 Live from the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering the 12th annual MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of MIT CDOIQ. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Peter Burris. We're joined by Jeff McMillan. He is the managing director at Morgan Stanley Well. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Jeff. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Just on a panel that was discussing the challenges and the opportunities of the CDO today. I mean, it is a mark of where the CDO role is, just by virtue of the fact that so many corporations are putting it front and center in their organizations. Sure. Yeah, I think what's interesting, though, is it is a bit of a solution in search of a problem. And what I find the biggest challenge that many of these people are facing is that data in and of itself solves nothing, right? That unless you actually say, what business problem am I trying to solve? What is it a risk problem? Is it an efficiency play? Is it a customer service issue? And then building your data solutions in support of that? Too many people start their journey by hiring 400 people and they create data lineages and they have to create a dictionary and they put all these structures in place and most of them fail because they actually didn't figure what they're solving for and oftentimes very elegant and small solutions can actually drive a lot of positive outcomes, but the biggest mistake that, and we actually discussed this on the panel, is knowing what you're solving for is the first step to be a successful Chief Data Officer. Well, investments in infrastructure before outcomes fail no matter what they are, right? So whether it's infrastructure of doing data analytics better, as you said, a whole bunch of clusters and a whole bunch of metadata management and other stuff, if it's not applied to some end, it's not going to get adopted. So we like to think we were talking in the opening thing that one of the things that the Chief Data Officer needs to do is acculturate the business to the idea of data being an asset, something that can be applied to work. And it's interesting in part because data can also help you choose what work you should apply it to. So talk a little bit about that. Does that resonate with you? I would totally agree with that and it's no different, like when the first person created a business, 2000 years ago, somewhere along the line, they said they needed someone to actually keep track of the money, right? And then the Chief Financial Officer role sort of emerged and then we had this thing where people actually came to work every day and they weren't really well trained and they didn't understand the responsibility. So we created the head of human resources. And I think these functions have evolved because as the business model grows, you need to have people to drive specific skills and competencies around these areas. And the truth is, in most organizations, we don't treat data like an asset. And part of it is the machinery, it's getting your Hadoop clusters up and putting your data, all that stuff. Well, we confuse the assets of the technology with the assets that drive business. That's right. And when people fail, it is rarely because they couldn't get the right data quality controls in place. They fail because they didn't get the right engagement model and they didn't get the right, the left hand or the right hand talking together. And at the core, data is not a data problem. It's an organizational problem. So there is this lack of consensus about where the CDO should sit, what his or her responsibilities, mandate, scope is, what do you think is the answer here? Well, we just got off the panel and this was actually hotly debated and there was definitely, there were two views on this that were highly divergent. But none of the other panelists are here. Yeah, so my view is the right view. Listen, the, and actually I'll lay out all sorts of arguments on one of my colleagues on the panel was really, was really sort of driving this sort of tech focused approach. And our argument, which has some matter in fairness is that so much of data is about the technology and the interplay and also the knowledge and the expertise and appreciation. Technology's been dealing this problem for 25 years. No one was actually listening to that, right? So there is tremendous knowledge and expertise built up there. I took the other side of the equation and I worked for the co-heads of our business because it's not about the technology. And again, the challenges and the barriers to success are not technical in nature, it's leadership. And one thing that's interesting about data and the reason that people have such a hard time with it is that the problem and the solution to the problem often sits in two different cost centers. So getting somebody else to care about a problem that impacts you when it actually doesn't drive your outcomes is really hard and that creates, that requires leadership and it requires collaboration. And sitting in a technology organization, by the way, I work with terrific technology folks, so this is not a disparagement on them, but sitting under the co-heads of the business, I am able to have those conversations with the other leaders of the business and say, listen, I know that you don't care about this but for the best interest of the organization, we have to make these investments and let me explain. And those people think more holistically because they're solving for the enterprise as opposed to what their individual piece of technology. Which really is kind of, you said it requires leadership and it requires collaboration, but that also is one of the fundamental orientation of what great strategy should be. It's a way of co-hearing the mental model, getting everybody to agree on what the outcome and what the objective needs to be. Totally, and by the way, for those of us who are around in the late 90s, Not me. When we had the, when everyone hired a head of internet strategy. This feels very much the same way, right? Everyone built websites and they had straight through processing and they sort of woke up a year and a half later and they said, how has this gotten better? And then they said, oh, maybe we actually need to connect it to our infrastructure. I'll date myself. I remember when these conversations about whether or not we had a CIO when we had a head of DP with an HR, we had a head of DP with an accounting and then it was, well, what do we, the chief is responsible from my perspective and I'd like to hear what you have to say. A chief, anything is responsible for getting a return on the assets that are entrusted to them. Yeah, and that is 100% true. That being said, where you make your money is in the businesses and I think to be a really good at this job, you have to be very humble and you can't make it about you and your goals and objectives. Because I have no goals and objectives outside of the goals and objectives of the businesses that I support. And part of what a lot of the challenges people have is they want to build empires and I actually, I've said to my boss, I have declared success when I'm an organization of one. Because what I've been able to do is I've been able to set up the right controls. I've got the right people and the right jobs who understand and the right technology. But the innovation is happening. It doesn't happen in my group. It happens away from my group. It happens when that 23 year old who has got, with six weeks of visualization training, is said at 10 o'clock at night, figures out a better way to sell a municipal bond because they spent 100 of their hours working on that, right? It's democratizing access to that and it's really finding that right balance between control, ensuring the right data quality in place, but also giving people the ability to innovate. And that's really where you, I think that's the perfect inflection point where you want to be. So what is the answer here? How would you give this remedy to other organizations in terms of the best practices that have emerged in how to do this and do it right? Well, first and foremost, you got to know what your strategy is. Like what, I was on a panel with GE and General Motors. Their goals and objectives are very different than my goals and objectives. So don't leave this conference because Jeff McMillan did it this way at Morgan Stanley and assumed that that's the right answer for you. I think you have to first ask yourself what are the most important objectives and what is your strategy? Because the other thing I find is you ask that question, a lot of businesses, even in this world in which, you know, 2018, we talk about all the time, they don't have a clearly articulated strategy. And unless you have a strategy, putting data on the back end of that isn't gonna solve the problem. So first and foremost, you got to have a strategy. And then secondly, you got to put the right technical infrastructure and there's a lot of plumbing that goes into this and I'm gonna gloss over it, but it's really important. And then you got to put the right organizational structure in place. And I actually don't believe that you create a different parallel committee around this. The way we do it at our firm is we actually, the existing executive committee is responsible for this. It's an additional function to them. We report into that function. And then you say, what is your business goals and objectives? Figure out what the gaps are and then spend the time, money and resources to solve and focus on that and do it one problem at a time and then doing that, you start to build this sort of what I'll describe as a data-centric or decision-centric culture. We call it data first. And so the way we tend to think about it and I want to bounce this off of you is what's your business? What are the activities that you, the outcomes that are necessary to perform that business? What activities are necessary to achieve those outcomes? What data is necessary to perform those activities? That's right. Is that kind of follow? 100% and also what processes? Because the other thing is that when you talk to the data consultants, it's all about the data. And then you talk to the process consultants all about the process. It's all about all of those things. And the point is that the data is the piece that sits but there are many factors that influence that. Sometimes it's a data quality program. Sometimes it's a training program. Sometimes it's a technology issue. Sometimes it's a vendor supply issue. There's a whole host of reasons and really the question is how do you use the data as the rallying point? To say this is the objective source of truth and where is that objective source of truth either not from a quality perspective on many's needs or from a business perspective, how does it impact those business and always going back to that thing? Because that thing is there's truth in that attribute. And is that a culture issue? Well, it's a process and it's a technology and it ultimately is a culture and it's going back to the original comment is do you see data as a problem or do you see data as an opportunity? And I would argue, and I'm not going to speak for other companies, but in the world of finance, we live in bits, zeros and ones, right? We are an information-based business at the core, right? That happens to be delivering a financial services product. And in that world, that is our competitive advantage. I mean, I have a database of every single transaction that every client has ever given with us at Morgan Stanley. I know your risk tolerance level. I know where you live. I know whether you have children, right? That is a powerful source of knowledge that if harnessed appropriately, allows to deliver a far, far superior solution to our clients than what they were getting previously. Great. Well, Jeff, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's really fun talking to you. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris. We will have more from MIT CDOIQ coming up just after this.