 Live from the Mandalay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at IBM Insight 2014. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for IBM Insight. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the seeds from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Courtney Evercrombie who's the emerging roles leader at IBM. Welcome back to The Cube. I know Dave interviewed at MIT at the chief data officer coming to MIT thing. Welcome back. Yeah, thanks. It was a blast. I pretty much talked the whole time. That was a cool event. It was kind of geeky and kind of academic, but this is much more higher paced here at IBM Insight where data is at the center of the action. And is there a chief data officer? Is that expanding? What's going on with that? Give us, you had some folks here, customers. I mean, is that a real role, other real people behind it? Gosh, you know, the person that was supposed to be here was a chief data officer, but I swear, they are real. They're not a unicorn. It still is, right? I mean. It still is, even though he's not here. Well, we had him on the Cube at the first MIT conference that we did. And we're talking about Derek Strauss just for you out there. So CDO, TD Ameritrade, sharp guy. And we met dozens, if not many dozens of CDOs, real CDOs. Yes, we did. And that role's popping up all over the place. I mean, it was single digits and now it's deep into the double digits, especially in those industries that we talk about. Yep, exactly. Connect to services, healthcare, government. I'm starting to see them in other industries like media, manufacturing. Absolutely. And Internet of Things is just going to make it that much more prolific on top of that because now you can embed, you know, sensor devices that are going to give you new sources of data, potentially new sources of revenue. If you know how to use that data and sell that data and augment the data to really make it valuable outside of your business. But that's kind of boring, you know. The fun stuff to talk about with Chief Data Officers is the political dynamics that they have to go through. Oh yeah. Is there a lot of mudslinging here or what? What's going on? Give us some good dirt. Oh man. Share with us. Well, you know, the CDO is kind of right now, it's a change agent role. And we know that that's like a thinkless role because you're going to get a lot of skin off the back, you got to have a thick, thick skin. You got to have tenacity. You got to have a lot of tenacity because you're going up against sometimes the CIO, sometimes- He's bunkered in. He's bunkered in. Sometimes you have some CIOs that realize, hey, you know, data's kind of a pain in the rear, you know, and I don't want to deal with all the business leaders all the time. And so, you know, just take it, please, please, for the love of- Good luck. Yeah, just take it. I take my power in cooling, too. Yeah, exactly, yeah, take it. We don't want it anymore. We don't want it anymore. So, you know, but then on the other hand, you also have all of the different C-suite members that you have to go and build advocacy with. So you're just like a cheerleader, all day long, talking to chief marketing officers, chief operations officers, and you're trying to tell them there's a lot of value in them, their heels, you know, this data is gold, and I'm going to show you the way because they just don't have the imagination for what they can actually accomplish with data. They think in terms of dashboards and reports, but did you guys see the Watson general session today where they literally have data elements that they're using to put together flavors? I mean, we're going to have a cookbook for crime. Oh, we know about the cookbook. Yeah. Oh, oh, technical difficulty. And then the other thing about the chief data officers, they make a lot of dough. So, you know what I mean? So they're all relays. Yeah, no, so people are jealous. They're like, oh, this guy's going to make all this money and why, you know, they got all this power and you know, organizations get. Yeah, well, and our friend Ursula from Key Bank, I'll give her a shout out, hey, Ursula. She's always saying all is fair in love war and data because it's like a big fight. Everybody agrees on the strategy, but then when it comes time to turn over that data, it's mine. Hey, the data says that we should invest less in this P&L and more than this, wait a minute, hold on a timeout, let me show you my data. Yes. And what do you do? You attack the data. Yeah, there's all kinds of defensive moves. Get your own data, get a smarter data scientist, right? So a chief data officer has to deal with all that gymnastics, right? Yeah, at the end of the day, they're wishing they had punching gloves, you know, to at least defend the block, doing a lot of blocking over there. A little tempo action. What is the biggest challenge politically for these guys? I mean, obviously there are some cases clawing their way up to the fight for their value purposes. Sometimes the CIO may or may not be bunkered in fighting their territory, it might come from the CFO or the business lines. I mean, people want the results. So what do they hang their hat on? What's their calling card? What horse do they ride into the board room with? The biggest case that I can honestly tell you for chief data officers is all they have to say is, do you want things to go back to the status quo? Because you tried to deliver on whatever it is, a data governance project, or you tried to deliver on, you were trying to accelerate a customer digital experience, or we really wanted to come out with a new app. Remember last time I was telling you about the Starbucks app and how great it is, and it's driving extra growth for them to the point where it's now going to become an actual way for them to make money, to recreate this for other companies potentially. I mean, these are really amazing things that chief data officers can bring about in a very, they can do it in an accelerated timeframe, whereas CEOs have been trying to do things by committee. They have CMOs and maybe they have some risk people and maybe they have some operations people and they're trying to attack the problem, but you know, everybody knows you don't get very far in a committee. I mean, if you've done a student project, you know that for crying out loud. You can talk about our EMIT people, I mean. So we got some crowd conversation from our friends, Tim Crawford and others. A question is, first of all, he made a comment, and it's great to see you on theCUBE. Data is gold and the CIO needs to follow. It's just a statement, not really a question. But his question is to you is, is the CDO a temporary phenomenon or will it persist or when will it change? Okay, and I know it's terrible to answer a question with a question, but if you feel like data is going to continue to be important, and I'll give you a little hint, it is. If you feel like it's going to continue to be important and grow in importance and with all of the internet of things now, all the connected devices, with all the new possibilities that you can potentially create a competitive advantage, whether it's through an operational efficiency or an actual new business model, this is only gonna grow as people start getting more visionary about how to use data and analytics. We're just barely scratching the surface because all of this time, data and analytics has really been down here at this more kind of like a manager level and broken out into silos and individual business units. Instead though, when you see a leader come in and they can create an actual vision for how to use the data, that's when you have things like Watson coming about. I mean, solving cancer with data, who would have thought that, or having a data cookbook? I mean, that's like, people would have laughed before this happened, but it takes someone being in charge to make that kind of vision. So I want to give, share with Tim a couple of anecdotes from the MIT conference. So we had the CIO of Seattle Children's on and also, I forget his name, I'm sorry, but then John Halamka, who's the CIO of Beth Israel in Boston. At both of them said, the CIOs, and Tim, you're going to love this, the CIO's days are numbered in their world. And what they both said was, we see the CIO role morphing into either a COO, because most of us report to the COO today, not the CEO. Remember, it used to be a big discussion about should the CIO report to the CFO or the CEO? But today it's really they report to the COO or the CFO. So growth path, COO or CTO, I'm a technologist at heart, okay, I'm a geek, I want to be a CTO or a chief data officer. So they both sort of agreed with that piece. Now, Tim, I'd love to hear your input on that as well. Tim's advisor to CIOs. Your livelihood depends on that role. Although, you know, hey, you've morphed as well, but do you see that? Do you see that role morphing? Absolutely. I've talked about today during the sessions we've been talking about how is this new role going to affect not just the CIO, but how is it going to affect all the other roles? Because we know that marketing has its own big huge data divisions now because they're using it like never before to create a new customer experience. We know that finance has always relied heavily on data. We know that, and people are going to at first feel like even CIOs, they're going to feel like this is a little bit of a loss. You know, there's always the fear that there's some kind of power going out the door when you give up a little piece of something, but the ones who are really visionary will understand that it will give them more time to either, if they're going to become a chief data officer, that would be a fantastic opportunity for them to start something brand new and really stake a claim on it. Or if they decide to stay in the CIO role, it could morph very much into more of a technology bent. Right now, that's what we see CIOs really focused on. And that's why the data officer even emerged, right? Because nobody was really connecting with the business. They were more concerned about the data systems that were housing it because before now, data hasn't really been front and center as an actual offering. It has been in the back office as the lifeblood of the business through ERP systems. So it made sense that CIOs would own it. But yes, I do see that, I either see that the CIO is going to become just a technology officer, which is a huge role by itself with bring your own device and all of that good stuff. Or it's going to have to go the route of the CIO. Well, Tim said, shouldn't the CIOs focus turn to data and away from the tech centric? Well, a lot of people would argue that the CIO is too busy keeping the lights on. Making sure the systems are up, servicing the application infrastructure. And so, but to that point though, Tim, I think there will be, there are some CIOs who have a data centricity. Go toward that CDO role is really the opportunity. Well, there's quite a difference. It really depends on the CIO themselves and their culture and what they believe. Oh, you're skeptical that the CIO can play that role. I'm skeptical and I'll tell you why. There is a whole different psychology. I've been telling everybody I talked to about this today. There's a psychology for a business person versus a CIO or an IT, a very heavily intensive IT person who grew up in IT. And if you think about how we even self-identify, I'm a marketer, I'm an IT person. I'm a finance person. Social media guru. I'm a social media guru. That's my Halloween costume. Yeah. I mean, so yeah, you have these identities within companies, it's almost like clicks in high school. And I do think that there is a certain culture that comes up in IT that is very project-driven. There's a beginning and end. There's an ROI and a cost and efficiencies must be had at the expense of innovations. Yeah, if it's on time and on budget, it's a success. But now, we don't, that's the old. We don't do things like that in business. On the business side of the house, you iterate and you iterate and you iterate. And you just keep iterating until you finally achieve that business goal that you were trying to originally achieve. I mean, essentially, whatever it is. We are seeing more CIOs come from the lines of business, though. It's not the norm, but you're seeing that creep in. So that maybe is a potential growth path. What other roles are you seeing? You have this title of emerging roles leader. Yeah. What other roles? Chief analytics officer, for sure, especially in banks. How's that different than the chief data officer? And does that individual report to the chief data officer? Now you're getting on to the good politics. These are juicy conversations, for sure. Amongst our world of all these emerging roles because many analytics folks are, they're the ones who actually have to bring the value because at the end of the day, if you're a chief data officer, maybe you're tasked originally with a regulatory mandate, but if you're really smart about it, the ones who are really flourishing and thriving in the role and really bringing it to a true C-suite level are the ones who are bringing an innovation agenda. And so, you know, that can't, the outcomes, the value of an innovation agenda is driven by analytics. If you have data and you have to come back to the CEO and say, they're going to say, well, what'd you do for the business? Okay, well, I've got a really clean database over here or I've got a really clean data lake and everybody's using it, okay? Golf clap. Yeah, exactly, okay. But if you say, oh, I increased sales 65% by providing a dashboard to increase competitiveness among salespeople without any incentive pay whatsoever, just the fact that they wanted to compete with each other. Okay, now you got my attention. 65% revenue growth just from providing a dashboard, what? You know, and then everybody's catching, it's catching on at the C-suite table. Everybody wants a piece of that. They're like, well, I want those results. So I want to see if I can apply something like that to my part of the business. And before you know it, that's how the CDO role, you know, really, really takes hold in a company. Courtney, what's the biggest thing that you see that has to happen for the CDO to coexist peacefully in harmony and a cohesiveness in a cohesive way across the organization? Is it going to be tech? Is it going to be the data? Is it going to be budget? I mean, people getting behind CDO, but this is the conflict between top-down governance restrictions, which we've seen with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. All this stuff creates more restrictions. Organically, data's growing at massive rates, so you have that pressure for organic new sources of data to ingest in, yet I need the compliance. So the collision between, you know, don't do this, I need restrictions, don't share anything with openness. It kind of creates a dynamic. Well, what's the actual question there, but you know what, I'll just go with it. Let's see. Just answer anything you want. I'll answer any part of that. Will the CDO stay around, or is this going to be a transitional position? No, I think it's absolutely here to stay, and I think it will cause other positions to morph around it because data is so incredibly important to competitive advantage for companies right now. It really is the new way to, you know, be innovative. You can learn new things about your customer statements. We have data available to us that we never had before thanks to these things that we carry around in our pockets all the time, especially, or anything that we interact with. Even our wearables themselves give us data all the time that is now usable in so many ways that you have to sit and just think of them all. It's almost like sci-fi novels. You really need to be imaginative with it. But I don't see the role going away at all, and it's only going to grow in importance of data. And I think it's a good question, but I think I would agree with you, especially inside those regulated businesses, that it's going to become the norm. Now, whether it permeates outside of those to the same degree, that's still a question mark, I think. Would you agree? I think it goes back to capturing the imagination of the CEO. I think there's a lot of reasons why CEOs are looking at this role right now. Some of them are the right reasons, and some of them are just, they are what they want. They write it on the airplane. No, they write it on the airplane. Or they're feeling competitive pressure. They feel like there's gold in their data somewhere. It just needs to be discovered. Well, the hepatitis are, go find that gold. Well, exactly. That's kind of the thought is, let's put it all in one big data lake and try to do some discovery. And that is certainly a valid point as well. What data products can we build? Can we monetize that data? I mean, I would certainly be asking that question. Absolutely. And then other times, they're like, well, my competitor just got a CDO, and they're going to do something fantastic, so I better figure this out. I think we talked last time about the CDO that was quoted as saying, the CEO gave me a blank piece of paper and said, make the strategy that's going to make our company more competitive. I mean, that's the kind of pressure these guys have to really create the role. And if you're a good CDO, you're going to see that as an opportunity. I mean, really great leaders that are change agents are going to come in and think, wow, this is a great opportunity. People who are going to get overwhelmed, maybe they're not the ones that are going to be the chief data officers in the long haul. Courtney, thanks so much for coming on. It's always a pleasure. You got it by so fast. Your smiles awesome, your energy's fantastic. We need a little shot in the arm. You brought your A game. Thank you so much. Great content. And the CDO will be important. I totally believe that emerging data sources is just too massive. There has to be someone, there has to be a data czar. So we're in agreement. This is theCUBE. Of course, we love sharing the data, extracting the data and sharing that with you. We'll be right back for more here at Insight, live in Las Vegas, IBM Insight. We'll be right back after this short break.