Wrapping up day one at the MIT CDOIQ Symposium, held at the MIT Campus in Cambridge, MA, Paul Gillin (@pgillin), Stu Miniman (@stu) and George Gilbert (@ggilbert41), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, closed today’s programming reviewing the topics of the day.

Gillin began the session by saying it was a day of variety. “We had two CEOs and also a CIO on our program today talking about roles and responsibilities,” he said. “We’ve had some technology talk about Hadoop and data lakes. We talked a lot about the value of information, what value data quality has to an organization and just the value of data in general.”

Where’s the tech?

Gillin seemed amazed that they spoke very little about the technology itself until the end of the day, and he also noted that they mostly discussed how data fits strategically within frameworks within an organization to give it a competitive advantage. Additionally, Gillin believes that organizational thinking is evolving toward giving data the same kind of value normally attached to machines and even people.

Miniman’s take on the day was that the conversation was more about business processes and a mandate from the business side of things not to let the technology itself become too complex or siloed.

“We’ve been talking for decades about silos, and there was a great line from Peter Wang [chief technology officer and cofounder of Continuum Analytics, Inc.] from Continuum who said something like we might not get rid of the silos, but if we could get above the water level, we’ll submerge them,” he said. Miniman believes the value lies in moving data forward, not just sitting in silos.

A new era, new roles and separate lanes

“We’re in this historical point where we are pivoting from an era of software to an era of data, where we are separating the value of data or information from the underlying infrastructures,” explained Gilbert, who compared the role of the chief data officer of today to being much like the CIO of 20 years ago.

Gillin pointed out that recent figures estimate by 2020 to 2022, there will be 44 exabytes of data to manage. Then the conversation moved to getting to self-service and data ownership while maintaining data quality. theCUBE analysts felt it would be difficult to maintain quality and that there were not many people providing solutions.

“If you are looking at guys who are trying to answer IT’s problems or the chief data officer’s problems, it’s an entirely different language,” Gilbert said. I don’t think we will find someone who bridges both sides anytime soon. I guess the idea is we’re going to have to put lanes on the highway, and you’ll have to stay in your lanes.”

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