The 12th annual MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium (MITCDOIQ) was held on July 18 -20 in Cambridge Massachusetts, USA, with the theme: "Exploiting Data Capital for Organizational Performance". There were 46 presentations for the 349 delegates attending this year's conference. The Pilog Group and PiLog Academy were represented by Dr Salomon de Jager who noted "It is amazing to see the magnitude and complexity of the data quality problems organizations are facing today with the vast quantities of data being captured from so many different sources. At the same time these organizations are trying to create more agile data processing environments to generate data value, as on the other hand new regulatory requirements are increasing and forcing data governance."
Prof John R Talburt, Director of the Information Quality Graduate Program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UA Little Rock) and a member of the Research Faculty at the Institute for Chief Data Officers, observed, "The more things have changed since the advent of the data warehousing era in the 1980's, the more they have stayed the same. We are still facing the same issues in today's Data Lake strategy. Everybody is trying to understand how to implement effective data quality management and data governance in the new environment of distributed processing and Big Data analytics."
The 2018 MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium was a meeting place for data professionals to understand the priorities of Chief Data Officers (CDOs) to enable data-driven decisions. The conference did put the spotlight on issues such as:
The concept of big data and why we need to understand data to use it more effectively.
The value that data brings to organizations as a non-rivalrous and non-depleting asset.
The importance of having a foundation of quality of data to support data and information initiatives for business success.
Pilog Academy has been a sponsor and collaborator with the UA Little Rock Information Quality Graduate program for many years, and Dr. de Jager serves as an Affiliate Faculty Member in the Program. PiLog Academy has just announced that it is providing a grant to the Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology at UA Little Rock to fund two full-time graduate assistantships for the 2018-2019 Academic Year. The students supported by these assistantships will work in Dr. Talburt's ongoing research in Entity Resolution for Big Data to ensure proper Master Data Governance. Professor John Talburt and Dr Salomon de Jager are planning to present a joint paper at next year's MITCDOIQ conference, (July 24 -26 2019) regarding the new ISO 8000 standards for Data Quality.
