 Welcome to Cube Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman and joining me for this segment is Jeff Kelly. We're from the Home Office in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Gonna be talking about the Chief Data Officer, term that most people haven't heard or maybe you've heard about it the last couple of years. Jeff, can you give us a little primer? You know, what is the Chief Data Officer? Well, it's a bit of a work in progress trying to determine exactly what that is. I think it's one of these roles that's emerged kind of in side-by-side with the emergence of big data and some of the implications of big data. So, largely speaking, when we think about a Chief Data Officer, we're mostly thinking about data governance-type responsibilities, things like what data should we store? What data should we keep? What data should we throw away? Who should have access to data? What type of analytics can we run? We often talk about, or I often say, just because big data makes something possible doesn't mean you should necessarily do it. And increasingly, a Chief Data Officer is one of those people who is responsible for keeping an eye on some of the uses of big data within the organization, some of those ethical issues, if you will. But in addition to that, obviously, it's more it's legal, it's compliance issues, things like that. So the Chief Data Officer, very much an emerging and evolving role, there's no hard set definition yet. But we're seeing it kind of lean more heavily towards the data governance side and a little bit less around the specific analytics. OK, so I'd heard of chief development officers and chief digital officers. So CDO is a term that's come up a bunch. In the organization, how does it fit with, I want to think the CIO would probably be somebody they report up to. And the data scientists, how does the CDO fit into the org? Well, again, it's evolving and there's no set answer to that question. But it's interesting when people think, well, as you mentioned, should the CDO report to the CIO? And increasingly, we're seeing that's actually not the case. Almost, we're seeing the CDO on a peer level with the CIO and often reporting up to the Chief Financial Officer or sometimes a Chief Security Officer, or even in some cases, directly to the CEO. So that's still kind of a work in progress. When you think about the CIO, more in charge of the systems that are used to run the company, whereas the Chief Data Officer, as the name implies, is more interested in the data itself, less around the systems that you're necessarily using to manipulate that data. So where the Chief Data Officer will report into is still an open question. And I think what's interesting, you'll see next week, we're going to be at the MIT CDO IQ Symposium. It's a bit of a mouthful, but it's our second year at that show. And one of the interesting things about our lineup of guests, you'll notice, is while we do have a couple Chief Data Officers on, we do have others who are CIOs, who are VP of security, different titles who are, maybe not Chief Data Officers in name, but are actually doing some of those type of functions. So it's still a work in progress trying to figure out who's going to be the CDO, where they're going to report to, and where they fit in the larger organization. Okay, so yeah, we love doing these events at MIT. We did the MIT Cybersecurity and International Relations event earlier this year. As you mentioned, this is the second year for the CDO IQ. You were at the event, Jeff, last year. What'd you learn? What was kind of an eye-opener for you, and what do you expect to see this year? Well, I think there's quite a few more CDOs out there than you might think. There's one thing that kind of struck us. But really, I think what struck me is that the fact that it is such an evolving, such an evolving role, and again, no set definition. We saw people who were called themselves Chief Data Officers, as I mentioned. We see people who call themselves VP of Business Intelligence and Infrastructure related to data. So there's any number of titles that kind of incorporate some of these functions. I think the other interesting thing was how they are not quite as concerned, again, with the analytics per se. You mentioned, you asked earlier a little bit about the relationship with the CDO relative to the chief, sorry, to data scientists. And while there is certainly a relationship there, we don't see the CDO as kind of overseeing data scientists, rather supporting them with some of the compliance type functions that are necessary when you're talking about doing some advanced analytics on sensitive data, like customer data, personally identifiable data. So those are a couple of things that struck us last year, and we're expecting this year will be even more interesting when we talk about it's been a whole nother year, this market talking about big data is evolving quickly. And we've heard anecdotally over the year, certainly the role of Chief Data Officer is likewise evolving quickly. So we're expecting to hear some really interesting comments this year. So I'm curious, if you look at big data, one of the challenges is, how much data do you get? What's good data? What's bad data? What's garbage you should get rid of? How does that whole discussion of collecting, I guess, is it the right data? All the data, how does that fit into this discussion? Well, a couple of different points. So when you think about what data you should be collecting and what data you should store and for how long, those kind of questions, you can look at it from a purely, if you're a data scientist looking from that perspective, you're looking at, well, what sources of data you're gonna help me get to the insights that I'm looking for. From a Chief Data Officer perspective, you're thinking, well, there are other issues to keep in mind in addition to those around where am I gonna get the best insights? And that is, what are the compliance issues related to any given piece of data or source of data? That impacts how long we should store that data. You often hear in the world of big data, it's essentially free to store data these days. So it's things like Hadoop and other ways of storing data quite inexpensively. So the idea from a data science perspective might be we'll just store everything because you never know when it might become valuable. Whereas a Chief Data Officer might take a different approach and say, well, that may very well be true, but it also could have an impact on what if we are involved in some kind of litigation, we've got to turn over all sources of data relative to that litigation. If we've stored everything, that could cause some issues on our side, whether it's just trying to find the right data that we have to turn over, whether maybe if we didn't store it in the first place, we wouldn't be involved in this litigation. So there's all sorts of issues related to how long you store data and what data you store beyond just, is it gonna be useful from an analytics perspective? All right, so Jeff, you've been talking a lot about the recent survey you did, companies that are going from traditional data warehousing to kind of modern business intelligence and analytics. Is there anything from the survey or the research you're looking up as to, who needs a Chief Data Officer? Is it the size of the company? Is it adoption of new technology? What should a company be looking out to say, wow, I need to have this either as a role or as a person doing this Chief Data Officer in parole? Well, I think, look, anytime you start to bring in new data sources that are quote unquote not traditional data sources. So these are either outside sources of data, they could be customer data that's created essentially by their use of applications, mobile apps or mobile devices. And anytime you start to merge data sets related to customers, you might have, again, personally identifiable data. If you've got credit card numbers, you've got social security numbers, anytime you're thinking about, well, hey, if we could merge that data with some other types of data and do some analytics, we could really find some interesting insights. Well, anytime you're starting to have that conversation, I think it's a good idea to at least start thinking about, if not a Chief Data Officer specifically, about somebody in the organization taking responsibility for some of the compliance and ethical responsibility related to using data wisely. All right, so Jeff, you know, we just finished a very busy first half of 2014. The Cube did over 20 shows. I know you were hitting a ton of things from the MIT event, I think, kind of kicks off the second half of the year for you. What should people be looking for, for big data events, and from the Wikibon big data research? Well, we're going to have a busy, you know, second half of the summer and fall and early winter. So from the Cube perspective, we're going to be obviously at MIT, CDO, IQ Symposium next week. That's July 23rd and 24th, 2014. So watch for that on siliconangle.tv. Following that, we're going to be at HP Vertigo's Big Data Conference right here in Boston. That's in early August. Then, in the fall, we've got shows at Tableau. We've got Splunks Customer Conference. And then of course we've got our own show, Big Data NYC, where we'll be broadcasting live from the Hilton of New York City, covering all things big data from New York and touching on some of the research we'll be doing as well. So from a research perspective, we've just wrapped up our first of two big data surveys. We've been rolling out research notes related to some of those findings, which you can find on wikibon.org slash big data. And then we're going to be conducting a second survey later in the summer, early in the fall. And we plan to start rolling out some of that, those findings and really unveiling the survey findings at our Big Data NYC event. So watch out for that as well. And then of course, in the meantime, we'll be talking to a lot of practitioners, both at these shows and as part of our research, and you'll just continue to see a lot of great content come out of wikibon. Okay, great, Jeff. Looking forward to hearing more about the CDOs, the CIOs, the data scientists, and all the research you've got coming out. Be sure to tune in, as Jeff mentioned, siliconangle.tv to catch all of the live cube coverage as well as wikibon.org slash big data for all of the research that Jeff is leading. Thanks so much for joining us and we'll see you next time.