>> Announcer: Live from downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Chief Data Officers Strategy Summit 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> We're back in San Francisco, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here covering exclusive coverage of IBM's Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit. This is the summit, as I said, they book in at each coast, San Francisco and Boston. Intimate, a lot of senior practitioners, chief data officers, data folks, people who love data. Caitlyn Halferty is back. She's the Client Engagement Executive and the Chief Data Officer office at IBM. Great. And, Allen Crane, Vice President at USAA. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. All right. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. Well, good day today, as I said, a very intimate crowd. You're here as a sort of defacto CDO, learning, sharing, connecting with peers. Set up your role, Allen. Tell us about that. >> At USA, we've got a distributed data and analytics organization where we have centralized functions in our hub, and then each of the lines of business have their own data offices. I happen to have responsibility for all the different ways that our members interact with us, so about 100 million phone calls a year, about a couple billion internet and digital sessions a year, most of that is on mobile, and always lookin' at the ways that we can give back time to our membership, as well as our customer service reps, who we call our member service reps, so that they can serve our members better. The faster and more predictive we can be with being able to understand our members better and prompt our MSRs with the right information to serve them, then the more they can get on to the actual value of that conversation. >> A lot of data. So, one of the things that Inderpal talked about the very first time I met him, in Boston, he talked about the Five Pillars, and the first one was you have to understand as a CDO, how your organization gets value out of data. You said that could be direct monetization or, I guess, increased revenue, cut costs. That's value. >> Right. >> That's right. >> That's the starting point. >> Right. >> So, how did you start? >> Well, actually, it was the internal monetization. So, first off, I want to say USA never sells any of our member data, so we don't think of monetization in that framework, but we do think of it terms of how do we give something that's even more precious than money back to our company and to our members and the MSRs? And, that is really that gift of time. By removing friction from the system, we've been able to reduce calls per member, through digitization activities, and reduced transfers and reduced misdirects by over 10% every year. We're doing work with AI and machine learning to be able to better anticipate what the member is calling about, so that we can get them to the right place at the right time to the right set member service representatives. And, so all these things have resulted in, not just time savings but, obviously, that translates directly to bottom line savings, but at the end of the day, it's about increasing that member service level, increasing your responsiveness, increasing the speed that you're answering the phone, and ultimately increasing that member satisfaction. >> Yeah, customer satisfaction, lowers churn rates, that's a form of monetization, >> Absolutely. >> so it's hard dollars to the CFO, right? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> All right, let's talk about the role of the CDO. This is something that we touched on earlier. >> Yes. >> We're bringing it home here. >> Yes. >> Last segment. Where are we at with the role of the CDO? It was sort of isolated for years in regulated industries, >> Correct. >> permeated to mainstream organizations. >> Correct. >> Many of those mainstream organizations can move faster, 'cause their not regulated, so have we sort of reached parody between the regulated and the unregulated, and what do you discern there in terms of patterns and states of innovation? >> Sure. I think when we kicked off these summits in 2014, many of our CDOs came from CIO type organizations, defensive posture, you know, king of the data warehouse that we joke about, and now annuls reports of that time were saying maybe 20% of large organizations were investing in the CDO or similar individual responsible for enterprise data, and now we see analysts reports coming out to say upwards of 85, even 90%, of organizations are investing in someone responsible for that role of the CDO type. In my opening remarks this morning, I polled the room to say who's here for the first time. It was interesting, 69, 70% of attendees were joining us for the first time, and I went back, okay, who's been here last year, year before, and I said who was here from the beginning, 2014 with us, and Allen is one of the individuals who's been with us. And, as much as the topics have changed and the role has grown and the purview and scope of responsibilities, some topics have remained, our attendees tell us, they're still important, top-of-mind, and data monetization is one of those. So, we always have a panel on data monetization, and we've had some good discussions recently, that the idea of it's just the external resell, or something to do with selling data externally is one view, but really driving that internal value, and the ways you drive out those efficiencies is another perspective on it. So, fortunate to have Allen here. >> Well, we've been able to, for that very reason, we've been able to grow our team from about six or seven people five years ago to well over a hundred people, that's focused on how we inefficiency out of the system. That mere 10%, when your call-per-member reduction, when you're taking 30 million calls in the bank, you know, that's real dollars, three million calls out of the system that you can monetize like that. So, it's real value that the company sees in us, and I think that, in a sense, is really how you want to be growing in a data organization, because people see value in you, are willing to give you more, and then you start getting into those interesting conversations, if I gave you more people, could you get me more results? >> Let's talk about digital transformation and how it relates to all this. Presumably, you've got a top down initiative, the CEO says, he or she says, okay, this is important. We got to do it. Boom, there's the North Star. Let's go. What's the right regime that you're seeing? Obviously, you've got to have the executive buy-in, you've got the Chief Data Officer, you have the Chief Digital Officer, the Chief Operating Officer, the CFO's always going to be there, making sure things are on track. How are you seeing that whole thing shake out, at least in your organization? >> Well, one thing that we've been seeing is digital digitization or the digital transformation is not about just going only digital. It's how does all this work together. It can't just be an additive function, where you're still taking just as many calls and so forth, but it's got to be something that that experience online has got to do something that's transformative in your organization. So, we really look at the member all the way through that whole ecosystem, and not just through the digital lens. And, that's really where teams like ours have really been able to stitch together the member experience across all their channels that they're interacting with us, whether that's the marketing channels or the digital channels or the call channel, so that we can better understand that experience. But, it's certainly a complementary one. It can't just be an additive one. >> I wonder if we could talk about complacency, in terms of digital transformation. I talk to a lot of companies and there's discussion about digital, but you talk to a lot of people who say, well, we're doing fine. Maybe not in our industry. Insurance is one that hasn't been highly disruptive, financial services, things like aerospace. I'll be retired by the time this all, I mean, that's true, right? And, probably accurate. So, are you seeing a sense of complacency or are you seeing a sense of urgency, or a mix or both? What are you seeing, Caitlyn? >> Well, it's interesting, and people may not be aware, but I'm constantly polling our attendees to ask what are top-of-mind topics, what are you struggling with, where are you seeing successes, and digital was one that came up for this particular session, which is why tomorrow's keynote, we have our Chief Digital Officer giving the morning keynote, to show how our data office and digital office are partnering to drive transformation internally. So, at least for our perspective, in the internal side of it, we have a priority initiative, a cognitive sales advisor, and it's essentially intended to bring in disparate part of customer data, obtained through many different channels, all the ways that they engage with us, online and other, and then, deliver it through sales advisor app that empowers our digital sellers to better meet their revenue targets and impact, and develop more of a quality client relationship and improve that customer experience. So, internally, at least, it's been interesting to see one of our strongest partnerships, in terms of business unit, has been our data and digital office. They say, look, the quality of the data is at the core, you then enable our digital sellers, and our clients benefit, for a better client experience. >> Well, about a year ago, we absolutely changed the organization to align the data office with the digital office, so that reports to our executive counsel level, so their peers, that reporting to the same organization, to ensure that those strategies are connected. >> Yeah, so as Caitlyn was saying, this Chief Data Officer kind of emerged from a defensive posture of compliance, governance, data quality. The Chief Digital Officer, kind of new, oftentimes associated with marketing, more of an external, perhaps, facing role, not always. And then, the CIO, we'll say, well, wait a minute, data is the CIO's job, but, of course, the CIO, she's too busy trying to keep the lights on and make everything work. So, where does the technology organization fit? >> Well, all that's together, so when we brought all those things together at the organizational level, digital, data, and technology were all together, and even design. So, you guys are all peers, reporting into the executive committee, essentially, is that right? Yes, our data, technology, and design, and digital office are all peers reporting to the same executive level. And then, one of the other pillars that Inderpal talks about is the relationship with the line of business. So, how is that connective tissue created? Well, being on the side that is responsible for how all of our members interact, my organization touches every product, every line of business, every channel that our members are interacting with, so our data is actually shared across the organization, so right now, really my focus is to make sure that that data is as accessible as it can be across our enterprise partners, it's as democratized as it can be, it's as high as quality. And then, things that we're doing around machine learning and AI, can be enabled and plugged into from all those different lines of business. >> What does success look like in your organization? How do you know you're doing well? I mean, obviously, dropping money to the bottom line, but how are you guys measuring yourselves and setting objectives? What's your North Star? >> I think success, for me, is when you're doing a good job, to the point that people say that question, could you do more if I gave you more? That, to me, is the ultimate validation. It's how we grew as an organization. You know, we don't have to play that justification game When people are already coming to the table saying, You're doing great work. How can you do more great work? >> So, what's next for these summits? Are you doing Boston again in the fall? Is that right? Are you planning >> We are, we are, >> on doing that? >> and you know, fall of last year, we released the blueprint, and the intent was to say, hey, here's the reflection of our 18 months, internal journey, as well as all our client interactions and their feedback, and we said, we're coming back in the spring and we're showing you the detail of how we really built out these internal platforms. So, we released our hybrid on-prem Cloud showcase today, which was great, and to the level of specificity that shows that the product solutions, what we're using, the Flash Storage, some of the AI components of machine learning models. >> The cognitive systems component? >> Exactly. And then, our vision, to your question to the fall, is coming back with the public Cloud showcases. So, we're already internally doing work on our public Cloud, in particular respect to our backup, some of our very sensitive client data, as well as some initial deep learning models, so those are the three pieces we're doing in public Cloud internally, and just as we made the commitment to come back and unveil and show those detail, we want to come back in the fall and show a variety of public Cloud showcases where we're doing this work. And then, hopefully, we'll continue to partner and say, hey, here's how we're doing it. We'd love to see how you're doing it. Let's share some best practices, accelerate, build these capabilities. And, I'll say to your business benefit question, what we've found is once we've built that platform, we call it, internally, a one IBM architecture, out our platform, we can then drive critical initiatives for the enterprise. So, for us, GVPR, you know, we own delivery of GVPR readiness across the IBM corporation, working with senior executives in all of our lines of business, to make sure we get there. But, now we've got the responsibility to drive out initiatives like that cross business unit, to your question on the partnerships. >> The evolution of this event seems to be, well, it's got a lot of evangelism early on, and now it's really practical, sort of sharing, like you say, the blueprint, how to apply it, a lot of people asking questions, you know, there's different levels of maturity. Now, you guys back tomorrow? You got to panel, you guys are doing a panel on data monetization? >> We're doing a panel on data monetization tomorrow. >> Okay, and then, you've got Bob Lord and Inderpal talking about that, so perfect juxtaposition and teamwork of those two major roles. >> And, this is the first time we've really showcased the data/digital partnership and connection, so I'm excited, want to appeal to the developer viewpoint of this. So, I think it'll be a great conversation about data at the core, driving digital transformation. And then, as you said, our data monetization panel, both external efforts, as well as a lot of the internal value that we're all driving, so I think that'll be a great session tomorrow. >> Well, and it's important, 'cause there's a lot of confusing, and still is a lot of confusion about those roles, and you made the point early today, is look, there's a big organizational issue you have to deal with, particularly around data silos, MyData. I presume you guys are attacking that challenge? >> Absolutely. >> Still, it's still a-- >> It's an ongoing-- >> Oh, absolutely. >> I think we're getting a lot better at it, but you've got to lean in, because if it's not internal, it's some of the external challenges around. Now we're picking Cloud vendors and so forth. Ten years ago, we had our own silos and our own warehouses, if we had a warehouse, and then, we were kind of moving into our own silos in our own databases, and then as we democratized that, we solved the one problem, but now our data's so big and compute needs are so large that we have no choice but to get more external into Cloud. So, you have to lean in, because everything is changing at such a rapid rate. >> And, it requires leadership. >> Yep. >> Absolutely. >> The whole digital data really requires excellent leadership, vision. IBM's catalyzing a lot of that conversation, so congratulations on getting this going. Last thoughts. >> Oh, I would just say, we were joking that 2014, the first couple of summits, small group, maybe 20-30 participants figuring out how to best organize from a structural perspective, you set up the office, what sort of outcomes, metrics, are we going to measure against, and those things, I think, will continue to be topics of discussion, but now we see we've got about 500 data leaders that are tracking our journey and that are involved and engaged with us. We've done a lot in North America, we're starting to do more outside the geographies, as well, which is great to see. So, I just have to say I think it's interesting to see the topics that continue to be of interest, the governance, the data monetization, and then, the new areas around AI, machine learning, data science, >> data science >> the empowering developers, the DevOps delivery, how we're going to deliver that type of training. So, it's been really exciting to see the community grow and all the best practices leveraged, and look forward to continuing to do more of that this year as well. >> Well, you obviously get a lot of value out of these events. You were here at the first one, you're here today. So, 2018. Your thoughts? >> I think the first one, we were all trying to figure out who we are, what's our role, and it varied from I'm a individual contributor, data evangelist in the organization to I'm king of the warehouse thing. >> Right. >> And, largely, from that defensive standpoint. I think, today, you see a lot more people that are leaning in, leading data science teams, leading the future of where the organizations are going to be going. This is really where the center of a lot of organizations are starting to pivot and look, and see, where is the future, and how does data become the leading edge of where the organization is going, so it's pretty cool to be a part of a community like this that's evolving that way, but then also being able to have that at a local level within your own organization. >> Well, another big take-away for me is the USAA example shows that this can pay for itself when you grow your own organization from a handful of people to a hundred plus individuals, driving value, so it makes it easier to justify, when you can demonstrate a business case. Well, guys, thanks very much for helping me wrap here. >> Absolutely. >> I appreciate you having us here. >> Thank you. >> It's been a great event. Always a pleasure, hopefully, we'll see you in the fall. >> Sounds good. Thank you so much. >> All right, thanks, everybody, for watching. We're out. This is theCUBE from IBM CDO Summit. Check out theCUBE.net for all of the videos, siliconangle.com for all the news summaries of this event, and wikibon.com for all the research. We'll see you next time. (techy music)