TheCUBE this week goes to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the Chief Data Officer Information Quality (MDOIQ) conference Wednesday and Thursday, providing comprehensive coverage of the challenges of Big Data, from ensuring data quality to information governance. TheCUBE will webcast all the general sessions and Wikibon CEO and Co-Founder David Vellante and Wikibon Principal Research Contributor and Big Data analyst Jeff Kelly will conduct in-depth interviews of speakers from academia, industry and independent analysis organizations.

Keynotes will include:

• “The Digitization of Capital” by Richard Watson, research director for the Advanced Practices Council of the Society for Information Management and J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished Chair for Internet Strategy at the University of Georgia.

• “A Holistic Systems Approach to Architecting the Future Enterprise” by Deborah Nightingale, former director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC), professor of the Practice of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems and co-director of MIT Lean Advancement Initiative.

• “You May Not Need Big Data After All” by Jeanne Ross, director of the MIT Center for Information Systems Research.

• “Data Quality through Curation at Big Data Scale” by Andy Palmer of Tamr, Inc.

• “How Federal Agencies Can Prepare Now for the DATA Act” by Catherine Ives, data quality solution expert at Citizant, and Hudson Hollister, founder and executive director of the Data Transparency Coalition.

• “Demonstrate a Successful Information Governance Program with Maturity Models: Quick and Easy” by Tina Rosario, VP of Data Governance and Management at SAP.

• “Big Data: Enabling a Modern Data Architecture” by Dan Rice, solution engineer at Hortonworks.

One important area of discussion will be the Chief Data Officer (CDO). This new role in the organization is still a “work in progress,” says Kelly in the video below. However, the role is developing as an independent C-suite individual separate from the CIO and concerned more with data governance than analysis. Issues include whether the organization needs a CDO, what data to capture, how long to keep it and how to balance the needs of analysis with individual privacy and data security.

The highs and lows of Big Data business

Big Data promises a revolution in how businesses operate. By combining various kinds of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data from internal and external sources, companies can base business decisions on forward-looking analysis that is much more accurate than “seat-of-the-pants” guesswork. This can provide a decisive competitive advantage and allow companies to streamline internal and especially customer-facing processes, improving service. Analysis of data from the Internet of Things can allow companies to anticipate equipment failures both internally and in their products, supporting active service to customers, again a source of competitive advantage.

However, it also presents major challenges, ranging from defining how best to use Big Data to meet the company’s most pressing needs to ensuring data quality, without which meaningful analysis is impossible, to rearchitecting how the company operates around the data value engine. It is these and similar challenges that Vellante and Kelly will explore in interviews with the conference speakers. CIOs seeking guidance for how to get started in Big Data or how to use their data resources to better advantage for their organizations will find this a rewarding two days.

photo credit: pHil____ via photopin cc