understand the value that it offers. So I think it's going to take time before we see that role per se show up in some of these other industries and you got to keep in mind where they're coming from. We're typically, in most enterprises today, data, not only the data itself, but the policies and the ways of interacting with that data, it's a very siloed approach. So I think it's a pretty radical shift to bring in someone who's going to, at the C level, oversee your data strategy holistically. I think that's the direction we're moving. Whether it'll be called the CDO per se, I don't know, but I think that is the direction we're moving and we'll see that in more and more industries. I think beyond the regulated industries, what's really going to push this is, fear is a great enabler and when we see some organization, some companies and some of these other non-regulated industries really start to tap into the value of data, that's going to spur their competitors to reevaluate the way they're working with data and I think that's really when we're going to start to see some more traction with, whether it's called the CDO or not, developing some competencies around the way organizations handle data holistically. So let's talk about tomorrow. Did you have something to add? I'd like to hear from you. What were your takeaways from that? Yeah, so I think that the role is solidifying in my mind. I had some real questions as to whether or not the Chief Data Officer had legs and I think it very clearly does in those industries that we talked about. I agree, I think the outside of those regulated industries, I think the notion of data governance is viewed as an inhibitor, a handcuff to innovation. And so I think it's very questionable to me whether or not that will ever take hold and I don't think the CIO role will die outside of those industries. It would very well may in selected cases inside of those industries. I think the CIO role is alive and well. It's transforming into more of a business orientation. I think the other thing is I think that companies are not as data driven as they say they are. That's my other sort of takeaway and just talking to organizations and talking to people around here. Everybody at the senior level says, oh yes, we're data driven, we're data driven, we're data driven, but they're really not. They don't have a data driven culture. They don't have the systems in place. They don't have the data architecture. A lot of times they don't even know their data sources. They're not leveraging data for competitive advantage. I think Jeannie said it, they're metrics driven. They might try to optimize an individual business unit might optimize on a metric that I believe. They may be output driven but not input driven. Yes, that's right. And so I think that's a change that is coming and I think companies that are truly data driven, we could spend all day defining that are going to lead the pack in industries and transform industries and I think you're seeing that certainly you see that with guys like Amazon and Google and that's trickling through I think to virtually every industry. So those are two of my big takeaways and I think I'm very excited to hear from the folks tomorrow. We've got some folks from State Street coming on, some senior data governance people, guys from the Navy, Deloitte's coming on. Who else do we have, Jeff? We've got a bunch of practitioners tomorrow which is exciting. We do, we've got, let's see, I think the US Army may be coming on tomorrow. We've got... Halapka's coming on who is the former CIO of partners and I think is now at... Is it Ben Desjardau? Is it Ben Desjardau? Yeah, we've got Axiom coming on talking about data privacy. There's a data broker and they're kind of front and center and this whole data privacy controversy or coverage around what is acceptable use of consumer data. Should consumers have some kind of quote unquote bill of rights when it comes to data and privacy and what should they expect? Or are they willing to have their data withheld from Google search results for a month? There's another good point, yeah. So thank you tomorrow. I think the other thing that I guess I would observe is the Jeff Hammabacher quote that I invoked today, you may be familiar with it, where the Jeff Hammabacher former cloud era former Facebooks are the best minds of my generation. Spend all their time figuring out how to get people to click on ads, sort of. And that was his slap in the face. And this was probably two or three years ago. He's subsequently left cloud era. I think he might still be involved in a cursory way. He's got a title, but he left, I believe in MD, right? And he left, or he's. I'm not sure if he's in MD, but he's over at Cedar Sinai, I think. He's at Mount Sinai Medical. Medical, yeah. Solving difficult medical problems with data. So my point there is I think while that was probably true at the early days of big data, it's really changing. You're certainly seeing it penetrate fraud detection. We heard today how it's being used at children's in Seattle in a variety of ways throughout the healthcare system to improve healthcare. And I think that the data really truly is becoming a source of competitive advantage in a way beyond just clicking on ads. So. Absolutely. Just to build on that. The leading cause, more deaths are caused by legal drugs in this country than illegal drugs. Far more. And primarily because of bad drug interactions. Drugs are combined without the physicians knowing the interactions on the patient. Now through the combination of DNA sequencing and massive databases and big data analytics, they're beginning to figure out how to apply DNA to understanding drug interactions and save many thousands of lives every year. Those are real practical examples of big data changing. Well, and Jim Noga said today, he's the CIO of Partners. He said, you remember the Vioxx scare? I happen to be on Vioxx at the time just coming off back surgery. And so it was fresh in my mind at the time. He said that we would have been able to predict that much, much earlier than was able to be done. And we could have cut that off at the pass. And so, many, many examples of that I think are going to emerge. And we're excited to be covering that on theCUBE. So gentlemen, thank you for coming on today and helping the wrap. We'll be back tomorrow. We start coverage at right around 10 o'clock Eastern time. Let me just double check that. Is that right, Jeff? That's correct. 10 a.m. Eastern time, 10, 10, 15. We'll be live here. Check out siliconangle.tv. You'll see all the shows that we've done. Live.siliconangle.tv is the live coverage. Of course, it's always on siliconangle.com and the Wikibon blog. And check out wikibon.org for all the research. So we're wrapping up day one. Jeff Kelly, Paul Gillin and Dave Vellante. We will be here tomorrow. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you then.