The role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has always had many challenges, but with the explosion of Big Data, it is difficult to determine roles and responsibilities of data governance. The question often becomes: Is it a business decision or an IT decision?

Getting to the heart of the matter, Tim Crawford, CIO and strategic advisor at AVOA, joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the HPE Big Data Conference held in Boston, MA, to discuss the role and responsibilities of the CIO.

What matters to today’s CIO?

Crawford began the conversation talking about what’s on the mind of today’s CIO.

“It’s the same things as the last 18 months, how do we up-level the conversation?” he said. He explained that on one end of the spectrum it is about engaging the customer, and on the other end of the spectrum it’s about driving the things that lead up to your business vision.

Managing regulatory matters

The group discussed the issue of data compliance and the challenges for the CIO to protect data when it comes to regulatory or legal concerns. Crawford pointed out that there is a need to start having these hard provocative conversations.

“Let’s stop dancing around the problem and get right to it and move on,” he said. He believes it is part of the CIO’s role, but he makes the argument that even if you put data policies in place, if the policies are not followed, it opens up a “Pandora’s box” during discovery if there is a company lawsuit.

Crawford maintained that managing the data and deciding what data to keep and what data to destroy is still a problem, and one of the chief issues is cost. “We need to start keeping all of the data, not only for liability, but the value of data today is going to be very different than the value of data in the future. Some will be important and some won’t, but you can’t predict that. So it is important to amass data and find ways to protect it. But there’s a real cost that comes with that too,” he reported.

Lock-in is a red herring for the CIO

When it comes to the issue of lock-in, Crawford considers everything the CIO does is a form of lock-in.

“It doesn’t matter what aspect you’re talking about moving; moving data around is not a trivial thing,” he remarked.

He illustrated the technological challenges and trials of retraining the end user. “Unless it provides a significant uptick in terms of value, you really have to stay off,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Big Data Conference.

Photo by SiliconANGLE