As much as we hear about the uncertain role of chief data officer — its variation from one company to another; its lack of clear standards or best practices — some are already betting that the role is here to stay. During the MIT CDOIQ Symposium at the MIT Campus in Cambridge, MA, theCUBE team, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke to folks from a college that is now offering an academic track to become a Chief Data Officer (CDO). The challenge they face is in training students for a profession whose definition is morphing almost daily.

John Talburt, executive director of the Center for Advanced Research in Entity Resolution and Information Quality at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), and Lawrence Whitman, dean of Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology at UALR, spoke to Stu Miniman (@stu) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE.

Talburt said that data has undergone several makeovers just in the past several years. In the past, he said, “We thought of data as belonging to the technology application. But there’s been a realization over the last few years that it really is independent,” he said.

Talburt argued that data “belongs to the organization overall, and it really needs to be managed as an asset.”

Bleeding edge 101

Whitman said if colleges want their high-tech career tracks to work, they’re going to have to keep the pace with the technology innovation.

“We want to be an industry-driven organization,” he said. “We’re an academic institution, so we have some requirements on that end,” he said, adding that those have to be balanced with the need to “make sure our current offerings are relevant to the industry, relevant to the demands and needs of both now and the future.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the MIT CDOIQ Symposium.

Photo by SiliconANGLE