Job titles can often disappear in the tech jargon and bureaucracy of the corporate world. Yet, it’s worth noting what’s on the business card for Mark Clare (pictured, left). He’s the head of data enablement at AstraZeneca PLC, a multinational biopharmaceutical company. Data enablement?

“AstraZeneca wanted to focus on how we actually enable our businesses,” Clare said. “I’ve always looked at this role in terms of three functions: value, risk and cost. In any chief data officer role, you have to look at all three.”

Clare spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit in San Francisco. He was joined by Glenn Finch (pictured, right), global leader of big data and analytics at IBM, and they discussed the evolution of responsibilities for CDOs and how cognitive digitization can improve scale and speed in data management (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Cognitive tools for data

Clare’s job title points to the evolving role of the CDO in many organizations as cognitive computing and growing use of artificial intelligence reshape the information-technology landscape. Finch offered attendees an example this week during the IBM CDO Summit, describing how a document can be fully digitized and quickly uploaded for insights and analysis that can offer significant business value.

“With cognitive and AI, I can read things like the human eye reads things,” Finch said. “We use this cognitive-digitization capability to grab data that’s locked in documents. Then you bring it back to the process so you can digitally reimagine it, and it usually cuts 70% to 80% out of the cycle time.”

Speed and scale are becoming paramount for many CDOs when it comes to managing data. Having the ability to bring both to the cognitive process at the point of ingestion is a key project that Clare has worked on with Finch and IBM.

“I wanted cognitive intelligence on data ingest because the processes that we had done for 20 years just wouldn’t scale,” Clare explained. “We’re seeing AI applied not just on the front end of analytics, but in the back end of the data management processes themselves.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE