Chief data officers will go the way of 'chief electricity officers' - if they do their job properly

As soon as data analysis is as easy as using a search engine, chief data officers will disappear, warns Walnut Medical technical director Bob Tulloch

The chief data officer role is little different from the ‘chief electricity officer' roles that sprang up in the 1890s - and will disappear as soon as standards and usability are improved.

That is the warning of Bob Tulloch, technical director at information firm Walnut Medical, speaking at this weeks' Computing IT Leaders' Forum in London, ‘Data Strategy: Building a Framework for Success'.

"When electricity first came out, it was dangerous. There were no standards. The technology was very loose - a bit like big data, in many ways," said Tulloch. "But you can't find a chief electricity officer in any company nowadays."

Tulloch, who has been the co-owner and technical director of information company Walnut Medical until its buy-out by DRG in April this year, is an experienced database developer as well as an entrepreneur.

What big data needs, he continued, is a Doug Englebart figure, or someone who can take the principles of big data and make it easy to use for the masses - thus rendering chief data officers redundant.

"On the ninth of December 1968 Englebart gave a 90 minute demonstration at the Association for Computing Machinery/Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, in front of an audience of about 1,000. If you now count up the number of people who claim they were at that demonstration, that room must've been stacked. Only 1,000 people saw it," said Tulloch.

At that event, though, Englebart demonstrated mice, windows, hypertext, video conferencing and a number of other computing concepts that are now common today - and this was before there were even personal computers. "Everything that now forms the modern computing model was demonstrated by Englebart in 1968."

Englebart's presentation has since been termed "the mother of all demos", given the range of now common concepts in computing that Englebart publicly aired for the first time. Those concepts, though, and their implementation eventually helped to move computing from a specialised ‘clericy' to the masses.

"Big data needs a Doug Englebart," added Tulloch. "So how do we get there?"

"The users have got to be connected directly to the data with no intermediaries. Let them create their own content. Let them own the data. Unless people think of the data as theirs, you won't get anywhere. They have got to own it.

"And the only way they'll own it is to use what people are familiar with: web-based interfaces. How many people can write a SQL statement? Not that many. Steal from Facebook, steal from Pinterest, steal from Twitter, steal from YouTube, steal from Google. Grab their ideas, grab their code and use it," urged Tulloch.

"The main thing is, do not make the user think. Remove thinking! How much data has Facebook got? How easy is it for an 80-year-old person to use Facebook constantly? They have access to that information, but they don't have to do anything that looks even vaguely like programming. The job for us, as data scientists, programmers and engineers, is to do silently protect and enforce compliance behind [the interface].

Walnut Medical and DRG deals in medical information. "One of the things we must always strip and make sure that there is no way of linking things to get to it, is personal information… we must silent protect and stop people being malicious or stupid [with the data]. That's our job.

"The ‘front' job is to make those web-style interfaces so that people are familiar with them," said Tulloch. And, when that level of simplicity, on the one hand, with compliance and data protection in the background can be achieved, organisations will no longer need chief data officers.