 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit, brought to you by IBM. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome to Boston everybody. This is SiliconANGLE Media's special presentation of the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit at the Copley Married in Boston. Big week for theCUBE, I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu, good to be working with you yet. Again, this is three in a row for us. We were at IBM Edge this week in Las Vegas, John Furrier and Peter Burris and team, Jeff Frick, we're out at Oracle Open World and then Bob Pitchiano is having a conference here. He's the leader of IBM's $15 billion analytics business. It's a two-day CDO summit and IBM has been going after this base for quite some time. Stu, as you know, from the MIT Chief Data Officer Conference, this is something that IBM has prioritized since the nascent days of the Chief Data Officer. Chief Data Officer has emerged in healthcare, financial services and certain public sector environments because they're highly regulated but it's begun to seep into other areas of business. A lot of discussion over the past several years about to whom should the CDO report? Should it be a reporting to the CIO? Most people feel it should not. What's the impact on the role of the CIO? I thought the CIO was the one who was responsible for data versus just keeping the lights on. So some interesting discussions here. We heard Stu and I were at the Diva Roundtable this morning and we heard some good stats, but Stu, I'll bring you into the conversation. You were at the CDO event at MIT this year. So far, how do they compare? Yeah, well, first of all, Dave, great to be with you again here. We were at the infrastructure show. Nominally it was called Edge, started heavily in storage, added power and mainframe but we spent a lot of time talking about data so it's only natural to go deeper into data. IBM, of course, doing a lot to move up the stack here. So get into that. And a lot of similar themes that I'm hearing so far of the CDO summit here compared to the MIT CDO event that we've covered with theCUBE and MIT for what was it Dave? Now four years, I think. And similar, a lot of government, financial, certain environments that have a lot of governance issues around data and everybody trying to understand how to really extract data out of it. Love Bob Pigeano this morning talking about how we can't just have some people off in the corner throwing reports at people. We're going to put, the term used is, data's gonna be the middle manager which means that we're gonna get more people access to the data itself and be able to dig in and manipulate it which is one of the promises of this whole big data and analytics era that we've been looking at for a number of years. The data is the new middle manager is what he said and that's a really interesting comment because when we actually stew in the 2006, 2007 time from when we started Wikibon, the big electronic movement was the changes in the federal rules of civil procedure in 2006, kind of a boring but important topic. The reason why it was so important is because the rule said, the law said now that electronic evidence generally specifically emails could be evidence, then had to be saved and it was a big case where Morgan Stanley for instance couldn't produce emails and they kept producing emails saying, oh, judge, we found some more, oh, judge, we found some more and they got to find a hundred million dollars and that was a huge case that got everybody scared. The general counsel started to freak out. The point was is that at the time, data was viewed as a liability. It was all about, okay, how do we get rid of data defensively, how long do we have to keep it? What risks do we have of keeping data around? We don't want to keep working for a pharmaceutical, we don't want to keep working process that says, this drug could have these nasty side effects that could lead to death, okay, and some smoking gun gets emerged but now the situation is totally flipped. It's very rare that you hear conversations about data as a liability. Much more stew you hear things like, well, we want to keep data forever because it has value for us and so the bit has flipped quite substantially, hasn't it? Yeah, absolutely right. We've been talking about, there's the line we've used over and over as data is the new oil, businesses are learning how to get new value out of their data and that bit flip of just saying, oh, wait, I have to store it and it's a hassle and I need to follow all these regulations to what can I do with it? How is it going to be my differentiation going forward? And IBM's done some real interesting things. Bob talked a little bit about, once again, why they bought the weather company, which is all about data. Heck, I was going back and forth with some people and saying, Twitter might be selling itself. People talk about people like Google and Salesforce. Maybe IBM should buy Twitter because what better way to train Watson than to give them the access to what everyone in the world is thinking even though we'd worry that Watson might turn into a troll. Well, we're hoping to have a pepper on it, world of Watson's stew, so maybe we can ask her about that So a couple other interesting stats we heard today. So Stu and I attended the DataDiva breakfast session. We were, a couple of the males who were actually at the breakfast, there were several actually, a handful. What we heard was actually a Gartner stat that 25% of chief data officers are women, which I knew it was high. I didn't know it was that high, which is kind of interesting. And there was a discussion around, you know, why is that? As many of you know, we're going to be at the Grace Hopper event. And one of the areas that we're exploring is actually a fairly large number of women take computer science in college, but they don't end up in tech fields. It's interesting to see that they end up in this chief data officer role, one of the CDOs on the breakfast panel, sort of intimated that, well, the role is not technical. And so as a result, a lot of men maybe don't want to go in that direction, but as well, it's a role that's very difficult. You know, there was an article that Caitlin Lepic put up this morning from Forbes. I think it was Forbes said, is the chief data officer a miracle worker? Well, you know, a lot of women are miracle workers. Maybe men don't want to work miracles. Who knows? It's something that a lot of, not much research has done on that, but it's an interesting discussion, just sort of hearing the perspective of the women who are chief data officers. What did you take away from that? Yeah, Dave, I mean, touched on a broad number of issues, things like just hiring, you know. I think many people have heard the research that say, you know, men, if they feel that they're 50% qualified, will go and apply for something. Women need to feel that they're 75% qualified. So if you change the way you write your job description and don't just say, hey, here's my ideal candidate. You say, hey, I'd like you to have one of these three things, you know, three of these five things. It might open it up. There was one person that said when they changed the description, he stopped getting all, you know, over 40 year old male Caucasians and actually got a very diverse, you know, pool of applicants and ended up hiring someone and felt that they really added really well to the team because we understand we need a diversity of ideas to be able to help us make better decisions. I mean, we talk about data, you know, the more data the better, the better viewpoints, the more different, you know, backgrounds that helps us a lot. So hiring, how do we keep, you know, pay equity going forward, talked about issues, not only women that might leave the workforce for a while, but now even more men might leave the workforce for, you know, a year or two to take care of children, all those sorts of things. And yeah, the Chief Data Officer itself, somebody said, yeah, maybe CDO is the Chief Diplomatic Officer and there's plenty of women that understand the skill set that they need to be able to get in the middle and manage the relationships of all these different groups that are trying to, you know, put their view on the data. So this is the discussion that we'll be having all day here at the Boston Copley Marriot. We've got executives coming on from IBM. We've got Chief Data Officers. We've got analysts coming up. We're talking about data, data as an asset. Yeah, we'll revisit data as a liability. Now that, you know, governance is starting to enter the conversation more. What are the data sources? What are some of the roadblocks in terms of actually executing on some of these larger analytics and data-oriented projects? So keep it right there, everybody. This is theCUBE. We're live from Boston. We'll be right back.