 Live from the campus of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering the MIT Chief Data Officer and the Information Quality Symposium. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and George Gilbert. Hi everyone, welcome to our live coverage, the CUBE's live coverage of the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Conference, known as CDOIQ. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but it's a conference that has been going on here at MIT for 13 years now. This is our fourth year of coverage of theCUBE, live coverage for two days, screaming from here from the floor of the town center in the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm Paul Gillan, I'm here with my cohort, my colleague, Stu Miniman, who is a first timer here at the CDOIQ conference. We're interested in getting your perspectives due after getting a sense of what this conference is like compared to some of the very big events that you go to. This is an intimate conference, there are only about 300 attendees here, but really outstanding speakers they get here. The roster this year is full of Chief Data Officer titles, we just heard from the Undersecretary of the Department of Defense, all kinds of government titles here, lots of senior executives, we've got several CEOs on the program of large companies like Group, Blue Cross Life. So, as a very senior audience, it has a lot of responsibility for data, and the topics that they have been discussing over the last four years that we've been doing our live coverage have changed so much. Four years ago, it was a much more of an academic event, it was a lot of technical talk about data quality and metadata and the specifics of managing data, and now they've sort of raised the game now, it's much more about the high level governance role, the big data and its strategic role in the organization. Just interesting to do as a first timer, how did the agenda strike you? Yeah, first of all, thanks Paul, I'm really excited to be here, I know Dave Vellante is this point and he couldn't be here, so I'm filling in for his shoes, I've done a couple of MIT events in the past and they're always exciting, and a little bit different from some of the academic events that you get compared to some of the big tech shows that you said that I'm usually at. So right, where does the CDO fit in the organization? One of the speakers this morning talked about big G and little G when it comes to governance, so what is policy, what is automation, what is organizational, how do all those things fit together, we've got a lot of CDOs on the agenda here. I was going back watching you, Paul and Dave Vellante doing some of the interviews from the previous years, and you're right, this started out as kind of the data quality, information governance, the whole wave of big data, how that plays into everything here, and this fits now into a lot of the broader themes that we've been tracking lately about the digital transformation, so as companies go into digital transformation, of course the data is one of the most important assets that people have, I mean your people and your data, it's like those are kind of two of the cornerstones that you're going to make up your company out of, so how that's matured, and we've got a great slate of guests on some really interesting panels, and we're going to be able to give our audience a good flavor of what's going on at this event for the next two days, which is pretty exciting. And we're going to be talking a lot about the CDO role, it's really been a recurring theme of this event is the evolution of the CDO, four years ago there weren't many people who had the title of CDO, now we see a lot of those titles throughout the Fortune 1000, but not a real clear definition of the role, it seems like it takes different forms and different organizations, different reporting structures, some are more technical role, some more strategic role, and it seems like this is a position that is still very much taking shape. Yeah, actually what I liked is this isn't just a bunch of academics sitting around saying what should be in the future, but trying to have groups in, the practitioners that are doing things are actually going to help drive results, so in the morning keynote this morning they said that they're looking to create not only a definition, but a job description that they can put out in the public, you know, put it up on Wikipedia, put it where they need to be, and so that the community can leverage that, so you've got this blending of the public sector, the enterprises that are doing this, and the academics all coming together to help move the industry forward. And incidentally at this event was just announced today the organization of the debut of the Institute for Chief Data Officers, which is a group that was created by the organizers of the MIT CDOIQ event. I believe they have 100 founding members and Chief Data Officers, some very blue chip companies, and really the first efforts that we've seen to bring together people around this evolving title to try to give it some definition and some staying power in organizations. With that though, we're going to wrap up this quick introduction. We're going to get right on to our first guest, Lawrence Whitman and John Talbert, who will talk about the Institute for Chief Data Officers. This is Paul Gillan. Stay with us, we'll be right back.