A huge issue for this year’s MIT CDOIQ Symposium, taking place at the MIT Campus in Cambridge, MA, has been revolving around the dynamics between the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Data Officer (CDO). Is the CDO a threat to the CIO? Is one the successor to other, or are they peers? Daniel LeBeau, SVP of Business Services and group CIO at GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK), and Mark Ramsey, CDO of GSK, spoke to Stu Miniman (@stu) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, about what they think of that dynamic.

“The way we do business will change over time,” said LeBeau, with the implication that the CDO position is in response to the changing nature of the tech industry. In the past, though, GSK had been looking at clinical and regulatory data; it had not done mixed-source analytics. After partnering for some experiments with a Big Data company and seeing the usefulness of such a partnership, GSK decided they needed someone internally to help do this consistently, and that is when Mark Ramsey was hired on.

For Ramsey’s part, he was excited about the opportunity because of the support from sponsors and executives. “It’s extremely important because these are painful and sometimes costly projects, so it does require strong support,” said Ramsey. Another thing that appealed to him was the ability to apply his previous experience and knowledge to an industry that is new to him, where the focus is on helping people instead of selling products.

Goals of the partnership

The partnership between the CIO and CDO at GSK is already proving its worth as LeBeau and Ramsey work together to defragment the data and develop platforms. While they do not meet every day, they attend steering committees and establish priorities with both short-term and long-term goals.

One example of a larger mutual goal is “finding the balance between speed and quality, as well as security and transparency,” said LeBeau.

Ramsey added, “As we go forward, data volumes will get larger but we’ll keep building on those successes.”

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