(bright upbeat music) >> Well, hello everybody. John Walls is here on "the CUBE". Great to have you with us as we continue our series here at the AWS Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And today we're talking about public service and not just a little slice of public service but probably the largest public sector offering in the UK and for with us or with us. Now to talk about that is Lianne Anderton, who is in with the Intelligent Automation Garage Delivery Lead at the UK Department of Work and Pension. Lianne, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us here on "the CUBE". >> Hi, thanks for having me. >> And also with this us is Amar Narayan, who is a Manager Director at Accenture the AWS Business Group for the Lead in Health and Public Sector, also UK and Ireland. And Amar, I think, you and Lianne, are in the same location, Newcastle, I believe in the UK, is that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yep, yeah, we're, here in the northeast of UK. >> Well, thank you for being with us. I appreciate the time. Lianne, let's talk about what you do, the Department of Work and Pension, the famous DWP in England. You have influence or certainly touchpoints with a huge amount of the British population. In what respects, what are you doing for the working class in England and what does technology have to do with all that? >> Sure, so for the Department for Work and Pensions I think the pensions bit is fairly self explanatory so anybody who is over state pension age within the UK. for the work part of that we also deal with people of working age. So, these are people who are either in employment and need additional help through various benefits we offer in the UK. Those people who are out of work. And we also deal with health related benefits as well. And we are currently serving over 20 million claimants every year at this moment in time. So, we're aware of a huge part of the UK government. >> All right, so say that number again. How many? >> 20 million claimants every year. >> Million with an M, right? >> Yeah. >> So, and that's individuals. And so how many transactions, if you will, how many do you think you process in a month? How, much traffic basically, are you seeing? >> An extraordinary amount? I'm not even, I don't think I even know that number. (Lianne laughing) >> Mind blowing, right? So, it's- >> A huge, huge amount. >> Mind blowing. >> Yeah, so, basically the we kind of keep the country going. So, you know, if the department for Work and Pensions kind of didn't exist anymore then actually it would cause an infinite number of problems in society. We, kind of help and support the people who need that. And, yeah, so we play a really vital role in kind of you know, social care and kind of public service. >> So, what was your journey to Accenture then? What, eventually led you to them? What problem were you having and how have you collaborated to solve that? >> So, in terms of how we work with Accenture. So, we had in around 2017 DWP was looking at a projected number of transactions growing by about 210 million which was, you know, an extraordinary amount. And, you know, I think as we've kind of covered everything that we do is on a massive scale. So, we as DWP as an organization we had absolutely no idea how we were going to be able to handle such a massive increase in the transactions. And actually, you know, after kind of various kind of paths and ideas of how we were going to do that, automation, was actually the answer. But the problem that we have with that is that we have, like many governments around the world, we have really older legacy systems. So, each of these benefits that we deal with are on legacy systems. So, whatever we were going to develop had to, you know, connect to all of these, it had to ingest and then process all of these pieces of data some of which, you know, given the fact that a lot of these systems have a lot of manual input you have data issues there that you have to solve and whatever we did, you know, as we've talked about in terms of volumes has to scale instantly as well. So, it has to be able to scale up and down to meet demand and, you know, and that down scaling is also equally as important. So yeah, you've got to be able to scale up to meet the volumes but also you've got to be able to downscale when when it's not needed. But we had nothing that was like that kind of helped us to meet that demand. So, we built our own automation platform, The Intelligent Automation Garage and we did that with Accenture. >> So Amar, I'd like you to chime in here then. So, you're looking at this client who has this massive footprint and obviously vital services, right? So, that's paramount that you have to keep that in mind and the legacy systems that Lianne was just talking about. So, now you're trying to get 'em in the next gen but also respecting that they have a serious investment already in a lot of technology. How do you approach that kind of problem solving, those dynamics and how in this case did you get them to automation as the solution? >> Sure, so I think I think one of the interesting things, yeah as Lianne has sort of described it, right? It's effectively like, you know the department has to have be running all of the time, right? They can't, you know, they can't effectively stop and then do a bunch of IT transformation, you know it's effectively like, you know, changing the wheels of a jumbo jet whilst it's taking off, right? And you've got to do all of that all in one go. But what I think we really, really liked about the situation that we were in and the client relationship we had was that we knew we had to it wasn't just a technology play, we couldn't just go, "All right, let's just put some new technology in." What we also needed to do was really sort of create a culture, an innovation culture, and go, "Well how do we think about the problems that we currently have and how do we think about solving them differently and in collaboration, right?" So, not just the, "Let's just outsource a bunch of technology for to, you know, to Accenture and build a bunch of stuff." So, we very carefully thought about, well actually, the unique situation that they're in the demands that the citizens have on the services that the department provide. And as Lianne mentioned, that technology didn't exist. So, we fundamentally looked at this in a different way. So, we worked really closely with the department. We said, Look, actually what we ultimately need is the equivalent of a virtual workforce. Something where if you already, you know all of a sudden had a hundred thousand pension claims that needed to be processed in a week that you could click your fingers and, you know in a physical world you'd have another building all of your kits, a whole bunch of trained staff that would be able to process that work. And if in the following week you didn't need that you no longer needed that building that stuff or the machinery. And we wanted to replicate that in the virtual world. So, we started designing a platform we utilized and focused on using AWS because it had the scalability. And we thought about, how were we going to connect something as new as AWS to all of these legacy systems. How are we going to make that work in the modern world? How are we going to integrate it? How we going to make sure it's secure? And frankly, we're really honest with the client we said, "Look, this hasn't been done before. Like, nowhere in Accenture has done it. No one's done it in the industry. We've got some smart people, I think we can do it." And, we've prototyped and we've built and we were able to prove that we can do that. And that in itself just created an environment of solving tricky problems and being innovative but most importantly not doing sort of proof of concepts that didn't go anywhere but building something that actually scaled. And I think that was really the real the start of what was has been the Garage. >> So, And Lianne, you mentioned this and you just referred to it Amar, about The Garage, right? The Intelligent Automation Garage. What exactly is it? I mean, we talked about it, what the needs are all this and that, but Lianne, I'll let you jump in first and Amar, certainly compliment her remarks, but what is the IAG, what's the... >> So, you know, I think exactly what kind of Amar, has said from a from a kind of a development point of view I think it started off, you know, really, really small. And the idea is that this is DWP, intelligent automation center of excellence. So, you know, it's aims are that, you know, it makes sure that it scopes out kind of the problems that DWP are are facing properly. So, we really understand what the crux of the problem is. In large organizations It's very easy, I think to think you understand what the problem is where actually, you know, it is really about kind of delving into what that is. And actually we have a dedicated design team that really kind of get under the bonnet of what these issues really are. It then kind of architects what the solutions need to look like using as Amar said, all the exciting new technology that we kind of have available to us. That kind of sensible solution as to what that should look like. We then build that sensible solution and we then, you know as part of that, we make sure that it scales to demand. So, something that might start out with, I dunno, you know a few hundred claimants or kind of cases going through it can quite often, you know, once that's that's been successful scale really, really quickly because as you know, we have 20 million claimants that come through us every year. So, these types of things can grow and expand but also a really key function of what we do is that we have a fully supported in-house service as well. So, all of those automations that we build are then maintained and you know, so any changes that kind of needed to be need to be made to them, we have all that and we have that control and we have our kind of arms wrapped around all of those. But also what that allows us to do is it allows us to be very kind of self-sufficient in making sure that we are as sufficient, sorry, as efficient as possible. And what I mean by that is looking at, you know as new technologies come around and they can allow us to do things more effectively. So, it allows us to kind of almost do that that kind of continuous improvement ourselves. So, that's a huge part of what we do as well. And you know, I think from a size point of view I said this started off really small as in the idea was this was a kind of center of excellence but actually as automation, I think as Amar alluded to is kind of really started to embed in DWP culture what we've started to kind of see is the a massive expansion in the types of of work that people want us to do and the volume of work that we are doing. So, I think we're currently running at around around a hundred people at the moment and I think, you know we started off with a scrum, a couple of scrum teams under Amar, so yeah, it's really grown. But you know, I think this is here to stay within DWP. >> Yeah, well when we talk about automation, you know virtual and robotics and all this I like to kind of keep the human element in mind here too. And Amar, maybe you can touch on that in certain terms of the human factors in this equation. 'Cause people think about, you know, robots it means different things to different people. In your mind, how does automation intersect with the human element here and in terms of the kinds of things Lianne wants to do down the road, you know, is a road for people basically? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think fundamentally what the department does is support people and therefore the solutions that we designed and built had to factor that in mind right? We were trying to best support and provide the best service we possibly can. And not only do we need to support the citizens that it supports. The department itself is a big organization, right? We're up to, we're talking between sort of 70 and 80,000 employees. So, how do we embed automation but also make the lives of the, of the DWP agents better as well? And that's what we thought about. So we said, "Well look, we think we can design solutions that do both." So, a lot of our automations go through a design process and we work closely with our operations team and we go, well actually, you know in processing and benefit, there are some aspects of that processing that benefit that are copy and paste, right? It doesn't require much thought around it, but it just requires capturing data and there's elements of that solution or that process that requires actual thought and understanding and really empathy around going, "Well how do I best support this citizen?" And what we tended to do is we took all of the things that were sort of laborious and took a lot of time and would slow down the overall process and we automated those and then we really focused on making sure that the elements that required the human, the human input was made as user friendly and centric as we possibly could. So, if there's a really complex case that needs to be processed, we were able to present the information in a really digestible and understandable way for the agents so that they could make a informed and sensible decision based around a citizen. And what that enabled us to do is essentially meet the demands of the volumes and the peaks that came in but also maintain the quality and if not improve, you know the accuracy of the claims processing that we had. >> So, how do you know, and maybe Lianne, you can address this. How do you know that it's successful on both sides of that equation? And, 'cause Amar raised a very good point. You have 70 to 80,000 employees that you're trying to make their work life much more efficient, much simpler and hopefully make them better at their jobs at the end of the day. But you're also taking care of 20 million clients on the, your side too. So, how do you, what's your measurement for success and what kind of like raw feedback do you get that says, "Okay, this has worked for both of our client bases, both our citizens and our employees?" >> Yeah, so we can look at this both from a a quantitative and a qualitative point of view as well. So, I think from a let take the kind figures first. So we are really hot on making sure that whatever automations we put in place we are there to measure how that automation is working what it's kind of doing and the impact that it's having from an operational point of view. So I think, you know, I think the proof of the fact that the Intelligent Automation Garage is working is that, you know, in the, in its lifetime, we've processed over 20 million items and cases so far. We have 65 scaled and transitioned automations and we've saved over 2 million operational hours. I was going to say that again that's 2 million operational hours. And what that allows us to do as an organization those 2 million hours have allowed us to rather than people as Amar, said, cutting and pasting and doing work that that is essentially very time consuming and repetitive. That 2 million hours we've been able to use on actual decision making. So, the stuff that you need as sentient human being to make judgment calls on and you know and kind of make those decisions that's what it's allowed us as an organization to do. And then I think from a quality point of view I think the feedback that we have from our operational teams is, you know is equally as as great. So, we have that kind of feedback from, you know all the way up from to the director level about, you know how it's kind of like I said that freeing up that time but actually making the operational, you know they don't have an easy job and it's making that an awful lot easier on a day to day basis. It has a real day to day impact. But also, you know, there are other things that kind of the knock on effects in terms of accuracy. So for example, robot will do is exactly as it's told it doesn't make any mistakes, it doesn't have sick days, you know, it does what it says on the tin and actually that kind of impact. So, it's not necessarily, you know, counting your numbers it's the fact that then doesn't generate a call from a customer that kind of says, "Well you, I think you've got this wrong." So, it's all that kind of, these kind of ripple effects that go out. I think is how we measure the fact that A, the garage is working and b, it's delivering the value that we needed to deliver. >> Robots, probably ask better questions too so yeah... (Lianne laughing) So, real quick, just real quick before you head out. So, the big challenge next, eureka, this works, right? Amar, you put together this fantastic system it's in great practice at the DWP, now what do we do? So, it's just in 30 seconds, Amar, maybe if you can look at, be the headlights down the road here for DWP and say, "This is where I think we can jump to next." >> Yeah, so I think, what we've been able to prove as I say is that is scaled innovation and having the return and the value that it creates is here to stay, right? So, I think the next things for us are a continuous expand the stuff that we're doing. Keeping hold of that culture, right? That culture of constantly solving difficult problems and being able to innovate and scale them. So, we are now doing a lot more automations across the department, you know, across different benefits across the digital agenda. I think we're also now becoming almost a bit of the fabric of enabling some of the digital transformation that big organizations look at, right? So moving to a world where you can have a venture driven architectures and being able to sort of scale that. I also think the natural sort of expansion of the team and the type of work that we're going to do is probably also going to expand into sort of the analytics side of it and understanding and seeing how we can take the data from the cases that we're processing to overall have a smoother journey across for our citizens. But it's looking, you know, the future's looking bright. I think we've got a number of different backlogs of items to work on. >> Well, you've got a great story to tell and thank you for sharing it with us here on "the CUBE", talking about DWP, the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK and the great work that Accenture's doing to make 20 million lives plus, a lot simpler for our friends in England. You've been watching ""the CUBE"" the AWS Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. (bright upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Well, hello everybody. John Walls is here on "the CUBE". Great to have you with us as we continue our series here at the AWS Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And today we're talking about public service and not just a little slice of public service but probably the largest public sector offering in the UK and for with us or with us. Now to talk about that is Lianne Anderton, who is in with the Intelligent Automation Garage Delivery Lead at the UK Department of Work and Pension. Lianne, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us here on "the CUBE". >> Hi, thanks for having me. >> And also with this us is Amar Narayan, who is a Manager Director at Accenture the AWS Business Group for the Lead in Health and Public Sector, also UK and Ireland. And Amar, I think, you and Lianne, are in the same location, Newcastle, I believe in the UK, is that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yep, yeah, we're, here in the northeast of UK. >> Well, thank you for being with us. I appreciate the time. Lianne, let's talk about what you do, the Department of Work and Pension, the famous DWP in England. You have influence or certainly touchpoints with a huge amount of the British population. In what respects, what are you doing for the working class in England and what does technology have to do with all that? >> Sure, so for the Department for Work and Pensions I think the pensions bit is fairly self explanatory so anybody who is over state pension age within the UK. for the work part of that we also deal with people of working age. So, these are people who are either in employment and need additional help through various benefits we offer in the UK. Those people who are out of work. And we also deal with health related benefits as well. And we are currently serving over 20 million claimants every year at this moment in time. So, we're aware of a huge part of the UK government. >> All right, so say that number again. How many? >> 20 million claimants every year. >> Million with an M, right? >> Yeah. >> So, and that's individuals. And so how many transactions, if you will, how many do you think you process in a month? How, much traffic basically, are you seeing? >> An extraordinary amount? I'm not even, I don't think I even know that number. (Lianne laughing) >> Mind blowing, right? So, it's- >> A huge, huge amount. >> Mind blowing. >> Yeah, so, basically the we kind of keep the country going. So, you know, if the department for Work and Pensions kind of didn't exist anymore then actually it would cause an infinite number of problems in society. We, kind of help and support the people who need that. And, yeah, so we play a really vital role in kind of you know, social care and kind of public service. >> So, what was your journey to Accenture then? What, eventually led you to them? What problem were you having and how have you collaborated to solve that? >> So, in terms of how we work with Accenture. So, we had in around 2017 DWP was looking at a projected number of transactions growing by about 210 million which was, you know, an extraordinary amount. And, you know, I think as we've kind of covered everything that we do is on a massive scale. So, we as DWP as an organization we had absolutely no idea how we were going to be able to handle such a massive increase in the transactions. And actually, you know, after kind of various kind of paths and ideas of how we were going to do that, automation, was actually the answer. But the problem that we have with that is that we have, like many governments around the world, we have really older legacy systems. So, each of these benefits that we deal with are on legacy systems. So, whatever we were going to develop had to, you know, connect to all of these, it had to ingest and then process all of these pieces of data some of which, you know, given the fact that a lot of these systems have a lot of manual input you have data issues there that you have to solve and whatever we did, you know, as we've talked about in terms of volumes has to scale instantly as well. So, it has to be able to scale up and down to meet demand and, you know, and that down scaling is also equally as important. So yeah, you've got to be able to scale up to meet the volumes but also you've got to be able to downscale when when it's not needed. But we had nothing that was like that kind of helped us to meet that demand. So, we built our own automation platform, The Intelligent Automation Garage and we did that with Accenture. >> So Amar, I'd like you to chime in here then. So, you're looking at this client who has this massive footprint and obviously vital services, right? So, that's paramount that you have to keep that in mind and the legacy systems that Lianne was just talking about. So, now you're trying to get 'em in the next gen but also respecting that they have a serious investment already in a lot of technology. How do you approach that kind of problem solving, those dynamics and how in this case did you get them to automation as the solution? >> Sure, so I think I think one of the interesting things, yeah as Lianne has sort of described it, right? It's effectively like, you know the department has to have be running all of the time, right? They can't, you know, they can't effectively stop and then do a bunch of IT transformation, you know it's effectively like, you know, changing the wheels of a jumbo jet whilst it's taking off, right? And you've got to do all of that all in one go. But what I think we really, really liked about the situation that we were in and the client relationship we had was that we knew we had to it wasn't just a technology play, we couldn't just go, "All right, let's just put some new technology in." What we also needed to do was really sort of create a culture, an innovation culture, and go, "Well how do we think about the problems that we currently have and how do we think about solving them differently and in collaboration, right?" So, not just the, "Let's just outsource a bunch of technology for to, you know, to Accenture and build a bunch of stuff." So, we very carefully thought about, well actually, the unique situation that they're in the demands that the citizens have on the services that the department provide. And as Lianne mentioned, that technology didn't exist. So, we fundamentally looked at this in a different way. So, we worked really closely with the department. We said, Look, actually what we ultimately need is the equivalent of a virtual workforce. Something where if you already, you know all of a sudden had a hundred thousand pension claims that needed to be processed in a week that you could click your fingers and, you know in a physical world you'd have another building all of your kits, a whole bunch of trained staff that would be able to process that work. And if in the following week you didn't need that you no longer needed that building that stuff or the machinery. And we wanted to replicate that in the virtual world. So, we started designing a platform we utilized and focused on using AWS because it had the scalability. And we thought about, how were we going to connect something as new as AWS to all of these legacy systems. How are we going to make that work in the modern world? How are we going to integrate it? How we going to make sure it's secure? And frankly, we're really honest with the client we said, "Look, this hasn't been done before. Like, nowhere in Accenture has done it. No one's done it in the industry. We've got some smart people, I think we can do it." And, we've prototyped and we've built and we were able to prove that we can do that. And that in itself just created an environment of solving tricky problems and being innovative but most importantly not doing sort of proof of concepts that didn't go anywhere but building something that actually scaled. And I think that was really the real the start of what was has been the Garage. >> So, And Lianne, you mentioned this and you just referred to it Amar, about The Garage, right? The Intelligent Automation Garage. What exactly is it? I mean, we talked about it, what the needs are all this and that, but Lianne, I'll let you jump in first and Amar, certainly compliment her remarks, but what is the IAG, what's the... >> So, you know, I think exactly what kind of Amar, has said from a from a kind of a development point of view I think it started off, you know, really, really small. And the idea is that this is DWP, intelligent automation center of excellence. So, you know, it's aims are that, you know, it makes sure that it scopes out kind of the problems that DWP are are facing properly. So, we really understand what the crux of the problem is. In large organizations It's very easy, I think to think you understand what the problem is where actually, you know, it is really about kind of delving into what that is. And actually we have a dedicated design team that really kind of get under the bonnet of what these issues really are. It then kind of architects what the solutions need to look like using as Amar said, all the exciting new technology that we kind of have available to us. That kind of sensible solution as to what that should look like. We then build that sensible solution and we then, you know as part of that, we make sure that it scales to demand. So, something that might start out with, I dunno, you know a few hundred claimants or kind of cases going through it can quite often, you know, once that's that's been successful scale really, really quickly because as you know, we have 20 million claimants that come through us every year. So, these types of things can grow and expand but also a really key function of what we do is that we have a fully supported in-house service as well. So, all of those automations that we build are then maintained and you know, so any changes that kind of needed to be need to be made to them, we have all that and we have that control and we have our kind of arms wrapped around all of those. But also what that allows us to do is it allows us to be very kind of self-sufficient in making sure that we are as sufficient, sorry, as efficient as possible. And what I mean by that is looking at, you know as new technologies come around and they can allow us to do things more effectively. So, it allows us to kind of almost do that that kind of continuous improvement ourselves. So, that's a huge part of what we do as well. And you know, I think from a size point of view I said this started off really small as in the idea was this was a kind of center of excellence but actually as automation, I think as Amar alluded to is kind of really started to embed in DWP culture what we've started to kind of see is the a massive expansion in the types of of work that people want us to do and the volume of work that we are doing. So, I think we're currently running at around around a hundred people at the moment and I think, you know we started off with a scrum, a couple of scrum teams under Amar, so yeah, it's really grown. But you know, I think this is here to stay within DWP. >> Yeah, well when we talk about automation, you know virtual and robotics and all this I like to kind of keep the human element in mind here too. And Amar, maybe you can touch on that in certain terms of the human factors in this equation. 'Cause people think about, you know, robots it means different things to different people. In your mind, how does automation intersect with the human element here and in terms of the kinds of things Lianne wants to do down the road, you know, is a road for people basically? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think fundamentally what the department does is support people and therefore the solutions that we designed and built had to factor that in mind right? We were trying to best support and provide the best service we possibly can. And not only do we need to support the citizens that it supports. The department itself is a big organization, right? We're up to, we're talking between sort of 70 and 80,000 employees. So, how do we embed automation but also make the lives of the, of the DWP agents better as well? And that's what we thought about. So we said, "Well look, we think we can design solutions that do both." So, a lot of our automations go through a design process and we work closely with our operations team and we go, well actually, you know in processing and benefit, there are some aspects of that processing that benefit that are copy and paste, right? It doesn't require much thought around it, but it just requires capturing data and there's elements of that solution or that process that requires actual thought and understanding and really empathy around going, "Well how do I best support this citizen?" And what we tended to do is we took all of the things that were sort of laborious and took a lot of time and would slow down the overall process and we automated those and then we really focused on making sure that the elements that required the human, the human input was made as user friendly and centric as we possibly could. So, if there's a really complex case that needs to be processed, we were able to present the information in a really digestible and understandable way for the agents so that they could make a informed and sensible decision based around a citizen. And what that enabled us to do is essentially meet the demands of the volumes and the peaks that came in but also maintain the quality and if not improve, you know the accuracy of the claims processing that we had. >> So, how do you know, and maybe Lianne, you can address this. How do you know that it's successful on both sides of that equation? And, 'cause Amar raised a very good point. You have 70 to 80,000 employees that you're trying to make their work life much more efficient, much simpler and hopefully make them better at their jobs at the end of the day. But you're also taking care of 20 million clients on the, your side too. So, how do you, what's your measurement for success and what kind of like raw feedback do you get that says, "Okay, this has worked for both of our client bases, both our citizens and our employees?" >> Yeah, so we can look at this both from a a quantitative and a qualitative point of view as well. So, I think from a let take the kind figures first. So we are really hot on making sure that whatever automations we put in place we are there to measure how that automation is working what it's kind of doing and the impact that it's having from an operational point of view. So I think, you know, I think the proof of the fact that the Intelligent Automation Garage is working is that, you know, in the, in its lifetime, we've processed over 20 million items and cases so far. We have 65 scaled and transitioned automations and we've saved over 2 million operational hours. I was going to say that again that's 2 million operational hours. And what that allows us to do as an organization those 2 million hours have allowed us to rather than people as Amar, said, cutting and pasting and doing work that that is essentially very time consuming and repetitive. That 2 million hours we've been able to use on actual decision making. So, the stuff that you need as sentient human being to make judgment calls on and you know and kind of make those decisions that's what it's allowed us as an organization to do. And then I think from a quality point of view I think the feedback that we have from our operational teams is, you know is equally as as great. So, we have that kind of feedback from, you know all the way up from to the director level about, you know how it's kind of like I said that freeing up that time but actually making the operational, you know they don't have an easy job and it's making that an awful lot easier on a day to day basis. It has a real day to day impact. But also, you know, there are other things that kind of the knock on effects in terms of accuracy. So for example, robot will do is exactly as it's told it doesn't make any mistakes, it doesn't have sick days, you know, it does what it says on the tin and actually that kind of impact. So, it's not necessarily, you know, counting your numbers it's the fact that then doesn't generate a call from a customer that kind of says, "Well you, I think you've got this wrong." So, it's all that kind of, these kind of ripple effects that go out. I think is how we measure the fact that A, the garage is working and b, it's delivering the value that we needed to deliver. >> Robots, probably ask better questions too so yeah... (Lianne laughing) So, real quick, just real quick before you head out. So, the big challenge next, eureka, this works, right? Amar, you put together this fantastic system it's in great practice at the DWP, now what do we do? So, it's just in 30 seconds, Amar, maybe if you can look at, be the headlights down the road here for DWP and say, "This is where I think we can jump to next." >> Yeah, so I think, what we've been able to prove as I say is that is scaled innovation and having the return and the value that it creates is here to stay, right? So, I think the next things for us are a continuous expand the stuff that we're doing. Keeping hold of that culture, right? That culture of constantly solving difficult problems and being able to innovate and scale them. So, we are now doing a lot more automations across the department, you know, across different benefits across the digital agenda. I think we're also now becoming almost a bit of the fabric of enabling some of the digital transformation that big organizations look at, right? So moving to a world where you can have a venture driven architectures and being able to sort of scale that. I also think the natural sort of expansion of the team and the type of work that we're going to do is probably also going to expand into sort of the analytics side of it and understanding and seeing how we can take the data from the cases that we're processing to overall have a smoother journey across for our citizens. But it's looking, you know, the future's looking bright. I think we've got a number of different backlogs of items to work on. >> Well, you've got a great story to tell and thank you for sharing it with us here on "the CUBE", talking about DWP, the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK and the great work that Accenture's doing to make 20 million lives plus, a lot simpler for our friends in England. You've been watching ""the CUBE"" the AWS Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello everybody, my name is Dave Vellante welcome to this CUBE conversation. You know for the last several weeks, we've been interviewing key executives to really try to understand how they're responding to the COVID-19 crisis. And one of the key areas that we've been reporting on is the so-called work from home offset. And I'll explain that in a little bit, but there are two great executives from Citrix that I'm really please to have on. Donna Kimmel, the Executive Vice-President and Chief People Officer. Donna, great to see ya', thanks for comin' on. >> Thank you. >> And she's joined by Meerah Rajavel who's the CIO of Citrix. Meerah, thank you as well. >> Thank you. >> So I mean this thing, it's been amazing. We've been doing a lot of research and it just obviously came out of the blue. Guys, if you would actually bring up that chart, I want to sort of set up the conversation here. This is something that we've been reporting on for a while. This is an ETR survey from about 1300 CIO's and IT practitioners that, we asked them how is your budget going to change in 2020 as a result of COVID? And you can see the red. We all know the story in the red, it's ugly. But surprisingly about 35% of the respondents said, no change. They're actually going to plow ahead, but what's even more surprising was 20 plus percent, about 21% said, we're actually going to spend more. And so you can see from the data that it's actually would be a lot worse were it not for the green. Now the reality is, that green is a function really of work from home infrastructure and guys that's something that I really want to talk to you about today. So, Donna let me start with you. I mean we always talk about people, process and technology. I mean we went from put your toe in the water with work from home infrastructure to all in. (chuckles) Your thoughts, I mean this is just overnight. >> Absolutely. You know I think when I think about remote work and working from home, it is really not business as usual. And probably was the biggest change that businesses have experienced, even in my career and many others. This was pretty much thrust upon us, the work from home. And we realize that it requires new ways of thinking and behaving and operating. Our home offices quickly became kitchen tables and basements and bathrooms and bedrooms. And in addition to it not neccesarily being setup the way we would normally set it up if we knew we were going to work from home. It also didn't generally involve caring for family members at the same time. And so most people thought for the first couple of weeks, well I can get through this you know for it's not an extended period of time, but the reality it's become an extended period of time. And I think ultimately, you know when we step back and think we're, as humans, we're all survivors and we're resilient. And there's a number of ways that we can help our employees as they make the adjustment that was really sort of pushed on them. >> Now, the executives that I've been talking to, they to a person start with look, the safety and health of our team is the most important. So you obviously had to communicate that, Donna. I wonder if you could talk about sort of the priorities, how you, you know what is it the cadence of your communication, the transparency of your communication, what really was your, sort of first move if you will? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think for us, one of the first things we had to step back and think about is, who are we, what is our culture, what's important to us? And we recognize at Citrix, that it's our talent that makes the business successful, so we need to show, understand as much of the experience as possible that our employees are having. And really come at it from, I think a place of empathy. Listening to what's important to them, thinking about what's going to enable them to be successful. Because when are employees are successful, they truly drive success and a great experience for our customers. They're the ones out there helping to support our customers to support our sales partners, and certainly ultimately our community. But when we think about this, we're thinking about the challenges, the opportunities, trying to developing plans and programs and making sure that we have continuous information that is provided to our employees. And I think part of it, we'll have an opportunity to talk with Meerah as well. When we step back, we think about kind of three things from a future of work perspective. We always think about the culture of the organization, which is the embodiment of the values, the who we are and what we do. All of this clearly is grounded in the business objectives. So the first piece is our culture. The second piece is our physical space. So what is our environment like that enables us to be as productive as possible? And then the third piece is our digital space. If you can think about all of those almost as a Venn diagram, that really puts the employee at the center. When we think about what's going to enable our employees to be successful, we think about that in a very holistic way. And so, culture is, sorry did you want to, I'm, >> Oh no, please, keep on talking, go ahead. >> Yeah, I was just going to say culture for us is really grounded in our ability to drive trust in the organization. It's about that human connection. Because the more we can be connected with each other as managers to employees and peers to employees, the better off we are. People will feel less isolated, because without that face to face it makes it, and face to face and I'll say in person makes it a lot more difficult. The second piece that we focus on is that physical environment. And I think for many employees, because they were thrust into the situation. When they compare it to the work environment, when you're in the office there's almost a professional feel, in that work environment. And so employees feel a fair amount of pressure to try to create that same professionalism at their home. And the reality is, it's hard to do that. So it puts a lot of pressure on employees when they recognize that the whole family is quarantined with them. Right there's home schooling going on, there's no child care or elder care, there's interruptions at inopportune times, barking dogs and cats walking across keyboards and family members doing drive-bys while the video camera's on. And I think one of the things that we've been able to do is to help employees feel comfortable with, that's who you are, that's our humanity. And the more we can help people feel comfortable about creating that physical space that's open and welcoming, that really helps drive that experience. And then the third piece as I mentioned, is the digital space. And that's really where the partnership with Meerah comes in and is so, so important. Do they have the right tools and technology at home to be able to drive that experience? And for us, you know as Meerah and I have talked that partnership between IT and HR is critical. We're almost like the new BFF. In order to drive the right experience to enable our employees to be as productive as possible in this work from home. >> All right, so Meerah let's get into that. So once you've established though the self, the safety, the health, of your employees obviously financial flexibility, and Runway and the like, their physical digital space. Now you're really under a microscope with the tech. Now, of course Citrix has been in this business for decades. So you know a lot about this, but nonetheless, this is really new. You were thrust into it overnight. Your thoughts on how you responded and you know kind of where we're at in that journey. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So one of the things Donna mentioned right, the three aspects. When we move to work from home the biggest piece of this aspect that made it, like for example she was telling, like myself, we are in transition. I'm moving from Austin, Texas to Florida when it is all in the middle, I'm right now in the middle of my transition, I'm not settled in my new house and literally I'm doing this interview with the, sitting my laptop on top of cereal boxes, right now. That's actually something that I empathize clearly with my employees. So the physical space, when you are in an office location it's not anymore that we can control. So the digital space needs to really compensate for the physical space. The culture is something, I think we are very lucky being in Citrix, the notion of what we have always been talking about remote work and employee experience, we have got that ingrained so when we have to go into this remote work space in a work force culture, the culture is something that I would say we had some foundation to stand on. But IT has to come in. It's not an easy job, because we want to give people the ability to do what they want in a productive fashion, but now digital needs to compensate for the physical, you know efficiency that are possibly lacking in a home environment. So I looked at it from three C's. It starts with connectivity, right. Connectivity being, are we providing the right kind of connectivity which is through a secure connection. At the end of the day, my job here is to make the employee productive and secure at the same time. It's not just about the productivity, but wrap it up with the greater experience. So we start looking at connectivity from a security point of view, from a performance point of view, using technologies like Sdram and maximizing their performance to their nearest, how we can break out the security to maximize performance for our employees. We also need to take into account that there are countries we went into the last way understand where the true problem, because if you go to Asia, there are so many countries, you know even if we can provide experience, they're experience is very dependent on the local connectivity. So we need to look at, okay how do we ensure our heavy duty applications are in a very optimized so it doesn't become a productivity hit for the employee. The second is you think about productivity for employees, and it's all about information sharing and content sharing right. So I call the second C is the content. The ability for the employee to have the right data, the right place and so they can make decisions and they can be productive. So using things like, whether it is your share file or your OneDrive or your vision platform, G-Drive, it doesn't matter, but you have to really make sure the data and information are available and be focused on making sure that they are streamlined and communicating about that very openly, like to Donna's point. The third C we looked at was collaboration, right. I mean that's actually with, you know we are now compensating for the physical touch with a digital touch. So that includes things like your audio conferencing platform, your videoconferencing platform, your ability to bring these different facets together right. I mean the ability to share, the ability to white board. I had last week, three days offsite and it was a complete virtual offsite with nine hours of working sessions and we used all kinds of tools that literally we had digital sticky's to move around that integrated into our videoconferencing platform that integrated into our conference sharing platform. So that whatever they are doing, those are all connected. At the end of the day, I truly felt like you know what? I can contribute to not adding to the carbon footprint of the globe. Because truly we had people from all over the globe, all of us set in. I'm getting feedback from employees saying, now the playing field is completely leveled down. People who were being remote users before, they felt they had a short stick. Now everybody's same, in fact my staff actually talked to one of my permanent remote employee and say, "Hey what is some tips that I can use from you "to make sure I'm productive, right?" So I see the culture aspect is super important that's actually bringing us together, but it is from a technology and digital point of view, bringing your you know connectivity, content and collaboration in a way that it's going to be secure and innovative. We are looking at it with the aspect of your culture and from the employee shoes is a super important thing from a technology point of view. >> So Donna you mentioned the sort of BFF between HR and IT. Now of course, HR and IT have always had a relationship, but it really has been around, like you know Human Capital Management software, whether it was simplified and efficient, onboarding, or certain you know change management functions. What have you been able to learn from that relationship and apply and what's new? >> You know, I think, what we're doing together, what Meerah and I and the IT and the HR organizations are really doing together is truly understanding what it means to enable productivity for employees. And when you think about having the right tools to enable employees to be productive, doing that in alignment with the culture of the organization. What is it that drives our sense of meaning and accomplishment? And then being able to do it in a way, both in a physical environment, whether that physical environment is in the office or if it is remote, we do look collectively together at the change management. How do you get employees to adopt new ways of doing things? And utilize that and learn from it. So if we experiment with certain types of productivity tools as Meerah was talking about. Which ones work, which ones needed a change, what works for some teams and didn't work for others? When she and I can do that together and our departments can do that together, that enables us to truly drive productivity across the organization. >> I would probably add one more thing to what Donna said. I mean the thing is, also if you think about it, you know the human resources, the talent organization has a much better understanding of the culture, of the sub-cultures, right. I mean I've never been in a company even when it's a thousand people company, you have sub-cultures. And HR you know involved in the culture of those sub-cultures. As we are going through from IT point of view, we look at it from user persona, okay. So a salesperson who's actually always on the road or always like more remote worker versus an engineering person. I mean we are a software company, an R & D persona quite a different set of productivity tools compared to a sales person, compared to an executive, compared to an executive assistant right. So for us, it's actually bringing that different functional line of business and the type of persona. And HR is absolutely crucial because as we are looking at it they're saying, what is a success for this organization? And what the culture of the organization and what are the primary job roles? And we don't do it just with HR, but HR uses so much content to get jump start and then we engage with the real users. We are not going with a blank sheet of paper. We are going with something that they can react to and they add to it. So we're doing a design thinking with them that something they can be in start to get rather than you know white canvas and telling, tell me what do you want? I mean, you know ask what you want, you'll be getting pie in the sky and the moon. >> Well it's a good thing you have those virtual sticky's too. That'll help with that design thinking right? You know, one of the things that I've been saying is that you know, we've never seen obviously anything like this before, a forced shut down of the economy which is why we're going to remember it. And like 911, you know post 911, we are going to see some things here that have permanence. And post GDPR for example, it required certain changes. So Donna, I wonder if we could start with you, just and it's ironic that we're starting a new decade with this crisis. We're not just going to go back and revert to 2019. There's not just going to be some you know all of a sudden everything is rosy again, it's not. It's going to, there's going to be certain permanent changes. How much have you thought about that and do you have any visibility on what those are going to be? >> Yeah, you know when I step back and I think about this and I think a large part of it has to do with much of what Meerah was just talking about in terms of design thinking. It's really, I think for all of us, it's coming back to recognize that this became almost a forced opportunity to focus on business continuity. And how do we think about what's right for us as we move forward? But the design of that is based on what is right, what's the context for that particular business? What's the culture of that organization? What are the products and services that that business provides? What are the sub-cultures in the organization? So for me, it really does step back to say, look we need to focus on business continuity. And now we have a couple of new models, where in the past it would be really easy for managers to say, you know I don't think my team can work remotely, or your job isn't possible to do remotely. And now what we're finding in many businesses is that many jobs can actually be done remotely, if they're provided the right tools and the right resources. So for me, I step back and say, as we think about the business continuity going forward, there is a new way to work. It is a combination of finding that flexibility between working in the office and remote work. And providing the right tools that enable employees to be able to do it successfully. >> You know, Meerah this notion that Donna's bringing up of business continuance, I've sort of been noodling on this and thinking that going forward, one of the things that will change is that companies might be willing to sub-optimize near term performance to put in better business resiliency. Now at the same time, I know how CEO's think. And they say okay great, we're going to make that investment yeah, fine we'll maybe sacrifice some short term performance. But and I had a really interesting conversation recently with a chief data officer who said, you don't have to sacrifice necessarily with data in this new era. There actually are ways in which you can both drive business resilience and drive productivity and ultimately profitability. What's your thinking on that sort of imbalance or balance, if you will? >> I agree with that statement because to me, you know today's business we need to look at I mean especially with the cloud and some of the new technology that we have, I mean even, I seriously think coming out of COVID there's going to be industries that are going to come out new business models that are going to emerge, right. I mean think about Telemedicine. We have been very, very hesitant about Telemedicine for decades now. I mean that's not a new concept. But we have been very hesitant. We said, "I have to see the doctor." But today pretty much everybody, except for if your seriously injured you're getting Telemedicine. That industry is going to work right. So to me the statement you made is absolutely, absolutely for me it's actually an opportunity coming out of an adversity that's going to come out. When I think about it the most important thing I see is the businesses that are going to be successful, that's why even HR, you know partnership is even more greater. The businesses that have talent with digital dexterity are the ones that are going to win, right. I mean regardless you know, where you are in HR, whether you're in finance, whether you're in IT, you're in R & D, you're in manufacturing, doesn't matter. Your digital dexterity of your company really makes you, whether you win in the market or you're one of those dinosaurs in the market right. And how do you bring those together? That's a cultural change, that's actually educating right. I mean we don't want to leave, we already have talent shortage and we don't want to leave a generation of population behind and focused on only the millennials and others. Because I mean, recently I've been going through Scaled Agile Framework, which is a Lean-Agile. And I really love the board of Lean-Agile. Lean has a lot of economy's of scale. Agile brings a lot of volatility. When you bring them together you get both and that's exactly what we need to do with our talent. Bring the system and bring the digital dexterity that we need to bring to that. Can we get it from a productivity, of course we want to be respectful of privacy, but as we have been going through we have been looking at different productivity metrics, looking at you know, what is the usage pattern for employees? How much quotient they have done, how was my MTTR? I mean in my organization I've been looking at the velocity of all transaction processing, Azure, Allusion escalate time. And we also even you know kind of little, because I think at the end of the day we as humans, we actually are social animals. We need the touch and we can not forget, we are not mechanical, we are human. So we need that empathy and we need that emotional side of it. So we have been both qualitatively and quantitatively checking with our workforce, how they are feeling about it and also looking at the data to see if the productivity is telling the story what people are talking about. And quite surprised, 66% of our population when we did this culture survey, said they feel more productive in this situation, because many of them contribute it back to, the time they save from not commuting or they feel just the sense of spending a little bit more time with the family, is actually getting them an extra boost. And they can really do a work-life integration, not like a work-life balance they need to do and we also heard about 11% felt pretty much, they are in the same range. But I also want to recognize it's not for everyone, but I mean we do have folks who are in manufacturing, they need to touch the physical things. And those jobs in certain ways need to be, you know more physical. So there's about three to five percent depending on your job functions that, you know what I need access to the lab, because I really feel the changing my connectivity, changing my or just like for the customer I'm repairing their board. I really need to see that. Those are the ones where we find you know absolute physical touch is required. >> You know in a way I mean we're kind of lucky in the technology business, talk about the digital transformation and I've been saying this has been accelerate a lot of digital transformations. But for us, you look at theCUBE, we've been a remote studios, no problem. You're a software company. You've already really transitioned largely to a subscription model, so you can code remotely. But there are some industries and in particular industries where you guys sell a lot of product. I think about healthcare, you mentioned Telemedicine Meerah. Financial services, the Feds, big users of VDI, highly regulated and secure industries. While it's not you know your main thrust, you talk to your peers in those industries. So and I've always said you know some of these industries really haven't digitally transformed. They're actually kind of complacent. My feeling is that this is going to really accelerate you know some of those industries that haven't transformed and haven't been disrupted. I wonder if you could both, you know comment from both a technology perspective and a people perspective. >> You know I think from the people perspective it's really about mindset. And recognizing that how we approach these new problems and these new ways of thinking about getting work done is all about what our minds block us from thinking. And this pushed us into a situation where we've been able to demonstrate roles that we did not think could ever be done remotely, can actually be done remotely. And so for me it is about a mindset shift. It's about enabling the dialogue, sort of having the courage to have that dialogue inside of the organization to understand again what's the business context? What can we do in a more flexible way? And how do we continue to serve our customers the best that we can? >> I think for me it comes down to you know, protection is always in extinction, right, I mean if you're trying to protect a current model and you're trying to be, saying you know, you don't want to be the dinosaur. Things are going to change and being proactive about the change and embracing the change will let you, to some extent influence and control that change versus being the change being done to you. In this particular case, to me looking at it to see especially with today's technology around you know, manufacturing industry's probably going to see a lot of remote trends that while with IOT and robotics coming in. And I see there's going to be one area you may see a drift down on type of talent that's getting extinct. On the other side, we are going to continue to see the demand on technology is going to continue to go up. And especially which is already shortage I mean if I remember the last survey from KPMG in December, the CIO survey said 60% of the CIO's responded they are having challenges with you know filling the roles. And I also remember the other one is around country survey of technology talent shortage. By 2030 the expectation is we are going to leave something around 8.7 billion or seven trillion dollars of revenue on the table and 85% will be unfulfilled. I mean this is the time for you know, really how do you insure, there are industries that are going to transform which means there are certain skills people need re-skill. I mean, even in technology, the re-skill and the up-skill is good to be a constant thing that's actually it's, nobody is bit you know as far from that one in my opinion in today's world. So that re-skill and up-skill is going to, the one's who are going to embrace that, they're going to be in a bigger way, taking advantage of this transitions and transformation. I also think there are areas that we may see what we call the height may have a broader adoption. So you had mentioned about the chief data office, talking about how data can come in. I mean I see automation accelerating. And data is going to be a full component of acceleration and you will see more and more, you know things around how measurement becomes important as a start, that leads to you know more data modeling, that least to more automation. That cycle is going to accelerate. The influence of AI is going to actually even further than we have said. I just wish some of the areas with you know, we have been slow in adoption, a few have accelerated. Some of the challenges we are dealing with now with capacity, we wouldn't have been having problem. I mean when I did a reflection with my team, the one of the highest one ranked by my leadership was we should have accelerated automation more. >> Well I think was some really, really interesting and deep points. Really no industry is safe from disruption and really Meerah to your points, if you're just a paving the cow path, you're going to be in trouble. If you're trying to protect the past from the future you're going to get disrupted. And I feel like you guys really have a good handle on this and it's our pleasure to be able to host and interview such experts like yourselves. I really appreciate you're sharing your insights and your experience with our audience. I mean we're kind of all in this together. So thank you Donna, Meerah. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Both: Thank you so much for having us. >> You're welcome and thank your for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE for my CXO series. We will see you next time. (calm music)