>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M I T. Chief data officer and information quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back >> to M I. T. Everybody watching the Cube, The leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Volonte here with Paul Guillen. My co host, Tom Davenport, is here is the president's distinguished professor at Babson College. Huebel? Um, good to see again, Tom. Thanks for coming on. Glad to be here. So, yeah, this is, uh let's see. The 13th annual M I t. Cdo lucky. >> Yeah, sure. As this year. Our seventh. I >> think so. Really? Maybe we'll offset. So you gave a talk earlier? She would be afraid of the machines, Or should we embrace them? I think we should embrace them, because so far, they are not capable of replacing us. I mean, you know, when we hit the singularity, which I'm not sure we'll ever happen, But it's certainly not going happen anytime soon. We'll have a different answer. But now good at small, narrow task. Not so good at doing a lot of the things that we do. So I think we're fine. Although as I said in my talk, I have some survey data suggesting that large U. S. Corporations, their senior executives, a substantial number of them more than half would liketo automate as many jobs as possible. They say. So that's a little scary. But unfortunately for us human something, it's gonna be >> a while before they succeed. Way had a case last year where McDonald's employees were agitating for increasing the minimum wage and tThe e management used the threat of wrote of robotics sizing, hamburger making process, which can be done right to thio. Get them to back down. Are you think we're going to Seymour of four that were maybe a eyes used as a threat? >> Well, I haven't heard too many other examples. I think for those highly structured, relatively low level task, it's quite possible, particularly if if we do end up raising the minimum wage beyond a point where it's economical, pay humans to do the work. Um, but I would like to think that, you know, if we gave humans the opportunity, they could do Maur than they're doing now in many cases, and one of the things I was saying is that I think companies are. Generally, there's some exceptions, but most companies they're not starting to retrain their workers. Amazon recently announced they're going to spend 700,000,000 to retrain their workers to do things that a I and robots can't. But that's pretty rare. Certainly that level of commitment is very rare. So I think it's time for the companies to start stepping up and saying, How can we develop a better combination of humans and machines? >> The work by, you know, brain Nelson and McAfee, which is a little dated now. But it definitely suggests that there's some things to be concerned about. Of course, ultimately there prescription was one of an optimist and education, and yeah, on and so forth. But you know, the key point there is the machines have always replace humans, but now, in terms of cognitive functions, but you see it everywhere you drive to the airport. Now it's Elektronik billboards. It's not some person putting up the kiosks, etcetera, but you know, is you know, you've you've used >> the term, you know, paid the cow path. We don't want to protect the past from the future. All right, so, to >> your point, retraining education I mean, that's the opportunity here, isn't it? And the potential is enormous. Well, and, you know, let's face it, we haven't had much in the way of productivity improvements in the U. S. Or any other advanced economy lately. So we need some guests, you know, replacement of humans by machines. But my argument has always been You can handle innovation better. You can avoid sort of race to the bottom at automation sometimes leads to, if you think creatively about humans and machines working as colleagues. In many cases, you remember in the PC boom, I forget it with a Fed chairman was it might have been, Greenspan said, You can see progress everywhere except in the product. That was an M. I. T. Professor Robert Solow. >> OK, right, and then >> won the Nobel Prize. But then, shortly thereafter, there was a huge productivity boom. So I mean is there may be a pent up Well, God knows. I mean, um, everybody's wondering. We've been spending literally trillions on I t. And you would think that it would have led toe productivity, But you know, certain things like social media, I think reduced productivity in the workplace and you know, we're all chatting and talking and slacking and sewing all over the place. Maybe that's is not conducive to getting work done. It depends what you >> do with that social media here in our business. It's actually it's phenomenal to see political coverage these days, which is almost entirely consist of reprinting politicians. Tweets >> Exactly. I guess it's made life easier for for them all people reporters sitting in the White House waiting for a press conference. They're not >> doing well. There are many reporters left. Where do you see in your consulting work your academic work? Where do you see a I being used most effectively in organizations right now? And where do you think that's gonna be three years from now? >> Well, I mean, the general category of activity of use case is the sort of someone's calling boring I. It's data integration. One thing that's being discussed a lot of this conference, it's connecting your invoices to your contracts to see Did we actually get the stuff that we contracted for its ah, doing a little bit better job of identifying fraud and doing it faster so all of those things are quite feasible. They're just not that exciting. What we're not seeing are curing cancer, creating fully autonomous vehicles. You know, the really aggressive moonshots that we've been trying for a while just haven't succeeded at what if we kind of expand a I is gonna The rumor, trawlers. New cool stuff that's coming out. So considering all these new checks with detective Aye, aye, Blockchain new security approaches. When do you think that machines will be able to make better diagnoses than doctors? Well, I think you know, in a very narrow sense in some cases, that could do it now. But the thing is, first of all, take a radiologist, which is one of the doctors I think most at risk from this because they don't typically meet with patients and they spend a lot of time looking at images. It turns out that the lab experiments that say you know, these air better than human radiologist say I tend to be very narrow, and what one lab does is different from another lab. So it's just it's gonna take a very long time to make it into, you know, production deployment in the physician's office. We'll probably have to have some regulatory approval of it. You know, the lab research is great. It's just getting it into day to day. Reality is the problem. Okay, So staying in this context of digital a sort of umbrella topic, do you think large retail stores roll largely disappeared? >> Uh, >> some sectors more than others for things that you don't need toe, touch and feel, And soon before you're to them. Certainly even that obviously, it's happening more and more on commerce. What people are saying will disappear. Next is the human at the point of sale. And we've been talking about that for a while. In In grocery, Not so not achieve so much yet in the U. S. Amazon Go is a really interesting experiment where every time I go in there, I tried to shoplift. I took a while, and now they have 12 stores. It's not huge yet, but I think if you're in one of those jobs that a substantial chunk of it is automata ble, then you really want to start looking around thinking, What else can I do to add value to these machines? Do you think traditional banks will lose control of the payment system? Uh, No, I don't because the Finn techs that you see thus far keep getting bought by traditional bank. So my guess is that people will want that certainty. And you know, the funny thing about Blockchain way say in principle it's more secure because it's spread across a lot of different ledgers. But people keep hacking into Bitcoin, so it makes you wonder. I think Blockchain is gonna take longer than way thought as well. So, you know, in my latest book, which is called the Aye Aye Advantage, I start out talking by about Tamara's Law, This guy Roy Amara, who was a futurist, not nearly as well known as Moore's Law. But it said, You know, for every new technology, we tend to overestimate its impact in the short run and underestimated Long, long Ryan. And so I think a I will end up doing great things. We may have sort of tuned it out of the time. It actually happens way finally have autonomous vehicles. We've been talking about it for 50 years. Last one. So one of the Democratic candidates of the 75 Democratic ended last night mentioned the chief manufacturing officer Well, do you see that automation will actually swing the pendulum and bring back manufacturing to the U. S. I think it could if we were really aggressive about using digital technologies in manufacturing, doing three D manufacturing doing, um, digital twins of every device and so on. But we are not being as aggressive as we ought to be. And manufacturing companies have been kind of slow. And, um, I think somewhat delinquent and embracing these things. So they're gonna think, lose the ability to compete. We have to really go at it in a big way to >> bring it. Bring it all back. Just we've got an election coming up. There are a lot of concern following the last election about the potential of a I chatbots Twitter chat bots, deep fakes, technologies that obscure or alter reality. Are you worried about what's coming in the next year? And that that >> could never happen? Paul. We could never see anything deep fakes I'm quite worried about. We don't seem. I know there's some organizations working on how we would certify, you know, an image as being really But we're not there yet. My guess is, certainly by the time the election happens, we're going to have all sorts of political candidates saying things that they never really said through deep fakes and image manipulation. Scary? What do you think about the call to break up? Big check. What's your position on that? I think that sell a self inflicted wound. You know, we just saw, for example, that the automobile manufacturers decided to get together. Even though the federal government isn't asking for better mileage, they said, We'll do it. We'll work with you in union of states that are more advanced. If Big Tak had said, we're gonna work together to develop standards of ethical behavior and privacy and data and so on, they could've prevented some of this unless they change their attitude really quickly. I've seen some of it sales force. People are talking about the need for data standard data protection standards, I must say, change quickly. I think they're going to get legislation imposed and maybe get broken up. It's gonna take awhile. Depends on the next administration, but they're not being smart >> about it. You look it. I'm sure you see a lot of demos of advanced A I type technology over the last year, what is really impressed you. >> You know, I think the biggest advances have clearly been in image recognition looking the other day. It's a big problem with that is you need a lot of label data. It's one of the reasons why Google was able to identify cat photos on the Internet is we had a lot of labeled cat images and the Image net open source database. But the ability to start generating images to do synthetic label data, I think, could really make a big difference in how rapidly image recognition works. >> What even synthetic? I'm sorry >> where we would actually create. We wouldn't have to have somebody go around taking pictures of cats. We create a bunch of different cat photos, label them as cat photos have variations in them, you know, unless we have a lot of variation and images. That's one of the reasons why we can't use autonomous vehicles yet because images differ in the rain and the snow. And so we're gonna have to have synthetic snow synthetic rain to identify those images. So, you know, the GPU chip still realizes that's a pedestrian walking across there, even though it's kind of buzzed up right now. Just a little bit of various ation. The image can throw off the recognition altogether. Tom. Hey, thanks so much for coming in. The Cube is great to see you. We gotta go play Catch. You're welcome. Keep right. Everybody will be back from M I t CDO I Q In Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stable, aren't they? Paul Gillis, You're watching the Cube?

in Cambridge Massachusetts it's the cube covering the MIT chief data officer and information quality symposium now here are your hosts Stu miniman and George Gilbert you're watching the cube SiliconANGLE media's flagship program we go out to lots of technology shows and symposiums like this one here help extract the signal from the noise I'm Stu miniman droid joined by George Gilbert from the Wikibon research team and really thrilled to have on the program the keynote speaker from this MIT event Tom Davenport whose pressure at babson author of some books including a new one that just came out and thank you so much for joining us my pleasure great to be here all right so uh you know so many things your morning keynote that I know George and I want to dig into I guess I'll start with you talk about the you know for eras of you called it data today used to be formation from the information sorry but you said you started with when it was three eras of analytics and now you've came to information so I'm just curious we you know we get caught up sometimes on semantics but is there a reason why you switch from you know analytics to information now well I'm not sure it's a permanent switch I just did it for this occasion but you know I I think that it's important for even people who aren't who don't have as their job doing something with analytics to realize that analytics or how we turn data into information so kind of on a whim I change it from four errors of analytics 24 hours of information to kind of broaden it out in a sense and make people realize that the whole world is changing it's not just about analytics ya know I it resonated with me because you know in the tech industry so much we get caught up on the latest tool George will be talking about how Hadoop is moving to spark and you know right if we step back and look from a longitudinal view you know data is something's been around for a long time but as as you said from Peter Drucker's quote when we endow that with relevance and purpose you know that that's when we get information so yeah and that's why I got interested in analytics a year ago or so it was because we weren't thinking enough about how we endowed data with relevance and purpose turning it into knowledge and knowledge management was one of those ways and I did that for a long time but the people who were doing stuff with analytics weren't really thinking about any of the human mechanisms for adding value to to data so that moved me in analytics direction okay so so Tommy you've been at this event before you know you you've taught in written and you know written books about this about this whole space so willing I'm old no no its you got a great perspective okay so bring us what's exciting you these days what are some of our big challenges and big opportunities that we're facing as kind of kind of humanity and in an industry yeah well I think for me the most exciting thing is they're all these areas where there's just too much data and too much analysis for humans to to do it anymore you know when I first started working with analytics the idea was some human analysts would have a hypothesis about how to do that about what's going on in the data and you'd gather some data and test that hypothesis and so on it could take weeks if not months and now you know we need me to make decisions in milliseconds on way too much data for a human to absorb even in areas like health care we have 400 different types of cancer hundreds of genes that might be related to cancer hundreds of drugs to administer you know we have these decisions have to be made by technology now and so very interesting to think about what's the remaining human role how do we make sure those decisions are good how do we review them and understand them all sorts of fascinating new issues I think along those lines come you know in at a primitive level in the Big Data realm the tools are kind of still emerging and we want to keep track of every time someone's touched it or transformed it but when you talk about something as serious as cancer and let's say we're modeling how we decide to or how we get to a diagnosis do we need a similar mechanism so that it's not either/or either the doctor or you know some sort of machine machine learning model or cognitive model some waited for the model to say here's how I arrived at that conclusion and then for the doctor to say you know to the patient here's my thinking along those lines yeah I mean I think one can like or just like Watson it was being used for a lot of these I mean Watson's being used for a lot of these oncology oriented projects and the good thing about Watson in that context is it does kind of presume a human asking a question in the first place and then a human deciding whether to take the answer the answers in most cases still have confidence intervals you know confidence levels associated with them so and in health care it's great that we have this electronic medical record where the physicians decision of their clinicians decision about how to treat that patient is recorded in a lot of other areas of business we don't really have that kind of system of record to say you know what what decision did we make and why do we make it and so on so in a way I think health care despite being very backward in a lot of areas is kind of better off than then a lot of areas of business the other thing I often say about healthcare is if they're treating you badly and you die at least there will be a meeting about it in a healthcare institution in business you know we screw up a decision we push it under the rug nobody ever nobody ever considered it what about 30 years ago I think it was with Porter's second book you know and the concept of the value chain and sort of remaking the the understanding of strategy and you're talking about the you know the AP AP I economy and and the data flows within that can you help tie your concept you know the data flows the data value chain and the api's that connect them with the porters value chain across companies well it's an interesting idea I think you know companies are just starting to realize that we are in this API economy you don't have to do it all yourself the smart ones have without kind of modeling it in any systematic way like the porter value chain have said you know we we need to have other people linking to our information through api's google is fairly smart i think in saying will even allow that for free for a while and if it looks like there's money to be made in what start charging for access to those api so you know building the access and then thinking about the the revenue from it is one of the new principles of this approach but i haven't seen its i think would be a great idea for paper to say how do we translate the sort of value chain ideas a michael porter which were i don't know 30 years ago into something for the api oriented world that we live in today which you think would you think that might be appropriate for the sort of platform economics model of thinking that's emerging that's an interesting question i mean the platform people are quite interested in inner organizational connections i don't hear them as talking as much about you know the new rules of the api economy it's more about how to two sided and multi-sided platforms work and so on Michael Porter was a sort of industrial economist a lot of those platform people are economists so from that sense it's the same kind of overall thinking but lots of opportunity there to exploit I think so tell me what want to bring it back to kind of the chief data officer when one of the main themes of the symposium here I really like you talked about kind of there needs to be a balance of offense and defense because so much at least in the last couple of years we've been covering this you know governance and seems to be kind of a central piece of it but it's such an exciting subject it's exciting subject but you know you you put that purely in defense on and you know we get excited the companies that are you know building new products you know either you know saving or making more money with with data Kenny can you talk a little bit about kind of as you see how this chief data officer needs to be how that fits into your kind of four arrows yeah yeah well I don't know if I mentioned it in my talk but I went back and confirmed my suspicions that the sama Phi odd was the world's first chief data officer at Yahoo and I looked at what Osama did at Yahoo and it was very much data product and offense or unity established yahoo research labs you know not everything worked out well at Yahoo in retrospect but I think they were going in the direction of what interesting data products can can we create and so I think we saw a lot of kind of what I call to point o companies in the in the big data area in Silicon Valley sing it's not just about internal decisions from data it's what can we provide to customers in terms of data not just access but things that really provide value that means data plus analytics so you know linkedin they attribute about half of their membership to the people you may know data product and everybody else as a people you may know now well we these companies haven't been that systematic about how you build them and how do you know which one to actually take the market and so on but I think now more and more companies even big industrial companies are realizing that this is a distinct possibility and we oughta we ought to look externally with our data for opportunities as much as supporting internal and I guess for you talk to you know companies like Yahoo some of the big web companies the whole you know Big Data meme has been about allowing you know tools and processes to get to a broader you know piece of the economy you know the counterbalance that a little bit you know large public clouds and services you know how much can you know a broad spectrum of companies out there you know get the skill set and really take advantage of these tools versus you know or is it going to be something that I'm going to still going to need to go to some outside chores for some of this well you know I think it's all being democratized fairly rapidly and I read yesterday the first time the quote nobody ever got fired for choosing amazon web services that's a lot cheaper than the previous company in that role which was IBM where you had to build up all these internal capabilities so I think the human side is being democratized they're over a hundred company over 100 universities in the US alone that have analytics oriented degree programs so i think there's plenty of opportunity for existing companies to do this it's just a matter of awareness on the part of the management team I think that's what's lacking in most cases they're not watching your shows i guess and i along the lines of the you know going back 30 years we had a preference actually a precedent where the pc software sort of just exploded onto the scene and it was i want control over my information not just spreadsheets you know creating my documents but then at the same time aighty did not have those guardrails to you know help help people from falling off you know their bikes and getting injured what are the what tools and technologies do we have for both audiences today so that we don't repeat that mistake ya know it's a very interesting question and I think you know spreadsheets were great you know the ultimate democratization tool but depending on which study you believe 22 eighty percent of them had errors in them and there was some pretty bad decisions that were made sometimes with them so we now have the tools so that we could tell people you know that spreadsheet is not going to calculate the right value or you should not be using a pie chart for that visual display I think vendors need to start building in those guardrails as you put it to say here's how you use this product effectively in addition to just accomplishing your basic task but you wouldn't see those guardrails extending all the way back because of data that's being provisioned for the users well I think ultimately if we got to the point of having better control over our data to saying you should not be using that data element it's not you know the right one for representing you know customer address or something along those lines we're not there yet and the vast majority of companies I've seen a few that have kind of experimented with data watermarks or something to say yes this is the one that you're allowed to to use has been certified as the right one for that purpose but we need to do a lot more in that regard yeah all right so Tommy you've got a new book that came out earlier this year only humans need apply winners and losers in the age of smart machines so ask you the same question we asked eric donaldson and Auntie McAfee when they wrote the second Machine Age you know are we all out of job soon well I think big day and I have become a little more optimistic as we look in some depth at at the data I mean one there are a lot of jobs evolving working with these technologies and you know it's just somebody was telling me the other day that is that I was doing a radio interview from my book and the guy was hung who said you know I've made a big transition into podcasting he said but the vast majority of people in radio have not been able to make that transition so if you're willing to kind of go with the flow learn about new technologies how they work I think there are plenty of opportunities the other thing to think about is that these transitions tend to be rather slow I mean we had about in the United States in 1980 about half a million bank tellers since then we've had ATMs online banking etc give so many bank tellers we have in 2016 about half a million it's rather shocking i think i don't know exactly what they're all doing but we're pretty slow in making these transitions so i think those of us sitting here today or even watching her probably okay we'll see some job loss on the margins but anybody who's willing to keep up with new technologies and add value to the smart machines that come into the workplace i think is likely to be okay okay do you have any advice for people that either are looking at becoming you know chief data officers well yeah as I as you said balanced offense and defense defense is a very tricky area to inhabit as a CDO because you if you succeed and you prevent you know breaches and privacy problems and security issues and so on nobody gives you necessarily any credit for it or even knows that it's helps of your work that you were successful and if you fail it's obviously very visible and bad for your career too so I think you need to supplement defense with offense activities are analytics adding valued information digitization data products etc and then I think it's very important that you make nice with all the other data oriented c-level executives you know you may not want to report to the CIO or if you have a cheap analytics officer or chief information security officer chief digitization officer chief digital officer you gotta present a united front to your organization and figure out what's the division of labor who's going to do what in too many of these organizations some of these people aren't even talking to each other and it's crazy really and very confusing to the to the rest of the organization about who's doing what yeah do you see the CDO role but you know five years from now being a standalone you know peace in the organization and you know any guidance on where that should sit is structurally compared to say the CIO yeah I don't you know I I've said that ideally you'd have a CIO or somebody who all of these things reported to who could kind of represent all these different interests of the rest of the organization that doesn't mean that a CDO shouldn't engage with the rest of the business I think CIO should be very engaged with the rest of the business but i think this uncontrolled proliferation has not been a good thing it does mean that information and data are really important to organization so we need multiple people to address it but they need to be coordinated somehow in a smart CEO would say you guys get your act together and figure out sort of who does what tell me a structure I think multiple different things can work you can have it inside of IT outside of IT but you can at least be collaborating okay last question I've got is you talked about these errors and you know that they're not you know not one dies in the next one comes and you talked about you know we know how slow you know people especially are to change so what happened to the company that are still sitting in the 10 or 20 era as we see more 30 and 40 companies come yeah well it's not a good place to be in general and I think what we've seen is this in many industries the sophisticated companies with regard to IT are the ones that get more and more market share the the late adopters end up ultimately going out of business I mean you think about in retail who's still around Walmart was the most aggressive company in terms of Technology Walmart is the world's largest company in moving packages around the world FedEx was initially very aggressive with IT UPS said we better get busy and they did it to not too much left of anybody else sending packages around the world so I think in every industry ultimately the ones that embrace these ideas tend to be the ones who who prosper all right well Tom Davenport really appreciate this morning's keynote and sharing with our audience everything that's happening in the space will be back with lots more coverage here from the MIT CDO IQ symposium you're watching the q hi this is christopher

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of biz ops Manifesto unveiled Brought to you by Biz Ops Coalition >>Hey, Welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz. Opps manifesto Unveil Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's a formal unveiling and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto Authors of the manifesto, if you will joining us again. We've had them all on individually. Now we're gonna have a great power panel. First up, we have met Kirsten returning. He's the founder and CEO of Task Top make good to see again. Where you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff. I'm dialing from Vancouver, Canada. >>Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also, we've got Tom Davenport coming from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson College. Tom, great to see. And I think you said you're a fund Exotic place on the East Coast. >>Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. >>Nice. Great to see you again. And also joining surge. Lucio. He is the VP and general manager Enterprise Software division at Broadcom Surge. Great to see you again. Where you coming in from? >>From Boston. Right next to kick off. Terrific. >>So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations. On this day I know it's It's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. Biz Opps Manifesto What was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition way, bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you could do better stuff within your own company Surge. Why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so? So I think we are really a critical juncture, right? Many large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. In fact, many recognized that the the Business Society collaboration has been one of the major impediments to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people or whether we're talking about vendors or system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing a lot these different players together assed part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a busy office manifesto. We can really start to have kind of a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts. And we can really start to provide kind of a much better support for large organizations to transform eso, whether it is technology or services or trading. I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together >>and Mick to you. Why did you get involved in this in this effort? >>So I've been closely involved the actual movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto, and I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level. And I think, as started just noted, we really need to improving. At the business level, every companies trying to become a software innovator trying to make sure that they can pick them, adapt quickly in the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers. Sooner. However, agile practices have really focused that these metrics these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole, and that just hasn't happened. Organizations are agile. Transmissions are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile. Have teams air functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move. Asked that. And that's exactly what the buzz off there's also manifested. Provides, >>right? Right And Tom to you. You've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and and a lot of work around analytics and data on data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you kind of share your perspective of of what you got excited Thio to sign on to this manifesto? >>Sure. Well, I have. You know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on Data Analytics and AI. But before that, I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy and a in general. I think, you know, we've just kind of optimized at too narrow a level. Whether you're talking about agile or Dev ops or, um, ml ops. Any of these kind of obs oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, But we're not changing the business effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>That's great, uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time, and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along. And then Cove it hit, and it was instant lights, which everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then you're employees. When if you could share how that really pushed this all along, right, because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you've got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly. When maybe revenues are down on. Do you really have Thio prioritize and get it right? >>Yeah. I mean, I'll just start by quoting city An Adele basically recently said that there's bean two years of digital transformation just last two months, and in many ways that's true. Um, but But yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with kind of a changes in culture that they really need Thio drive to be able to describe themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right. About 40% of the personal loans today are being origin dated by Finn tax of a like of Sophie or or ah Lendingclub, right, Not your traditional brick and worked for bank. And so the while there is kind of ah, much more of an appetite, and it's it's more of a survival type driver these days. The reality is that in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on these digital transformation, they need to start to really aligned the business 90 you know, in many ways and make cover that actually really emerge from the court desire to really improve software predictability, but we've which we have really missed is all the way. Start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continuously continuous improvement and measurement off business outcomes. So by lining, but of this dis kind of inward metrics that I t is typically being using to business outcomes, we think we can start to really help different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There is an imperative to act now, um, and and results. I think it's kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation, >>right? I want to follow up on the culture comment with Utah because you've talked before about kind of process, flow and process flow throughout a whore, unorganized ation. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time, and I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think and then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just a tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah, you know, I've always found that the soft stuff the you know, the culture of the behavior of the values is the hard stuff to change and mawr and mawr. We we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation, you have tow change, people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data driven cultures, and in many cases, there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that cultural behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we if we build a system, you know, if if we build it, they won't necessarily come right, >>right? So I want to go toe to you, Nick, because, you know, we're talking about work flows and flow. Andi, you've written about flow both in terms of, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks which is now even more important again when these decisions are much more critical because you have a lot less ah, wiggle room in tough times. But you also talked about flow from the culture side on the people's side. So I wonder if you could just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things to get the answers better? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom just said. If you're optimize, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business into the customer. Now what we've noticed in the data since that that we've learned from customers value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams is that what's taking six months and to and to deliver that value, the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers. Unhappy customers, when you're innovating, have so high performing organizations we can measure their intent flow time in days. All of a sudden, that feedback loop the satisfaction your developers measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context switching last year, delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these thes other approximately six that we use, which is how efficient my annual team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility, of fast learning, of adaptability, of the business. And that's exactly what the bishops manifesto pushes your organization to. You need to put in place this new operate model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before, >>right? I love that. I'm gonna go back to Utah, him on that to follow up, because I think I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for. Because, you know, if you're optimizing for a vs B, you know you could have a very different product that that you kick out. You know, my favorite example with With Clayton Christensen and Innovator's Dilemma talking about the three inch our drive, if you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing. If you optimize it for vibration is another thing, and sure enough, you know they missed it on the Palm because it was the it was the game council which which drove that whole business. So when you're talking to customers and we think we're here with cloud all the time people optimizing for cost efficiency instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them? Kind of rethink and really, you know, forced them to to look at the at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just that. What do you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's it's a difficult aspect toe of the decision toe frame it correctly in the first place. Um, there. It's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue. But if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly too narrowly, say, or you frame it as an either or situation when you could actually have some of both, um, it's very difficult for the process toe work out correctly. So in many cases, I think we need to think mawr at the beginning about how we frame this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, it's worth that extra time to think. Think carefully about how the decision has been structured. Right? >>Surge. I wanna go back to you and talk about the human factors because we just discussed you could put in great technology. But if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know it's not gonna be successful. And that's going to reflect poorly on the technology. Even if I had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the core values of the best hopes manifesto, you know a big one is trust and collaboration. You know, learn, responded pivot. Wonder if you can share your thoughts on trying to get that cultural shift s so that you can have success with the people or excuse me with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive position. >>So I think I think at the ground level, it really starts with the realization that we were all different. We come from different backgrounds. Oftentimes we tend Thio. Blame the data. It's not uncommon my experience that we spend the first, you know, 30 minutes of any kind of one hour the conversation to debate the ability of the data on DSO, one of the first kind of probably manifestations that we've had. Our revelations as we start to engage with our customers is by just exposing high Fidelity data set two different stakeholders from their different lands. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data, but that's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when when when we think about kind of the types of changes were trying Thio truly affect around data driven decision making? It's all about bringing the data in context the context that is relevant and understandable for different stakeholders. Whether we're talking about an operator developed for a business analyst, so that's that's the first thing. The second layer, I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific silo. So I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business k p i. Whether you are accounting, you know, with sales per hour or the engagement of your users on your mobile application, whatever it is, if you start to connect that k p I business K p I to the key piece that developers might be looking at, whether it is now the number of defects or velocity or whatever over metrics that they are used to to actually track, you start to be able to actually contextual eyes in what we are. The affecting, basically metric that that is really relevant. And what we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, You know, some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives to to drive engagement, right? So, you know, if you look at zoom, for instance, Zoom giving away, it's service thio education is all about. I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in there, but it's it's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams and because now they're doing something for good, and many organizations are trying to do that. But you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink? Oh, you connect everybody kind of business objective fruit data. And I always start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lands and collaborating on the data. Right? >>Right. That's good. Uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying I t for a long time writing lots of books and and getting into it. Um, Why now? You know what? Why now? Are we finally aligning business objectives with objects? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now? The time for this. This this move with the with the biz ops. >>Well, in much of the past, I t waas sort of a back office related activity. You know, it was important for, um, producing your paychecks and, uh, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it. Now, every organization needs to be a software business of data business. A digital business. The anti has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it. You run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally so. And even if you're in a new industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, you know, the digital native companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our I T projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well, almost every time, >>right. And I just I just wanna fall by that time, in terms of the you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data analytics, from artisanal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage the ai driven stage. What I find interesting about all the stages you always put a start date. You never put it in date. Um, so you know, is the is the big data. I'm just gonna use that generically moment in time. Finally, here. Where were, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, But actually could start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seem to go away. The three artisanal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less and less of it to be artisanal. We can't really afford for everything to be artisanal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift Mawr and Mawr of it to be done through automation and be to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanal e anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but, you know, we are We are making progress, >>right? Right. And make back to you in terms of looking at agile because you're you're such a student of agile. When when you look at the opportunity with biz ops, um, and taking the lessons from agile, you know what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? you know, taking this approach will enable >>Yeah, I think both surgeon Tom hit on this. Is that in agile? What's happened is that we've been, you know, measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there, developers air working on these tools of delivering features. The foundations for for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer, and when I was really happy when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker is able to do that. The fewer impediments are in my way, the quicker was deployed and running the cloud, the happier I waas and that's exactly what's happening if we could just get the right data elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented and delivering value to customers. None of these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from a nightie, came from where for I t being a cost center and something that provided email on back office systems. So we need thio rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics, their customer and business centric. And make sure that every development organization is focused on those as well as the business itself that we're measuring value. And they were helping that value flow without interruption. >>I love that because if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it. And you gotta but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So, gentlemen, thank you again for for your time. Uh, congratulations on the on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and bringing together this coalition of industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot. And you're not wasting resource is where you're not gonna get the r. O. I. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the Cube. Thank >>you. All >>right, So we have surged. Tom and Mick. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. It's a biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Yeah,

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a BizOps manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling, and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto authors of the manifesto. If you will, uh, joining us again, we've had them all on individually. Now we're going to have a great power panel. First up. We're gonna have Mitt Kirsten returning he's the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff I'm dialing from Vancouver, >>We're Canada, Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport come in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson college, Tom. Great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun, exotic place on the East coast >>Realm of Memphis shoes. That's on Cape Cod. >>Great to see you again and also joining surge Lucio. He is the VP and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >>Uh, from Boston right next to Cape Cod. >>Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. The biz ops manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, a way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you can do better stuff within your own company, surge, why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right? Many, um, large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. Um, in fact, um, many recognized that, uh, the, the business side, it collaboration has been, uh, one of the major impediments, uh, to drive that kind of transformation. That, and if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or, um, you know, system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together, um, as part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps manifesto, we can really start to F could have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to, to transform. Uh, so whether it is technology or services or, um, or training, I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together, right. >>And mic to you. Why did you get involved in this, in this effort? >>So I've been closely involved the agile movement since it started two decades with that manifesto. And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level, and I think that was just no. Did we really need to improve at the business level? Every company is trying to become a software innovator, trying to make sure that they can pivot quickly and the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers sooner. However, agile practices have really focused on these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Uh, organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the manifesto provides. Right, >>Right, right. And Tom, to you, you've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to, uh, to sign onto this manifesto. >>Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on data and analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know, we've just kind of optimize that to narrow a level, whether you're talking about agile or dev ops or ML ops, any of these kinds of ops oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, but we're not changing the business, uh, effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea, that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>Great. Uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along and then covert hit and it was instant Lightswitch. Everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, uh, both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then your employees when you're, if you could share how that really pushed this all along. Right? Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down, uh, and you really have to, uh, to prioritize and get it right. >>Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello basically recently said that they're speeding the two years of digital preservation just last two months in any many ways. That's true. Um, but yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with a kind of a changes in culture. They really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? So about 40% of the personal loans today are being, uh, origin data it's by fintechs, uh, of a like of Sophie or, uh, or a lending club, right? Not to a traditional brick and mortar for BEC. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a, it's more of a survival type of driver these days. >>Uh, the reality is that's in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on this digital transformation, they need to start to really align the business nightie, you know, in many ways and make cover. Does agile really emerge from the core desire to truly improve software predictability between which we've really missed is all the way we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability, and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning that of these, uh, discuss inward metrics, that's, it is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really ELP, uh, different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to acts now. Um, and, and resolves, I think is kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation. Right. >>I want to follow up on the culture comment, uh, with you, Tom, because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of a behavior, the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more, we, we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then, um, did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that, um, cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we, if we build system, if we build it, they won't necessarily come. Right. >>Right. So I want to go to you Nick. Cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow, um, and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, um, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks, which is now even more important again, when these decisions are much more critical. Cause you have a lot less, uh, wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So I wonder if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers, unhappy customers when you're innovating half so high performing organizations, we can measure third and 10 float time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop, the satisfaction your developer's measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass, you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these other approximate tricks that we use, which is how efficient is my agile team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the biz ops manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. Right. >>I love that. And I'm going back to you, Tom, on that to follow up. Cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for. Cause you know, if you're optimizing for a versus B, you know, you can have a very different product that you kick out and let you know. My favorite example is with Clayton Christianson and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive. If you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing, if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the, it was the game console, which, which drove that whole business. So when you, when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time, people optimizing for cost efficiency, instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to, to look at the, at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just said, what are you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah. Um, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or, um, attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's, it's a difficult aspect of the decision to frame it correctly in the first place. Um, there, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, um, it, it's very difficult for the, um, process to work out correctly. So in many cases that I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, um, it's worth that extra time to think, think carefully about how the decision has been structured, right >>Surgery. I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors because as we just discussed, you can put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if it had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the, the, the core values, uh, of the Bezos manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond and pivot. I wonder if you can share your thoughts on, on trying to get that cultural shift, uh, so that you can have success with the people or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive, uh, position. >>So I think, I think at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Um, oftentimes we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. Um, and so, um, one of the first kind of, uh, probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is spike, just exposing, uh, high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when, when, when we think about kind of the types of changes we're trying to, to truly affect around data driven decision making, it's all about bringing the data in context, in the context that is relevant and understandable for, for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or develop for a business analyst. >>So that's, that's the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific cycle. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI, whether you are counting, you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is, you can start to connect that PKI to the business KPI, to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is the number of defects or a velocity or whatever, you know, metrics that they are used to to actually track you start to, to be able to actually contextualize in what we are the effecting, basically a metric that is really relevant in which we see is that DC is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating, uh, some of these new products or services or initiatives, um, to, to drive engagements, right? >>So if you look at zoom, for instance, zoom giving away a it service to, uh, to education, he's all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in therapists. It's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and the organizations are trying to do that, but you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to, everybody's kind of a business objective fruit data, and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. Right, >>Right. That's a good, uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying it for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Um, why now, you know, what w why now are we finally aligning business objectives with, with it objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this, this, this move with the, uh, with the biz ops? >>Well, and much of the past, it was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for, um, uh, producing your paychecks and, uh, um, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it now, every organization needs to be a software business, a data business, a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it, you run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally. So, um, and, uh, even if you're in a, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, uh, you know, the digital native, um, companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our it projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well. Um, almost every time, I just want to follow up by that, Tom, >>In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artismal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage, the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date. You never put an end date. Um, so you know, is the, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically a moment in time finally here, where we're, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The, um, the artisinal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less than less of it to be artisinal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisinal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and B to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but, you know, we are, we are making progress. Right, >>Right. And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile, cause you're, you're such a, a student of agile when, when you look at the opportunity with ops, um, and taking the lessons from agile, you know, what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >>Yeah. I think both Sergeant Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for, for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way, that quicker was deployed and running in the cloud, the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data, uh, elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from an ITK, from where, for it being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every development the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value and that we're helping that value flow without interruptions. >>I love that mic. Cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it and you gotta, but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, uh, thank you again for, for your time. Congratulations on the, uh, on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and together this coalition >>Of, of, uh, industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the cube. Alright, so we had surge, Tom and Mick I'm. Jeff, you're watching the cube, it's a biz ops manifesto and unveil. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of BizOps manifesto, unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition and welcome back Friday, Jeff Frick here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios. And we'd like to welcome you back to our continuing coverage of biz ops manifesto, unveil exciting day to really, uh, kind of bring this out into public. There's been a little bit of conversation, but today's really the official unveiling and we're excited to have our next guest to share a little bit more information on it. He's Patrick tickle. He's a chief product officer for planned view. Patrick. Great to see you. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invite. So why the biz ops manifesto, why the biz optical edition now when you guys have been at it, it's relatively mature marketplace businesses. Good. What was missing? Why, why this, uh, why this coalition? >>Yeah, so, you know, again, why is, why is biz ops important and why is this something I'm, you know, I'm so excited about, but I think companies as well, right. Well, you know, in some ways or another, this is a topic that I've been talking to, you know, the market and our customers about for a long time. And it's, you know, I really applaud, you know, this whole movement, right. And, um, in resonates with me, because I think one of the fundamental flaws, frankly, of the way we've talked about technology and business literally for decades, uh, has been this idea of, uh, alignment. Those who know me, I occasionally get off on this little rant about the word alignment, right. But to me, the word alignment is, is actually indicative of the, of the, of the flaw in a lot of our organizations and biz ops is really, I think now trying to catalyze and expose that flaw. >>Right. Because, you know, I always say that, you know, you know, alignment implies silos, right. Instantaneously, as soon as you say there's alignment, there's, there's obviously somebody who's got a direction and other people that have to line up and that, that kind of siloed, uh, nature of organizations. And then frankly, the passive nature of it. Right. I think so many technology organizations are like, look, the business has the strategy you guys need to align. Right. And, and, you know, as a product leader, right. That's where I've been my whole career. Right. I can tell you that I never sit around. I almost never use the word alignment. Right. I mean, whether I never sit down and say, you know, the product management team has to get aligned with Deb, right. Or the dev team has to get aligned with the delivery and ops teams. I mean, what I say is, you know, are we on strategy, right? >>Like we've, we have a strategy as a, as a full end to end value stream. Right. And that there's no silos. And I mean, look, every on any given day we got to get better. Right. But the context, the context we operate is not about alignment. Right. It's about being on strategy. And I think I've talked to customers a lot about that, but when I first read the manifesto, I was like, Oh yeah, this is exactly. This is breaking down. Maybe trying to eliminate the word alignment, you know, from a lot of our organizations, because we literally start thinking about one strategy and how we go from strategy to delivery and have it be our strategy, not someone else's that we're all aligning to it. And it's a great way to catalyze that conversation. That I've, it's been in my mind for years, to be honest. Right. >>So, so much to unpack there. One of the things obviously, uh, stealing a lot from, from dev ops and the dev ops manifesto from 20 years ago. And as I look through some of the principles and I looked through some of the values, which are, you know, really nicely laid out here, you know, satisfy customers, do continuous delivery, uh, measure, output against real results. Um, the ones that, that jumps out though is really about, you know, change, change, right? Requirements should change frequently. They do change frequently, but I'm curious to get your take from a, from a software development point, it's easy to kind of understand, right. We're making this widget and our competitors, beta widget plus X, and now we need to change our plans and make sure that the plus X gets added to the plan. Maybe it wasn't in the plan, but you talked a lot about product strategy. So in this kind of continuous delivery world, how does that meld with, I'm actually trying to set a strategy, which implies the direction for a little bit further out on the horizon and to stay on that while at the same time, you're kind of doing this real time continual adjustments. Cause you're not working off a giant PRD or MRD anymore. >>Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. You know, one of the terms, you know, that we use internally a lot and even with my customers, our customers is we talked about this idea of rewiring, right. And I think, you know, it's kind of a, now an analogy for transformation. And I think a lot of us have to rewire the way we think about things. Right. And I think at Planview where we have a lot of customers who live in that, you know, who operationalize that traditional PPM world. Right. And are shifting to agile and transforming that rewire is super important. And, and to your point, right, it's, you've just, you've got to embrace this idea of, you know, just iterative getting better every day and iterating, iterating, iterating as to building annual plans or, you know, I get customers occasionally who asked me for two or three year roadmap. >>Right. And I literally looked at them and I go, there's no, there's no scenario where I can build a two or three year roadmap. Right. You, you, you think you want that, but that's not, that's not the way we run. Right. And I will tell you the biggest thing that for us, you know, that I think is matched the planning, uh, you know, patents is a word I like to use a lot. So the thing that we've like, uh, that we've done from a planning perspective, I think is matched impedance to continuous delivery is instituting the whole program, implement, you know, the program, increment planning, capabilities and methodologies, um, in the scaled agile world. Right. And over the last 18 months to two years, we really have now, you know, instrumented our company across three value streams. You know, we do quarterly PI program increment 10 week planning, you know, and that becomes, that becomes the Terra firma of how we plant. >>Right. And it's, what are we doing for the next 10 weeks? And we iterate within those 10 weeks, but we also know that 10 weeks from now, we're going to, we're going to adjust iterate again. Right. And that shifting of that planning model, you know, to being as cross-functional is that as that big room planning kind of model is, um, and also, uh, you know, on that shorter increment, when you get those two things in place, all sudden the impedance really starts to match up, uh, with continuous delivery and it changes, it changes the way you plan and it changes the way you work. Right? >>Yeah. Their thing. Right. So obviously a lot of these things are kind of process driven, both within the values, as well as the principles, but there's a whole lot, really about culture. And I just want to highlight a couple of the values, right? We already talked about business outcomes, um, trust and collaboration, uh, data driven decisions, and then learn, respond and pivot. Right. A lot of those are cultural as much as they are process. So again, is it the, is it the need to really kind of just put them down on paper and you know, I can't help, but think of, you know, the hammering up the, uh, the thing in the Lutheran church with their, with their manifesto, is it just good to get it down on paper? Because when you read these things, you're like, well, of course we should trust people. And of course we need an environment of collaboration and of course we want data driven decisions, but as we all know saying it and living, it are two very, very different things. >>Yeah. Good question. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways you bring that to life you're right. And just hanging up, you know, I think we've all been through the hanging up posters around your office, which these days, right. Unless you're going to hang a poster and everybody's home office. Right. You can't even, you can't even fake it that you think that might work. Right. So, um, you know, you really, I think we've attacked that in a variety of ways. Right. And you definitely have to, you know, you've got to make the shift to a team centric culture, right. Empowered teams, you know, that's a big deal. Right. You know, a lot of, a lot of the people that, you know, we lived in a world of quote unquote, where we were lived in a deep resource management world for a long, long time. >>And right. A lot of our customers still do that, but you know, kind of moving to that team centric world is, uh, is really important and core the trust. Um, I think training is super important, right. We've, you know, we've internally, right. We've trained hundreds employees over the last a year and a half on the fundamentals really of safe. Right. Not necessarily, you know, we've had, we've had teams delivering in scrum and the continuous delivery for, you know, for years, but the scaling aspect of it, uh, is where we've done a lot of training and investment. Um, and then, you know, I think, uh, leadership has to be bought in. Right. You know? And so when we pie plan, you know, myself and Cameron and the other members of our leadership, you know, we're NPI planning, you know, for, for four days. Right. I mean, it's, it's, you've got to walk the walk, you know, from top to bottom and you've got to train on the context. Right. And then you, and then, and, and then once you get through a few cycles where you've done a pivot, right. Or you brought a new team in, and it just works, it becomes kind of this virtuous circle where he'll go, man, this really works so much better than what we used to do. Right. >>Right. The other really key principle to this whole thing is, is aligning, you know, the business leaders and the business prioritization, um, so that you can get to good outcomes with the development and the delivery. Right. And we, we know again, and kind of classic dev ops to get the dev and the production people together. So they can, you know, quickly ship code that works. Um, but adding the business person on there really puts, puts a little extra responsibility that they, they understand the value of a particular feature or particular priority. Uh, they, they can make the, the, the trade offs and that they kind of understand the effort involved too. So, you know, bringing them into this continuous again, kind of this continuous development process, um, to make sure that things are better aligned and really better prioritize. Cause ultimately, you know, we don't live in an infinite resources situation and people got to make trade offs. They got to make decisions as to what goes and what doesn't go in for everything that goes. Right. I always say you pick one thing. Okay. That's 99 other things that couldn't go. So it's really important to have, you know, this, you said alignment of the business priorities as well as, you know, the execution within, within the development. >>Yeah. I think that, you know, uh, you know, I think it was probably close to two years ago. Forester started talking about the age of the customer, right. That, that was like their big theme at the time. Right. And I think to me what that, the age of the customer actually translates to and Mick, Mick and I are both big fans of this whole idea of the project and product shift, mixed book, you know, it was a great piece on a, you're talking about, you know, as part of the manifesto is one of the authors as well, but this shift from project to product, right? Like the age of the customer, in my opinion, the, the embodiment of that is the shift to a product mentality. Right. And, and the product mentality in my opinion, is what brings the business and technology teams together, right? >>Once you, once you're focused on a customer experience is delivered through a product or a service. That's when I that's, when I started to go with the alignment problem goes away, right. Because if you look at software companies, right, I mean, we run product management models yeah. With software development teams, customer success teams, right. That, you know, the software component of these products that people are building is obviously becoming bigger and bigger, you know, in an, in many ways, right. More and more organizations are trying to model themselves over as operationally like software companies. Right. Um, they obviously have lots of other components in their business than just software, but I think that whole model of customer experience equaling product, and then the software component of product, the product is the essence of what changes that alignment equation and brings business and teams together because all of a sudden, everyone knows what the customer's experiencing. Right. And, and that, that, that makes a lot of things very clear, very quickly. >>Right. I'm just curious how far along this was as a process before, before COBIT hit, right. Because serendipitous, whatever. Right. But the sudden, you know, light switch moment, everybody had to go work from home and in March 15th compared to now we're in October and this is going to be going on for a while. And it is a new normal and whatever that whatever's going to look like a year from now, or two years from now is TBD, you know, had you guys already started on this journey cause again, to sit down and actually declare this coalition and declare this manifesto is a lot different than just trying to do better within your own organization. >>Yeah. So we had started, uh, you know, w we definitely had started independently, you know, some, some, you know, I think people in the community know that, uh, we, we came together with a company called lean kit a handful of years ago, and I give John Terry actually one of the founders LeanKit immense credit for, you know, kind of spearheading our cultural change and not, and not because of, we were just gonna be, you know, bringing agile solutions to our customers, but because, you know, he believed that it was going to be a fundamentally better way for us to work. Right. And we kind of, you know, we started with John and built, you know, out of concentric circles of momentum and, and we've gotten to the place where now it's just part of who we are, but, but I do think that, you know, COVID has, you know, um, I think pre COVID a lot of companies, you know, would, would adopt, you know, the would adopt digital slash agile transformation. >>Um, traditional industries may have done it as a reaction to disruption. Right. You know, and in many cases, the disruption to these traditional industries was, I would say a product oriented company, right. That probably had a larger software component, and that disruption caused a competitive issue, uh, or a customer issue that caused companies and tried to respond by transforming. I think COVID, you know, all of a sudden flatten that out, right. We literally all got disrupted. Right. And so all of a sudden, every one of us is dealing with some degree of market uncertainty, customer uncertainty, uh, and also, you know, none of us were insulated from the need to be able to pivot faster, deliver incrementally, you know, and operate in a different, completely more agile way, uh, you know, post COVID. Right. Yeah. That's great. >>So again, a very, very, very timely, you know, a little bit of serendipity, a little bit of planning. And, you know, as, as with all important things, there's always a little bit of lock in, uh, and a lot of hard work involved. So a really interesting thank you for, for your leadership, Patrick. And, you know, it really makes a statement. I think when you have a bunch of leaderships across an industry coming together and putting their name on a piece of paper, uh, that's aligned around us some principles and some values, which again, if you read them who wouldn't want to get behind these, but if it takes, you know, something a little bit more formal, uh, to kind of move the ball down the field, and then I totally get it and a really great work. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing it. >>Oh, absolutely. No. Like I said, the first time I read it, I was like, yep. Like you said, this is all, it's all makes complete sense, but just documenting it and saying it and talking about it moves the needle. I'll tell you as a company, you gotta, we're pushing really hard on, uh, you know, on our own internal strategy on diversity and inclusion. Right. And, and like, once we wrote the words down about what, you know, what we aspire to be from a diversity and inclusion perspective, it's the same thing. Everybody reads the words that goes, why wouldn't we do this? Right. But until you write it down and kind of have again, a manifesto or a Terra firma of what you're trying to accomplish, you know, then you can rally behind it. Right. As opposed to it being something that's, everybody's got their own version of the flavor. Right. And I think it's a very analogous, you know, kind of, uh, initiative. Right. And, uh, and it's happening, both of those things right. Are happening across the industry these days. Right. >>And measure it too. Right. And measure it, measure, measure, measure, get a baseline. Even if you don't like to measure, even if you don't like what the, even if you can argue against the math, behind the measurement, measure it. And at least you can measure it again and you can, and you've got some type of a comp and that is really the only way to, to move it forward. We're Patrick really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for, uh, for taking a few minutes out of your day. >>It's great to be here. It's an awesome movement and we're glad to be a part of it. >>All right. Thanks. And if you want to check out the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops, manifesto.org, read it. You might want to sign it. It's there for you. And thanks for tuning in on this segment will continuing coverage of the biz op manifesto unveil you're on the cube. I'm Jeff, thanks for watching >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event is the biz ops manifesto unveiling. So the biz ops manifesto and the biz ops coalition had been around for a little while, but today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling, or we're excited to have some of the foundational people that, you know, have put their, put their name on the dotted, if you will, to support this initiative and talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest we're excited to have is dr. Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think, right? Yes. Great to be here, Jeff. Thank you. Absolutely. I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us, a couple, a couple of weeks back. So hopefully things are, uh, are getting a little better and we get those fires under control. Yeah. >>Things have cleared up now. So yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U S and it's going to have the Arabic cleaner as well. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So you you've been an innovation guy forever starting way back in the day and Xerox park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox park for the first time last year. I mean, that, that to me represents along with bell labs and, and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers, that's gotta be one of the greatest ones. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox park, you know, some of the lessons you learned and what you've been able to kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah. I was fortunate to join Xerox park in the computer science lab there at a fairly early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then in the computer science lab, where some of the inventions around programming around software development games, such as object programming, and a lot of what we had around really modern programming levels constructs, those were the teams I had the fortunate of working with, and really our goal was. And of course, there's, as, as you noticed, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really it was the model that was all about changing the way that we work was looking at for how we can make it 10 times easier to white coat. But this is back in 99. And we were looking at new ways of expressing, especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are wanting to innovate for their business to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. >>So we create a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie, that former to fucking from Microsoft who was responsible for, he actually got Microsoft word as a sparking into Microsoft and into the hands of bill Gates and that company that was behind the whole office suite and his vision. And then when I was trying to execute with, working for him was to make PowerPoint like a programming language to make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working, that there was something else, fundamentally wrong programming languages, or new ways of building software. Like let's try and do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So, you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of dev ops and really this kind of embracing of, of, of sprints and, you know, getting away from MRDs and PRDs and these massive definitions of what we're going to build and long build cycles to this iterative process. And this has been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the biz ops coalition, why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the program language levels of teams can have effective languages deployed to soften to the cloud easily now, right? And at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades, decades ago was formed. We were adopting and all the, all the teams I was involved with and it's really become a self problem. So agile tools, agile teams, agile ways of planning, uh, are now very mature. And the whole challenge is when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the technology part of the organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things, one set of metrics, one set of tools. And the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a whole different set of measures. Pretty >>Interesting. Cause I think it's pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver. Cause they've got a feature set, right. And they've got bugs and it's easy to, it's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is this disconnect on the business side, in terms of, you know, is it the right investment? You know, are we getting the right business ROI on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or should we building a completely different product set? So it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resources. You can't, nobody has unlimited resources. And ultimately you have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to do. And it sounds like that's a really big piece of this, of this whole effort. >>Yeah. Jeff, that's exactly it, which is the way that the agile team measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are, but are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of a rapidly changing economy, roughly changing market. And those are, those are all around the customer. And so what I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them try to apply those principles of agile and dev ops, that those are not enough, those measures technical practices, uh, those measured sort of technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that it really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we need it to go. Right. >>So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a bestselling author from project to product and, and, and you, you brought up this concept in your book called the flow framework. And it's really interesting to me cause I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow and a process flow and, and you know, that's how things get done and, and, and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in, in a little higher level existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know, not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of at your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort, which flow are you talking about in your book? Or is it a little bit of both? >>That's a great question. It's not one I get asked very often cause to me it's absolutely both. So that the thing that we want to get, that we've learned how to master individual flow, that there's this beautiful book by me, how you teaches me how he does a beautiful Ted talk by him as well about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with question replies, how can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How can we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the biz ops manifesto, it says, I focus on outcomes on using data to drive whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics, such as, how quickly did we implement this feature? No, it's really how much value did the customer go to the future? >>And how quickly did you learn and how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? Really that with companies like Netflix and Amazon have mastered, how do we get that to every large organization, every it organization and make everyone be a software innovator. So it's to bring that, that concept of flow to these end to end value streams. And the fascinating thing is we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster, developers actually become more happy. So things like that and point out promoter scores, rise, and we've got empirical data for this. So that the beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able to combine these two things and see the results and the data that you increase flow to the customer. Your developers are more, >>I love it. I love it, right, because we're all more, we're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive when we're in the flow. So I, that is a great melding of, of two concepts, but let's jump into the, into the manifesto itself a little bit. And you know, I love that you took this approach really of having kind of four key values and then he gets 12 key principles. And I just want to read a couple of these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead. Right? Of course. Right. Of course you should focus on business outcomes. Of course you should have trust and collaboration. Of course you should have database decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever's the loudest person in the room, uh, and to learn and respond and pivot. But what's the value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper, because again, this is not this, these are all good, positive things, right? When somebody reads these to you or tells you these are sticks it on the wall, of course. But unfortunately of course isn't always enough. >>No. And I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifesto in two decades ago, uh, the whole dev ops movement of the last decade of flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones undergoing digital transformations have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value, uh, in technology and innovation is through costs for many organizations. The way that they actually are looking at that they're moving to cloud is actually as a reduction in cost. Whereas the right way of looking at moving to cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So really the key thing is, is to move away from those old ways of doing things of funding projects and cost centers, to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback and how quickly you're innovating for your customer. >>So these things do seem very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing to focus on these. You need to actually have accurate realtime data of how much value you fund to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not driven on data. If you don't know what your bottleneck is. And this is something that in decades of manufacturing, a car manufacturers, other manufacturers, master, they always know where the bottom back in their production processes. You ask a random CIO when a global 500 company where their bottleneck is, and you won't get a clear answer because there's not that level of understanding. So have to actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you fall. And I guess because that's, what's making your developers miserable and frustrated, then having them context, which I'm trash. So the approach here is important and we have to stop doing these other things, >>Right? There's so much there to unpack. I love it. You know, especially the cloud conversation because so many people look at it wrong as, as, as a cost saving a device, as opposed to an innovation driver and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal. And I, you know, I think at the same thing, always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting real tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors, but the real power, I think in Moore's laws is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what you build and design. I think it's funny to your, your comment on the flow and the bottleneck, right? Cause, cause we know manufacturing, as soon as you fix one bottleneck, you move to your next one, right? You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know, you're not, you're not increasing that speed down the line, unless you can identify where that bottleneck is or no matter how many improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly it. And you also make it sound so simple, but again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where the bottom line is, and these bottlenecks are adjusted to say, it's just whack-a-mole right. So we need to understand is the bottleneck because our security reviews are taking too long and stopping us from getting value for the customer. If it's that automate that process. And then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploying yourself into the cloud was taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first, rather than again, that sort of cost reduction. First, you have to think of that approach of customer centricity and you only focused on optimizing costs. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one of these fascinating things. Whereas if you focus on getting back to the customer and reducing your cycles on getting value, your flow time from six months to two weeks or two, one week or two event, as we see with, with tech giants, you actually can both lower your costs and get much more value that for us to get that learning loop going. >>So I think I've seen all of these cloud deployments and one of the things that's happened that delivered almost no value because there was such big bottlenecks upfront in the process and actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going float for us rather than costs where we started our project versus silky. >>I love that. And, and, and, and it, it begs repeating to that right within the subscription economy, you know, you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you're delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like, you know, they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month, but once you're in a subscription relationship, you know, you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customer. So it's such a different kind of relationship than kind of the classic, you know, big bang with a maintenance agreement on the back end really important. Yeah. >>And I think in terms of industry shifts that that's it that's, what's catalyzed. This interesting shift is in this SAS and subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's and they're winning the business, not you. So one way we know is to delight our customers with great user experiences. Well, that really is based on how many features you delivered or how much, how big, how many quality improvements or scalar performance improvements you delivered. So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto, as well as the full frame of touch on is if you can't measure how much value you delivered to a customer, what are you measuring? You just backed again, measuring costs and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring cost to measuring value, to survive in the subscription economy. >>We could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and, and, and a data driven, um, decision making a data driven organization cause right day has been talked about for a long time, the huge big data meme with, with Hadoop over, over several years and, and data warehouses and data lakes and data oceans and data swamps, and can go on and on and on. It's not that easy to do, right? And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially. We're just around the corner from, from IOT and 5g. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale, again, this is going to overwhelm and one of the really interesting principles, uh, that I wanted to call out and get your take right, is today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can, again, you've got some great historical perspective, um, reflect on how hard it is to get the right data, to get the data in the right context, and then to deliver it to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah. I definitely think the front parts of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into the swamps as, as you mentioned, because if you don't have the data in the right format, you've cannot connect collected at the right way. You want that way, the right way you can't use human or machine learning effectively. And there've been the number of data warehouses in a typical enterprise organization. And the sheer investment is tremendous, but the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is, is, is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've noticed is that if you can model your value streams, so yes, you understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery of value and how long that takes. What is your time to value these metrics like full time? You can actually use both the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that down as well, as far as getting to the organization, but you can actually start using that those models to understand and find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, right? >>Well, you can detect interesting bottlenecks when you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that were not intuitive to me that had to do with, you know, more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually an organization that was very good at working from home because of our open source roots. So that data is highly complex. Software value streams are extremely complicated. And the only way to really get the proper analyst and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front part of what you said is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all their tools, but not modeled in the right way. Right, right. >>Right. Well, all right. So before I let you go, you know, let's say you get a business leader, he buys in, he reads the manifesto, he signs on the dotted line and he says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with, with the development teams. You know, I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engaging with our customers. I want to be more data-driven how do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early wins, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative. >>Right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website, uh, there's the manifesto, but the key thing is just to get you set up it's to get started and to get the key wins. So take a probably value stream that's mission critical. It could be your new mobile and web experiences or, or part of your cloud modernization platform or your analytics pipeline, but take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the end to end flow of value. Make sure you have a value metric that everyone is on the same page on the people, on the development teams, the people in leadership all the way up to the CEO. And one of the, what I encourage you to start is actually that content flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure it, whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization, that is the one metric that Adrian Cockcroft. When the people I respect tremendously put into his cloud for CEOs, the metric, the one, the one way to measure innovation. So basically take these principles, deploy them on one product value stream, measure, sentiment, flow time, and then you'll actually be well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and dev ops all the way to, to the business, to the way >>You're offering model. >>Well, Mick really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and, and get into this. Cause I just, I just love the perspective and, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox park and they get, you know, it's, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So to, to incorporate that into, continue to spread that well, uh, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. >>All right. And go to the biz ops manifesto.org, read it, check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the cube. I'm Jeff. Rick. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube come due from our Palo Alto studios today for a big, big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the biz ops manifesto unveiling a thing's been in the works for awhile and we're excited to have our next guest. One of the, really the powers behind this whole effort. And he's joining us from Boston it's surge, Lucio, the vice president, and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you. >>Hi, good to see you, Jeff. Glad to be here. >>So you've been in this business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the biz ops manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today and in 2020? >>Yeah. So, so I've been in this business for close to 25 years, right? So about 20 years ago, the agile manifesto was created. And the goal of the agile manifesto was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the efforts to build software. And, uh, if you, if you roll that kind of 20 years later, and if you look at the current state of the industry, uh, the product, the project management Institute, estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars, every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we were recently served a third of the, uh, a number of executives in partnership with Harvard business review and 77% of those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really at the collaboration between business and it, and that that's been kind of a case for, uh, almost 20 years now. >>Um, so the, the, the key challenge we're faced with is really that we need a new approach and many of the players in the industry, including ourselves, I've been using different terms, right? Some are being, are talking about value stream management. Some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the site, reliability engineering movement, in many ways, it embodies a lot of these kind of concepts and principles. So we believed that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around, could have one concept. And so in many ways, the, uh, the BizOps concept and the business manifesto are bringing together a number of ideas, which have been emerging in the last five years or so, and, and defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so the hope is that by joining our forces and defining public key principles and values, we can help the industry, uh, not just, uh, by, you know, providing them with support, but also, uh, tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody's seeking. >>Right, right. So COVID now we're six months into it, approximately seven months into it. Um, a lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening. We've got a ways to go, but one of the things that on the positive side, right, and you've seen all the memes and social media is, is a driver of digital transformation and a driver of change. Cause we had this light switch moment in the middle of March and there was no more planning. There was no more conversation. You've suddenly got remote workforces, everybody's working from home and you got to go, right. So the reliance on these tools increases dramatically, but I'm curious, you know, kind of short of, of the beginnings of this effort in short of kind of COVID, which, you know, came along unexpectedly. I mean, what were those inhibitors because we've been making software for a very long time, right? The software development community has, has adopted kind of rapid change and, and iterative, uh, delivery and, and sprints, what was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes. >>Well, so, so you have to understand that it is, is kind of a its own silos. And traditionally it has been treated as a cost center within large organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result could have a traditional dynamic between it and the business is basically one of a kind of supplier up to kind of a business. Um, and you know, if you, if you go back to, uh, I think you'll unmask a few years ago, um, basically at this concept of the machines to build the machines and you went as far as saying that, uh, the machines or the production line is actually the product. So, um, meaning that the core of the innovation is really about, uh, building, could it be engine to deliver on the value? And so in many ways, you know, we have missed on this shift from, um, kind of it becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises. >>And, and he talks about culture. Now, culture is a, is a sum total of beavers. And the reality is that if you look at it, especially in the last decade, uh, we've agile with dev ops with, um, I bring infrastructures, uh, it's, it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so the, when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze this system, um, it's, it's very challenging for it to actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone, um, to actually include business as sort of an integral part of kind of a delivery chain. And so it's both kind of a combination of, of culture, um, which is required as well as tools, right? To be able to start to bring together all these data together, and then given the volume variety of philosophy of the data, uh, we have to apply some core technologies, which have only really, truly emerged in the last five to 10 years around machine learning and analytics. And so it's really kind of a combination of those freaks, which are coming together today to really help organizations kind of get to the next level. Right, >>Right. So let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about, uh, the coalition, uh, the BizOps coalition. I just liked that you put down these really simple, you know, kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting, you know, business outcomes, over individual projects and outputs, trust, and collaboration, oversight, load teams, and organizations, data driven decisions, what you just talked about, uh, you know, over opinions and judgment and learned, respond and pivot. I mean, surgery sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, aren't, isn't everyone working to these values already. And I think he touched on it on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data driven decisions. I mean, these are fundamental ways that people must run their business today, or the person that's across the street, that's doing it. It's going to knock them out right off their blog. >>Yeah. So that's very true. But, uh, so I'll, I'll mention in our survey, we did, uh, I think about six months ago and it was in partnership with, uh, with, uh, an industry analyst and we serve at a, again, a number of it executives to understand how many we're tracking business outcomes I'm going to do with the software executives. It executives we're tracking business outcomes. And the, there were less than 15% of these executives were actually tracking the outcomes of a software delivery. And you see that every day. Right? So in my own teams, for instance, we've been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so, and we've uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives, which are not strategic for us. Um, I take, you know, another example, for instance, one of our customers in the, uh, in the airline industry and Harvard, for instance, that a number of, uh, um, that they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. >>And yet, um, you know, the, it teams, whether it's operations, software environments were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so the connectivity between kind of the inwards metrics that RT is using, whether it's database time, cycle time, or whatever metric we use in it are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with what the, the software delivery chain, right? This, uh, the system, which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and, and starting to, um, infuse some of the agile culture and principles. Um, that's emerged from the software side into the business side. Um, of course the lean movement and other movements have started to change some of these dynamic on the, on the business side. And so I think this, this is the moment where we are starting to see kind of the imperative to transform. Now, you know, Covina obviously has been a key driver for that. The, um, the technology is right to start to be able to weave data together and really kind of, uh, also the cultural shifts, uh, Prue agile through dev ops through, uh, the SRE movement, uh frulein um, business transformation, all these things are coming together and that are really creating kind of the conditions for the BizOps manifesto to exist. >>So, uh, Clayton Christianson, great, uh, Harvard professor innovator's dilemma might still my all time favorite business books, you know, talks about how difficult it is for incumbents to react to, to disruptive change, right? Because they're always working on incremental change because that's what their customers are asking for. And there's a good ROI when you talk about, you know, companies not measuring the right thing. I mean, clearly it has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right. That that's always the case, but hopefully that's an, an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, you know, what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics, um, in, in biz ops that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions, investment decisions on whether they should do, you know, move project a along or project B. >>So there, there are only two things, right? So, so I think what you're talking about is portfolio management, investment management, right. And, um, which, which is a key challenge, right? Um, in my own experience, right? Uh, driving strategy or a large scale kind of software organization for years, um, it's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who is doing what, uh, um, I mean, some of our largest customers we're engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is how many people do I have and that specific initiative at any point in time, and just tracking that information is extremely difficult. So, and again, back to a product project management Institute, um, there, they have estimated that on average, it organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources focused on initiatives, which are not strategically aligned. >>So, so that's one dimensional portfolio management. I think the key aspect though, that we are, we're really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of a business metrics to the it metrics. Um, so I'll use kind of two simple examples, right? And my background is around quality and I've always believed that the fitness for purpose is really kind of a key, um, uh, philosophy if you will. And so if you start to think about quality as fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right. And fitness for purpose for a core banking application or mobile application are different, right? So the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different. Um, and so the, and yeah, if you look at our, it, operations are operating there, we're using kind of a same type of, uh, kind of inward metrics, uh, like a database off time or a cycle time, or what is my point of velocity, right? >>And so the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that it is using, which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so, you know, if I'm, if I'm trying to build a poor banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptight, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe your social, a mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so what you want is for everybody across it, to look at these metric and what are the metrics within the software delivery chain, which ultimately contribute to that business metric. And some cases cycle time may be completely irrelevant, right? Again, my core banking app, maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to, um, Charles you mentioned, uh, around the, the, um, uh, around the disruption that we see is, or the investors is the dilemma now is really around the fact that many it organizations are essentially applying the same approaches of, for innovation, like for basically scrap work, then they would apply to kind of over more traditional projects. And so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about two-speed it, and yes, it exists, but in reality are really organizations, um, truly differentiating, um, all of the operate, their, their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And this is really where BizOps is trying to affect. >>I love that, you know, again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes, right. And it's horses for courses, as you said, this project, you know, what you're measuring and how you define success, isn't necessarily the same as, as on this other project. So let's talk about some of the principles we talked about the values, but, you know, I think it's interesting that, that, that the BizOps coalition, you know, just basically took the time to write these things down and they don't seem all that super insightful, but I guess you just got to get them down and have them on paper and have them in front of your face. But I want to talk about, you know, one of the key ones, which you just talked about, which is changing requirements, right. And working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven, you know, this, the software to change in software development, because, you know, if you're in a game app and your competitor comes out with a new blue sword, you got to come out with a new blue sword. >>So whether you had that on your Kanban wall or not. So it's, it's really this embracing of the speed of change and, and, and, and making that, you know, the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenal one. And the other one you talked about is data, right? And that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and AI, and, you know, in the, the big data thing with Hadoop, you know, started years ago, but we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out, that it's not just big data, and it's not even generic machine learning or artificial intelligence, but it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem, to your point, to try to actually reach an objective, whether that's, you know, increasing the, your average ticket or, you know, increasing your checkout rate with, with, with shopping carts that don't get left behind in these types of things. So it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you got started, when we had big, giant, you know, MRDs and PRDs and sat down and coded for two years and came out with a product release and hopefully not too many patches subsequently to that. >>It's interesting. Right. Um, again, back to one of these surveys that we did with, uh, with about 600, the ITA executives, and, uh, and, and we, we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open. Um, and, and one of them was really wrong requirements and, uh, and it was really a wrong, uh, kind of what do you, what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I were to remember correctly, over 80% of the it executives set that the best approach they'll prefer to approach these core requirements to be completely defined before software development starts, let me pause there we're 20 years after the agile manifesto, right? And for 80% of these idea executives to basically claim that the best approach is for requirements to be fully baked before salt, before software development starts, basically shows that we still have a very major issue. >>And again, our hypothesis in working with many organizations is that the key challenge is really the boundary between business and it, which is still very much contract based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for it deliver on time on budget, right. But what is the incentive for it to actually delivering on the business outcomes, right? How often is it measured on the business outcomes and not on an SLA or on a budget type criteria? And so that's really the fundamental shift that we need to, we really need to drive up as an industry. Um, and you know, we, we talk about kind of this, this imperative for organizations to operate that's one, and back to the, the, um, you know, various Doris dilemna the key difference between these larger organization is, is really kind of, uh, if you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared to, um, you know, startups? What, why is it that, uh, more than 40% of, uh, personal loans today or issued not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by, um, startups? Well, the reason, yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes and not disrupting ourselves, which Christiansen covered the length, but it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of a dynamic picture. We can business it and, and, and partner right. To, to deliver on a specific business outcome. >>All right. I love that. That's a great, that's a great summary. And in fact, getting ready for this interview, I saw you mentioning another thing where, you know, the, the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos. Cause you have all these autonomous people working, you know, kind of independently. So it's even a harder challenge for, for the business leaders to, to, as you said, to know, what's actually going on, but, but certainly I w I want to close, um, and talk about the coalition. Um, so clearly these are all great concepts. These are concepts you want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition, why, you know, take these concepts out to a broader audience, including either your, your competition and the broader industry to say, Hey, we, as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts, these values, these principles. >>So first I think we, we want, um, everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts. I think we were all from our own different vantage point, realizing that things after change, and again, back to, you know, whether it's value stream management or site reliability engineering, or biz ops, we're all kind of using slightly different languages. Um, and so I think one of the important aspects of BizOps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about, you know, consulting agile transformation experts, uh, whether we're talking about vendors, right, provides kind of tools and technologies or these large enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around kind of, um, in a much more consistent way. The second aspect is for, to me is for, um, DS concepts to start to be embraced, not just by us or trying, or, you know, vendors, um, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, thought leaders, but also for some of our old customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. >>So we, our, our objective with the coalition needs to be pretty, pretty broad. Um, and our hope is by, by starting to basically educate, um, our, our joint customers or partners, that we can start to really foster these behaviors and start to really change some of dynamics. So we're very pleased at if you look at, uh, some of the companies which have joined the, the, the, the manifesto. Um, so we have vendors such as desktop or advance, or, um, uh, PagerDuty for instance, or even planned view, uh, one of my direct competitors, um, but also thought leaders like Tom Davenport or, uh, or cap Gemini or, um, um, smaller firms like, uh, business agility, institutes, or agility elf. Um, and so our goal really is to start to bring together, uh, fall years, people would have been LP, large organizations, do digital transformation vendors. We're providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on this digital preservation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of, uh, education support and tools that the industry needs. Yeah, >>That's great surge. And, uh, you know, congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while, putting all this together, getting people to sign onto the manifesto, putting the coalition together, and finally today getting to unveil it to the world in, in a little bit more of a public, uh, opportunity. So again, you know, really good values, really simple principles, something that, that, uh, shouldn't have to be written down, but it's nice cause it is, and now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So thank you for, uh, for sharing this story and again, congrats to you and the team. >>Thank you. Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it. >>Oh, my pleasure. Alrighty, surge. If you want to learn more about the BizOps manifest to go to biz ops manifesto.org, read it and you can sign it and you can stay here for more coverage. I'm the cube of the biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. See you next >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of this ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by bill. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto unveiling. It's been in the works for awhile, but today's the day that it actually kind of come out to the, to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe is Tom Davenport. He is a distinguished author and professor at Babson college. We could go on, he's got a lot of great titles and, and really illuminary in the area of big data and analytics Thomas. Great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Happy to be here with you. >>Great. So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn posts. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address longterm issues, uh, in how technology works within businesses, biz ops. What did you see in biz ops, uh, that, that kind of addresses one of these really big longterm problems? >>Well, yeah, but the longterm problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and it people between business objectives and the, it solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think since the beginning of information technology and sadly it hasn't gone away. And so biz ops is a new attempt to deal with that issue with, you know, a new framework, eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that we'll actually solve a business problem with an it capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with like dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around, uh, agile software development and a theory that we want to embrace change that that changes. Okay. Uh, and we want to be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that. And that's been happening in the software world for, for 20 plus years. What's taken so long to get that to the business side, because as the pace of change has changed on the software side, you know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution on the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no PRDs and MRDs and big, giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. It took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And you know, there have been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and it, there was the so called alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston university developed, I think more than 20 years ago, but you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's time for another serious attempt at it. Right. >>And do you think doing it this way, right. With the, with the biz ops coalition, you know, getting a collection of, of, of kind of likeminded individuals and companies together, and actually even having a manifesto, which we're making this declarative statement of, of principles and values, you think that's what it takes to kind of drive this kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in, uh, in production in the field. >>I think certainly, um, no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think our coalition is a good idea and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out what you see as the key principles of the idea. And that makes it much easier for everybody to understand and act on. >>I think it's just, it's really interesting having, you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the, of the values as well as, as the, uh, the principles and the values, you know, business outcomes matter trust and collaboration, data driven decisions, which is the number three or four, and then learn, respond and pivot. It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly, but, but obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are, but you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy, uh, and a big piece of this is data and analytics and moving to data-driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process and informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the mini stages of analytics. Um, and how has that's evolved over, over time, you know, as you think of analytics and machine learning, driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that, what's that thing for you? What does that make you, you know, start to think, wow, this is, this is going to be pretty significant. >>Yeah. Well, you know, this has been a longterm interest of mine. Um, the last generation of AI, I was very interested in expert systems. And then, um, I think, uh, more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about automated decision-making using what was available then, which was rule-based approaches. Um, but you know, this addresses an issue that we've always had with analytics and AI. Um, you know, we, we tended to refer to those things as providing decision support. The problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions, um, with now contemporary AI tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data, we want most of those, I think to be at least recommended if not totally made by an algorithm or an AI based system, and that I believe would add to the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions and in most organizations, >>No, I think, I think you just answered my next question before I, before Hey, asked it, you know, we had dr. Robert Gates on a former secretary of defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions. And he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems, uh, that actually had an automated trigger on it were on the North Korea and South Korea border. Um, everything else, as you said, had to go through a sub person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know, what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us to more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time, both as the data to support that as well as our comfort level, um, enables us to turn more and more actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, it's suggested we need, um, data and, um, the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current. And we, we need to know the outcomes of that data. You know, um, most machine learning models, at least in business are supervised. And that means we need to have labeled outcomes in the, in the training data. But I, you know, um, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that, that the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that we're finding out quite frequently these days is that, um, the data that we have do not reflect, you know, what it's like to do business in a pandemic. Um, I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff cam at wake forest university, we called it data science quarantined, and we interviewed with somebody who said, you know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Um, our models maybe have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have to make sure that the data from the past and that's all we have of course, is a good guide to, you know, what's happening in the present and the future as far as we understand it. Yeah. >>I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020, it was finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight, but it turned out 20, 20 a year. We found out we actually know nothing and everything thought we knew, but I wanna, I wanna follow up on that because you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now we're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold fold or double down. And, and I can't think of a more, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the BizOps when now your whole portfolio strategy, um, these to really be questioned and, and, you know, you have to be really, uh, well, uh, executing on what you are, holding, what you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment. >>Well, yeah, and I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine. Who's a senior executive at Genpact. And, um, I, um, used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could, you could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio of digital projects. You need to think about, well, um, given some constraints on resources and a difficult economy for a while, which of our projects do we want to keep going on pretty much the way we were and which ones are not that necessary anymore? You see a lot of that in AI, because we had so many pilots, somebody told me, you know, we've got more pilots around here than O'Hare airport and AI. Um, and then, but the ones that involve double down they're even more important to you. They are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out in the pandemic, on digital projects. It's more and more important for customers to be able to interact with you, um, digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want to, um, cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them and get them done faster and better. >>Right, right. Uh, another, another thing that came up in my research that you quoted, um, was, was from Jeff Bezos, talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly, but meaningfully improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which, which gets way too much buzz, but really applied right. Applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value. And, you know, the, the BizOps, uh, manifesto is, is, is calling it out in this particular process. But I'd love to get your perspective as you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where are the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions, um, uh, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that, um, ag Lafley, the former CEO of Procter and gamble used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those. He said in your tenure as CEO, those are probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because, um, you don't have much data about them. You're only making them a few times and in part, because, um, they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future, that the best human decision makers, um, have. Um, but, um, in general, I think where they are, the projects that are working well are, you know, when I call the low hanging fruit ones, the, some people even report to it referred to it as boring AI. >>So, you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it to a bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but AI, as you suggested is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. It's not so good at the, at the really big moonshots, like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well what's the best stock or bond under all circumstances or even autonomous vehicles. Um, we, we made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not going to be perfect for quite a while. And we really don't want to be driving around on them very much unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic and you know, that sort of thing, right? That's funny you bring up contract management. >>I had a buddy years ago, they had a startup around contract management and was like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, you know, how, how can you possibly build software around contract management? It's language, it's legal, ease. It's very specific. And he's like, Jeff, we just need to know where's the contract. And when does it expire? And who's the signatory. And he built a business on those, you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts contractor in people's drawers and files and homes, and Lord only knows. So it's really interesting, as you said, these kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you can extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah. I mean, if you're Amazon, um, uh, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important to have some kind of billion dollar projects. And he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to, um, what AI has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on, based on data. >>Right? So Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before, before we let you go on on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not, not a, the vast majority of, of your publications and that's the new way to work, you know, as, as the pandemic hit in mid March, right. And we had this light switch moment, everybody had to work from home and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up. Well, you know, now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not going to be going back to work for a while. And so we're going to continue on this for a while. And then even when it's not what it is now, it's not going to be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder, and I know you, you, uh, you teased, you're working on a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way to work and, and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess. >>Yeah. I missed was an interest of mine. I think, um, back in the nineties, I wrote an article called, um, a coauthored, an article called two cheers for the virtual office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge. Then some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical and, uh, we said two cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings. And, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can accomplish most of what we need to do with a digital interface, but, um, you know, things like innovation and creativity and certainly, um, uh, a good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so I, you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. >>Um, we'll have, um, times when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and to jump on airplanes, to, to, um, give every little, um, uh, sales call or give every little presentation. Uh, we just have to really narrow down what are the circumstances where face to face contact really matters. And when can we get by with, with digital, you know, I think one of the things in my current work I'm finding is that even when you have AI based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, we need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next, then make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence of an AI system, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. >>Yeah. I think such, such a huge opportunity as you just said, cause I forget the stats on how often we're interrupted with notifications between email texts, Slack, a sauna, Salesforce, the list goes on and on. So, you know, to put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention, and you've written a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic, we'll say for another day, you know, it really begs, it really begs for some assistance because you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not, it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's a feature that we're looking for. I agree. Totally. Alright, Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I gotta dig into the library. It's very long. So I might start at the attention economy. I haven't read that one in to me. I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time and, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right. Take care. Alright. He's Tom I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto and Vale. Thanks for watching the cube. We'll see you next time.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a BizOps manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling, and we're excited to have three of the core of founding members of the manifesto authors of the manifesto. If you will, uh, joining us again, we've had them all on individually. Now we're going to have a great power panel first up. We're gab Mitt, Kirsten returning he's the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff I'm dialing from Vancouver, >>We're Canada, Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport come in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson college, Tom. Great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun, exotic place on the East coast >>Realm of Memphis shoe sits on Cape Cod. >>Great to see you again and also joining surge Lucio. He is the VP and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >>Uh, from Boston right next to kickoff. >>Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's, it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. The biz ops manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, a way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you can do better stuff within your own company, surge, why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right? Many, um, large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. Um, in fact, um, many recognize that, uh, the, the business side, it collaboration has been, uh, one of the major impediments, uh, to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or, um, you know, system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together, um, as part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps manifesto, we can really start to F could have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to transform. Uh, so whether it is technology or services or, um, we're training, I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together, right. >>And Nick to you, why did you get involved in this, in this effort? >>So Ben close and follow the agile movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto. >>And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level, and I think as satisfies noted, uh, we really need to improve at the business level. Every company is trying to become a software innovator, uh, trying to make sure that they can adapt quickly and the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver the customer sooner. However, agile practices have really focused on these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Uh, organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the that's manifested provides. Right, >>Right, right. And Tom, to you, you've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to, uh, to sign onto this manifesto. >>Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on data and analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know, we've just kind of optimized that to narrow a level, whether you're talking about agile or dev ops or ML ops, any of these kinds of ops oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, but we're not changing the business, uh, effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>Great. Uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along and then covert hit and it was instant lights, which everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, uh, both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then your employees when you're, if you could share how that really pushed this all along. Right? Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down, uh, and you really have to, uh, to prioritize and get it right. >>Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello basically recently said that they're speeding the two years of digital preservation just last two months in any many ways. That's true. Um, but, but yet when we look at large enterprises, they're >>Still struggling with the kind of a changes in culture that they really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? So about 40% of the personal loans today, or being, uh, origin data it's by fintechs, uh, of a like of Sophie or, uh, or a lending club, right? Not to a traditional brick and mortar for BEC. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a, it's more of a survival type of driver these days. Uh, the reality is that's in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage with this digital transformation, they need to start to really align the business. And it, you know, in many ways, uh, make covered that agile really emerged from the core desire to truly improve software predictability between which we've really missed is all that we, we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning kind of these, uh, kind of inward metrics, that's, it is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really ELP different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to act now. Um, and, and resolves, I think is kind of the right approach to drive that transformation. Right. >>I want to follow up on the culture comment, uh, with Utah, because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of the behavior, the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more, we, we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that, um, most organizations still don't have data-driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then, um, did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that, um, cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we, if we build a system, >>If we build it, they won't necessarily come. Right. >>Right. So I want to go to, to you Nick cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow, um, and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, um, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks, which is now even more important again, when these decisions are much more critical. Cause you have a lot less, uh, wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So I wonder if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers, unhappy customers when you're innovating house. So high performing organizations we can measure at antenna flow time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop, the satisfaction, your developers measurably, it goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass, you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these, these other approximate tricks that we use, which is how efficient is my adult team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the biz ops manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. Right. >>I love that. And I'm gonna back to you Tom, on that to follow up. Cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for, because you know, if you're optimizing for a versus B, you know, you can have a very different product that, that you kick out. And, you know, my favorite example is with Clayton Christianson and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive, if you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing, if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the, it was the game console, which, which drove that whole business. So when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time, people optimizing for a cost efficiency, instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to, to look at the, at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just that, what are you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah. Um, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's, it's a difficult aspect to have the decision to confirm it correctly in the first place. Um, there, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame >>That decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, um, it, it's very difficult for the, um, process to work out correctly. So in many cases, I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, um, it's worth that extra time to think, think carefully about how the decision has been structured. Right, >>Sir, I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors because as we just discussed, you can put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if that had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the, the, the, the core values, uh, of the Bezos manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond, and pivot. Wonder if you can share your thoughts on, on trying to get that cultural shift, uh, so that you can have success with the people, or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive, uh, position. >>So I think, I think at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Uh, oftentimes we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. Um, and so, um, one of the first kind of, uh, probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is spoke just exposing, uh, high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when, when, when we think about kind of the types of changes we're trying to, to truly affect around data driven decision making, he told about bringing the data in context and the context that is relevant and understandable for, for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or develop for a business analyst. >>So that's, that's the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific silo. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI, whether you are counting, you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is, you can start to connect that PKI to business KPI, to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is all the number of defects or velocity or whatever over your metrics that you're used to, to actually track you start to be able to actually contextualize in what we are, the effecting, basically a metric of that that is really relevant. And then what we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives, um, to, to drive engagements, right? >>So if you look at zoom, for instance, zoom giving away a it service to, uh, to education, he's all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in there, but it's, it's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and many organizations are trying to do that, but you only can do this kind of things in the limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to, everybody's kind of a business objective fruit data, and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. Right, >>Right. That's a good, uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying it for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Um, why now, you know, what, why, why now are we finally aligning business objectives with, with it objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this, this, this move with the, uh, with the biz ops? >>Well, and much of a past, it was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for, um, uh, producing your paychecks and, uh, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it now, every organization needs to be a software business, a data business, a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it, you run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally. So, um, and even if you're in, uh, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, uh, you know, the digital native, um, companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our it projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well. Um, almost every time, I just want to fall by that, Tom, >>In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artismal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage, the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date, you never put an end date. Um, so you know, is the, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically a moment in time finally here where we're, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The, um, the artisinal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less and less of it to be artisinal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisinal anymore. It's too labor and, and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and B to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but we are, we are making progress. Right. >>Right. And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile, cause you're, you're such a student of agile. When, when you look at the opportunity with biz ops and taking the lessons from agile, you know, what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >>Yeah. I think both search and Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way, that quicker was deployed and running in the cloud, the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data, uh, elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really this, these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics. So when, from where for it being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every development the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value. And that will help you that value flow without interruptions. >>I love that mic. Cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it and you gotta, but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, uh, thank you again for, for your time. Uh, congratulations on the, uh, on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and bringing together this coalition, uh, of, of, uh, industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the cube. >>Thank you. >>Alright, so we had surge Tom and Mick I'm. Jeff, you're watching the cube. It's a biz ops manifesto unveil. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back. Variety. Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're in our Palo Alto studios, and we'd like to welcome you back to our continuing coverage of biz ops manifesto unveil some exciting day to really, uh, kind of bring this out into public. There's been a little bit of conversation, but today's really the official unveiling and we're excited to have our next guest is share a little bit more information on it. He's Patrick tickle. He's a chief product officer for planned view. Patrick. Great to see you. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invite. So why >>The biz ops manifesto, why the biz ops coalition now when you guys have been at it, it's relatively mature marketplace businesses. Good. What was missing? Why, why this, why this coalition? >>Yeah. So, you know, again, why is, why is biz ops important and why is this something that I'm, you know, I'm so excited about, but I think companies as well, right? Well, no, in some ways or another, this is a topic that I've been talking to the market and our customers about for a long time. And it's, you know, I really applaud this whole movement. Right. And, um, it resonates with me because I think one of the fundamental flaws, frankly, of the way we have talked about technology and business literally for decades, uh, has been this idea of, uh, alignment. Those who know me, I occasionally get off on this little rant about the word alignment, right. But to me, the word alignment is, is actually indicative of the, of the, of the flaw in a lot of our organizations and biz ops is really, I think now trying to catalyze and expose that flaw. >>Right. Because, you know, I always say that, you know, you know, alignment implies silos, right. Instantaneously, as soon as you say there's alignment, there's, there's obviously somebody who's got a direction and other people that have to line up and that kind of siloed, uh, nature of organizations then frankly, the passive nature of it. Right. I think so many technology organizations are like, look, the business has the strategy you guys need to align. Right. And, and, you know, as a product leader, right. That's where I've been my whole career. Right. I can tell you that I never sit around. I almost never use the word alignment. Right. I mean, whether, you know, I never sit down and say, you know, the product management team has to get aligned with dev, right. Or the dev team has to get aligned with the delivery and ops teams. I mean, what I say is, you know, are we on strategy, right? >>Like we've, we have a strategy as a, as a full end to end value stream. Right. And that there's no silos. And I mean, look, every on any given day we got to get better. Right. But the context, the context we operate is not about alignment. Right. It's about being on strategy. And I think I've talked to customers a lot about that, but when I first read the manifesto, I was like, Oh yeah, this is exactly. This is breaking down. Maybe trying to eliminate the word alignment, you know, from a lot of our organizations, because we literally start thinking about one strategy and how we go from strategy to delivery and have it be our strategy, not someone else's that we're all aligning to. And I, and it's a great way to catalyze that conversation that I've, it's been in my mind for years, to be honest. Right. >>So, so much to unpack there. One of the things obviously, uh, stealing a lot from, from dev ops and the dev ops manifesto from 20 years ago. And, and as I look through some of the principles and I looked through some of the values, which are, you know, really nicely laid out here, you know, satisfy customer, do continuous delivery, uh, measure, output against real results. Um, the ones that, that jumps out though is really about, you know, change, change, right? Requirements should change frequently. They do change frequently, but I'm curious to get your take from a, from a software development point, it's easy to kind of understand, right. We're making this widget and our competitors, beta widget plus X, and now we need to change our plans and make sure that the plus X gets added to the plan. Maybe it wasn't in the plan, but you talked a lot about product strategy. So in this kind of continuous delivery world, how does that meld with, I'm actually trying to set a strategy, which implies the direction for a little bit further out on the horizon and to stay on that while at the same time, you're kind of doing this real time continual adjustments because you're not working off a giant PRD or MRD anymore. >>Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. You know, one of the terms, you know, that we use internally a lot and even with my customers, our customers is we talk about this idea of rewiring, right. And I think, you know, it's kind of a, now an analogy for transformation. And I think a lot of us have to rewire the way we think about things. Right. And I think at Planview where we have a lot of customers who live in that, you know, who operationalize that traditional PPM world. Right. And are shifting to agile and transforming that rewire is super important. And, and to your point, right, it's, you've just, you've got to embrace this idea of, you know, just iterative getting better every day and iterating, iterating, iterating as opposed to building annual plans or, you know, I get customers occasionally who asked me for two or three year roadmap. >>Right. And I literally looked at them and I go, there's no, there's no scenario where I can build a two or three year roadmap. Right. You, you, you think you want that, but that's not, that's not the way we run. Right. And I will tell you the biggest thing that for us, you know, that I think is matched the planning, uh, you know, patents is a word I like to use a lot. So the thing that we've like, uh, that we've done from a planning perspective, I think is matched impedance to continuous delivery is instituting the whole program, implement, you know, the program, increment planning, capabilities, and methodologies, um, in the scaled agile world. Right. And over the last 18 months to two years, we really have now, you know, instrumented our company across three value streams. You know, we do quarterly PI program increment 10 week planning, you know, and that becomes, that becomes the Terra firma of how we plan. >>Right. And it's, what are we doing for the next 10 weeks? And we iterate within those 10 weeks, but we also know that 10 weeks from now, we're gonna, we're gonna adjust iterate again. Right. And that shifting of that planning model to, you know, to being as cross-functional is that as that big room planning kind of model is, um, and also, uh, you know, on that shorter increment, when you get those two things in place, also the impedance really starts to match up, uh, with continuous delivery and it changes, it changes the way you plan and it changes the way you work. Right? >>Yeah. Their thing. Right. So obviously a lot of these things are kind of process driven, both within the values, as well as the principles, but there's a whole lot, really about culture. And I just want to highlight a couple of the values, right? We already talked about business outcomes, um, trust and collaboration, uh, data driven decisions, and then learn, respond and pivot. Right. A lot of those are cultural as much as they are process. So again, is it the, is it the need to really kind of just put them down on paper and, you know, I can't help, but think of, you know, the hammer and up the, a, the thing in the Lutheran church with it, with their manifesto, is it just good to get it down on paper? Because when you read these things, you're like, well, of course we should trust people. And of course we need an environment of collaboration and of course we want data driven decisions, but as we all know saying it and living, it are two very, very different things. >>Yeah. Good question. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways to bring that to life you're right. And just hanging up, you know, I think we've all been through the hanging up posters around your office, which these days, right. Unless you're going to hang a poster in everybody's home office. Right. You can't even, you can't even fake it that you think that might work. Right. So, um, you know, you really, I think we've attacked that in a variety of ways. Right. And you definitely have to, you know, you've got to make the shift to a team centric culture, right. Empowered teams, you know, that's a big deal. Right. You know, a lot of, a lot of the people that, you know, we lived in a world of quote, unquote work. We lived in a deep resource management world for a long, long time, and right. >>A lot of our customers still do that, but, you know, kind of moving to that team centric world is, uh, is really important and core to the trust. Um, I think training is super important, right. I mean, we've, you know, we've internally, right. We've trained hundreds employees over the last a year and a half on the fundamentals really of safe. Right. Not necessarily, you know, we've had, we've had teams delivering in scrum and the continuous delivery for, you know, for years, but the scaling aspect of it, uh, is where we've done a lot of training investment. Um, and then, you know, I think a leadership has to be bought in. Right. You know? And so when we pie plan, you know, myself and Cameron and the other members of our leadership, you know, we're NPI planning, you know, for, for four days. Right. I mean, it's, it's, you've got to walk the walk, you know, from top to bottom and you've got to train on the context. Right. And then you, and then, and, and then once you get through a few cycles where you've done a pivot, right. Or you brought a new team in, and it just works, it becomes kind of this virtuous circle where he'll go, man, this really works so much better than what we used to do. Right. >>Right. The other really key principle to this whole thing is, is aligning, you know, the business leaders and the business prioritization, um, so that you can get to good outcomes with the development and the delivery. Right. And we know again, and kind of classic dev ops to get the dev and the production people together. So they can, you know, quickly ship code that works. Um, but adding the business person on there really puts, puts a little extra responsibility that they, they understand the value of a particular feature or particular priority. Uh, they, they can make the, the, the trade offs and that they kind of understand the effort involved too. So, you know, bringing them into this continuous again, kind of this continuous development process, um, to make sure that things are better aligned and really better prioritize. Cause ultimately, you know, we don't live in an infinite resources situation and people gotta make trade offs. They gotta make decisions as to what goes and what doesn't go in for everything that goes. Right. I always say you pick one thing. Okay. That's 99 other things that couldn't go. So it's really important to have, you know, this, you said alignment of the business priorities as well as, you know, the execution within, within the development. >>Yeah. I think that, you know, uh, you know, I think it was probably close to two years ago. Forester started talking about the age of the customer, right. That, that was like their big theme at the time. Right. And I think to me what that, the age of the customer actually translates to and Mick, Mick and I are both big fans of this whole idea of the project, the product shift, mixed book, you know, it was a great piece on a, you're talking to Mick, you know, as part of the manifesto is one of the authors as well, but this shift from project to product, right? Like the age of the customer, in my opinion, the, the, the embodiment of that is the shift to a product mentality. Right. And, and the product mentality in my opinion, is what brings the business and technology teams together, right? >>Once you, once you're focused on a customer experience, that's delivered through a product or a service that's when I that's, when I started to go with the alignment problem goes away, right. Because if you look at software companies, right, I mean, we run product management models, you know, with software development teams, customer success teams, right. That, you know, the software component of these products that people are building is obviously becoming bigger and bigger, you know, in an, in many ways, right. More and more organizations are trying to model themselves over as operationally like software companies. Right. Um, they obviously have lots of other components in their business than just software, but I think that whole model of customer experience equaling product, and then the software component of product, the product is the essence of what changes that alignment equation and brings business and teams together because all of a sudden, everyone knows what the customer's experiencing. Right. And, and that, that, that makes a lot of things very clear, very quickly. >>Right. I'm just curious how far along this was as a process before, before covert hit, right. Because serendipitous, whatever. Right. But th the sudden, you know, light switch moment, everybody had to go work from home and in March 15th compared to now, we're in October, and this is going to be going on for a while, and it is a new normal and whatever that whatever's going to look like a year from now, or two years from now is TBD, you know, had you guys already started on this journey cause again, to sit down and actually declare this coalition and declare this manifesto is a lot different than just trying to do better within your own organization. >>Yeah. So we had started, uh, you know, w we definitely had started independently, you know, some, some, you know, I think people in the community know that, uh, we, we came together with a company called lean kit a handful of years ago, and I give John Terry actually one of the founders leaned to immense credit for, you know, kind of spearheading our cultural change and not, and not because of, we were just going to be, you know, bringing agile solutions to our customers, but because, you know, he believed that it was going to be a fundamentally better way for us to work. Right. And we kind of, you know, when we started with John and built, you know, out of concentric circles of momentum and, and we've gotten to the place where now it's just part of who we are, but, but I do think that, you know, COVID has, you know, um, I think pre COVID a lot of companies, you know, would, would adopt, you know, the, you would adopt digital slash agile transformation. >>Um, traditional industries may have done it as a reaction to disruption. Right. You know, and in many cases, the disruption to these traditional industries was, I would say a product oriented company, right. That probably had a larger software component, and that disruption caused a competitive issue or a customer issue that caused companies and tried to respond by transforming. I think COVID, you know, all of a sudden flatten that out, right. We literally all got disrupted. Right. And, and so all of a sudden, every one of us is dealing with some degree of market uncertainty, customer uncertainty, uh, and also know none of us were insulated from the need to be able to pivot faster, deliver incrementally, you know, and operate in a different, completely more agile way, uh, you know, post COVID. Right. Yeah. That's great. >>So again, a very, very, very timely, you know, a little bit of serendipity, a little bit of, of planning. And, you know, as, as with all important things, there's always a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work involved. So a really interesting thank you for, for your leadership, Patrick. And, you know, it really makes a statement. I think when you have a bunch of leaderships across an industry coming together and putting their name on a piece of paper, uh, that's aligned around us some principles and some values, which again, if you read them who wouldn't want to get behind these, but if it takes, you know, something a little bit more formal, uh, to kind of move the ball down the field, and then I totally get it and a really great work. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing it. >>Oh, absolutely. No. Like I said, the first time I read it, I was like, yeah, like you said, this is all, this all makes complete sense, but just documenting it and saying it and talking about it moves the needle. I'll tell you as a company, you gotta, we're pushing really hard on, uh, you know, on our own internal strategy on diversity inclusion. Right? And, and like, once we wrote the words down about what, you know, what we aspire to be from a diversity and inclusion perspective, it's the same thing. Everybody reads the words and goes, why wouldn't we do this? Right. But until you write it down and kind of have again, a manifesto or a Terrafirma of what you're trying to accomplish, you know, then you can rally behind it. Right. As opposed to it being something that's, everybody's got their own version of the flavor. Right. And I think it's a very analogous, you know, kind of, uh, initiative, right. And, uh, and this happening, both of those things, right. Are happening across the industry these days. Right. >>And measure it too. Right. And measure it, measure, measure, measure, get a baseline. Even if you don't like to measure, even if you don't like what the, even if you can argue against the math, behind the measurement, measure it, and at least you can measure it again and you can, and you've got some type of a comp and that is really the only way to, to move it forward. Well, Patrick really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for, uh, for taking a few minutes out of your day. >>It's great to be here. It's an awesome movement and we're glad >>That'd be part of it. All right. Thanks. And if you want to check out the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops, manifesto.org, read it. You might want to sign it. It's there for you. And thanks for tuning in on this segment will continuing coverage of the biz op manifesto unveil here on the cube. I'm Jeff, thanks for watching >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios. And welcome back to this event is the biz ops manifesto unveiling. So the biz ops manifesto and the biz ops coalition had been around for a little while, but today's the big day. That's kind of the big public unveiling or excited to have some of the foundational people that, you know, have put their, put their name on the dotted, if you will, to support this initiative and talk about why that initiative is so important. And so the next guest we're excited to have is dr. Mick Kirsten. He is the founder and CEO of Tasktop mic. Great to see you coming in from Vancouver, Canada, I think, right? Yes. Thank you. Absolutely. I hope your air is a little better out there. I know you had some of the worst air of all of us, a couple, a couple of weeks back. So hopefully things are, uh, are getting a little better and we get those fires under control. Yeah. >>Things have cleared up now. So yeah, it's good. It's good to be close to the U S and it's going to have the Arabic cleaner as well. >>Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So you you've been an innovation guy forever starting way back in the day and Xerox park. I was so excited to do an event at Xerox park for the first time last year. I mean, that, that to me represents along with bell labs and, and some other, you know, kind of foundational innovation and technology centers, that's gotta be one of the greatest ones. So I just wonder if you could share some perspective of getting your start there at Xerox park, you know, some of the lessons you learned and what you've been able to kind of carry forward from those days. >>Yeah. I was fortunate to join Xerox park in the computer science lab there at a very early point in my career, and to be working on open source programming languages. So back then in the computer science lab, where some of the inventions around programming around software development teams, such as object oriented programming, and a lot of what we had around really modern programming levels constructs, those were the teams I have the fortune of working with, and really our goal was. And of course there's as, as you know, uh, there's just this DNA of innovation and excitement and innovation in the water. And really it was the model back then was all about changing the way that we work, uh, was looking at for how we could make it 10 times easier to write code. But this is back in 99. And we were looking at new ways of expressing, especially business concerns, especially ways of enabling people who are, who want to innovate for their business to express those concerns in code and make that 10 times easier than what that would take. >>So we create a new open source programming language, and we saw some benefits, but not quite quite what we expected. I then went and actually joined Charles Stephanie, that former to fucking Microsoft who was responsible for, he actually got Microsoft word as a spark and into Microsoft and into the hands of bill Gates on that company. I was behind the whole office suite and his vision. And then when I was trying to execute with, working for him was to make PowerPoint like a programming language, make everything completely visual. And I realized none of this was really working in that there was something else, fundamentally wrong programming languages, or new ways of building software. Like let's try and do with Charles around intentional programming. That was not enough. >>That was not enough. So, you know, the agile movement got started about 20 years ago, and we've seen the rise of dev ops and really this kind of embracing of, of, of sprints and, you know, getting away from MRDs and PRDs and these massive definitions of what we're going to build and long build cycles to this iterative process. And this has been going on for a little while. So what was still wrong? What was still missing? Why the BizOps coalition, why the biz ops manifesto? >>Yeah, so I basically think we nailed some of the things that the program language levels of teams can have effective languages deployed soften to the cloud easily now, right? And at the kind of process and collaboration and planning level agile two decades, decades ago was formed. We were adopting and all the, all the teams I was involved with and it's really become a self problem. So agile tools, agile teams, agile ways of planning, uh, are now very mature. And the whole challenge is when organizations try to scale that. And so what I realized is that the way that agile was scaling across teams and really scaling from the technology part of organization to the business was just completely flawed. The agile teams had one set of doing things, one set of metrics, one set of tools. And the way that the business was working was planning was investing in technology was just completely disconnected and using a whole different set of advisors. >>Interesting. Cause I think it's pretty clear from the software development teams in terms of what they're trying to deliver. Cause they've got a feature set, right. And they've got bugs and it's easy to, it's easy to see what they deliver, but it sounds like what you're really honing in on is this disconnect on the business side, in terms of, you know, is it the right investment? You know, are we getting the right business ROI on this investment? Was that the right feature? Should we be building another feature or should we building a completely different product set? So it sounds like it's really a core piece of this is to get the right measurement tools, the right measurement data sets so that you can make the right decisions in terms of what you're investing, you know, limited resources. You can't, no one has unlimited resources and ultimately have to decide what to do, which means you're also deciding what not to do. And it sounds like that's a really big piece of this, of this whole effort. >>Yeah. Jeff, that's exactly it, which is the way that the agile team measures their own way of working is very different from the way that you measure business outcomes. The business outcomes are in terms of how happy your customers are, but are you innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace of a rapidly changing economy, rapidly changing market. And those are, those are all around the customer. And so what I learned on this long journey of supporting many organizations transformations and having them try to apply those principles of agile and dev ops, that those are not enough, those measures technical practices, those measured sort of technical excellence of bringing code to the market. They don't actually measure business outcomes. And so I realized that it really was much more around having these entwined flow metrics that are customer centric and business centric and market centric where we need it to go. Right. >>So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your book because you're also a bestselling author, a project, a product, and, and, and you, you brought up this concept in your book called the flow framework. And it's really interesting to me cause I know, you know, flow on one hand is kind of a workflow and a process flow and, and you know, that's how things get done and, and, and embrace the flow. On the other hand, you know, everyone now in, in a little higher level existential way is trying to get into the flow right into the workflow and, you know, not be interrupted and get into a state where you're kind of at your highest productivity, you know, kind of your highest comfort, which flow are you talking about in your book or is it a little bit about, >>Well, that's a great question. It's not what I get asked very often. Just to me, it's absolutely both. So that the thing that we want to get to, we've learned how to master individual flow. That is this beautiful book by me, how he teaches me how he does a beautiful Ted talk by him as well about how we can take control of our own flow. So my question with the book with project replies, how can we bring that to entire teams and really entire organizations? How can we have everyone contributing to a customer outcome? And this is really what if you go to the biz ops manifesto, it says, I focus on outcomes on using data to drive whether we're delivering those outcomes rather than a focus on proxy metrics, such as, how quickly did we implement this feature? No, it's really how much value did the customer go to the feature and how quickly did you learn and how quickly did you use that data to drive to that next outcome? >>Really that with companies like Netflix and Amazon have mastered, how do we get that to every large organization, every it organization and make everyone be a software innovator. So it's to bring that co that concept of flow to these entwined value streams. And the fascinating thing is we've actually seen the data. We've been able to study a lot of value streams. We see when flow increases, when organizations deliver value to a customer faster, developers actually become more happy. So things like the employee net promoter scores rise, and we've got empirical data for this. So the beautiful thing to me is that we've actually been able to combine these two things and see the results in the data that you increase flow to the customer. Your developers are more happy. >>I love it, right, because we're all more, we're all happier when we're in the flow and we're all more productive when we're in the flow. So I, that is a great melding of, of two concepts, but let's jump into the, into the manifesto itself a little bit. And, you know, I love that, you know, took this approach really of having kind of four key values and then he gets 12 key principles. And I just want to read a couple of these values because when you read them, it sounds pretty brain dead. Right? Of course. Right. Of course you should focus on business outcomes. Of course you should have trust and collaboration. Of course you should have database decision making processes and not just intuition or, you know, whoever's the loudest person in the room, uh, and to learn and respond and pivot. But what's the value of actually just putting them on a piece of paper, because again, this is not this, these are all good, positive things, right? When somebody reads these to you or tells you these are sticks it on the wall, of course. But unfortunately of course isn't always enough. >>No. And I think what's happened is some of these core principles originally from the agile manifesto two decades ago, uh, the whole dev ops movement of the last decade of flow feedback and continue learning has been key. But a lot of organizations, especially the ones that are undergoing digital transformations have actually gone a very different way, right? The way that they measure value in technology and innovation is through costs for many organizations. The way that they actually are looking at that they're moving to cloud is actually as a reduction in cost. Whereas the right way of looking at moving to cloud is how much more quickly can we get to the value to the customer? How quickly can we learn from that? And how quickly can we drive the next business outcome? So really the key thing is, is to move away from those old ways of doing things, a funny projects and cost centers, uh, to actually funding and investing in outcomes and measuring outcomes through these flow metrics, which in the end are your fast feedback and how quickly you're innovating for your customer. >>So these things do seem, you know, very obvious when you look at them. But the key thing is what you need to stop doing to focus on these. You need to actually have accurate realtime data of how much value your phone to the customer every week, every month, every quarter. And if you don't have that, your decisions are not driven on data. If you don't know what your boggling like is, and this is something that in decades of manufacturing, a car manufacturers, other manufacturers, master, they always know where the bottom back in their production processes. You ask a random CIO when a global 500 company where their bottleneck is, and you won't get a clear answer because there's not that level of understanding. So let's, you actually follow these principles. You need to know exactly where you fall. And I guess because that's, what's making your developers miserable and frustrated around having them context, which on thrash. So it, the approach here is important and we have to stop doing these other things, >>Right? There's so much there to unpack. I love it. You know, especially the cloud conversation, because so many people look at it wrong as, as, as a cost saving device, as opposed to an innovation driver and they get stuck, they get stuck in the literal and the, and you know, I think at the same thing, always about Moore's law, right? You know, there's a lot of interesting real tech around Moore's law and the increasing power of microprocessors, but the real power, I think in Moore's laws is the attitudinal change in terms of working in a world where you know that you've got all this power and what you build and design. I think it's funny to your, your comment on the flow and the bottleneck, right? Cause, cause we know manufacturing, as soon as you fix one bottleneck, you move to your next one, right? You always move to your next point of failure. So if you're not fixing those things, you know, you're not, you're not increasing that speed down the line, unless you can identify where that bottleneck is or no matter how many improvements you make to the rest of the process, it's still going to get hung up on that one spot. >>That's exactly it. And you also make it sound so simple, but again, if you don't have the data driven visibility of where that bottom line is, and these bottlenecks are adjusted to say defense just whack them. All right. So we need to understand is the bottleneck because our security reviews are taking too long and stopping us from getting value for the customer. If it's that automate that process. And then you move on to the next bottleneck, which might actually be that deploying yourself into the cloud. It's taking too long. But if you don't take that approach of going flow first, rather than again, that sort of cost reduction. First, you have to think of the approach of customer centricity and you only focused on optimizing costs. Your costs will increase and your flow will slow down. And this is just one of these fascinating things. >>Whereas if you focus on getting closer to the customer and reducing your cycles out on getting value, your flow time from six months to two weeks or two, one week or two event, as we see with the tech giants, you actually can both lower your costs and get much more value for us to get that learning loop going. So I think I've, I've seen all these cloud deployments and one of the things happened that delivered almost no value because there was such big bottlenecks upfront in the process and actually the hosting and the AP testing was not even possible with all of those inefficiencies. So that's why going float us rather than costs when we started our project versus silky. >>I love that. And, and, and, and it, it begs repeating to that right within the subscription economy, you know, you're on the hook to deliver value every single month because they're paying you every single month. So if you're not on top of how you're delivering value, you're going to get sideways because it's not like they pay a big down payment and a small maintenance fee every month. But once you're in a subscription relationship, you know, you have to constantly be delivering value and upgrading that value because you're constantly taking money from the customer. So it's such a different kind of relationship than kind of the classic, you know, big bang with a maintenance agreement on the back end really important. Yeah. >>And I think in terms of industry shifts that that's, it that's, what's catalyzed. This industry shift is in this SAS and subscription economy. If you're not delivering more and more value to your customers, someone else's, and they're winning the business, not you. So, one way we know is to delight our customers with great user experience as well. That really is based on how many features you delivered or how much, how much, how many quality improvements or scalar performance improvements we delivered. So the problem is, and this is what the business manifesto, as well as the flow frame of touch on is if you can't measure how much value you deliver to a customer, what are you measuring? You just backed again, measuring costs, and that's not a measure of value. So we have to shift quickly away from measuring costs to measuring value, to survive. And in the subscription economy, >>We could go for days and days and days. I want to shift gears a little bit into data and, and a data driven decision making a data driven organization cause right day has been talked about for a long time, the huge big data meme with, with Hadoop over, over several years and, and data warehouses and data lakes and data oceans and data swamps. And you can go on and on and on. It's not that easy to do, right? And at the same time, the proliferation of data is growing exponentially. We're just around the corner from, from IOT and five G. So now the accumulation of data at machine scale, again, is this gonna overwhelm? And one of the really interesting principles, uh, that I wanted to call out and get your take right, is today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence. I wonder if you can, again, you've got some great historical perspective, um, reflect on how hard it is to get the right data, to get the data in the right context, and then to deliver it to the decision makers and then trust the decision makers to actually make the data and move that down. You know, it's kind of this democratization process into more and more people and more and more frontline jobs making more and more of these little decisions every day. >>Yeah. I definitely think the front parts of what you said are where the promises of big data have completely fallen on their face into the swamps as, as you mentioned, because if you don't have the data in the right format, you've cannot connect, collected that the right way you want it, that way, the right way you can't use human or machine learning on it effectively. And there've been the number of data where, how has this in a typical enterprise organization and the sheer investment is tremendous, but the amount of intelligence being extracted from those is, is, is a very big problem. So the key thing that I've noticed is that if you can model your value streams, so you actually understand how you're innovating, how you're measuring the delivery of value and how long that takes, what is your time to value through these metrics like full time? >>You can actually use both the intelligence that you've got around the table and push that down as well, as far as getting to the organization, but you can actually start using that those models to understand and find patterns and detect bottlenecks that might be surprising, right? Well, you can detect interesting bottlenecks when you shift to work from home. We detected all sorts of interesting bottlenecks in our own organization that were not intuitive to me that have to do with, you know, more senior people being overloaded and creating bottlenecks where they didn't exist. Whereas we thought we were actually an organization that was very good at working from home because of our open source roots. So the data is highly complex. Software value streams are extremely complicated. And the only way to really get the proper analysts and data is to model it properly and then to leverage these machine learning and AI techniques that we have. But that front part of what you said is where organizations are just extremely immature in what I've seen, where they've got data from all their tools, but not modeled in the right way. Right, right. >>Right. Well, all right. So before I let you go, you know, let's say you get a business leader. He, he buys in, he reads the manifesto, he signs on the dotted line and he says, Mick, how do I get started? I want to be more aligned with the, with the development teams. I know I'm in a very competitive space. We need to be putting out new software features and engage with our customers. I want to be more data-driven how do I get started? Well, you know, what's the biggest inhibitor for most people to get started and get some early wins, which we know is always the key to success in any kind of a new initiative. >>Right? So I think you can reach out to us through the website, uh, for the manifesto. But the key thing is just, it's definitely set up it's to get started and to get the key wins. So take a product value stream. That's mission critical if it'd be on your mobile and web experiences or part of your cloud modernization platform where your analytics pipeline, but take that and actually apply these principles to it and measure the end to end flow of value. Make sure you have a value metric that everyone is on the same page on, but the people on the development teams that people in leadership all the way up to the CEO, and one of the, where I encourage you to start is actually that end to end flow time, right? That is the number one metric. That is how you measure it, whether you're getting the benefit of your cloud modernization, that is the one metric that when the people I respect tremendously put into his cloud for CEOs, the metric, the one, the one way to measure innovation. So basically take these principles, deploy them on one product value stream measure, Antonin flow time, uh, and then you'll actually be well on your path to transforming and to applying the concepts of agile and dev ops all the way to, to the, to the way >>You're offering model. >>Well, Mick really great tips, really fun to catch up. I look forward to a time when we can actually sit across the table and, and get into this. Cause I just, I just love the perspective and, you know, you're very fortunate to have that foundational, that foundational base coming from Xerox park and they get, you know, it's, it's a very magical place with a magical history. So to, to incorporate that into, continue to spread that well, uh, you know, good for you through the book and through your company. So thanks for sharing your insight with us today. >>Thanks so much for having me, Jeff. Absolutely. >>All right. And go to the biz ops manifesto.org, read it, check it out. If you want to sign it, sign it. They'd love to have you do it. Stay with us for continuing coverage of the unveiling of the business manifesto on the cube. I'm Jeff. Rick. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage, a biz ops manifesto unveiled brought to you by biz ops coalition. >>Hey, welcome back. You're ready. Jeff Frick here with the cube for our ongoing coverage of the big unveil. It's the biz ops manifesto manifesto unveil. And we're going to start that again from the top three And a Festo >>Five, four, three, two. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the cube come to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a big, big reveal. We're excited to be here. It's the biz ops manifesto unveiling a thing's been in the works for a while and we're excited to have our next guest. One of the, really the powers behind this whole effort. And he's joining us from Boston it's surge, Lucio, the vice president, and general manager enterprise software division at Broadcom surge. Great to see you. >>Hi, good to see you, Jeff. Glad to be here. >>Absolutely. So you've been in this business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of changes in technology. What is the biz ops manifesto? What is this coalition all about? Why do we need this today and in 2020? >>Yeah. So, so I've been in this business for close to 25 years, right? So about 20 years ago, the agile manifesto was created. And the goal of the agile manifesto was really to address the uncertainty around software development and the inability to predict the efforts to build software. And, uh, if you, if you roll that kind of 20 years later, and if you look at the current state of the industry of the product, the project management Institute, estimates that we're wasting about a million dollars, every 20 seconds in digital transformation initiatives that do not deliver on business results. In fact, we were recently served a third of the, a, a number of executives in partnership with Harvard >>Business review and 77% of those executives think that one of the key challenges that they have is really the collaboration between business and it, and that that's been kind of a case for, uh, almost 20 years now. Um, so the, the, the key challenge that we're faced with is really that we need a new approach. And many of the players in the industry, including ourselves have been using different terms, right? Some are being, are talking about value stream management. Some are talking about software delivery management. If you look at the site, reliability engineering movement, in many ways, it embodies a lot of these kind of concepts and principles. So we believed that it became really imperative for us to crystallize around, could have one concept. And so in many ways, the, a, the BizOps concept and the BizOps manifesto are bringing together a number of ideas, which has been emerging in the last five years or so, and, and defining the key values and principles to finally help these organizations truly transform and become digital businesses. And so the hope is that by joining our forces and defining public key principles and values, we can help the industry, uh, not just, uh, by, you know, providing them with support, but also tools and consulting that is required for them to truly achieve the kind of transformation that everybody's taking. >>Right. Right. So COVID now we're six months into it, approximately seven months into it. Um, a lot of pain, a lot of bad stuff still happening. We've got a ways to go, but one of the things that on the positive side, right, and you've seen all the memes and social media is, is a driver of digital transformation and a driver of change. Cause we had this light switch moment in the middle of March, and there was no more planning. There was no more conversation. You've suddenly got remote workforces, everybody's working from home and you got to go, right. So the reliance on these tools increases dramatically, but I'm curious, you know, kind of short of, of the beginnings of this effort in short of kind of COVID, which, you know, came along unexpectedly. I mean, what were those inhibitors because we've been making software for a very long time, right? The software development community has, has adopted kind of rapid change and, and iterative, uh, delivery and, and sprints, what was holding back the connection with the business side to make sure that those investments were properly aligned with outcomes. >>Well, so, so you have to understand that it is, is kind of a its own silos. And traditionally it has been treated as a cost center within large organizations and not as a value center. And so as a result, kind of a, the traditional dynamic between it and the business is basically one of a kind of supplier up to kind of a business. Um, and you know, if you go back to, uh, I think you'll unmask a few years ago, um, basically at this concept of the machines to build the machines and you went as far as saying that, uh, the, the machines or the production line is actually the product. So, uh, meaning that the core of the innovation is really about, uh, building, could it be engine to deliver on the value? And so in many ways, you know, we, we have missed on this shift from, um, kind of it becoming this kind of value center within the enterprises and end. >>He talks about culture. Now, culture is a, is a sum total of behaviors. And the reality is that if you look at it, especially in the last decade, uh, we've agile with dev ops with, um, I bring infrastructures, uh, it's, it's way more volatile today than it was 10 years ago. And so the, when you start to look at the velocity of the data, the volume of data, the variety of data to analyze the system, um, it's, it's very challenging for it to actually even understand and optimize its own processes, let alone, um, to actually include business as sort of an integral part of kind of a delivery chain. And so it's both kind of a combination of, of culture, um, which is required, uh, as well as tools, right? To be able to start to bring together all these data together, and then given the volume of variety of philosophy of the data. Uh, we have to apply some core technologies, which have only really, truly emerged in the last five to 10 years around machine learning and analytics. And so it's really kind of a combination of those freaks, which are coming together today, truly out organizations kind of get to the next level. Right, >>Right. So let's talk about the manifesto. Let's talk about, uh, the coalition, uh, the BizOps coalition. I just liked that you put down these really simple, you know, kind of straightforward core values. You guys have four core values that you're highlighting, you know, business outcomes, over individual projects and outputs, trust, and collaboration, oversight, load teams, and organizations, data driven decisions, what you just talked about, uh, you know, over opinions and judgment and learned, respond and pivot. I mean, surgery sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, aren't, isn't everyone working to these values already. And I think he touched on it on culture, right? Trust and collaboration, data driven decisions. I mean, these are fundamental ways that people must run their business today, or the person that's across the street, that's doing it. It's going to knock them out right off their block. >>Yeah. So that's very true. But, uh, so I'll, I'll mention an hour survey. We did, uh, I think about six months ago and it was in partnership with, uh, with, uh, an industry analyst and we serve at a, again, a number of it executives to understand only we're tracking business outcomes. I'm going to get the software executives, it executives we're tracking business outcomes. And the, there were less than 15% of these executives were actually tracking the outcomes of the software delivery. And you see that every day. Right? So in my own teams, for instance, we've been adopting a lot of these core principles in the last year or so, and we've uncovered that 16% of our resources were basically aligned around initiatives, which are not strategic for us. Um, I take another example, for instance, one of our customers in the, uh, in the airline industry and Harvard, for instance, that a number of, uh, um, that they had software issues that led to people searching for flights and not returning any kind of availability. >>And yet, um, you know, the it teams, whether it's operation software environments were completely oblivious to that because they were completely blindsided to it. And so the connectivity between kind of the inwards metrics that RT is using, whether it's database time, cycle time, or whatever metric we use in it are typically completely divorced from the business metrics. And so at its core, it's really about starting to align the business metrics with the, the, the software delivery chain, right? This, uh, the system, which is really a core differentiator for these organizations. It's about connecting those two things and starting to, um, infuse some of the agile culture and principles. Um, that's emerged from the software side into the business side. Um, of course the lean movement and other movements have started to change some of these dynamics on the business side. And so I think this, this is the moment where we are starting to see kind of the imperative to transform. Now, you know, Covina obviously has been a key driver for that. The, um, the technology is right to start to be able to weave data together and really kind of, uh, also the cultural shifts, uh, Prue agile through dev ops through, uh, the SRE movement, uh frulein um, business transformation, all these things are coming together and that are really creating kind of the conditions for the BizOps manifestor to exist, >>Uh, Clayton Christianson, great, uh, Harvard professor innovator's dilemma might steal my all time. Favorite business books, you know, talks about how difficult it is for incumbents to react to, to disruptive change, right? Because they're always working on incremental change cause that's what their customers are asking for. And there's a good ROI when you talk about, you know, companies not measuring the right thing. I mean, clearly it has some portion of their budget that has to go to keeping the lights on, right. That that's always the case, but hopefully that's an ever decreasing percentage of their total activity. So, you know, what should people be measuring? I mean, what are kind of the new metrics, um, in, in biz ops that drive people to be looking at the right things, measuring the right things and subsequently making the right decisions, investment decisions on whether they should do, you know, move project a along or project B. >>So there, there are only two things, right? So, so I think what you're talking about is portfolio management, investment management, right. And, um, which, which is a key challenge, right? Um, in my own experience, right? Uh, driving strategy or a large scale kind of software organization for years, um, it's very difficult to even get kind of a base data as to who is doing what, uh, um, I mean, some of our largest customers we're engaged with right now are simply trying to get a very simple answer, which is how many people do I have and that specific initiative at any point in time and just tracking that information is extremely difficult. So, and, and again, back to a product project management Institute, um, they're, they've estimated that on average, it organizations have anywhere between 10 to 20% of their resources focused on initiatives, which are not strategically aligned. >>So that's one dimension on portfolio management. I think the key aspect though, that we are really keen on is really around kind of the alignment of a business metrics to the it metrics. Um, so I'll use kind of two simple examples, right? And my background is around quality. And so I've always believed that fitness for purpose is really kind of a key, um, uh, philosophy if you will. And so if you start to think about quality as fitness for purpose, you start to look at it from a customer point of view, right. And fitness for purpose for core banking application or mobile application are different, right? So the definition of a business value that you're trying to achieve is different. Um, and so the, and yet, if you look at our, it, operations are operating, they were using kind of a same type of, uh, kind of inward metrics, uh, like a database of time or a cycle time, or what is my point of velocity, right? >>And, uh, and so the challenge really is this inward facing metrics that it is using, which are divorced from ultimately the outcome. And so, you know, if I'm, if I'm trying to build a poor banking application, my core metric is likely going to be uptime, right? If I'm trying to build a mobile application or maybe your social mobile app, it's probably going to be engagement. And so what you want is for everybody across it, to look at these metric, and what's hard, the metrics within the software delivery chain, which ultimately contribute to that business metric and some cases cycle time may be completely irrelevant, right? Again, my core banking app, maybe I don't care about cycle time. And so it's really about aligning those metrics and be able to start to differentiate, um, the key challenges you mentioned, uh, around the, the, um, uh, around the disruption that we see is, or the investors is the dilemma now is really around the fact that many it organizations are essentially applying the same approaches of, for innovation, right, for basically scrap work, then they would apply to kind of over more traditional projects. And so, you know, there's been a lot of talk about two-speed it, and yes, it exists, but in reality are really organizations, um, truly differentiating, um, all of the operate, their, their projects and products based on the outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And this is really where BizOps is trying to affect. >>I love that, you know, again, it doesn't seem like brain surgery, but focus on the outcomes, right. And it's horses for courses, as you said, this project, you know, what you're measuring and how you define success, isn't necessarily the same as, as on this other project. So let's talk about some of the principles we've talked about the values, but, you know, I think it's interesting that, that, that the BizOps coalition, you know, just basically took the time to write these things down and they don't seem all that, uh, super insightful, but I guess you just gotta get them down and have them on paper and have them in front of your face. But I want to talk about, you know, one of the key ones, which you just talked about, which is changing requirements, right. And working in a dynamic situation, which is really what's driven, you know, this, the software to change in software development, because, you know, if you're in a game app and your competitor comes out with a new blue sword, you've got to come out with a new blue sword. >>So whether you had that on your Kanban wall or not. So it's, it's really this embracing of the speed of change and, and, and, and making that, you know, the rule, not the exception. I think that's a phenomenal one. And the other one you talked about is data, right? And that today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. So informed decisions must be generated by machine learning and AI, and, you know, in the, the big data thing with Hadoop, you know, started years ago, but we are seeing more and more that people are finally figuring it out, that it's not just big data, and it's not even generic machine learning or artificial intelligence, but it's applying those particular data sets and that particular types of algorithms to a specific problem, to your point, to try to actually reach an objective, whether that's, you know, increasing the, your average ticket or, you know, increasing your checkout rate with, with, with shopping carts that don't get left behind and these types of things. So it's a really different way to think about the world in the good old days, probably when you got started, when we had big, giant, you know, MRDs and PRDs and sat down and coded for two years and came out with a product release and hopefully not too many patches subsequently to that. >>It's interesting. Right. Um, again, back to one of these surveys that we did with, uh, with about 600, the ITA executives, and, uh, and, and we, we purposely designed those questions to be pretty open. Um, and, and one of them was really role requirements and, uh, and it was really a wrong kind of what do you, what is the best approach? What is your preferred approach towards requirements? And if I remember correctly over 80% of the it executives set that the best approach they'll prefer to approach is for requirements to be completely defined before software development starts. Let me pause there where 20 years after the agile manifesto, right? And for 80% of these idea executives to basically claim that the best approach is for requirements to be fully baked before salt, before software development starts, basically shows that we still have a very major issue. >>And again, our hypothesis in working with many organizations is that the key challenge is really the boundary between business and it, which is still very much contract based. If you look at the business side, they basically are expecting for it deliver on time on budget, right. But what is the incentive for it to actually delivering all the business outcomes, right? How often is it measured on the business outcomes and not on an SLA or on a budget type criteria. And so that, that's really the fundamental shift that we need to, we really need to drive up as an industry. Um, and you know, we, we talk about kind of this, this imperative for organizations to operate that's one, and back to the innovator's dilemma. The key difference between these larger organization is, is really kind of a, if you look at the amount of capital investment that they can put into pretty much anything, why are they losing compared to, um, you know, startups? What, why is it that, uh, more than 40% of, uh, personal loans today or issued not by your traditional brick and mortar banks, but by, um, startups? Well, the reason, yes, it's the traditional culture of doing incremental changes and not disrupting ourselves, which Christiansen covered at length, but it's also the inability to really fundamentally change kind of a dynamic picture. We can business it and, and, and partner right. To, to deliver on a specific business outcome. Right. >>I love that. That's a great, that's a great summary. And in fact, getting ready for this interview, I saw you mentioning another thing where, you know, the, the problem with the agile development is that you're actually now getting more silos because you have all these autonomous people working, you know, kind of independently. So it's even a harder challenge for, for the business leaders to, to, to, as you said, to know, what's actually going on, but, but certainly I w I want to close, um, and talk about the coalition. Um, so clearly these are all great concepts. These are concepts you want to apply to your business every day. Why the coalition, why, you know, take these concepts out to a broader audience, including your, your competition and, and the broader industry to say, Hey, we, as a group need to put a stamp of approval on these concepts, values, these principles. >>So, first I think we, we want, um, everybody to realize that we are all talking about the same things, the same concepts. I think we were all from our own different vantage point, realizing that, um, things after change, and again, back to, you know, whether it's value stream management or site reliability engineering, or biz ops, we're all kind of using slightly different languages. Um, and so I think one of the important aspects of BizOps is for us, all of us, whether we're talking about, you know, consulting agile transformation experts, uh, whether we're talking about vendors, right, provides kind of tools and technologies, or these large enterprises to transform for all of us to basically have kind of a reference that lets us speak around kind of, um, in a much more consistent way. The second aspect is for, to me is for, um, these concepts to start to be embraced, not just by us or trying, or, you know, vendors, um, system integrators, consulting firms, educators, thought leaders, but also for some of our old customers to start to become evangelists of their own in the industry. >>So we, our, our objective with the coalition needs to be pretty, pretty broad. Um, and our hope is by, by starting to basically educate, um, our, our joint customers or partners, that we can start to really foster these behaviors and start to really change, uh, some of dynamics. So we're very pleased at if you look at, uh, some of the companies which have joined the, the, the, the manifesto. Um, so we have vendors and suggest desktop or advance, or, um, uh, PagerDuty for instance, or even planned view, uh, one of my direct competitors, um, but also thought leaders like Tom Davenport or, uh, or cap Gemini or, um, um, smaller firms like, uh, business agility, institutes, or agility elf. Um, and so our, our goal really is to start to bring together, uh, thought leaders, people who have been LP, larger organizations do digital transformation vendors, were providing the technologies that many of these organizations use to deliver on these digital preservation and for all of us to start to provide the kind of, uh, education support and tools that the industry needs. Yeah, >>That's great surge. And, uh, you know, congratulations to you and the team. I know this has been going on for a while, putting all this together, getting people to sign onto the manifesto, putting the coalition together, and finally today getting to unveil it to the world in a little bit more of a public, uh, opportunity. So again, you know, really good values, really simple principles, something that, that, uh, shouldn't have to be written down, but it's nice cause it is, and now you can print it out and stick it on your wall. So thank you for, uh, for sharing this story. And again, congrats to you and the team. Thank you. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Alrighty, surge. If you want to learn more about the biz ops, Manifesta go to biz ops manifesto.org, read it, and you can sign it and you can stay here for more coverage. I'm the cube of the biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. See you next time >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of this ops manifesto unveiled and brought to you by >>This obstacle volition. Hey, welcome back, everybody Jeffrey here with the cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz ops manifesto unveiling. It's been in the works for awhile, but today's the day that it actually kind of come out to the, to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe is Tom Davenport. He's a distinguished author and professor at Babson college. We could go on, he's got a lot of great titles and, and really illuminary in the area of big data and analytics Thomas. Great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Happy to be here with you. >>Great. So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn posts. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address longterm issues, uh, in how technology works within businesses, biz ops. What did you see in biz ops, uh, that, that kind of addresses one of these really big longterm problems? >>Well, yeah, but the longterm problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and it people between business objectives and the, it solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think since the beginning of information technology and sadly it hasn't gone away. And so biz ops is a new attempt to deal with that issue with a, you know, a new framework, eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that will actually solve a business problem with an it capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with like dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around, uh, agile software development and a theory that we want to embrace change that that changes. Okay. And we want to be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that. And that's been happening in the software world for, for 20 plus years. What's taken so long to get that to the business side, because as the pace of change has changed on the software side, you know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution, the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no PRDs and MRDs and big, giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. It took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And, you know, there had been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and it, there was the so called strategic alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston university developed, I think more than 20 years ago, but you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's time for another serious attempt at it. >>And do you think doing it this way, right. With the, with the BizOps coalition, you know, getting a collection of, of, of kind of likeminded individuals and companies together, and actually even having a manifesto, which we're making this declarative statement of, of principles and values, you think that's what it takes to kind of drive this kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in, uh, in production in the field. >>I think certainly no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think our coalition is a good idea and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out what you see as the key principles of the idea. And that makes it much easier for everybody to understand and act on. >>I, I think it's just, it's really interesting having, you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the, of the values as well as, as the, uh, the principles and the values, you know, business outcomes matter trust and collaboration, data-driven decisions, which is the number three of four, and then learn, respond and pivot. It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly, but, but obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are, but you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy, uh, and a big piece of this is data and analytics and moving to data driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process and informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the mini stages of analytics. Um, and how has that evolved over over time, you know, as you think of analytics and machine learning, driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that, what's that thing for you? What does that make you, you know, start to think, wow, this is this going to be pretty significant. >>Yeah. Well, you know, this has been a longterm interest of mine. Um, the last generation of AI, I was very interested in expert systems. And then, um, I think, uh, more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about automated decision-making using what was available then, which was rule-based approaches. Um, but you know, this addresses an issue that we've always had with analytics and AI. Um, you know, we, we tended to refer to those things as providing decision support, but the problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions, um, with now contemporary AI tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data, we want most of those, I think to be at least, um, recommended if not totally made by an algorithm or an AI based system. And that I believe would add to, um, the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions and in most organizations, >>No, I think, I think you just answered my next question before I, before I asked it, you know, we had dr. Robert Gates on the former secretary of defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions. And he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems, uh, that actually had an automated trigger on it were on the North Korea and South Korea border. Um, everything else, as you said, had to go through a sub person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know, what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us to more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time, both as the data to support that as well as our comfort level, um, enables us to turn more and more actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, as I suggested we need, um, data and the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current, and we need to know the outcomes of that data. You know, um, most machine learning models, at least in business are supervised. And that means we need to have labeled outcomes in the, in the training data. But I, you know, um, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that, that the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that we're finding out quite frequently these days is that, um, the data that we have do not reflect, you know, what it's like to do business in a pandemic. Um, I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff cam at wake forest university, we call it data science quarantined, and we interviewed with somebody who said, you know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Um, our models maybe have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have to make sure that the data from the past and that's all we have of course, is a good guide to, you know, what's happening in the present and the future as far as we understand it. >>Yeah. I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020, it was finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight, but I turned down 20, 20 a year. We found out we actually know nothing and everything and thought we knew, but I want to, I want to follow up on that because you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We've got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now we're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold fold or double down. And, and I can't think of a more, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the biz ops when now your whole portfolio strategy, um, these to really be questioned and, and, you know, you have to be really, uh, well, uh, executing on what you are, holding, what you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment. >>Well, yeah, and I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine. Who's a senior executive at Genpact. And, um, I, um, used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could, you could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio of digital projects. You need to think about, well, um, given some constraints on resources and a difficult economy for a while, which of our projects do we want to keep going on pretty much the way we were and which ones are not that necessary anymore? You see a lot of that in AI, because we had so many pilots, somebody told me, you know, we've got more pilots around here than O'Hare airport and, and AI. Um, and then, but the ones that involve doubled down, they're even more important to you. They are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out, um, in the pandemic on digital projects, it's more and more important for customers to be able to interact with you, um, digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want to cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them and get them done faster and better. Right, >>Right. Uh, another, another thing that came up in my research that, that you quoted, um, was, was from Jeff Bezos, talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly, but meaningfully improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which, which gets way too much buzz, but really applied right. Applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value. And, you know, the, the BizOps, uh, manifesto is, is, is calling it out in this particular process. But I'd love to get your perspective as you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where are the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions, um, uh, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that, um, ag Lafley, the former CEO of Procter and gamble used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those. He said in your tenure as CEO, those are probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because, um, you don't have much data about them. You're only making them a few times and in part, because, um, they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future, that the best human decision makers, um, have. Um, but, um, in general, I think where they, I, the projects that are working well are, you know, what I call the low hanging fruit ones, the, some people even report to it referred to it as boring AI. >>So, you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it to a bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but AI, as you suggested is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. It's not so good at the, at the really big moonshots, like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well what's the best stock or bond under all or even autonomous vehicles. Um, we, we made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not going to be perfect for quite a while, and we really don't want to be driving around on, um, and then very much unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic and you know, that sort of thing, right? >>That's funny you bring up contract management. I had a buddy years ago, they had a startup around contract management and I've like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, you know, how can you possibly build software around contract management? It's language, it's legal, ease. It's very specific. And he's like, Jeff, we just need to know where's the contract. And when does it expire? And who's the signatory. And he built a business on those, you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts are in people's drawers and files and homes. And Lord only knows. So it's really interesting, as you said, these kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you can extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah. I mean, if you're Amazon, um, uh, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important to have some kind of billion dollar project. And he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to, um, what AI has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on, based on data. >>Right? So Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before, before we let you go on, on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not, not a, the vast majority of, of your publications and that's the new way to work, you know, as, as the pandemic hit in mid March, right. And we had this light switch moment, everybody had to work from home and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up. Well, you know, now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not going to be going back to work for a while. And so we're going to continue on this for a while. And then even when it's not what it is now, it's not going to be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder, and I know you, you, uh, you teased, you're working on a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way to work and, and, and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess. >>Yeah. I missed was an interest of mine. I think, um, back in the nineties, I wrote an article called, um, a coauthored, an article called two cheers for the virtual office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge. Then some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical and, uh, we said two cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings. And, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can, most of what we need to do with a digital interface, but, um, you know, things like innovation and creativity, and certainly, um, uh, a good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so I, you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. >>Um, we'll have, um, times when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and to jump on airplanes, to, to, um, give every little, um, uh, sales call or give every little presentation. Uh, we just have to really narrow down what are the circumstances where face to face contact really matters. And when can we get by with digital? You know, I think one of the things in my current work I'm finding is that even when you have AI based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, we need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next, then make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence of an AI system, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. >>I think such, such a huge opportunity as you just said, cause I forget the stats on how often we're interrupted with notifications between email texts, Slack, a sauna, Salesforce, the list goes on and on. So, you know, to put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention, you've written a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic, we'll say for another day, you know, it, it really begs, it really begs for some assistance because you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not, it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's a feature that we're looking for. >>I agree. Totally >>Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I got to dig into the library. It's very long. So I might start at the attention economy. I haven't read that one. And to me, I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time and, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right. He's Tom I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto and Vail. Thanks for watching the cube. We'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of biz ops Manifesto unveiled. Brought to you by biz ops Coalition. Hey, welcome back your body, Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the busy ops manifesto unveiling its been in the works for a while. But today is the day that it actually kind of come out to the to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, Why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe, is Tom Davenport. He is a distinguished author on professor at Babson College. We could go on. He's got a lot of great titles and and really illuminate airy in the area of big data and analytics. Thomas, great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Happy to be here with you. Great. >>So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn post. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address long term issues, Uh, in how technology works within businesses. Biz ops. What did you see in biz ops? That that kind of addresses one of these really big long term problems? >>Well, yeah. The long term problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and I t people between business objectives and the i t. Solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think, since the beginning of information technology, and sadly, it hasn't gone away. And so busy ops is new attempt to deal with that issue with a, you know, a new framework. Eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that will actually solve a business problem with a nightie capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with, like, Dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around a agile software development and the theory that we want to embrace change that that changes okay on. We wanna be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that, and that's been happening in the software world for for 20 plus years. What's taking so long to get that to the business side because the pace of change is change on the software side. You know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution on the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no P R D S and M R. D s and big giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. Took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And, you know, there have been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and i t. There was the so called strategic alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston University developed, I think more than 20 years ago. But, you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's, um you know, time for another serious attempt at it, >>right? And do you think doing it this way right with the bizarre coalition, you know, getting a collection of of kind of like minded individuals and companies together and actually even having a manifesto which were making this declarative statement of principles and values. You think that's what it takes to kind of drive this, you know, kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in in production in the field. >>I think certainly no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think a coalition is a good idea, and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out. What you see is the key principles of the idea, and that makes it much easier for everybody. Toe I understand and act on. >>Yeah, I I think it's just it's really interesting having, you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the of the values as well as as the the principles and and the values, you know. Business outcomes, matter, trust and collaboration, data driven decisions, which is the number three or four and then learn, responded pivot. It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly. But obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are. But you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy. Yeah, And a big piece of this is data analytics and moving to data driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. And informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the many stages of analytics. Onda. How has that's evolved over over time? You know, it is You think of analytics and machine learning driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that? What's that think for you? What does that make you? You know, start to think Wow, this is This is gonna be pretty significant. >>Yeah, well, you know, this has been a long term interest of mine. Um, the last generation of a I I was very interested in expert systems. And then e think more than 10 years ago, I wrote an article about automated decision making using, um, what was available then, which is rule based approaches. But, you know, this address is an issue that we've always had with analytics and ai. Um, you know, we tended Thio refer to those things as providing decision support. The problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions with now contemporary ai tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think, at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data. We want most of those I think, to be at least, um, recommended, if not totally made by analgesic rhythm or an AI based system, and that, I believe would add to the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions. And in most organizations, >>you know, I think I think you just answered my next question before I Before I asked it. You know, we had Dr Robert Gates on the former secretary of Defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions, and he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems that actually had an automated trigger on it, We're on the North Korean South Korea border. Um, everything else that you said had to go through some person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us that more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time both as the the data to support that as well as our comfort level, Um, enables us to turn mawr mawr actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, I suggested we need data, and the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current, and we need to know the outcomes of the that data. You know, most machine learning models, at least in business, are supervised, and that means we need tohave labeled outcomes in the in the training data. But you know, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that were finding out quite frequently these days is that the data that we have a do not reflect you know what it's like to do business in a pandemic. I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff Cam at Wake Forest University. We call it Data Science Quarantined and it we interviewed somebody who said, You know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Our models may be have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have toe make sure that the data from the past and you know that's all we have, of course, is a good guide toe. You know what's happening in the present and in the future, as far as we understand it. >>Yeah, I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020 was finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight. But it turned out 2020 the year we found out we actually know nothing and everything >>we thought we d >>o. But I wanna I wanna follow up on that because, you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now. We're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold, fold or double down, and And I can't think of, um or, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the biz ops. When now your whole portfolio strategy, um, needs to really be questioned. And, you know, you have to be really well executing on what you are holding. What you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment? >>Well, yeah, And I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine was a senior executive at gen. Packed, and I used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could You could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio. Digital projects you need to think about. Well, um, given some constraints on resource is and a difficulty economy for a while. Which of our projects do we wanna keep going on Pretty much the way we were for and which ones, um, are not that necessary anymore. You see a lot of that in a I because we had so many pilots. Somebody told me, You know, we've got more pilots around here than O'Hare Airport in a I, um and then the the ones that involve double down there, even mawr Important to you, they are. You know, a lot of organizations have found this out in the pandemic on digital projects. It's more and more important for customers to be ableto interact with you digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want toe cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them, get them done faster and better. >>Another. Another thing I came up in my research that that you quoted um, was was from Jeff. Bezos is talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly but meaning fleeing, improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which which gets way too much buzz but really applied, applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value. And, you know, the biz ops manifesto is calling it out in this particular process. But I just love to get your perspective. As you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions, um, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that a G laugh. Li, the former CEO of Proctor and Gamble, used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those, he said. In your tenure as CEO, those air probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because you don't have much data about them. Your you know, only making them a few times and in part because they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future that the best human decision makers have. Um, but in general, I think where they I The projects that are working well are you know what I call the low hanging fruit ones? The some people even report to refer to it as boring A. I so you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it Thio bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain. Companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but a I, as you suggest, is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. Um, it's not so good at the at the really big Moonshots like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well, what's the best stock or bond under all circumstances or even autonomous vehicles. We made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not gonna be perfect for quite a while. And we really don't wanna be driving around on, um in that very much, unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic. And you know that sort of thing, right? >>That's funny. Bring up contract management. I had a buddy years ago. They had a startup around contract management, and I'm like and this was way before we had the compute power today and cloud proliferation. I said, You know how How could you possibly built off around contract management? It's language. It's legalese. It's very specific. He's like Jeff. We just need to know where's the contract and when does it expire? And who's the signatory? And he built a business on those you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts from people's drawers and files and homes and Lord only knows so it's really interesting as you said. These kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you could extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah, I mean, if you're Amazon, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important toe have some kind of billion dollar projects, and he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to what a I has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on based on data. >>Right? So, Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before before you let Ugo on on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not not the vast majority of your publications. And that's the new way toe work, you know, as as the pandemic hit in mid March, right? And we had this light switch moment. Everybody had to work from home, and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up. Well, you know, now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not gonna be going back to work for a while, and so we're going to continue on this for a while, and then even when it's not what it is now, it's not gonna be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder and I know you, you tease. You're working on a a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way, uh, toe work and and and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess, >>Yeah, this was an interest of mine. I think. Back in the nineties, I wrote an article called a co authored an article called Two Cheers for the Virtual Office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge than some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical, and we said to cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings and, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's it's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can accomplish most of what we need to do with a digital interface, but you know, things like innovation and creativity and certainly, um a A good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. Um, will have, um, time when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and toe jump on airplanes. Thio, Thio, give every little sales call or give every little presentation we just have to really narrow down. What are the circumstances, where face to face contact really matters and when can we get by with digital? You know, I think one of the things in my current work on finding is that even when you have AI based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, we need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next and make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence of an AI system, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. Yeah, >>I think such such a huge opportunity as you just said, because I forget the stats on how often were interrupted with notifications between email text, slack asana, salesforce The list goes on and on. So, you know, t put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention. And you've written a you know, a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic will say for another day. You know, it really begs. It really begs for some assistance because, you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's the future that we're looking for. >>Great. Totally. Alright, >>Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I got to dig into the library. It's very long song. I might started the attention economy. I haven't read that one in to me. I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time. And, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right, take care. Alright. East, Tom. I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Thanks for watching the Cube. We'll see you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of biz ops Manifesto unveiled. Brought to you by biz ops Coalition. Hey, welcome back your body, Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the busy ops manifesto unveiling its been in the works for a while. But today is the day that it actually kind of come out to the to the public. And we're excited to have a real industry luminary here to talk about what's going on, Why this is important and share his perspective. And we're happy to have from Cape Cod, I believe, is Tom Davenport. He is a distinguished author on professor at Babson College. We could go on. He's got a lot of great titles and and really illuminate airy in the area of big data and analytics. Thomas, great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Happy to be here with you. Great. >>So let's just jump into it, you know, and getting ready for this. I came across your LinkedIn post. I think you did earlier this summer in June and right off the bat, the first sentence just grabbed my attention. I'm always interested in new attempts to address long term issues, Uh, in how technology works within businesses. Biz ops. What did you see in biz ops? That that kind of addresses one of these really big long term problems? >>Well, yeah. The long term problem is that we've had a poor connection between business people and I t people between business objectives and the i t. Solutions that address them. This has been going on, I think, since the beginning of information technology, and sadly, it hasn't gone away. And so busy ops is new attempt to deal with that issue with a, you know, a new framework. Eventually a broad set of solutions that increase the likelihood that will actually solve a business problem with a nightie capability. >>Right. You know, it's interesting to compare it with, like, Dev ops, which I think a lot of people are probably familiar with, which was, you know, built around a agile software development and the theory that we want to embrace change that that changes okay on. We wanna be able to iterate quickly and incorporate that, and that's been happening in the software world for for 20 plus years. What's taking so long to get that to the business side because the pace of change is change on the software side. You know, that's a strategic issue in terms of execution on the business side that they need now to change priorities. And, you know, there's no P R D S and M R. D s and big giant strategic plans that sit on the shelf for five years. That's just not the way business works anymore. Took a long time to get here. >>Yeah, it did. And, you know, there have been previous attempts to make a better connection between business and i t. There was the so called strategic alignment framework that a couple of friends of mine from Boston University developed, I think more than 20 years ago. But, you know, now we have better technology for creating that linkage. And the, you know, the idea of kind of ops oriented frameworks is pretty pervasive now. So I think it's, um you know, time for another serious attempt at it, right? >>And do you think doing it this way right with the bizarre coalition, you know, getting a collection of of kind of like minded individuals and companies together and actually even having a manifesto which were making this declarative statement of principles and values. You think that's what it takes to kind of drive this, you know, kind of beyond the experiment and actually, you know, get it done and really start to see some results in, in in production in the field. >>Well, you know, the manifesto approach worked for Karl Marx and communism. So maybe it'll work. Here is Well, now, I think certainly no one vendor organization can pull this off single handedly. It does require a number of organizations collaborating and working together. So I think a coalition is a good idea, and a manifesto is just a good way to kind of lay out. What you see is the key principles of the idea, and that makes it much easier for everybody. Toe I understand and act on. >>Yeah, I I think it's just it's really interesting having you know, having them written down on paper and having it just be so clearly articulated both in terms of the of the values as well as as the the principles and and the values, you know, business outcomes, matter, trust and collaboration, data driven decisions, which is the number three or four and then learn responded Pivot, It doesn't seem like those should have to be spelled out so clearly, but obviously it helps to have them there. You can stick them on the wall and kind of remember what your priorities are. But you're the data guy. You're the analytics guy. Uh, and a big piece of this is data analytics and moving to data driven decisions. And principle number seven says, you know, today's organizations generate more data than humans can process. And informed decisions can be augmented by machine learning and artificial intelligence right up your alley. You know, you've talked a number of times on kind of the many stages of analytics Onda how that's evolved over over time. You know, it is you think of analytics and machine learning driving decisions beyond supporting decisions, but actually starting to make decisions in machine time. What's that? What's that think for you? What does that make you? You know, start to think Wow, this is this is gonna be pretty significant. >>Yeah, well, you know, this has been a long term interest of mine. Um, the last generation of a I I was very interested in expert systems. And then e think more than 10 years ago I wrote an article about automated decision making using, um, what was available then, which is rule based approaches. But, you know, this address is an issue that we've always had with analytics and ai. Um, you know, we tended Thio refer to those things as providing decision support. The problem is that if the decision maker didn't want their support, didn't want to use them in order to make a decision, they didn't provide any value. And so the nice thing about automating decisions with now contemporary ai tools is that we can ensure that data and analytics get brought into the decision without any possible disconnection. Now, I think humans still have something to add here, and we often will need to examine how that decision is being made and maybe even have the ability to override it. But in general, I think, at least for, you know, repetitive tactical decisions, um, involving a lot of data. We want most of those I think, to be at least, um, recommended, if not totally made by analgesic rhythm or an AI based system, and that I believe would add to the quality and the precision and the accuracy of decisions in in most organizations. >>You know, I think I think you just answered my next question before I before I asked it. You know, we had Dr Robert Gates on the former secretary of Defense on a few years back, and we were talking about machines and machines making decisions, and he said at that time, you know, the only weapon systems that actually had an automated trigger on it, We're on the North Korea and South Korea border. Everything else, as you said, had to go through some person before the final decision was made. And my question is, you know what are kind of the attributes of the decision that enable us to more easily automated? And then how do you see that kind of morphing over time both as the data to support that as well as our comfort level, Um, enables us to turn Maura Maura actual decisions over to the machine? >>Well, yeah, I suggested we need data and the data that we have to kind of train our models has to be high quality and current, and we need to know the outcomes of that data. You know, most machine learning models, at least in business, are supervised, and that means we need tohave labeled outcomes in the in the training data. But, you know, the pandemic that we're living through is a good illustration of the fact that the the data also have to be reflective of current reality. And, you know, one of the things that we're finding out quite frequently these days is that the data that we have do not reflect. You know what it's like to do business in it. Pandemic it. I wrote a little piece about this recently with Jeff Cam at Wake Forest University. We call it Data Science quarantined, and we interviewed somebody who said, You know, it's amazing what eight weeks of zeros will do to your demand forecast. We just don't really know what happens in a pandemic. Our models may be have to be put on the shelf for a little while and until we can develop some new ones or we can get some other guidelines into making decisions. So I think that's one of the key things with automated decision making. We have toe, make sure that the data from the past and you know, that's all we have, of course, is a good guide toe. You know what's happening in the present and and the future as far as we understand it. >>Yeah, I used to joke when we started this calendar year 2020 is finally the year that we know everything with the benefit of hindsight. But it turned out 2020 the year we found out we actually know nothing and everything way. But I wanna I wanna follow up on that because, you know, it did suddenly change everything, right? We got this light switch moment. Everybody's working from home now. We're many, many months into it, and it's going to continue for a while. I saw your interview with Bernard Marr and you had a really interesting comment that now we have to deal with this change. We don't have a lot of data and you talked about hold, fold or double down and and I can't think of, um or, you know, kind of appropriate metaphor for driving the value of the biz ops. When now your whole portfolio strategy, um, needs to really be questioned. And, you know, You have to be really well, executing on what you are holding, what you're folding and what you're doubling down with this completely new environment. >>Well, yeah, And I hope I did this in the interview. I would like to say that I came up with that term, but it actually came from a friend of mine who's a senior executive at gen. Packed. And I used it mostly to talk about AI and AI applications, but I think you could You could use it much more broadly to talk about your entire sort of portfolio of digital projects you need to think about. Well, um, given some constraints on resource is and a difficulty economy for a while. Which of our projects do we wanna keep going on Pretty much the way we were And which ones, um, are not that necessary anymore. You see a lot of that in a I because we had so many pilots, somebody for me, you know, we've got more pilots around here, then O'Hare airport in a I, um and then the the ones that involve double down there, even mawr Important to you, they are, you know, a lot of organizations have found this out in the pandemic on digital projects, it's more and more important for customers to be ableto interact with you, um, digitally. And so you certainly wouldn't want toe cancel those projects or put them on hold. So you double down on them, get them done faster and better. >>Another. Another thing that came up in my research that that you quoted, um, was was from Jeff. Bezos is talking about the great bulk of what we do is quietly but meaning fleeing, improving core operations. You know, I think that is so core to this concept of not AI and machine learning and kind of the general sense, which which gets way too much buzz but really applied, applied to a specific problem. And that's where you start to see the value and, you know, the biz ops. Uh, manifesto is calling it out in this particular process, but I just love to get your perspective. As you know, you speak generally about this topic all the time, but how people should really be thinking about where the applications where I can apply this technology to get direct business value. >>Yeah, well, you know, even talking about automated decisions? Uh, the kind of once in a lifetime decisions, uh, the ones that a g laugh Li, the former CEO of Proctor and Gamble, used to call the big swing decisions. You only get a few of those, he said. In your tenure as CEO, those air probably not going to be the ones that you're automating in part because you don't have much data about them. You're only making them a few times, and in part because they really require that big picture thinking and the ability to kind of anticipate the future that the best human decision makers have. Um, but in general, I think where they I the projects that are working well are you know what I call the low hanging fruit ones? The some people even report to refer to it as boring A I so you know, sucking data out of a contract in order to compare it Thio bill of lading for what arrived at your supply chain. Companies can save or make a lot of money with that kind of comparison. It's not the most exciting thing, but a I, as you suggest, is really good at those narrow kinds of tasks. Um, it's not so good at the at the really big Moonshots like curing cancer or, you know, figuring out well, what's the best stock or bond under all circumstances or even autonomous vehicles. We made some great progress in that area, but everybody seems to agree that they're not going to be perfect for quite a while. And we really don't wanna be driving around on, um in that very much, unless they're, you know, good and all kinds of weather and with all kinds of pedestrian traffic. And you know that sort of thing, right? >>That's funny. Bring up contract management. I had a buddy years ago. They had a startup around contract management, and I'm like, and this was way before we had the compute power today and and cloud proliferation. I said, You know how How could you possibly built off around contract management? It's language. It's legalese. It's very specific. He's like Jeff. We just need to know where's the contract and when does it expire? And who's a signatory? And he built a business on those you know, very simple little facts that weren't being covered because their contracts from People's drawers and files and homes, and Lord only knows So it's really interesting, as you said, these kind of low hanging fruit opportunities where you could extract a lot of business value without trying to, you know, boil the ocean. >>Yeah, I mean, if you're Amazon, Jeff Bezos thinks it's important toe have some kind of billion dollar projects, and he even says it's important to have a billion dollar failure or two every year. But I think most organizations probably are better off being a little less aggressive and, you know, sticking to what a I has been doing for a long time, which is, you know, making smarter decisions based on based on data. >>Right? So, Tom, I want to shift gears one more time before before you let Ugo on on kind of a new topic for you, not really new, but you know, not not the vast majority of your publications. And that's the new way toe work, you know, as as the pandemic hit in mid March, right? And we had this light switch moment. Everybody had to work from home, and it was, you know, kind of crisis and get everybody set up well you know, Now we're five months, six months, seven months. A number of companies have said that people are not gonna be going back to work for a while. And so we're going to continue on this for a while, and then even when it's not what it is now, it's not gonna be what it was before. So, you know, I wonder and I know you, you tease. You're working on a a new book, you know, some of your thoughts on, you know, kind of this new way. Uh, toe work and and and the human factors in this new, this new kind of reality that we're kind of evolving into, I guess. >>Yeah, This was an interest of mine. I think back in the nineties, I wrote an article called Ah Co authored an article called Two Cheers for the Virtual Office. And, you know, it was just starting to emerge. Then some people were very excited about it. Some people were skeptical and we said to cheers rather than three cheers because clearly there's some shortcomings and, you know, I keep seeing these pop up. It's great that we can work from our homes. It's great that we can accomplish most of what we need to do with a digital interface. But you know, things like innovation and creativity and certainly a a good, um, happy social life kind of requires some face to face contact every now and then. And so you know, I think we'll go back to an environment where there is some of that. We'll have, um, time when people convene in one place so they can get to know each other face to face and learn from each other that way. And most of the time, I think it's a huge waste of people's time to commute into the office every day and toe jump on airplanes. Thio, Thio give every little mhm, uh, sales call or give every little presentation. We just have to really narrow down. What are the circumstances, where face to face contact really matters and when can we get by with digital? You know, I think one of the things in my current work I'm finding is that even when you have a I based decision making, you really need a good platform in which that all takes place. So in addition to these virtual platforms, We need to develop platforms that kind of structure the workflow for us and tell us what we should be doing next and make automated decisions when necessary. And I think that ultimately is a big part of biz ops as well. It's not just the intelligence oven, a isis some, but it's the flow of work that kind of keeps things moving smoothly throughout your organization. Yeah, >>I think such such a huge opportunity as you just said, because I forget the stats on how often were interrupted with notifications between email text, slack asana, salesforce The list goes on on and on. So, you know, t put an AI layer between the person and all these systems that are begging for attention. And you've written a you know, a book on the attention economy, which is a whole nother topic will say for another day. You know, it really begs. It really begs for some assistance because, you know, you just can't get him picked, you know, every two minutes and really get quality work done. It's just not it's just not realistic. And you know what? I don't think that's the future that we're looking for. >>Great totally alright, >>Tom. Well, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation. I gotta dig into the library. It's very long song. I might started the attention economy. I haven't read that one in to me. I think that's the fascinating thing in which we're living. So thank you for your time. And, uh, great to see you. >>My pleasure, Jeff. Great to be here. >>All right, take care. Alright. He's Tom. I'm Jeff. You are watching the continuing coverage of the biz ops manifesto. Unveil. Thanks for watching. The Cube will see you next time.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE. With digital coverage of BizOps Manifesto Unveiled. Brought to you by BizOps Coalition. >> Hey, welcome back everybody ,Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the BizOps Manifesto Unveiled. Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's the formal unveiling and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto, authors of the manifesto, if you will. And joining us again, we've had them all on individually, now we're going to have a great power panel. First up, we're going to have Mik Kersten returning. He's the founder and CEO of Tasktop. Mik, good to see you again. Where are you dialing in from? >> Great to see you again, Jeff. I'm dialing from Vancouver, Canada. >> Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also we've got Tom Davenport, coming in from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson College. Tom, great to see you. And I think you said you're at a fun exotic place on the East Coast. >> From Massachusetts, Cape Cod. >> Nice, great to see you again. And also joining Serge Lucio. He is the VP and General Manager Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom. Serge, great to see you again, where are you coming in from? >> From Boston right next to Cape Cod. >> Terrific. So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations on this day. I know it's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil. But let's just jump into it. BizOps Manifesto, what was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition, way bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company initiative that you know, you can do better stuff within your own company? Serge, why don't we start with you? >> Yeah, so I think we were at a really critical juncture, right. Many large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. In fact, many recognized that the business (indistinct) collaboration has been one of the major impediments to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people are, whether we're talking about vendors or system decorators, consulting firms, are talking about the same kind of concepts, but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing all these different players together as part of the coalition and formalizing, basically the core principles and values in a BizOps Manifesto, we can really start to kind of have a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts and we can really start to provide, could have a much better support for large organizations to transform. So whether it is technology or services or training, I think that's really the value of bringing all of these players together. >> Great. And Mik to you. Why did you get involved in this effort? >> So I've been close and follow the agile movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto. And I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level and I think as Serge has noted, we really need to improve at the business level. Every company is trying to become a software innovator, trying to make sure that they can pivot that quickly and then changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers sooner. However, agile practices have really focused that these metrics, these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole. And that just hasn't happened. Organizations are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile, how teams are functioning not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move past that. And that's exactly what the BizOps Manifesto provides. >> Right, great And Tom to you, you've been covering tech for a very very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and a lot of work around analytics and data and data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you could kind of share your perspective of what you got excited to sign onto this manifesto. >> Sure. Well, I have, you know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on Data Analytics and AI, but before that I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy. And in general, I think, you know we've just kind of optimize that to narrow a level whether you're talking about agile or DevOps or MLops, any of these kind of ops oriented movements. We're making individual project performance and productivity better but we're not changing the business effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the BizOps idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >> That's great. Serge back to you, right. I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time and it's been you know, kind of trucking along and then COVID hit and it was instant light switch. Everyone's working from home, you've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication, both within your customer base and your partner base but also then your employees. One of you can share how that really pushed this all along, right. Because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly when maybe revenues are down and you really have to prioritize and get it right. >> Yeah. Maybe I'll just start by quoting Satina Nello, basically recently said that there's been two years of digital transformation just last two months. And in any many ways that's true. But yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with a kind of a changes in culture. That they really need to drive to be able to disrupt themselves. And not surprisingly you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right? About 40% of the personal loans today, are being originated by fintechs of a like of Sophie or LendingClub, right? Not to traditional brick and mortar for a bank. And so the, well, there is kind of a much more of an appetite and it's a more of a survival type of driver these days. The reality is that in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on this digital transformation they need to start to really align the business in IT. You know, in many ways and make cover that agile really emerge from the core desire to truly improve software predictability which we've really missed is all that we start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continual sleep continuous improvement and measurement of business outcomes. So by aligning that of these discuss inward metrics that's, IT is typically being using to business outcomes. We think we can start to really help different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There's an imperative to acts now and resolves I think is kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation. >> Great. I want to follow up on the culture comment with you, Tom because you've talked before about kind of process flow and process flow throughout a whore and an organization. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time. And I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think. And then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just the tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >> Yeah. You know, I've always found that the soft stuff about, you know, the culture of a behavior the values is the hard stuff to change and more and more we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation you have to change people's behaviors and attitudes. We haven't made as much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data driven cultures. And in many cases there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that cultural, behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we build system. You know, if we build it, they won't necessarily come. >> Right. So I want to go to you Nick. 'Cause you know, we're talking about workflows and flow and, and you've written about flow both in terms of, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks which is now even more important again when these decisions are much more critical 'cause you have a lot less wiggle room in tough times, but you also talked about flow from the culture side and the people side. So, I wanted if you can just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things, to get the answers better. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom has said. If you're optimized, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business and the customer. Now, what we've noticed in the data, since that we've learned from customers, value streams, enterprise organizations value streams, is that when it's taking six months at the end to deliver that value with the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers unhappy customers when you're innovating house. So high performing organizations we can measure their end flow time and dates. All of a sudden that feedback loop the satisfaction your developer's measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context, switching glass you're delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these other approximate tricks that we use which is how efficient is my agile team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility of fast learning of adaptability to the business. And that's exactly what the BizOps Manifesto pushes your organization to do. You need to put in place this new operating model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before. >> Right. I love that. And I'm going back to you, Tom, on that to follow up 'cause I think, I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for 'cause you know if you're optimizing for A versus B, you know you can have a very different product that you kick out and let you know. My favorite example is with Clayton Christensen and innovator's dilemma talking about the three inch hard drive. If you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing if you optimize it for vibration is another thing and sure enough, you know, they missed it on the poem because it was the game console which drove that whole business. So when you when you're talking to customers and we think we hear it with cloud all the time people optimizing for a cost efficiency instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool. How do you help them kind of rethink and really, you know, force them to look at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just said what are you optimizing for? >> Oh yeah, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And you know, it's a difficult aspect to the decision to frame it correctly in the first place. There, it's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue, but if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly to narrowly say, or you frame it as an either or situation where you could actually have some of both, it's very difficult for the process to work out correctly. So in many cases that I think we need to think more at the beginning about how we bring this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, it's worth that extra time to think carefully about how the decision has been structured. >> Right. Serge, I want to go back to you and talk about the human factors, because as we've just discussed, you could put it in great technology, but if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know, it's not going to be successful and that's going to reflect poorly on the technology, even if it had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the core values of the Bezos Manifesto, you know, a big one is trust and collaboration, you know, learn, respond and pivot. One of you can share your thoughts on trying to get that cultural shift so that you can have success with the people or excuse me, with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive position. >> So I think, at the ground level, it truly starts with the realization that we're all different. We come from different backgrounds. Often times we tend to blame the data. It's not uncommon my experiments that we spend the first you know 30 minutes of any kind of one hour conversation to debate the validity of the data. And so one of the first kind of probably manifestations that we've had or revelations as we start to engage with our customers is like just exposing high-fidelity data sets to different stakeholders from their different lens. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data. That's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when we think about kind of the types of changes that we're trying to truly effect around data driven decision making it's all about bringing the data in context, the context that is relevant and understandable for different stakeholders, whether we're talking about an operator or a developer or a business analyst. So that's, the first thing. The second layer I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific cycle. And so I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business KPI whether you are counting you know, sales per hour, or the engagements of your users on your mobile applications, whatever it is. You can start to connect that KPI to business KPI to the KPIs that developers might be looking at, whether it is the number of defects or a velocity or whatever, you know metrics that they are used to actually track. You start to be able to actually contextualize in what we are the effecting, basically a metric that is really relevant in which we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, you know, some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives to drive engagements, right? So if you look at zoom for instance, zoom giving away it's service to education, is all about, I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in therapists. It's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams. And because now they're doing something for good and the organizations are trying to do that. But you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink how you connect to everybody's kind of a business objective through data and now you start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lens and collaborate on all the data. >> Right, great That's a good. Tom I want to go back to you. You've been studying IT for a long time, writing lots of books and getting into it. Why now, you know, what why now (laughs) are we finally aligning business objectives with IT objectives? You know, why didn't this happen before? And you know, what are the factors that are making now the time for this move with the BizOps? >> Well, much of a past, IT was sort of a back office related activity. And, you know, it was important for producing your pay check and capturing the customer orders but the business wasn't built around it. Now, every organization needs to be a software business data business a digital business, the auntie has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it you run a pretty big risk of, you know going out of business or losing out to competitors totally. So, and even if you're you know, an industry that hasn't historically been terribly technology oriented customer expectations flow from, you know, the digital native companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our IT projects or building things that don't really work for the business. It's mission critical that we do that well almost every time. >> Right. And I just want to follow up by that, Tom In terms of the, you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data and analytics from artisanal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage the AI driven stage and what I find diff interesting that all those stages, you always put a start date. You never put an end date. So, you know, is the big data I'm just going to use that generically moment in time, finally here, where we're you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists but actually can start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >> Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seemed to go away. The artisanal stuff is still being done but we would like for less and lesser of it to be artisanal, we can't really afford for everything to be artisanal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift more and more of it to be done through automation and to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, you know at some point maybe we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanally anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet but you know, we are making progress. >> Right And Mick, back to you in terms of looking at agile 'cause you're such a student of agile, when you look at the opportunity with BizOps and taking the lessons from agile, you know what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? You know, taking this approach will enable. >> Yeah. I think both Serge and Tom hit on this is that in agile what's happened is that we've been you know measuring tiny subsets of the value stream right. We need to elevate the data's there. Developers are working on these tools that delivering features that the foundations for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer. And when I was really happy is when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker I was able to do that the fewer impediments are in my way the quicker was deployed and running in the cloud the happier I was, and that's exactly what's happening. If we can just get the right data elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented around delivering value to customers. Not only these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from an IT, for IT being a cost center and something that provided email and then back office systems. So we need to rapidly shift to those new meaningful metrics that are customized business centric and make sure that every developer the organization is focused on those as well as the business itself, that we're measuring value and we're helping that value flow without interruptions. >> I love that Mik 'cause if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it but you got to be measuring the right thing. So gentlemen, thank you again for your time. Congratulations on the unveil of the BizOps Manifesto and bringing together this coalition of industry experts to get behind this. And you know there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot and you're not wasting resources where you're not going to get the ROI. So congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you from Vancouver. >> Alright, so we had Serge, Tom and Mik. I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. It's a BizOps Manifesto Unveiled. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here with The Cube coverage for two days. We're wrapping up, getting down on day one in the books for the Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of The Cube. We are in Miami Beach, the Fontainebleau Hotel. I'm personally excited for this next guest because I'm a huge Red Sox fan, even though I got moved out to California. Giants is in a different area. National League is different than American League, still my heart with the Red Sox. And we're here with an industry veteran, seasoned professional in IT and data, Brian Shield. Boston Red Sox Vice President of Technology and IT. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> John: So congratulations on the rings. Since I moved out of town, Red sox win their World Series, break the curse of the Bambino. >> Hey we appreciate that. Thank you. >> My family doesn't want me back. You got to show >> Yeah, maybe I'll put this one up for the, maybe someone can zoom in on this. Which camera is the good one? This one here? So, there ya go. So, World Series champs for at least for another week. (laughter) >> Bummer about this year. Pitching just couldn't get it done. But, good team. >> Happens. >> Again, things move on, but you know. New regime, new GM going to come on board. >> Yup. >> So, but in general, Red Sox, storied franchise. Love it there. Fenway Park, the cathedral of baseball parks. >> Brian: Defnitely. >> And you're seeing that just play out now, standard. So just a great place to go. We have tickets there. So, I got to ask you. Technology, sports, really is modernized faster than I think any category. And certainly cyber security forced to modernize because of the threats. But sports, you got a business to run, not just IT and making the planes run on time. >> Sure. >> Scouts, money, whatever. >> Fans. >> You got fan experience. >> Stadium opportunities. >> Club management, scouts are out there. So you got business, team, fans. And data's a big part of it. That's part of your career. Tell us what the cutting edge innovation is at the Red Sox these days. >> I think baseball in general, as you indicated, it's a very evolving kind of environment. I mean historically I think people really sort of relish the nostalgia of sports and Fenway Park being as historic as it is, was probably the pinnacle of that, in some respects. But Red Sox have always been leaders and baseball analytics, you know. And everyone's pretty familiar with "Moneyball" and Brad Pitt. >> John: Is that a true story, he turned down the GM job? >> I'm told it is. (laughter) I don't know if I fully vetted that question. But over the last six, seven years, you know we've really turned our attention to sort of leveraging sort of technology across the businesses, right? Not just baseball and analytics and how we do scouting, which continues to evolve at a very rapid pace. But also as you pointed out, running a better business, understanding our fans, understanding fan behavior, understanding stadiums. There's a lot of challenges around running an effective stadium. First and foremost to all of us is really ensuring it's a great fan experience. Whether it's artificial intelligence, or IoT technologies or 5G or the latest Wifi, all those things are coming up at Fenway Park. You and I talked earlier about we're about to break ground for a new theater, so a live theater on the outside, beyond the bleachers type of thing. So that'll be a 5,400-seat arena, 200 live performances a year, and with e-sports, you know, complementing it. It just gives you an example of just how fast baseball is sort of transitioning. >> And the theater, is that going to be blown out from where that parking garage is, structure and going towards >> So the corner of Landsdown and Ipswich, if you think of that sort of corner back there, for those that are familiar with the Fenway area. So it's going to be a very big change and you'll see the difference too from within the ballpark. I think we'll lose a couple of rows of the bleachers. That'll be replaced with another gathering area for fans and things like that, on the back end of that theater. So build a great experience and I think it really speaks to sort of our ability to think of Fenway as more of a destination, as a venue, as a complementary experience. We want people to come to the area to enjoy sports and to enjoy entertainment and things. >> You know Brian, the consumerization of IT has been kicked around. Last decade, that was a big buzzword. Now the blending of a physical event and digital has certainly consumed the world. >> Absolutely. >> And we're starting to see that dynamic. You speak to a theater. That's a physical space. But digital is also a big part of kind of that complementary. It's not mutually exclusive for each other. They're integrated business models. >> Absolutely. >> So therefore, the technology has to be seamless. The data has to be available. >> Yup. >> And it's got to be secure. >> Well the data's got to be ubiquitous, right? I mean you don't want to, if we're going to have fans attending theater and then you're going to go to Fenway Park or they leave a game and then go to some other event or they attend a tour of Fenway Park, and beyond maybe the traditional what people might think about, is certainly when you think about baseball and Fenway Park. You know we have ten to twelve concerts a year. We'll host Spartan games, you know. This Christmas, I'm sorry, Christmas 2020 we now have sort of the Fenway Bowl. So we'll be hosting the AAC ACC championship games there with ESPN. >> John: Hockey games? >> Hockey games. Obviously we have Liverpool soccer being held there so it's much more of a destination, a venue for us. How we leverage all the wonderful things about Fenway Park and how we modernize, how we get basically the best of what makes Fenway Park as great as it is, yet as modern as we can make it, where appropriate to create a great fan experience. >> It's a tough balance between balancing the brand and having things on brand as well. >> Sure. >> Does that come into your job a lot around IT? Saying being on brand, not kind of tearing down the old. >> Yeah absolutely. I think our CEOs and leadership team, I mean it's not success for us if you pan to the audience and everyone is looking at their phone, right? That's not what we aspire to. We aspire to leverage technology to simplify people's experience of how do you get to the ballpark, how do I park, how do I get if I want to buy concessions or merchandise, how do I do it easily and simply? How do we supplement that experience with maybe additional data that you may not have had before. Things like that, so we're doing a lot of different testing right now whether it's 4D technologies or how we can understand, watch a play from different dimensions or AI and be able to perhaps see sort of the skyline of Boston since 1912, when Fenway Park launched... And so we sort of see all these technologies as supplemental materials, really kind of making it a holistic experience for fans. >> In Las Vegas, they have a section of Las Vegas where they have all their test beds. 5G, they call it 5G, it's really, you know, evolution, fake 5G but it's a sandbox. One of the challenges that you guys have in Boston, I know from a constraint standpoint physically, you don't have a lot of space. How do you sandbox new technologies and what are some of the things that are cool that people might not know about that are being sandboxed? So, one, how do you do it? >> Yeah. >> Effectively. And then what are some of the cool things that you guys are looking at or things they might not know about that would be interesting. >> Sure. Yeah so Fenway Park, we struggle as you know, a little bit with our footprint. You know, honestly, I walk into some of these large stadiums and I get instant jealousy, relative to just the amount of space that people have to work with and things. But we have a great relationship with our partners so we really partner, I think, particularly well with key partners like Verizon and others. So we now have 5G partially implemented at Fenway Park. We expect to have it sort of fully live come opening day next year. So we're really excited about that. We hope to have a new version of Wifi, the latest version of Wifi available, for the second half of the year. After the All-Star Break, probably after the season's over. But before our bowl game hopefully. We're looking at some really interesting ways that we can tease that out. That bowl game, we're really trying to use that as an opportunity, the Fenway Bowl, as an opportunity to make it kind of a high-tech bowl. So we're looking at ways of maybe doing everything from hack-a-thons to a pre-egaming sort of event to some interesting fan experiential opportunities and things like that. >> Got a lot of nerds at MIT, Northeastern, BU, Bentley, Babson, all the schools in the area. >> Yeah, so we'll be reaching out to colleges and we'll be reaching out to our, the ACC and AACs as well, and see what we can do to kind of create sort of a really fun experience and capitalize on the evolving role of e-sports and the role that technology can play in the future. >> I want to get to the e-sports in a second but I want to just get the plug in for Acronis. We're here at their Global Cyber Summit. You flew down for it, giving some keynote speeches and talks around security. It's a security company, data protection, to cyber protection. It is a data problem, not a storage appliance problem. It's a data problem holistically. You get that. >> Sure. Sure. >> You've been in the business for a long time. What is the security kind of posture that you guys have? Obviously you want to protect the data, protect privacy. But you got to business. You have people that work with you, supply chain, complex but yet dynamic, always on environment. >> That's a great question. It's evolving as you indicated. Major League Baseball, first and foremost, does an outstanding job. So the last, probably last four plus years, Major League Baseball has had a cyber security program that all the clubs partake in. So all 30 clubs are active participants in the program. They basically help build out a suite of tools as well as the ability to kind of monitor, help participate in the monitoring, sort of a lot of our cyber security assets and logs And that's really elevated significantly our posture in terms of security. We supplement that quite a bit and a good example of that is like Acronis. Acronis, for us, represents the ability for us to be able to respond to certain potential threats like ransom-ware and other things. As well as frankly, what's wonderful about a tool like this is that it allows us to also solve other problems. Making our scouts more efficient. We've got these 125 scouts scattered around the globe. These guys are the lifeblood of our, you know, the success of our business. When they have a problem, if they're in Venezuela or the Dominican or someplace else, in southeast Asia, getting them up and running as quickly as we can, being able to consume their video assets and other things as they're scouting prospects. We use Acronis for those solutions. It's great to kind of have a partner who can both double down as a cyber partner as well as someone who helps drive a more efficient business. >> People bring their phone into the stadiums too so those are end points now connecting to your network. >> Definitely. And as you pointed out before, we've got great partnerships. We've got a great concession relationship with Aramark and they operate, in the future they'll be operating off our infrastructure. So we're in the point of rolling out all new point-of-sale terminals this off-season. We're excited about that 'cause we think for the first time it really allows us to build a very comprehensive, very secure environment for both ourselves and for all the touchpoints to fans. >> You have a very stellar career. I noticed you were at Scudder Investments back in the '80s, very cutting-edge firm. FTD that set the whole standard for connecting retailers. Again, huge scale play. Can see the data kind of coming out, they way you've been a CIO, CTO. The EVP CIO at The Weather Channel and the weather.com again, first mover, kind of pioneer. And then now the Red Sox, pioneering. So I got to ask you the modernization question. Red Sox certainly have been cutting-edge, certainly under the last few owners, and the previous Henry is a good one, doing more and more, Has the business model of baseball evolved, 'cause you guys a franchise. >> Sure. >> You operate under the franchisor, Major League Baseball, and you have jurisdictions. So has digital blurred the lines between what Advanced Media unit can do. You got communities developing outside. I watch the games in California. I'm not in there but I'm present digitally. >> Sure. Sure. >> So how has the business model flexed with the innovation of baseball? >> That's a great question. So I mean, first off, the relationship between clubs like ours and MLB continue to evolve. We have a new commissioner, relatively new commissioner, and I think the whole one-baseball model that he's been promoting I think has been great. The boundaries sometimes between digital assets and how we innovate and things like that continues to evolve. Major League Baseball and technology groups and product groups that support Major League Baseball have been a fantastic partner of ours. If you look at some of the innovations with Statcast and some of the other types of things that fans are now becoming more familiar with. And when they see how fast a runner goes or how far a home run goes and all those sort of things, these kinds of capabilities are on the surface, but even like mobile applications, to make it easy for fans to come into ballparks and things like that really. What we see is really are platforms for the future touchpoints to all of our customers. But you're right, it gets complicated. Streaming videos and people hadn't thought of before. >> Latin America, huge audience for the Red Sox. Got great players down there. That's outside the jurisdiction, I think, of the franchise agreement, isn't it? (laughs) >> Well, it's complicated. As this past summer, we played two games in England, right? So we enjoy two games in London, sadly we lost to the Yankees in both of those, but amazing experience and Major League Baseball really hats off to those guys, what they did to kind of pull that together. >> You mentioned Statcast. Every year when I meet with Andy Jassy at AWS, he's a sports fan. We love to talk sports. That's a huge, kind of shows the power of data and cloud computing. >> No doubt. >> How do you guys interface with Statcast? Is that an Amazon thing? Do they come to you? Are they leveraging dimensions, camera angles? How does that all work? Are you guys involved in that or? >> Brian: Oh yeah, yeah. >> Is that separate? >> So Statcast is just one of many data feeds as you can imagine. One of the things that Major League Baseball does is all that type of data is readily available to every club. So every club has access to the data. The real competitive differentiator, if you will, is how you use it internally. Like how your analysts can consume that data. We have a baseball system we call Beacon. We retired Carmine, if you're familiar with the old days of Carmine. So we retired Carmine a few years ago with Beacon. And Beacon for us represents sort of our opportunity to effectively collapse all this information into a decision-making environment that allows us to hopefully to kind of make the best decisions to win the most games. >> I love that you're answering all these questions. I really appreciate it. The one I really want to get into is obviously the fan experience. We talked about that. No talent on the field means no World Series so you got to always be constantly replenishing the talent pool, farm system, recruiting, scouting, all these things go on. They're instrumental. Data's a key driver. What new innovations that the casual fan or IT person might be interested in what's going on around scouting and understanding the asset of a human being? >> Right. Sure. I mean some of this gets highly confidential and things, but I think at a macro level, as you start to see both in the minor leagues and in some portions of the major leagues, wearable technologies. I think beyond just sort of player performance information that you would see traditionally with you might associate it with like Billy Beane, and things like that with "Moneyball" which is evolved obviously considerably since those days. I mean understanding sort of player wellness, understanding sort of how to get the most out of a player and understanding sort of, be able to kind of predict potential injuries and accelerate recoveries and being able to use all of this technology where appropriate to really kind of help sort of maximize the value of player performance. I mean, David Ortiz, you know, I don't know where we would have been in 2018 without, you know, David. >> John: Yeah. >> But like, you know >> Longevity of a player. >> Absolutely. >> To when they're in the zone. You wear a ring now to tell you if you're sleeping well. Will managers have a visual, in-the-zone, don't pull 'em out, he can go an extra inning? >> Well, I mean they have a lot of data. We currently don't provide all that data to the clubhouse. I mean, you know, and so If you're in the dugout, that information isn't always readily available type of thing. But players know all this information. We continue to evolve it. At the end of the day though, it's finding the balancing act between data and the aptitudes of our coaching staff and our managers to really make the wise decisions. >> Brian, final question for you. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now? Besides the fan having a great experience, 'cause that's you kind of touched on that. What's the coolest thing that you're excited about that you're working on from a tech perspective that you think is going to be game-changing or interesting? >> I think our cloud strategy coming up in the future. It's still a little bit early stage, but our hope would be to kind of have clarity about that in the next couple months. I think is going to be a game-changer for us. I think having, you know, we enjoy a great relationship with Dell EMC and yet we also do work in the cloud and so being able to leverage the best of both of those to be able to kind of create sort of a compelling experience for both fans, for both player, baseball operations as well as sort of running an efficient business, I think is really what we're all about. >> I mean you guys are the poster child for hybrid cloud because you got core, data center, IoT, and >> No doubt. So it's exciting times. And we're very fortunate that with our relationship organizations like Dell and EMC, we have leading-edge technologies. So we're excited about where that can go and kind of what that can mean. It'll be a big step. >> Okay two personal questions from me as a fan. One is there really a money-counting room like in the movie "The Town"? Where they count a big stack of dollar bills. >> Well, I'm sure there is. I personally haven't visited it. (laughs) I know it's not in the room that they would tell you it is on the movie. (laughter) >> And finally, can The Cube get press passes to cover the games, next to NESN? Talk tech. >> Yeah, we'll see what we can do. >> They can talk baseball. We can talk about bandwidth. Right now, it's the level five conductivity. We're looking good on the pipes. >> Yeah we'll give you a tech tour. And you guys can sort of help us articulate all that to the fans. >> Thank you so much. Brian Shield, Vice President of Technology of the Boston Red Sox. Here talking about security and also the complications and challenges but the mega-opportunities around what digital and fan experiences are with the physical product like baseball, encapsulates kind of the digital revolution that's happening. So keep covering it. Here in Miami, I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back after this short break. (techno music)

(bright symphony music) >> Hello, I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE Media and co-host of theCUBE. We're here in Paulo Alto at our studio here. I'm joining with Joseph Jacks, the founder and general partner of OSS Capital. Open Source Software Capital, is what OSS stands for. He's also the founder of KubeCon which now is part of the CNCF. It's a huge conference around Kubernetes. He's a cloud guy. He knows open source. Very well respected in the industry and also a great guest and friend of theCUBE, CUBE alumni. Joseph, great to see you. Also known as JJ. JJ, good to see you. >> Thank you for having me on again, John. >> Hey, great to have you come on. I know we've talked many times on theCUBE, but you've got some exciting news. You got a new firm, OSS Capital. Open Source Software, not operational support like a telco, but this is an investment opportunity where you're making investments. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> So I know you can't talk about some of the specifics on the funds size, but you are actually going to go out, talk to entrepreneurs, make some equity investments. Around open source software. What's the thesis? How did you get here, why did you do it? What's motivating you, and what's the thesis? >> A lot of questions in there. Yeah, I mean this is a really profoundly huge year for open source software. On a bunch of different levels. I think the biggest kind of thing everyone anchors towards is GitHub being acquired by Microsoft. Just a couple of weeks ago, we had the two huge hadoop vendors join forces. That, I think, surprised a lot of people. MuleSoft, which is a big opensource middleware company, getting acquired by Salesforce just a year after going public. Just a huge outcome. I think one observation, just to sort of like summarize the year 2018, is actually, starting in January, almost on sort of like a monthly basis, we've observed a major sort of opensource software company outcome. And sort of kicking off the year, we had CoreOS getting acquired by Red Hat. Brandon and Alex, the founders over there, built a really interesting company in the Kubernetes ecosystem. And I think in February, Al Fresco, which is an open source content portal taking privatization outcome from a private equity firm, I believe in March we had Magento getting acquired by Adobe, which an open source based CMS. PHP CMS. So just a lot of activity for significant outcomes. Multibillion dollar outcomes of commercial open source companies. And open source software is something like 20 years old. 20 years in the making. And this year in particular, I've just seen just a huge amount of large scale outcomes that have been many years in the making from companies that have taken lots of venture funding. And in a lot of cases, sort of partially focused funding from different investors that have an affinity for open source software and sort of understand the uniqueness of the open source model when it's applied to business, when it's applied to company building. But more sort of opportunistic and sort of affinity oriented, as opposed to a pure focus. So that's kind of been part of the motivation. I'd say the more authentically compelling motivation for doing this is that it just needs to exist. This is sort of a model that is happening by necessity. We're seeing more and more software companies be open source software companies. So open source first. They're built in a distributed way. They're leveraging engineers and talent around the world. They're just part of this open source kind of philosophy. And they are fundamentally kind of commercial open source software companies. We felt that if you had a firm basically designed in a way to exclusively focus on those kind of companies, and where the firmware actually backed and supported by the founders of the largest commercial open source companies in the world before sort of the last decade. That could actually deliver a lot of value. So we've been sort of blogging a little bit about this. >> And you wrote a great post on it. I read about open source monetization. But I think one of the things I'm seeing as well that supports your thesis, and I like to get your reaction to it because I think this is something that's not really talked about, but open source is still young. I mean, you go back. I remember the days when we used to have to hide in the shadows to get licenses and pirate stuff and do all those crazy stuff. But now, it's only a couple decades away. The leaders that were investing were usually entrepreneurs that've been successful. The Rob Bearns, the Amar Wadhwa, the guy that did Spring. All these different open source. Linux, obviously, great success story. But there hasn't any been any institutional. Yeah, you got benchmark, other things, done some investments. A discipline around open source. Where open source is now table stakes in all software development. Cloud is scaling, scaling out globally. There's no real foc- There's never been a firm that's been focused on- Just open source from a commercial, while maintaining the purity and ethos of open source. I mean, is that. >> You agree? >> That's true. >> 100%, yeah. That's been the big part of creating the firm is aligning and solving for a pure focused structure. And I think what I'll say abstractly is this sort of venture capital, venture style approach to funding enterprise technology companies, software companies in general, has been to kind of find great entrepreneurs and in an abstract way that can build great technology companies. Can bring them to market, can sell them, and can scale them, and so on. And either create categories, or dominate existing categories, and disrupt incumbents, and so on. And I think while that has worked for quite a while, in the venture industry overall, in the 50, 60 years of the venture industry, lots of successful firms, I think what we're starting to see is a necessary shift toward accounting for the fundamental differences of opensource software as it relates to new technology getting created and going, and new software companies kind of coming into market. So we actually fundamentally believe that commercial open source software companies are fundamentally different. Functionally in almost every way, as compared to proprietary closed source software companies of the last 30 years. And the way we've sort of designed our firm and we'll about ten people pretty soon. We're just about a month in. We're growing the team quickly, but we're sort of a small, focused team. >> A ten's not focused small, I mean, I know venture firms that have two billion in management that don't have more than 20 people. >> Well, we have portfolio partners that are focused in different functional areas where commercial open source software companies have really fundamental differences. If you were to sort of stack rank, by function, where commercial open source software companies are really fundamentally different, sort of top to bottom. Legal would be, probably, the very top of the list. Right, in terms of license compliance management, structuring all the sort of protections and provisions around how intellectual property is actually shipped to and sold to customers. The legal licensing aspects. The commercial software licensing. This is quite a polarizing hot topic these days. The second big functional area where we have a portfolio partner focused on this is finance. Finance is another area where commercial open source software companies have to sort of behaviorally orient and apply that function very, very differently as compared to proprietary software companies. So we're crazy honored and excited to have world experts and very respected leaders in those different areas sort of helping to provide sort of different pillars of wisdom to our portfolio companies, our portfolio founders, in those different functional areas. And we provide a really focused kind of structure for them. >> Well I want to ask you the kind of question that kind of bridges the old way and new way, 'cause I definitely see you guys definitely being new and different, which is good. Or as Andy Jassy would say, you can be misunderstood for a while, but as you become successful, people will start understanding what you do. And that's a great example of Amazon. The pattern with success is traditionally the same. If we kind of encapsulate the difference between open source old and new, and that is you have something of value, and you're disrupting the market and collecting rents from it. Or revenue, or profit. So that's commercial, that's how businesses run. How are you guys going to disrupt with open source software the next generation value creation? We know how value's created, certainly in software that opensource has shown a path on how to create value in writing software if code is value and functionality's value. But to commercialize and create revenue, which is people paying something for something. That's a little bit different kind of value extraction from the value creation. So open source software can create value in functionality and value product. Now you bring it to the market, you get paid for it, you have to disrupt somebody, you have to create something. How are you looking at that? What's the vision of the creation, the extraction of value, who's disrupted, is it greenfield new opportunities? What's your vision? >> A lot of nuance and complexity in that question. What I would say is- >> Well, open source is creating products. >> Well, open source is the basis for creating products in a different kind of way. I'll go back to your question around let's just sort of maybe simplify it as the value creation and the value capture dynamics, right? We've sort of written a few posts about this, and it's subtle, but it's easy to understand if you look at it from a fundamental kind of perspective. We actually believe, and we'll be publishing research on this, and maybe even sort of more principled scientific, perhaps, even ways of looking at it. And then blog posts and research. We believe that open source software will always generate or create orders of magnitude more value than any constituent can capture. Right, and that's a fundamental way of looking at it. So if you see how cloud providers are capturing value that open source creates, whether it's Elasticsearch, or Postgres, or MySQL or Hadoop. And then commercial open source software companies that capture value that open source software creates, whether it's companies like Confluent around Kafka, or Cloudera around Hadoop, or Databricks around Apache Spark. Or whether it's the creators of those projects. The creators of Spark and Hadoop and Elasticsearch, sometimes many of them are the founders of those companies I mentioned, and sometimes they're not. We just believe regardless of how that sort of value is captured by the cloud providers, the commercial vendors, or the creators, the value created relative to the value captured will always be orders and orders of magnitude greater. And this is expressed in another way, which this may be easier to understand, it's a sort of reinforcing this kind of assertion that there's orders of magnitude value created far greater than what can be captured. If you were to do a survey, which we're currently in the process of doing, and I'm happy to sort of say that publicly for the first time here, of all the commercial open source software companies that have projects with large significant adoption, whether, say for example, it's Docker, with millions of users, or Apache Hadoop. How many Hadoop deployments there are. How many customers' companies are there running Hadoop deployments. Or it may be even MySQL. How many MySQL installations are there. And then you were to sort of survey those companies and see how many end users are there relative to how many customers are paying for the usage of the project. It would probably be something like if there were a million users of a given project, the company behind that project or the cloud provider, or say the end user, the developer behind the project, is unlikely to capture more than, say, 1% or a couple percent of those end users to companies, to paying companies, to paying customers. And many times, that's high. Many times, 1% to 2% is very high. Often, what we've seen actually anecdotally, and we're doing principled research around this, and we'll have data here across a large number of companies, many times it's a fraction of 1%. Which is just sort of maybe sometimes 10% of 1%, or even smaller. >> So the practitioners will be making more money than the actual vendors? >> Absolutely right. End users and practitioners always stand to benefit far greater because of the fundamental nature of open source. It's permissionless, it's disaggregated, the value creation dynamics are untethered, and it is fundamentally freely available to use, freely available to contribute to, with different constraints based on the license. However, all those things are sort of like disaggregating the creating of technology into sort of an unbounded network. And that's really, really incredible. >> Okay, so first of all, I agree with your premise 100%. We've seen it with CUBE, where videos are free. >> And that's a good thing. All those things are good. >> And Dave Vellante says this all the time on theCUBE. And we actually pointed this out and called this in the Hadoop ecosystem in 2012. In fact, we actually said that on theCUBE, and it turned out to be true, 'cause look at Hortonworks and Cloudera had to merge because, again, the market changed very quickly >> Value Creation. >> Because value >> Was created around them in the immediate cloud, etc. So the question is, that changes the valuation mechanisms. So if this true, which we believe it is. Just say it is. Then the traditional net present value cash flow metric of the value of the firm, not your firm, but, like, if I'm an open source firm, I'm only one portion of the extraction. I'm a supplier, and I'm an enabler, the valuation on cash flow might not be as great as the real impact. So the question I have for you, have you thought about the valuation? 'Cause now you're thinking about bigger construct community network effects. These are new dynamics. I don't think anyone's actually crunched a valuation model around this. So if someone knew that, say for example, an open source project created all this value, and they weren't necessarily harvesting it from a cash flow perspective, there might be other ways to monetize it. Have you though about that, and what's your reaction to that concept? 'Cause capitalism would kind of shake down the system. 'Cause why would someone be motivated to participate if they're not capturing any value? So if the value shifts, are they still going to be able to participate? You follow the logic I'm trying to- >> I definitely do. I think what I would say to that is we expect and we encourage and we will absolutely heavily invest in more business model innovation in the area of open source. So what I mean by that is, and it's important to sort of qualify a few things there. There's a huge amount of polarization and lack of consensus, lack of industry consensus on what it actually means to have or implement an open source based business model. In fact there's a lot of people who just sort of point blankedly assert that an opensource business model does not exist. We believe that many business models for monetizing and commercializing open source exist. We've blogged and written about a few of them. Their services and training and support. There's open core, which is very effective in sort of a spectrum of ways to implement open core. Around the core, you can have a thin crust or a thick crust. There's SAS. There are hardware based distribution models, things like Sourcefire, and Cumulus Networks. And there are also network based approaches. For example, project called Storj or Stor-J. Being developed and run now by Ben Golub, who's the former CEO of Docker. >> CUBE alumni. >> Ben's really great open source veteran. This is a network, kind of decentralized network based approach of sort of right sizing the production and consumption of the resource of a storage based open source project in a decentralized network. So those are sort of four or five ways to commercializing value, however, four or five ways of commercializing value, however what we believe is that there will be more business model innovation. There will be more developments around how you can better capture more, or in different ways, the value that open source creates. However, what I will say though, is it is unrealistic to expect two things. It is unrealistic and, in fact, unfair to expect that any of those constituents will contribute back to open source proportional to the value that they received from it, or the benefit, and I'm actually paraphrasing Doug Cutting there, who tweeted this a couple of years ago. Very profoundly deep, wise tweet, which I very strongly agree with. And it is also unrealistic to expect a second thing, which is that any of those constituents can capture a material portion of the value that open source creates, which I would assert is many trillions of dollars, perhaps tens of trillions of dollars. It's really hard to quantify that. And it's not just dollars in economic sense, it's dollars in productivity time saved, new markets, new areas, and so on. >> Yeah, I think this is interesting, and I think that we'll be an open book at that. But I will say that what I've observed in looking through all these CUBE interviews, I think that business model innovation absolutely is something that is an IP. >> We need it. Well, it's now intellectual property, the business model isn't, hey I went to business school, learned this at Babson or Harvard, I learned this business model. We're going to do SAS premium. Okay, I get that. There's going to be very interesting new innovations coming, and I think that's the new IP. 'Cause open source, if it's community based, there's going to be formulas. So that's going to be really inter- Okay, so now let's get back to actual funding itself. You guys are doing early stage. Can you take us through the approach? >> We're very focused on early stage, investing, and backing teams that are, just sort of welcoming the idea of a commercial entity around their open source project. Or building a business fundamentally dependent on an open source project or maybe even more than one. The reason for that is this is really where there's a lot of structural inefficiency in supporting and backing those types of founders. >> I think one of the things with ... is with that acquisition. They were pure on the open source side, doing a great job, didn't want to push the business model too hard because the open source, let's face it, you got people like, eh, I don't want to get caught on the business side, and get revenue, perverse incentives might come up, or fear of incentives that might be different or not aligned. Was a great a value. >> I think so. >> So Red Hat got a steal on that one. But as you go forward, there's going to be certainly a lot more stuff. We're seeing a lot of it now in CNCF, for instance. I want to get your thoughts on this because, being the co founder of KubeCon, and donating it to the CNCF, Kubernetes is the hottest thing on the planet, as we talked about many years ago. What's your take on that, now? I see exciting things happening. What is the impact of Kubernetes, in your opinion, to the world, and where do you see that evolving rapidly, and where is the focus here as the people should be paying attention to? >> I think that Kubernetes replaces EC2. Kubernetes is a disaggregated API for distributed computing anywhere. And it happens to be portable and able to run on any kind of computer infrastructure, which sort of makes it like a liquid disaggregated EC2-like API. Which a lot of people have been sort of chasing and trying to implement for many years with things like OpenStack or Eucalyptus. But interestingly, Kubernetes is sort of the right abstraction for distributed computing, because it meets people where they are architecturally. It's sort of aligned with this current movement around distributed systems first designs. Microservices, packaging things in small compartmentalized units. >> Good for integrating of existing stuff. >> Absolutely, and it's very composable, un-opinionated architecturally. So you can sort of take an application and structure it in any given way, and as long as it has this sort of isolation boundary of a container, you can run it on Kubernetes without needing to sort of retrofit the architecture, which is really awesome. I think Kubernetes is a foundational part of the next kind of computing paradigm in the same way that Linux was foundational to the computing paradigm that gave rise to the internet. We had commodity hardware meeting open source based sort of cost reduction and efficiency, which really Linux enabled, and the movement toward scale out data center infrastructure that supported the Internet's sort of maturity and infrastructure. I think we're starting to see the same type of repeat effect thanks to Kubernetes basically being really well received by engineers, by the cloud providers. It's now the universal sort of standard for running container based applications on the different cloud providers. >> And think having the non-technical opinion posture, as you said, architectural posture, allows it to be compatible with a new kind of heterogeneous. >> Heterogeneity is critical. >> Heterogeneity is key, 'cause it's not just within the environment, it's also within each vendor, or customer has more heterogeneity. So, okay, now that's key. So multi cloud, I want to get your thoughts on multi cloud, because now this goes into some of things that might build on top of if Kubernetes continues to go down the road that you say it does. Then the next question is, stateful applications, service meshes. >> A lot of buzz words. A lot of buzz words in there. Stateful application's real because at a certain point in time, you have a maturity curve with critical infrastructure that starts to become appealing for stateful mission critical storage systems, which is typically where you have all the crown jewels of a given company's infrastructure, whether it's a transactional system, or reading and writing core customer, or financial service information, or whatever it is. So Kubernetes' starting to hit this maturity curve where people are migrating really serious mission critical storage workloads onto that platform. And obviously we're going to start to see even more critical work loads. We're starting to see Edge workloads because Kubernetes is a pretty low footprint system, so you can run it on Edge devices, you can even run it on microcontrollers. We're sort of past the experimental, you know, fun and games was Raspberry Pi, sort of towers, and people actually legitimately doing real world Edge kind of deployments with Kubernetes. We're absolutely starting to see multi-geo, multi-replication, multi-cloud sort of style architectures becoming real, as well. Because Kubernetes is this API that the industry's agreeing upon sufficiently. We actually have agreement around this sort of surface area for distributed system style computing that if cloud providers can actually standardize on in a way that lets application specific vendors or new types of application deployment models innovate further, then we can really unlock this sort of tight coupling of proprietary services inside cloud providers and disaggregate it. Which is really exciting, and I forget the Netscape, Jim Barksdale. Bundling, un-bundling. We're starting to see the un-bundling of proprietary cloud computing service API's. Things like Kinesis, and ALB and ELB and proprietary storage services, and these other sticky services get un-bundled because of two big things. Open source, obviously, we have open source alternative data paths. And then we have Kubernetes which allows us to sort of disaggregate things out pretty easily. >> I want to hear your thoughts, one final concept, before we break, 'cause I was having a private conversation with three people besides myself. A big time CIO of a company that if I said the name everyone would go, oh my god, that guy is huge, he's seen it all going back many, many ways. Currently done a lot of innovation. A hardcore network chip guy who knows networking, old school infrastructure. And then a cloud native application founder who knows a lot about software development and is state-of-the-art cloud native. So cloud native, all experienced, old-school, kind of about my age, a cloud native app developer, a big time CIO, and a chip networking kind of infrastructure guy. And we're talking, and one thing that came out, I want to get you thoughts on this, he says, so what's going on with DevOps, how do you see this service mesh, is a stay for (mumbles) on top of the stack, no stacks, horizontally scalable. And the comment that came out was storage and networking have had this relationship with everything since day one. Network moves a packet from point A to point B, and nothing happens in between, maybe some inspection. And storage goes from here now to the then, because you store it. He goes, that premise moves up the stacks, so then the cloud native guy goes, well that's what's happening up at the top, there's a lot of moving things around, workloads and or services, provisioning services, and then from now to then state. In real time. And what dawned on the next conversation the CIO goes, well this is exactly our challenge. We have under the hood infrastructure being programmable, >> We're having some trouble with the connection. Please try again. >> My phone's calling me. >> Programmable connections. >> So you got the programmable on the top of the stack too, so the CIO said, that's exactly the problem we're trying to solve. We're trying to solve some of these network storage concepts now at an application level. Your thoughts to that. >> Well, I think if I could tease apart everything you just said, which is profound synthesis of a lot of different things, I think we've started to see application logic leak out of application code itself into dedicated layers that are really good at doing one specific thing. So traditionally we had some crud style kind of behavioral semantics implemented around business logic. And then, inside of that, you also had libraries for doing connectivity and lookups and service discovery and locking and key management and encryption and coordination with other types of applications. And all that stuff was sort of shoved into the single big application binary. And now, we're starting to see all those language runtime specific parts of application code sort of crack or leak out into these dedicated, highly scalable, Unix philosophy oriented sort of like layers. So things like Envoy are really just built for the sort of nervous system layer of application communication fabric up and down the layer two through layer seven sort of protocol transport stack, which is really profound. We're seeing things like Vault from Hashicorp handle secure key storage persistence of application dedication, authorization, metadata and information to sort of access different systems and end points. And that's a dedicated sort of stateful layer that you can sort of fragment out and delegate sort of application specific functionality to, which is really great for scalability reasons. And on, and on, and on. So we've started to see that, and I think one way of looking at that is it's a cycle. It's the sort of bundling and un-bundling aspect. >> One of the granny level services are getting a really low level- >> Yeah, it's a sort of like bundling and un-bundling and so we've got all this un-bundling happening out of application code to these dedicated layers. The bundling back may happen. I've actually seen a few Bay Area companies go like, we're going back to the monolith 'cause it actually gives us lots of efficiencies in things that we though were trade offs before. We're actually comfortable with a big monorepo, and one or two core languages, and we're going to build everything into these big binaries, and everyone's going to sort of live in the same source code repository and break things out through folders or whatever. There's a lot of really interesting things. I don't want to say we're sort of clear on where this bundling, un-bundling is happening, but I do think that there's a lot of un-bundling happening right now. And there's a lot of opportunity there. >> And the open source, obviously, driving it. So final question for you, how many deals have you done? Can you talk a little bit about the firm? And exciting things and plans that you have going forward. >> Yeah, we're going to be making a lot of announcements over the next few months, and we're, I guess, extremely thrilled. I don't want to say overwhelmed, 'cause we're able to handle all of the volume and inquiries and inbound interest. We're really honored and thrilled by the reception over the last couple weeks from announcing the firm on the first of October, sort of before the Hortonworks Cloudera merger. The JFrog funding announcement that week. The Elastic IPO. Just a lot of really awesome things happened that week. This is obviously before Microsoft open sourced all their patents. We'll be announcing more investments that we've made. We announced our first one on the first of October as well with the announcement of the firm. We've made a good number of investments. We're not able to talk to much about our first initiative, but you'll hear more about that in the near future. >> Well, we're excited. I think it's the timing's perfect. I know you've been working on this kind of vision for a while, and I think it's really great timing. Congratulations, JJ >> Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. >> Joesph Jacks, also known as JJ, founder and general partner of OSS Capital, Open Source Software Capital, co founder of KubeCon, which is now part of the CNCF. A real great player in the community and the ecosystem, great to have him on theCUBE, thanks for coming in. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. >> Thanks, John. (bright symphony music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's "The Cube", covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (Salsa style music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to "The Cube". This is our exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound. This is a conference where the local entrepreneurs, industry legends, financiers, funders, everyone's coming together from Blockchain cryptocurrency in the decentralized web. A lot of great use cases. We have the politicians as well here in Puerto Rico, kind of enticing the community to do more here. I'm John Furrier with "The Cube". I'm here with Luis Macias, who's is the CEO of Grain Chain, a start up out of Texas, doing very interesting things with Blockchain, and a really good example of really the value proposition of reducing steps it takes to get something done creating value, and then sharing that value. Luis, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for inviting me. >> So we talked yesterday, here off camera, about what you're doing on, but I want you to take a minute to explain to the folks what you guys do, and why Blockchain? What's the difference? >> Sure. So, I would say about 5 years ago we got approached by a large scale farmer, and he asked us to find a solution to be able to modernize his business, you know. As we all know, the farming industry is not as technical as a lot of the other industries, so we went out and searched and we just couldn't find a solution. So we built the appropriate solution to take a seed from the ground and take it all the way to the commodities market in an instant, instead of 3 to 4 weeks. So basically what we do is we join the buyer or the buyers of the actual soft commodities, and we allow them to create smart contracts with individual farmers. This ensures not only the payment to the farmer, but it allows the farmer to get paid instantly. What does it do really for our overall industry? Our buyers gain instant custody of the actual grain the second it crosses the scale. That changes everybody's life dramatically. >> So the middle man gets kind of disrupted, but before we go in that, I want to kind of dig, >> Sure >> it's important because I'm from California. >> Okay >> It's a huge farming thing there, cultural thing going on there. What's your background? How did you get here? I mean, how long have you been doing it? >> Sure. >> And when did you jump on the Blockchain as an opportunity? >> So we've been developing software for the last 17 years. We've done it for the insurance industry and for state governments, and we are in Texas and we a have personal relationships with many farmers. We saw a problem and we needed to solve it. In the last year, we went ahead and started applying the Blockchain to the process. And the Blockchain is a perfect form. When you have two parties who really, really don't need to trust each other, and need to trust each other with a distributed ledger, you've got a perfect scenario. If we're about to write a contract and a thousand people be able to verify that contract, and we're able to transfer money from one person to another without the two parties being involved, we've got a perfect scenario. >> Yeah. That's awesome. >> And that's where Blockchain really, really effects the agricultural industry and our farmers. >> You know I said on "The Cube" this morning, we were talking about it last night with some folks, the killer app for Blockchain is money. >> Yes. >> The common thread in all this is money. Just like the first computer in the TCPIP revolution, it was email. There's a 20 year killer app. We hate email now, but the point is you're in the money transaction business, but there's a supply chain involved. This is where it gets interesting. This is where I think you're onto something really nice here, because you are essentially creating a better contractual environment between buyer and seller, but the product still needs to move to the market. >> Yes. >> This is where you're innovating. Can you talk up, specifically, about how you're disrupting that piece? >> Sure. So, basically what we're able to do, is not only allow farmers to involve themselves in the forward and future's market, also the spot market within the actual system. So, it integrates with the actual trading applications, but it also integrates with their future's market and forward's market contractors. So, we're taking a group of people who are not very technical and we're giving them that ability to do what the big brokers do >> Yeah. >> In the overall industry. >> Just give an example, a run of the mill example use case. >> Sure, sure. One of our farmers who's got 5 million pounds of corn does a forward market with a buyer, the second he processes the scale, it will settle that contract instantly, and then it will actually notify him and say it is in your best interest to go ahead and close the other 3 million pounds because the price just spiked. He hits one button. He makes more money than he's ever made on any contract he has done in the past. >> And that's because what happens? What was the old way? What was the old way? >> The old way is he pretty much put it in the silo, and sent the papers to an accounting office. Three or four weeks later, he figured out how much he had, then he gave it to a broker to be able to look at the actual inventory. They put it up on the market, and they make the actual commission. >> They make the spread. >> Yeah. >> They increase, they mark it up. >> Exactly. >> They take the spread down, and they still got to send paperwork back to the guy and say "This is what we sold". >> Exactly, and then eventually get paid. This pretty much turns that entire process into an instant action. >> This is a game changer. This is basically taking all those steps, and a lot of potential miscues could happen in that process. >> Absolutely. >> Time wasted, errors. >> And there's, you know, I don't want to put any bad actors, but it also eliminates the bad actors out of the scenario. Our governing system actually integrates directly into the scales, gets signatures from the scientific reading instruments, so we're removing bad actors and we're removing errors, and we're speeding the process. >> You know, I have a computer science degree, and software background, like yourself, but also got an NBA from Babson College, one of the words they use in the NBA class is "value chain". >> Yeah. >> The "value chain". You know, the activities as part of creating value. Kind of a document thing, but the word Blockchain, value chain, really this is the perfect example of the kinds of use cases that we see in Blockchain. >> Absolutely. >> Moving a product to the market, reducing the steps it takes to do something, saving time, and being more efficient. >> And having a complete trust system. You know, when you have a farmer who's paying a 1% premium to be able to ensure to get paid, a 90% and there's still litigation in everything involved, this completely eliminates that scenario. >> Yeah. The other thing we talked about on "The Cube" this morning and yesterday, I was saying was that killer app's money, which is great, money has to move around. That's what we see activity on, and some bad actors there for sure, but marketplaces is also the other killer app. Do you agree? I mean, because you're essentially creating a marketplace. You need a marketplace. >> Absolutely. I actually just got approached about 10 minutes ago from a local Puerto Rican gentlemen who's restarting a farm after the weather event that happened here. He's trying to figure out how to get honey into the U.S. market, but is scared to sell it to just anyone. He asked me if it's possible to be able to set up smart contracts with all the random buyers that want to buy his honey. >> Yeah. >> This is an exact scenario where we are helping a community who has to start over and figure out who to sell their product to. >> You know Luis, this is a great example of, kind of, categorically what I'm seeing across the disruptions schemes out there, which is, in the cloud computing era, Amazon Web Services created a catalog of services that allowed you to use resources without having to build stuff up from scratch, provisioning servers. This is kind of happening here, where you're starting to see a sense of services or players, a catalog of services, >> Absolutely. >> happening in business. So essentially you're going to the next level. This seems to be a consistent pattern. What's your take? >> Yeah. Absolutely. It's allowing the smallest guys in the industry to the biggest guys in the industry to take advantage. When you have people using Amazon Web Services, you're having massive corporations and the one business man owner. What we're doing here is, we're giving the same opportunities for both classes of people to be able to scale, and put their product on the market without having to do a massive investment, >> Yeah. >> Or be scared that they're going to get robbed. >> It's a great value proposition. I'm sure you've got a lot of investors knocking on your door. Take us through what you're doing right now. You're doing an ICO? Are you raising money? And, what are you expansion plans? Because I know you're in Texas. Are you in California yet? I mean, a lot of agricultural activity there. >> So. >> What's your growth plan? >> So what we're doing is, we're doing a Token So Event, and we're doing a private placement sell to accredited investors. We're trying to respect all the SEC regulations out there. We're launching that at the end of this month. We are currently based in Texas and we also got approached by the Mexican Government to apply the technology to the state run silos in Mexico, so what we're looking for is really finding people who want to help us scale this product world-wide and being able to participate in our sale. If you're able to go onto our website, grainchain.io, and sign up to our white list, that'll allow you to get some information on how to participate. >> Grainchain.io >> That is correct. >> Like as in the grain of a seed. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, I'm going to ask you about Puerto Rico. >> Yes. >> You've been here a couple days. What's the vibe here? Why is this such an important event? A lot of people who are watching this aren't here. What's happening in Puerto Rico? What are you hearing in the hallways? What is some of your conversations? And, what are your observations? >> I mean, I think that the reality is that Puerto Rico is trying to embrace technology, and trying to embrace an industry that can support the people here. We've seen a lot of the devastation as we're driving around, but Puerto Rico is back up and running. So, the reality is that I feel very, very strongly about, not only supporting the local economy, but the fact that they're supporting real technology and providing and trying to get real solutions into this country to restart. >> And the young people are really engaged on Blockchain crypto. >> Absolutely. And you know, you'll have a lot of young very very aggressive developers. I've met a lot of people here, who've come here. A lot of locals who are looking for work in Blockchain and developers. So we're very excited to really really see that everything is kind of kicking back up here in Puerto Rico. >> Well, my final question for you, Luis, is as an industry participant and developer and player, what is this wave about? You know, you put your industry hat on and expert hat on, what is happening? I mean, what is really happening with Blockchain Crypto and decentralized applications? Because there is so much action, people want to get on this wave and surf this puppy. What's happening? In your personal opinion, what is this wave all about? >> I mean, I think that this is, again, not comparing to the dot com era, but it's giving the average person the ability to get into real industry. It's allowing everyone to be a participant, an investor, a developer, an overall embraceor of the technology that you haven't seen in a long time. Usually the software development and putting out products takes a lot of technical skill, and this is really kind of encouraged everyone to embrace it, look at it, and allows everyone to participate. >> And so basically the democratization of society. >> Absolutely, but it's also the democratization of a world economy, not a local economy. >> And the locals can play and customize it for their own personal needs. >> Absolutely. >> Well Puerto Rico's got a great opportunity on the loose. Thank you so much for coming on. CEO of grainchain.io, I'm John Furrier at the Blockchain Unbound Conference. Day 1 of 2 days of coverage. We're talking to all the experts, entrepreneurs, thought leaders, investors. More live coverage after this short break. (logo music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by SiliconAngle Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference, here in Orlando Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Jeff Frick. We're joined by Sarah Clatterback. She's the Senior Director of Engineering at LinkedIn, and Erica Lockheimer, the head of Growth Engineering at LinkedIn. Thanks so much for coming on the show, again. >> Yes, thank you. >> Thanks for having us again. >> We're getting the band back together. >> Absolutely. >> So before the cameras were rolling you were talking about the exciting initiatives and programs you have at LinkedIn. One of them that definitely caught Jeff's imagination was Reach. It's sort of a cross-fit for engineers. So tell us more about Reach. >> Yeah, so Reach is a program where we wanted to really look at how we're hiring talent in a different way. So one of the things, actually it was an inspiration of a candidate that we had at Grace Hopper last year, where she had come and she gave us her resume. >> Yep. >> Abby, and she said "I can't get an engineering job. I did a boot camp but no one will hire me. I don't have enough experience." And she really was the catalyst that really created the program. We said, we need to look at talent in a very different way. So we decided, it stemmed also from her and also from Whit where if there's working mothers, how do they get back into the workforce? So these two ideas started coming together, and we said, why not create a program where we can maybe have them come to LinkedIn, get their skills back up, teach them how to code, and eventually work at LinkedIn. So we kicked off the program, and we did very little media, and we had over 700 people apply, and we went through 500 applications, and had 30 candidates at LinkedIn. So they just finished the end of the group session, but they are converting. They're learning how to code. They're checking code live to the site, and these are people from different backgrounds. As a veteran, returning back to work, even some people that have been in a bad situation of being homeless. I mean, this is talking about, not only about career transformation, but transforming their lives. And it's such a special program that has just changed the way that we're thinking about hiring. I don't know if you want to add anything. >> Yeah, I mean, I think that it's had a great impact on our company. I think, the way we think about hiring, but also how the whole team has interacted and really come together to support these apprentices, in being successful as engineers. So I've seen it actually transform the entire culture of our engineering team through this whole program. >> It's interesting, you use the word apprenticeship . And I think of that too, 'cause there's always the talk, right, about technology taking jobs. On the other hand, we hear over and over, there's all these open tech jobs. There's nobody to fill them. >> Yes. >> And then you got the transition with the truck drivers that are all going to be displaced by autonomous trucks, in the not distant future. So it's interesting as you point out, to kind of rethink, kind of the classic, go to school do your time, come in at the bottom and work your way up. Because there needs to be a much more variant to be able to get people to retrain, to take people through various backgrounds. And are you seeing that reflected, 'cause you guys, obviously, represent a bunch of companies that are looking for people. Are you seeing a broader adoption of this kind of non-traditional approach to getting talent? >> Well, it's a program that we started off as a pilot. >> Okay. >> We are definitely going to do a second round. So we would love to share and open source how we're doing it and we'd love to have other companies thinking this way. But it's truly, back to Sarah's point, it's really not only transformed our culture, but it's even thinking about how we're hiring. We're in hiring committee every single week, and we start looking at these candidates, like oh, it looks like a Reach candidate. Before you would've maybe bypassed them and said oh they're not ready. This is now a different way to invest. But I definitely want more companies to do this, and we'll pilot, we'll share it, we'll open source it, and it will be fantastic. >> So talk about some of the other programs including Invest, and how you're helping, making sure that employees are happy where they are. >> So Invest is a program that came out of the Women and Tech Initiative between Sarah and I, and we thought about some of the personal experiences that we had, is how did we get to where we're at? And you want to design a program about your own experiences. You're like, hey I know that works. Let me just create a playbook around it. So we met, and we said we have executive coaching. We had basically a community of people, we could talk to about some challenges and we had managers invest in us. So why not create a program about that. So we have, this is our third session that we're doing it, and we have 50 women in the program. But the program consists of two day executive coaching, one-on-one with your manager, continuant of bringing the community of women together, and going through this. And what we've found in the success results is there's zero in the last 10 months of them being part of this program, and 40 percent promotions which is fantastic. And then what also happens is they go into this program, and they want to be mentored, and they graduate really literally from the program. Now we want them to pay it forward. >> Pay it forward to the next cohort that's going to come through this program. And I think we have several things we can measure. I mean, you talked about the promotion rate, but we can also talk about, did they have, sort of, a career moment in the year following their trip through the program. Were they able to step up and take a bigger assignment, more responsibility. There are other ways to measure the success of the program, as well, and we're seeing that across the board. >> Yeah, and just to add on to it, it really is a community that we're starting to build within the company, and it just feels fantastic. People feel great. We're walking around through the hallways like, I'm part of Invest when can I sign up. Everybody wants to be a part of it. So we need to figure out, and we can scale it faster. >> Well measurement is also so important too, because so many companies want to know what the return on investment. So how do you think about the data collection and then measuring progress? >> Yeah, so basically for all these initiatives before we start them we say what are going to be the things that we're going to measure? What are the metrics of success. And I think in this particular case, Erika mentioned attrition rate. That's what's in it for the company is retaining top talented women. But then on the other side, are they achieving their career goals? Are they getting promoted? Are they able to step up? So those were, kind of, the two metrics that we had set for the program before we even started. And then we can basically check and see, are we achieving those results, or do we need to pivot something about the program, or reshape the program. So we do this at least yearly, if not quarterly, to see if we're tracking towards our goals. >> And just to add on to measurement, like she mentioned, it's hard to mention, how do you feel? You went through this program, how do you feel? They are feeling better. They are feeling more empowered. They want to actually be part of Whitmore and then help pay it forward. So that's also an amazing measurement of success too. >> I went to an interesting pitch night a little while ago. Stanford, I think MIT, Babson, and Cal, and there was a start up there. They were looking at external data sources, social media, et cetera to try and quickly identify high-risk leaves inside the company. So to basically would be the drive your candidate's election to say this person looks like, they're doing behaviors that might indicate they might be boogieing. >> Right, right? >> So maybe they should invested in to keep it going. 'Cause obviously it's so much better to keep your good people than to have to hire, retrain. >> Definitely. >> Et cetera. The huge ROI. And of course, the last thing, and I joke with you guys every time I see you. 'Cause I see you so often on LinkedIn usually, in a classroom. >> Good, keep on using LinkedIn >> With a bunch of little girls, teaching them, taking your weekends to teach coding and tech. It's just fantastic. But really interesting that you're expanding that program as well. So that Sarah can get some of her Saturdays back which I'm happy for. And really taking something successful. >> Yeah. >> And as you said, open sourcing. Open source continues to be such a great innovation engine. One of you can tell us a little bit about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So our high school trainee program, we've been running it for three years now. We just finished our third cohort, and I think the results sort of speak for themselves. We've got a 96 percent rate of students going on to pursue stem degrees, and 89 percent studying computer science in particular. So I think we're actually seeing the result that we want out of the program, and we've even gone and reached a lot of girls who might be first generation college attendees, and we're even having the same success with them. So we really wanted to expand this program, horizontally scale it so to speak. So what we've done is we've put our program outline, as well as our curriculum that we do during the summer, online on GitHub, and we're encouraging other companies to pick this up, to adapt it to their own needs, and to provide additional opportunity for students around Silicone Valley and beyond. >> What's the biggest, consistent, it's not a surprise if it's consistent, and you've been doing it for three years. But as you run these programs, when you get the girls in for the first time, what's the thing that most people would never expect that you see over, and over, and over? >> I think for me, it's really seeing the identity transformation of the students. They come in. They're not sure if they belong. They feel intimidated, and by the end of the summer, they're confident, they're certain that they're going to be engineers. They see a future for themselves in Silicon Valley, and that's reflected not only at the end of the program, but also as they follow up with us in the subsequent years. So, for example, one of our first cohort has already finished her undergrad at Berkeley >> Yay! >> Wow! >> in two years, in computer Science. >> She finished in two years? >> She finished her undergrad >> She's a very motivated lady. >> She's so excited. >> She's amazing. >> Wow. >> And she's in a third year master's program right now. I get updates periodically from all the students. How they're doing, how their programs are going. One of the women from our first cohort, Vanessa, is also here at Grace Hopper. So we're going to meet up for dinner tomorrow night. It's really great to follow them as they become confident technologists into their career. >> Great story. >> So I want to ask you, being here at Grace Hopper, it's easy to feel that companies really get it in the sense of the importance of recruiting and retaining women, making sure that there's opportunities for them. But in terms of the state of the industry, and I'm asking LinkedIn which really epitomizes professional career management. >> Yes. >> Do companies get it? Where are we? >> So I think there's several companies that want to do something, I think we're all still trying to figure it out. As sad as that may be at times, but it's a hard problem to solve. When you're at a conference like this and you're like, there's not enough women in tech. There's tons of women in tech. If you have to think about how you're hiring in and if you want different results, you have to do something different. So what are you doing? Your old ways of doing things is not the way to do it, clearly. So how can you pivot and change? So I think they need to continually try different things. But I feel good. I feel we're going to get in that right trajectory, but it's going to take some time. >> Yeah, I think this is algorithm optimization, right? >> Yes, good analogy, good analogy. >> The inputs and the outputs. Are we getting the result that we want? And we're all iterating our algorithms to figure out what's working, and how we can do better. >> New inputs, new inputs. >> Excellent. Well Erika, Sarah, thank you so much. It's always so much fun having you on the show. >> Well thank you for having us, it's fantastic. >> Absolutely >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Jeff Frick who will be back tomorrow with more from Grace Hopper. See you then. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The CUBE, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we're live here in Las Vegas. Behind me is the VM Village, this is The CUBE on the ground live at VMworld, I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. Excited to have Sanjay Poonen, Cube VIP new badge that's going out. Five or more times you get a special badge on the website Chief Operating Officer, Chief Customer Operations as well at VMware, Sanjay. >> I think I won one of your hoop madness what do you call those Cube >> John: Yeah, that's right. You did get one of those. >> One of them, so add that to the smallest. >> Came in second to the bot, next year you won. We're going to have to check the algorithm on it that's before we had machine learning, so... Sanjay, great to see you. >> Always a pleasure, John and Dave, thank you for having me here. >> So, you know, in fairness to the VMware management team I got to say, great content program. Usually you can see, kind of, maybe some things that are kind of a little futuristic on the spot big time, on the content. True private cloud, data that Wikibon reported on, you guys are right in line with that. Hybrid-cloud is where its going from multi-cloud. You talk multi-cloud, the Kubernetes orchestration vision for Cloud Native, and even you were doing some interviewing on stage. >> Trying to be Anderson Cooper. >> So, tell us, what's your perspective because you got to balance here you got the reality of the Amazon relationship front and center, delivered big time there, shipping, western region, VMware on-prem, and on-cloud and this new cloud native vector of orchestration and simplicity. >> Yeah, I think, at least from our perspective as I describe in sort of that one chart where I try to put it in Sesame Street simple terms as I like to describe. VMware is one of the most fundamental companies that had a incredible impact in the data center, taking more costs and complexity. We are the defacto backbone of almost everybody's data center, but as the data center moves to the cloud you got to ask yourself, what's the relevance, and we've now shown, same way with the desktop going to mobile, and that's the end-user stuff that we've talked about the last few shows. But let's focus on that cloud part. We really felt as people extended to the public cloud we had to change our strategy to not seek to be a public cloud ourselves, and that's the reason we divested VCloud Air, and focused on significant things we could do with the leading public cloud vendors. As you know, Andy Jassy is a classmate of mine, Pat, Raghu, myself, began the discussions with Andy two years ago, and we announced the deal last year in October. This year having him on stage was, for me, personally a dream come true, and really nice to see that announcement, but we wanted to make sure we were also relevant to some of the other clouds. So earlier this year, in February, we announced Horizon Cloud, the VDI product manager. Today, we announced Kubernetes VMware, Pivotal and Google Form in Kubernetes, IBM Cloud. So all of the top four clouds, AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM have something going with VMware being with Pivotal. That's a big statement to our multi-cloud vision. >> And what a changeover from just two years ago when the ecosystem was, kind of, like a deer in the headlights, not knowing which way to zig or zag, do they cross the street. Where are we going with this? Now the clarity's very clear, cloud, and IoT, and edge with Amazon right there, a lot of the workloads there with multi-cloud. So the question I got to have you is that, as we just talked to the Google guys, is VMware turning into an arms dealer? Because that's a nice position to be at, because you're now driving VMware into multiple clouds. >> I think, you know, when I was on your show last time I described this continent called VMware, and then bridges into them. (John laughs) Let me try another and see if this works. That was good, but it had its 12-month shelf life. Think about the top four public clouds as sort of Mount Rushmore type figures. Each at different heights, AWS, Azure, Google, IBM Cloud, in market share they're the top four. If you want to build a house on top of Mount Rushmore, okay, it could work, but you're going to have to build it on top of one president's head. The moment you want to build it, you need some concrete infrastructure that fills in all the holes between them. That's VMware. It's the infrastructure platform that can sit on top of those varied disparate levels of Mount Rushmore, and make yourself relevant from on. So that's why we fell, whether you want to call that a quintessential platform, an arms provider, whatever it is, for the 4,400 cloud providers, plus the top four or five public cloud players today, VMware has to be relevant. We weren't two or three years ago. Now, for the top three, we're very relevant. >> I call it a binding agent. You're the binding agent across clouds, that's what you're really trying to become. But I wonder if, you know, you're talking about the clarity. I mean, VMware, things are good right now. Two years ago, was looking kind of hmmm, maybe not so good, with license growth down, and now it's up, stock prices double digits, >> Stock prices almost highest >> Okay, so I want to understand the factors behind that. You mentioned the clarity around vCloud Air and the AWS agreement, clearly. The second I want to attest is, the customer reality of cloud, that I can't just ship my business to the cloud, ship my data to the cloud. I got to bring the cloud model to the data. Did that in your conversation with customers, those two factors lead to customers being more comfortable, signing longer term agreements with you guys. Is that a bit part of the tailwind? I wonder if you could discuss that. >> Yeah, Dave I think that's absolutely right. One of the things I've learned in my 25 years of IT is, you want to keep being strategic to your customers. You never want to be in a place where you're in a cul-de-sac. And I started to sense, right, not definitively, but perhaps two years ago, there was a little it of that cul-de-sac perception as our license revenue was growing, particularly on this cloud strategy. Are you trying to be a public cloud, are you not, what's your stance versus AWS as one example, and with vCloud Air, there was a little bit of that hesitation. And if you asked our sales teams, the clarifying of our cloud strategy, which last year was okay but didn't have the substance or the punch. Now you've got an AWS coming on stage, and the other cloud providers where we have substance. I think that clarifying the cloud strategy game the ability for customers to say, even while they were waiting for AWS to be shipped, the last year, three or four quarters are spending of on-premise VMware stuff has gone up, 'cause they see us as strategic. The second aspect I think is our products are now a lot more mature than they were before outside of B sphere. VMware cloud foundation, which consists of storage, networking, VSAN, NSX, and you've talked to those people on your stage, workspace one, end user computing. These have really, really helped, and I think the third factor is, we've really focused on building a very strong team, from Pat, myself, to Raghu, Rajeev, Ray, Mauricio, Robin, I think it's a world-class infrastructure, so we just added Claire Dixon as our Chief Comms Officer on eBay. This is for us now, and everyone in the rest of the organization, we want to continue building a world-class sort of warrior-style strength in numbers. >> Quick follow-up if I may, just a little Jim Kramer moment. And the financial's looking good, you just raised four billion of cheap debt, right the operating cash flow, three billion dollars, and the nice thing about the clarity around vCloud Air is, the capital expenditure, it's just a very capital-efficient model that you guys have now, and I've been saying, you can't say it, but to me the stock's undervalued. When you do the ratios and the multiples on those factors, it looks like a cheap stock to me. >> John: I would love to see you buy it because we have to disclose it, the big position in VMware. >> No, no, no. >> We don't have any stock >> I wish we did. >> We just want to keep growing and the market will fairly value us over time. >> Yeah, it will. >> Well you guys had a good team at VMware, so let's just go back and unpack that. So there was a transformation. Peter Burrows was talking about IBM over the years, had a massive transformation, so really kind of a critical moment for VMware as you're pointing out. We had this great discipline, great technology, great community folks, still there now, as you mentioned, but that transition from saying, we got to post a position, are we in cloud or not, let's make a decision and move on, and as Dave said, it's good economics behind not having a cloud, but I saw a slide that said VMware Cloud, you can still have a cloud strategy using Amazon. Okay, I get that. So the question for you is this. This is the debate that we've been having. Just like in the cryptocurrency market, you're seeing native tokens in cryptography, and then secondary tokens, just one went crazy today. With cloud, we see native cloud, and then new clouds that are going to be specialty clouds. You're seeing a huge increase the long-tail power law of cloud providers that are sitting on other clouds. We think this is a trend. How does VMware help those potential ascensior clouds, the Deloitte clouds, the farming drone cloud that's going to have unique applications? So if applications become clouds, how does VMware help that? >> That's a really good question. So first off, we have 4,400 cloud providers that built their stacks on VMware. And it could be some of these sourced. Probably the best example are companies like Rackspace, OVH, T-Systems. And we're going to continue to empower them, and I think many of them that are in country-specific areas, France, Germany, China, Asia, have laws that require data to be there, and I think they quite frankly have a long existence, and some of them like Rackspace have adapted their model to be partnering with AWS, so we're going to continue to help them, and that's our VMware cloud provider program, that's going to be great. The other phenomenon we see happening is these mini data centers starting to form at what's called the edge. So edge computing is really almost like this mobile device becoming bigger and bigger, it becomes like a refrigerator, it becomes like a mini data center, and it's not sitting in the cloud, it's actually sitting in a branch someplace or somewhere external. VMware Stack could actually become the software that powers that whole thing. So if you believe that basically cloud providers are going to be three or four or five big public clouds, a bunch of cloud providers are country-specific, or vertical-specific, again in these edge computings, VMware becomes quintessentially important to all of those, and we become, whether you call it a platform, a glue, or whatever have you, and our goal is to make sure we're pervasive in all of those. I think it's going to, world is go, going to go from mobile cloud to cloud edge, I mean the whole word of cloud and edge computing is the future. >> So you believe that there potentially could be another second coming of more CSPs exploding big time. >> Especially with edge computing, and country-specific rules. There's some countries that just won't do business with a US public cloud because of whatever reason. >> Well, many of those 4,400 would say, hey, we have to have a niche so we can compete with AWS, so we don't get AWS-ized. So what's your message to those guys now that you're sort of partnered up with AWS? >> Listen, OVH is a good example. Virtuastream's another, I'll give you two good examples. OVH, we sold vCloud Air to them. We are helping those customers be successful. I go to some of those calls jointly with them, they are based in France expending some of their presence to the US, and have got some very specific IP that makes their data centers efficient. We want to help then be successful. Some of the technology that we've built in vCloud Air, we're now licensing to them so we can them be successful. Virtustream, you know Rodney Rogers being on your show. Mission-critical apps is tough for some of the public clouds to get right. They've perfected the art, and I've known them from my SAP days. So there's going to be some of these other clouds that are going to be enormously successful in their niche, and their niche are going to get bigger and bigger. We want to make sure every one of them are successful. And I think there's a big opportunity for multiple vendors to be successful. It won't be just the top three or four public clouds. There will be some boutique usage by country or some horizontal or vertical use case. >> Good for an arms dealer. Well this is my whole point, this is what we've been getting at. We're kind of riffing in real time, little competitive strategy, we got the Harvard MBA and I'm the Babson guy, we'll arm wrestle it out here, maybe do some car karaoke together. But this brings up the question, and I've been saying for a long time on The Cube, and Dave and I have been talking about, we see a long tail, torso neck expanding, where right now it's a knife-edge, long tail, top native clouds and then nobody else. So I think we're going to see this expand out where specialty clouds are going to come out for your reasons. So that is going to open up the door, and those guys they're not going to want their own cloud. >> Sanjay: I agree. >> And that's a channel, an app, who knows? >> You look at an example, one, two other examples of specialty clouds, these are SAS vendors. If you look at two vertical companies, Viva and Guidewire. These are SAS companies that are in the life sciences and insurance space. They've been enormously successful in a space that you're probably maybe a Zapier Salesforce would have done, but they have been focused in a vertical market, insurance and life sciences. And I think there's going to be many providers the same way at the IS level or the PAS level, to also be successful and we welcome, this is going to be a large multi-cloud world. >> Edge cloud. You guys talking about the edge before. Pat had the slide of the pendulum swinging. >> Sanjay: Exactly. >> What is that edge cloud do to the existing business? Is it disruptive or is it evolutionary in your opinion? >> It's disruptive in the sense that, if you've taken a hardware-centric view of that, I think you're going to be disrupted. You take things like software-defined WAN, software-defined networking. So I think the beauty of software is that we're not depending on the size of the hardware that sits underneath it, whether it's a big data center or small edge of the cloud. We're building this to be an all-form factors, and I agree with Marc Andreessen in the sense the software's eating up the world. So given the fact that VMware >> And the edge. >> Yeah, our premise is if there's more computing that's moving to the edge, more software define happening at the edge, we should benefit from that. The hardware vendors will have to adapt, and that's good. But software becomes quintessential. Now I think the edge is showing a little bit of, like, you know, Peter Levine had a story about how cloud computing might be extinct if edge computing takes off. Because what's happening is this machine starts to get bigger and bigger and sits in a branch or in some local place, and it's away from the cloud. So I think it actually is a beautiful world where if you're willing to adapt quickly, which software lets you do, adapt quickly, I think there's a bright future as world moves cloud, mobile, and edge. >> Great stuff, Sanjay, and I was referencing car karaoke, you have on your Twitter >> Oh the carpool karaoke. >> The carpool karaoke. >> It was a fun little thing. Maybe we could do it together, three of us some time. (John laughs) >> I don't do karaoke. Final... >> Just sing, man Just be out there doing your thing. >> I embarrass myself on The Cube enough, I don't need karaoke to help there. >> David: I'm in. (laughs) >> All right, I'll do it. All right, final question for you. >> That's a deal. Let's do it. >> Final question, Michael Dell and we're talking, the world's upside down right now, the computer industry has been thrown up in the air, it's going to be upside down, reconfiguration. You've been in the business for a long time, you've seen many waves. Actually the waves now are pretty clear. What's the fallout going to be from this for customers, for the vendors, for how people buy and build relationships in this new world? >> I think there's a couple of fundamental principles. I talked about one, software, let's not repeat that. I think ecosystems rule. It's really important that you don't look at yourself as having to own the full stack, you know VMware's chosen to be hardware-dependent. Yes, we're owned by Dell, but you've seen us announce a HP partnership here, right? You've seen us do deals with Fujitsu. We had AWS Cloud and Google Cloud. So when you view the world, I love this line by Isaac Newton, he said, "I see clearly because I stand on the shoulders of giants." And to me, that's a very informed strategy to actually guide our ecosystem strategy. Who are the giants in our space? It's the companies that are relevant, with the biggest market caps. Apple, Google, Microsoft, you know, AWS is part of Amazon, and then you know, HP, EMC, Dell, so and so, we list them, by my SAP. If we're relevant to all of them, I'd love to see the momentum of VMworld and the momentum to reinvent start coalescing. Collectively there's probably a hundred thousand people who come to all of our VMware vForums. Andy Jassy told me he expects 40,000 at re:Invent, and maybe across all of his AWS summits, he has a hundred thousand. I was sharing with him an idea. Why don't we have these two amoebas of growing conferences start to coalesce where we mingle, maybe 20% goes to both conferences, but we'll come to your show and be the best software vendor, that hijacks your show, so to speak, (John laughs) I didn't use that word. But we become the best vendor, and we'll roll out the red carpet to you. Now we've got a collection of 200,000, we couldn't have done that on our own. That's an example of AWS and VMware partnering. Now it doesn't have to be exclusively AWS, we could do it with another partner too. Microsoft doesn't show up at the AWS re:Invent conference, we do. Similarly we could maybe do something very specific with Azure and VDI at the Microsoft event, or Kubernetes and Google. So for VMware, our strategy needs to be highly relevant to the power players in the ecosystem, and the guiding our software-defined strategy to make that work, and I think if we do that, you know, you could see this be a 10 billion and bigger company. >> Well it says it's not a zero sum game, >> Sanjay: No, everybody wins. >> And if you can stay in the game, everybody wins, right. >> And I think in the software-defined infrastructure space, we like our odds. We feel we could be the leading player in that software-defined area. >> And it changes and reimagines that relationship between how people consume or procure technology, because the cloud's a mosaic, as Sam Ramji was telling me earlier. >> Oh you had Sam on your show? Wonderful. >> I had him on earlier, and he sees the cloud as a mosaic. >> He's a fantastic thought leader in open source, we were deeply grateful to have him at our event today. >> Andy Jassy, your classmate and friend, collaborator, he was onstage, great performance that he gave. Really talking to your crowd, saying, "We got your back," basically. Not a barney deals, not a optical deal, we are in on it, we're investing, and we got your back. That's interesting. >> We want to be with all of the key leaders that are driving significant parts of the ecosystem, we want to be friends, our tent is large. If everybody. Provided there's, like you said, not a barney announcement, so provided there's value to the customer. If there is, our tent is large, right? We will have point competitors, you know, here and there, and you know me, I'm very competitive. >> John: (laughs) No! >> I've not named competitors too much in this show. >> Really, really. >> But, if anything now, my mind's a lot more focused on the ecosystem, and I want to make this tent large for as many, many players to come here and have a big presence at VMworld. >> And the ecosystem is reforming around this new cloud reality, and the edge is going to change that shape even further. >> Competing on value, competing in a new ecosystem requires a new way to think about relationships. >> If I could give you one other example, then. In the world of mobile, who would have thought that the most important company to mobile security and enterprise to Apple is VMware now, thanks to AirWatch, or to Samsung, whatever it might be, right. This is the world we live in, and we have to constantly adapt ourselves. So maybe next year we'll be talking about IoT or something different, and their ecosystem. >> Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, good friend inside The Cube, always candid. Thanks for sharing your commentary and color on the industry, VMware and your personal perspective. I'm John Furrier, Cube coverage live in Las Vegas, here on the ground floor in the VM Village. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break.