As the role of the chief data officer is critically aligned with data, they must know how to best use the immense quantities of information that flow into their companies, 24/7.

Inderpal Bhandari, global chief data officer at IBM Corp., joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the IBM World of Watson event in Las Vegas, NV. They discussed his thoughts around a roadmap for business and sources of data.

Follow the roadmap

The discussion kicked off with a general overview of the landscape for data architects, and how that data is put to use. Furrier asked if there is a data approach that Bhandari prefers.

His preference is “the building blocks approach, if you’re talking a pure technical architecture approach,” he said. “I would start with the business itself, how the business is going to go about monetizing itself. Not how [the business] makes money today; how it will make money in the future. It’s a business roadmap.”

Bhandari referred to his list of five actions a CDO should do, with the first three performed sequentially, and the last two in parallel. Sequentially they are as follows: develop a clear data strategy; execute enterprise-wide governance and management systems; become the central and trusted data source for your company; build deep data and analytics partnerships and scale; and develop talent in this area.

Data sources

Vellante asked about from where the data is coming from primarily, whether it’s internal or external.

“Today, we’re making uses of much more unstructured data sources (i.e., if we’re dealing with a new supplier, we could look at what’s out on the internet about them),” explained Bhandari. He also gave the example of IBM Watson in healthcare, where in three to five years, every provider will want to consult Watson with its vast sources of data.

“If you think of it in the healthcare context, a doctor examining patients … the exogenous data [for example, information from medical journals regarding the patient’s diagnosis] it could be far greater than the internal data [that which is gleaned from the patient themselves],” Bhandari said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM World of Watson 2016.

*Disclosure: IBM and other companies sponsor some IBM World of Watson segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Photo by SiliconANGLE