 Live from Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE at the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium with hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly. Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly and this is theCUBE, we're live at the MIT Information Quality Symposium. theCUBE is Silicon Angles flagship program, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. It's day two for us at MIT IQ, it's a Chief Data Officer Symposium, a lot of CDOs here, I think it's the leading forum, leading thinkers on the whole Chief Data Officer, emerging role are really here at MIT. Courtney Abercrombie is here, she's with IBM, she's in the emerging roles and she's a market leader for the big data and analytics piece of the business. Courtney, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thanks, I'm thrilled to be here. So you gave a talk yesterday evening. Yes. Talking to CDOs, which is your wheelhouse. That is my wheelhouse, yeah. Give you hints and tips on how to sort of interact with the C-suite, so give us the sort of bumper sticker, what were you talking about? Well, and you know what's funny is we actually managed to keep everybody past happy hour, so you know it was a good discussion, if you can do that, because the drinks were already flowing and everybody knew that, so that was a personal point of pride for me. Well done. Yeah, no, basically we were talking about how you build success and traction with your CEO and your C-suite, because essentially if you don't get your CEO on board or if they don't already have a predetermined disposition towards data as a way to make decisions and build business value, you're really going to fail as a chief data officer, I hate to say it. I don't care how scrappy and change agent you are, you're now going to get anywhere if your CEO is not on board with you. So I really, I take to heart all of the issues that I try to bring and topics that I try to bring to the chief data officers. I look for their best practices and their shared successes. I talk with them daily, every single day I try to talk to a chief data officer to understand what they've done that was really right, and then I bring it back together into these kind of keynotes. So I know that's why they like to come and hear about it, but at the end of the day you really have to seek out the champion in the organization, even if you're able to get a mandate from your CEO, which is, that's like a unicorn quite frankly, because you rarely get a mandate, a hard and fast mandate. It's more like a, what did I show you yesterday from the Center for Applied Insights? It's more of a quote like, here's the blank paper, you show me the data strategy that's going to help us drive competitive advantage, because executives know that they need to do this. They stay up at night thinking about the fact that their other competitors are going to outdo them in some way, shape, or form with all this new technology where you can do everything, internet of things, connected devices, machine to machine learning. They know there's all this advantage to be had, but CEOs just don't really, they don't speak data. They don't know how to even articulate what they want. They just know they want a competitive advantage out of it. And so I like to speak to Chief Data Officers about what it is that CEOs generally have in mind when they're talking about how to drive business value from data, even though they may not know themselves. So I use the C-suite studies from our Institute for Business Value where we've interviewed like, do you guys know about the C-suite studies? Sure, absolutely. See it every year. Yeah, it's like 4,000. Audience may not. 4,000 different CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, CIOs, you name it. Any C-suite executive, we interview them. And we try to do that on an 18 month cycle, so we're up to date with the most current issues. And so essentially I gathered all of these insights that were relevant to the Chief Data Officer and including the Chief Data Officer's own success stories and put them all into this presentation. And basically it revolves around, or revolves around, excuse me, building small successes, finding the one stakeholder in the company that you're going to start with and build your advocacy, having that member of the C-suite table champion you to the other C-suite members, this is the formula for success that I have seen. The ones who don't do well, the Chief Data Officers who find themselves incredibly frustrated. And let's just face it, you heard Eugene earlier. He was talking about this trial and error approach, right? I mean that's really how it is and so if I can help eliminate some of this pain by sharing back some of these stories about don't try to bite the whole elephant at once, take little nibbles until it finally comes down, I mean that really is the story here because so many of the Chief Data Officers get in their position, they're gung-ho and they try to tackle the whole entire regulatory mandate at once or they're trying to tackle the whole organization's needs at once instead of prioritizing so that they can actually achieve success with one stakeholder who's going to help them build advocacy. So I think actually Eugene is actually one of the best, I see him sitting over here is why I'm pointing for you in the crowd at actually being an internal consultant and having this really official approach to how he talks to his internal clients and educates them. I started to do that yesterday. I haven't even given you a word edge-wise, go ahead. We love guests like this. Push the button and we sit back. No, please stop. Well we had Eugene on yesterday and absolutely he talked about the importance of storytelling and being able to communicate. Now we've covered kind of, we've talked a lot of Dave over the last couple years about what does a data scientist need and one of those things is being able to communicate but that also applies to the Chief Data Officer for sure. So what are you seeing in terms of best practices or advice you have for CBOs in terms of that communication part? Because clearly finding a champion and building those relationships requires you to tell a story as Eugene would put it. Yes, it does. Yes, actually I mean I think there's two that come to mind. Derek Strauss, I always quote him because he's just, well today I found out from West Hunt who is the nationwide Chief Data Officer that in fact Derek Strauss is the father of Chief Data Officer supporting to him. So it's good that I quote Derek so much. I feel validated too and you guys should feel validated. Yeah, he was on the Cube last year, one of our first CBOs on. Exactly, so he's a thought leader for the Chief Data Officers. He's very good, he's very sharp. But he has an approach where he uses rallying cries. So basically his rallying cry that I just love and everybody writes it down and I give him full credit but I do put it in my keynotes because it's a best practice. His rallying cry around the customer experience and how he's helping to develop that is Google Fast, Apple Easy, Amazon Intimate. Who doesn't want that kind of client experience? Everybody wants, that's like the best of all worlds, isn't it? So do you think you can be all three or do you have to pick one and optimize on one? What do you see from clients? Oh I think you can, I think you can. In this digital age I think you can absolutely be fast. I mean think about what these little phones can do. I mean so Apple Easy, Google Fast is right there when you need it. Right on your phone, Amazon Intimate is personalization. Everybody wants to know something that everybody only wants to see what they want to see. They don't want to see a bunch of extra junk. I don't want junk email, I don't even want junk mail it to my door. That's kind of old fashioned. But if I'm walking by a Starbucks and I happen to get a coupon as I'm walking by, as long as I'm opted in and they have my permission, then I'm going to be excited to get that offer and that's very easy for me. So then right then I go redeem my free drink and famous plug for Starbucks. You can pay me later. But that's how things are and that is Google Fast, Apple Easy, Amazon Intimate. It's personalized, it's fast because it's right there on my phone and I can redeem it right away and it's easy. What are you seeing in terms of the CDO role? You mentioned regulatory mandates earlier. That's obviously a catalyst within the industries like healthcare or financial services, et cetera, government. What are you seeing in terms of the CDO role emerging outside of those regulated industries? Is it happening? How is it happening? How fast is it happening? That's true. Now, it really is the fact that we're seeing most of them are emerging from regulated industries like banking, government, insurance, healthcare. Healthcare is really trying to figure out. They're really struggling with the space right now, how to become data driven, especially because of some of the regulatory mandates that they've just recently been given. But outside of that, the media services firms, and I mean firms like Axiom, Xperion, AC Nielsen, some of our best clients, quite frankly, those guys all have had Chief Data Officers because they're very marketing driven. And so any firms that have been marketing driven have either a Chief Digital Officer. If they don't have a Chief Data Officer, it takes them a little bit longer because as a secondary function, they have to go in and then figure out how to put all the data together themselves. So they end up fulfilling that role. So we do see that role emerging more like a digital officer would be emerging more than a data officer in some industries like that or like retail. I mean that's an opportunity. It's an opportunity. As opposed to a risk mitigation. Oh yeah, yeah. It's a huge opportunity. So it's not a privacy driven type of thing. No. It's a let's go sell more stuff. And industrial. Industrial is probably one of the biggest areas where the Chief Data Officer is emerging because there's so much opportunity with the connected devices now. I mean you can put a chip. I mean think about this. One of my favorite stories, and I won't mention his name because I don't have permission, but it's from a person who was telling me that they'd like to go from being a light bulb manufacturer to becoming a data traffic solution provider. That's transformational for that company and that industry because they're a leader in that industry. So if they achieve this transformation, it will effectively change their whole industry because of their leadership status. And now instead of having just the one time hit that they get from selling a light bulb, they're going to have a traffic solution where the data is the most central part of the monetary stream from that. So talk about that a little bit more. That's a transformation of the industry. So talk about more about how data catalyzes or is fundamental to that transformation. Well basically because of all of these new streaming technologies and because of the technologies that we haven't had the ability to really analyze this much volume of data, and I hate to talk about it as big data, but it kind of is because there's a lot of volume coming in off of internet of things, off of connected devices. And that really is because of the technology to aggregate and analyze and just predict and respond immediately. Because of those technological capabilities, we're seeing whole new transformations of companies. Now you're not just a light bulb provider, you're a data solution traffic provider, or you're no longer just a mobile device manufacturer, you're a healthcare wearables group, where you can report back instantaneously about the pulse and different things on people's bodies because you've got connected devices and chips and streaming information coming in and out. I mean it's phenomenal, but you have to have the ability to analyze and collect all that data, and that's the part that's new. It's the technology and the capability that have been present in the market. Yeah I think you're kind of hitting on some of the things Dr. Watson talked about yesterday in his keynote about digitizing your assets, your capital assets, and whether that's physical assets or your social capital or symbolic capital, whatever the case might be. In this case talking about physical capital, and I'm not sure which company you're talking about, but we've been covering the so-called industrial internet companies like GE, which are really going from manufacturing industrial equipment, which they're going to continue to do, but their success is going to be much more predicated on how they manage and help their customers analyze all that data coming off those devices, rather than the device itself. And that's a big shift for a company like GE, which is a huge long history. It's really quite a shift, and they're very clearly heavily invested in that. So once a little bit about IBM and your role, so your role really is to advocate for the CDO, right? Before that role and to really see it established more widely. Talk a little bit about why that's important to IBM. IBM, as you know, our CEO, Jenny Rometti, has been talking about transforming industries. And if you think about the story I just told you about the lightbulb manufacturer, that's a pretty amazing story because the guy that's leading that is the Chief Data Officer. He's the one making the change. So he's actually, he is a transformed profession, if you will, because of the data and technology capabilities, but he's also leading the change, becoming the change agent that is actually going to change that entire industry because he's part of a leading organization in that industry. And he will set the bar for everybody else by setting this data vision of what they're going to accomplish. And really inspiring his entire company to get behind this new transformative way of doing business, to go from just having a single hit of money when a lightbulb gets sold to having a stream of money coming in from data solutions off of traffic. And who knows where he's going to take it from there. You can kind of already see an additional vision, not just related to traffic solutions, but who else might be interested in the automotive industry, might be interested in augmenting his data, Google Maps or somebody. Who knows? Who knows? The possibilities are endless, but he's there creating that vision for the company. And because he's creating the vision for the company, he's transforming the industry. And that makes him absolutely 100% interesting to us as IBM. Courtney, last question. We're out of time. We're going to go. Wow, we're already out of time. How does that happen? It flies by, right? The Cube, very comfortable, right? It is, absolutely. It's a bumper sticker question. The car's pulling away from the Tang Center. That is this little remote location in Cambridge. But the car's pulling away. Three, four hundred CDOs here in the audience and information quality executives. What's the bumper sticker say on the back of that car from your perspective as it's pulling away from this event? Okay, that's kind of a hard one. Oh, wow, because I would say for me, that bumper sticker was great ideas. Great ideas from CDOs who are scrappy little change agents, underdogs that I want to root for all the way. I want to say congratulations and let's keep up the conversations. Keep going. Courtney, thanks so much for coming to the Cube. It was great to have you. Thanks. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this is the Cube. We're live from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Right back.