 Live from Cambridge, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium. Now your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts everybody. I'm Dave Vellante, and this is theCUBE's SiliconANGLE Wikibon's continuous coverage of MIT IQ. MIT IQ stands for the Information Quality Symposium. Become the Chief Data Officer Symposium. It's my pleasure to have Flavio Perez and Mario Cervi who are with KeyBros. Flavio is the president and CEO. Mario is the project director and assessor. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you very much. So KeyBros, very interesting initiative. We were talking off camera about it. Flavio, maybe you could tell us about KeyBros. What is it and why was it formed? Yeah, we have founded it in 2010 with the support of Professor Richard and with the mission of disseminating the culture of data quality and data management in Brazil. Since then we had four international conference and many courses of IQ and data management there. So the initiative was formed to try to create awareness about data quality and promote that notion of data quality. What was the relationship Mario with MIT? Rich Wang helped get you started? We started to work with data problems in the beginning of the 90s. And then in the beginning of 2000 years we knew the IQ program here and we started to come from 2003 to attend conferences, courses and Professor Wang encouraged us to create an IQ association in Brazil to promote the culture there and we did it in 2000 then. But we are here in every conference and almost every year since 2003. So it's important to bring the ideas, the new concepts, the state of the art and data management to our region. So how did you fund the initiative? How do you pay for it? Yeah, it's really a... We were with Professor Richard and he said we must create, we must disseminate the culture in Brazil. It's interesting for the United States and it's very interesting. We said it's very interesting to Brazil too. So we started to talk about and we created the foundation. With the support of many companies in Brazil and we have the participation, most of the people that participate in QIBRAZ is from the industry. We have few people from the university, few people from the government, but almost all the companies are from the initiative. Big financial services presence, obviously. Yes, financial services, direct marketing and strategic marketing, consultants, also media agencies and we have good support there from those companies. And so what kind of activities do you and services do you sort of provide the community? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. We offer data management courses, training and annual conferences and we always bring at least four international speakers, mostly from USA. Professor Wang has been in three of our four conferences. Professor Young Lee, Professor Stalbert, they have already been there. So, and we have also local speakers talking about cases, local cases in this field of data quality and data management. Now how did you guys get at this? And in our conference we had, in average, 300 attendees. So good size, I mean it's comparable to this event. Yeah. Okay. Now, are you data guys? How did you get involved in this career? We are from IT, our background is in computer science and now we discovered data as a passion, you know, to work with data to support business. We are more working more with business people than IT people. What about the chief data officer role in Brazil? We've met Mario, he's been on the queue, he was the first CDO and... Mario Fadio, yes. He was the first CDO. Around the mid 2000 companies there started to create the customer data departments. Then it became, these areas became the CDO and Mario Fadio was the first one but we already have another 40, around 30 or 40 companies with CDOs so far. So, obviously the companies in your region are receptive to this idea, they're supporting your initiative. What are the big challenges that they're facing and how are you helping them through that? Well, we have the challenges there, are quite similar what we hear but our market is not so mature but we face the same type of problems. We have the problem of data ownership, we have a conflict with IT and other Cs in the companies. But people are, there is getting aware of the importance of managing data outside of the IT sphere. So, you're going on, you're progressing. So, what are some of the things that you're excited about working on, upcoming initiatives, what are the things that you want to accomplish probably for your organization? Keep it on the kitchen to catch it on. The objective is to spread the culture, to gather more companies discussing the subjects of data management and to give in our region the status data management has together. So, we are trying to bring as many companies as we can to our society to discuss data management issues. So, keep growing, how many organizations are involved in Cuba today? Around those 310s represent around 50, 55 companies, mostly of them based in Sao Paulo but from all over the country, other companies too. And you were saying before, Mario, that the challenges are the same, the issues are similar, what are the differences? I think that our market is not so mature in data management as the market here in the USA. So, we have steps to go ahead but we are, I think that if we follow the concepts and the discussions here, we can bring ideas there and get this maturity a little bit faster. We have, our culture is in the beginning yet and the way we are doing now is to have an approach to big associations like DMA in Brazil, they have a very big association to do together an approach to the companies. So... You know DMA, Drudeck Marketing Association? Yeah, sure. We have a chapter there they are helping us to spread the culture among their associations. So there's a lot of talk at this event and others about data as a liability, data as an asset, you know, and that conversation seems to be leaning more these days toward marketing and data as an asset. Jeff Humberbacher from Facebook is very famous, he was one of the Cloudera saying that he's a young, brilliant mind. He said the best minds of my generation are spending their time trying to figure out how to get people to click on Google ads. But of course we see a lot of examples around here particularly in healthcare, government, financial services with fraud. What do you see in terms of the sentiment within your constituents in terms of how they view the opportunity versus the liability? What is data to them? Is data a problem that has to be managed? Is it an opportunity that can be mined? No, I think it's time more seen as an opportunity to support decisions, to support customer relationship, to support MDM initiatives, you know, mostly focused in customer, okay? So I think that there is room for growing. How do people measure the value of data? It's hard, normally they don't. Normally they don't, right, that's true. So it's too uncertain how to measure value, how to calculate ROA and ROI. So we are beginning discussions on this area, it's too, because there's certainly a desire to do that, it's just not a standardized way of doing it maybe, or an accepted way maybe. At least to justify the projects. So a lot of it's still done on gut feel, is that right? Yeah, I think so, good. All right, any final thoughts on this conference? Well, the conference is getting every year better and we are very pleased to come here every year to see people talking and to see the progress of data cult and data management area. Very nice to be here. Thank you. Yeah, my pleasure, Flavio Amaria, thanks for coming to theCUBE, it was great to meet you. Thank you. All right, keep right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. Right after this is to theCUBE, we're live from MIT in Cambridge, Mass. We'll be right back.