>>Data is at the heart of transformation and the change. Every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way it's time for thought leaders. >>Welcome to thought leaders, a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Volante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. >>And today we're going to hear from experienced leaders who are transforming their organizations with data insights and creating digital first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my cohosts from ThoughtSpot first chief data strategy officer, the ThoughtSpot is Cindy Hausen. Cindy is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of successful business intelligence unlock the value of BI and big data. Cindy was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindy. Great to see you welcome to the show. Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. Now our second cohost and friend of the cube is ThoughtSpot CEO, sedition air. Hello. Sudheesh how are you doing today? I am validating. It's good to talk to you again. That's great to see you. Thanks so much for being here now Sateesh please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today. >>Thanks, Dave. >>I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Um, look, since we have all been, you know, cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up know sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting very more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time. Then this is going to be used. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. >>And number three, has we planned through this? You know, we are living through these difficult times. You want an event to be this event, to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event. Now, the challenge is how do you do that with the team being change agents? Because teens can, as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do, or like through the VA. I think of it changes sort of like if you've ever done bungee jumping and it's like standing on the edges waiting to make that one more step, uh, you know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take change requires a lot of courage. And when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation, most businesses, it is somewhat scary. >>Change becomes all the more difficult, ultimately change requires courage, courage. To first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that, you know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes they feel like I don't have the skills. Sometimes they've may feel that I'm, I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about, you know, that are people in the company who are going to have the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data. They have the skills to do that, but they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. >>So there is the silo of people with the answers, and there is a silo of people with the questions. And there is gap. This sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all know the business needs. And the last change to sort of bring an external force. Sometimes it could be a tool. It could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is, you may need to bring some external stimuli to start the domino of the positive changes that are necessarily the group of people that we are brought in. The four people, including Cindy, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to trust the rope, that you will be safe. And you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump. >>So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Ternopil Chernobyl. What went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic. And yet the culture said, no, we're perfect. Hide it. Don't dare tell anyone which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, the additional thousands, getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there and even be inhabited again, this is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with. And this is why I want you to focus on having fostering a data driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. >>So I'll talk about culture and technology. Isn't really two sides of the same coin, real world impacts. And then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, you know, Cindy, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin. One reflects the other. What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parameterized reports on premises, data, warehouses, or not even that operational reports at best one enterprise, nice data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency. >>And sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured on least cost to serve. So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and it or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics search and AI driven insights, not on premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data Lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse, the collaboration is being a newer methods, whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish that there is an ability to confront the bad news. >>It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. None of this. Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that. There's still proud of that ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas, fail fast, and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and double monetized, not just for people, how are users or analysts, but really at the of impact what we like to call the new decision makers or really the front line workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. >>Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor, 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology. How did we get here? It's because state of the art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on premises on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on premises. And state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report over time, visual based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data sometimes coming from a data warehouse, the current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics. >>And this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody's hard coding of report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank top bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pinboard that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. >>You use to be able to create an investment place. A bet for maybe 10 years, a few years ago, that time horizon was five years now, it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier the data science, tier data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse and pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So thoughts about was the first to market with search and AI driven insights, competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or, or Azure synapse or Google big query, they do not. >>They re require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate the pace of change. It's acceleration Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI. And that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gardner it score that I worked on, or the data warehousing Institute also has the maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data driven. As Michelle spoke about it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes. >>And often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders, you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say, I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years. But look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, it said, Hey, we're not doing good cross selling customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage. >>They opened fake accounts, basing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples, Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker spinal implant diabetes, you know, this brand and at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers. And even though the us federal government said, well, you can't turn them off. >>He said, we'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, he said, you know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people, giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent, identify the relevance, or I like to call it with them and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, chief analytics, officer chief, digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that. Oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe, you have the CDO of just eat a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, national Australian bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD bank going to NAB. >>So these change agents come in disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again. I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is with them, what is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor, okay. We could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your seventies or eighties for the teachers, teachers, you ask them about data. They'll say we don't, we don't need that. I care about the student. So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is with them. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget, what is the value we're trying to deliver with this? And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard business review study found that 44% said lack of change. Management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data driven insights. >>The third point organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC a BI competency center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead to the year ahead and exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty. And I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture. That's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at thought leaders. And next I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Masa, Pharaoh, chief data officer of Western union. And before joining Western union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JP Morgan chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance, and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. >>Very happy to be here and, uh, looking forward to, uh, to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven, uh, capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how did it connect and enable different business teams and technology teams into the future. As we look across, uh, our data ecosystems and our platforms and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive an organization from a data standpoint into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that as part of that partnership. >>And it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole we've looked at how do we make sure that our, that our business and our professional lives right, are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go on to google.com or you go on to being, you gone to Yahoo and you search for what you want search to find an answer ThoughtSpot for us, it's the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is it's allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone or an engineer to go pull information or pull data, we actually can have the end users or the business executives, right. >>Search for what they need, what they want at the exact time that action needed to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place on top of that, we are on the journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology or our Elequil environments. And as we move that we've actually picked to our cloud providers going to AWS and GCP. We've also adopted snowflake to really drive into organize our information and our data then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So the portion of us though, is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the, the, the it teams together to really hit the drive, these holistic end to end solution, the capabilities to really support the actual business into the future. >>That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data driven. This is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what does this is maybe be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it, that is really becoming a data driven organization. And as part of that, it's really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, as upon products, solutions or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that, uh, that become crucial as you move forward, right, uh, into this, uh, into this new age, especially with COVID with COVID now taking place across the world, right? >>Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers. And these, these very difficult times as part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation ecosystems and solutions to really drive those, those capabilities. And those solutions forward as we go through this journey, uh, boasted both of my career, but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change has only a celebrating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed up to date with new technology changes both on the platform standpoint tools, but also what our customers want, what our customers need and how do we then surface them with our information, with our data, with our platform, with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. >>This is all around becoming a more data driven organization, such as how do you use your data to support the current business lines, but how do you actually use your information, your data, to actually better support your customers and to support your business there's important, your employees, your operations teams, and so forth, and really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when he talked to get large dividends from his investments into the future. But that being said, uh, I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data driven organization. And I'm looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you, >>Tom. That was great. Thanks so much. Now I'm going to have to brag on you for a second as a change agent. You've come in this rusted. And how long have you been at Western union? >>Uh, well in nine months. So just, uh, just started this year, but, uh, there'd be some great opportunities and great changes and we were a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >>Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe, and he is a serial change agent most recently, Schneider electric, but even going back to Sam's clubs. Gustavo. Welcome. >>So hi everyone. My name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindy, for the intro, as you mentioned, doing transformations is a high effort, high reward situation. I have empowerment transformations and I have less many transformations. And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so in today I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI, and also, how do you communicate, especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are nontraditional sometimes. >>And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very into what is happening, society, socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing. You know, the common example is a great example. And for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned is great to be, you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the Koresh. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about Nadina afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes in your swimming upstream. >>But what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. What I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make change for the bigger, eh, you know, workforce? So the bigger, good, despite the fact that this might have a perhaps implication. So my own self interest in my career, right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that are not well seeing politically speaking, what are the right thing to do and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past. >>And what they show is that if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to add cultural issues, politics, and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindy has mentioned, these topic about culture is sexually gaining, gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and he wants about 45%. I believe today it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation in set us state, eh, deadline to say, Hey, in two years, we're going to make this happen. Why do we need to do, to empower and enable this change engines to make it happen? >>You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So I'll give you examples of some of the roadblocks that I went through. As I think the transformations most recently, as Cindy mentioned in Schneider, there are three main areas, legacy mindset. And what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time. And here is how having successful while working the past is not going to work. Now, the opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a digital mindset and their up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, you know, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going to in a, in a way that is super fast, the second area, and this is specifically to implementation of AI is very interesting to me because just the example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? >>We went on implementation and a lot of the way the it team function. So the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prison of the prior auth success criteria for the traditional BIS. And that's not going to work again, your opportunity here is that you need to really find what success look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same as this experience you have at home is a very simple concept. And so we need to think about how do we gain that user experience with this augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent processes and technology to enable that. And finally, and obviously with, with COVID a lot of pressuring organizations and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs sometimes and cut budget. >>We have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest some growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest. And these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent, your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work in working very hard, but it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there. And you just to put into some perspective, there have been some studies in the past about, you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously this is going to vary by your organization. >>Maturity is going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with. And I've been with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level, but in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put a tagline or attack price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work. When you have data that is flawed as opposed to have imperfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do a hundred things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be a hundred dollars. >>But now let's say you have 80% perfect data and 20% flow data by using this assumption that Florida is 10 times as costly as perfect data. Your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to a hundred dollars. This just for you to really think about as a CIO CTO, CSRO CEO, are we really paying attention and really close in the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure. If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see this snowball effect or to measure the overall impact. But as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these various, right. I think the key is I am in analytics. I know statistics obviously, and, and, and love modeling and, you know, data and optimization theory and all that stuff. >>That's what I came to analytics. But now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value. And in this case, for example, for Schneider, there was this tagline coffee of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically how to bring in the right leaders, because you need to focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress. You know, again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can. You need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics solution. And finally you need to make it super simple for the, you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. >>They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data driven culture, that's where you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, it, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics, I pulled up, it was actually launched in July of this year. And we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers. But one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know, you're going from Excel, you know, in some cases or Tablo to other tools like, you know, you need to really explain them. >>What is the difference in how these two can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kinds of tools? Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit. But in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal going back to Cindy's point. I really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to the station. Like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership in shape the culture so people can understand why you truly need to invest, but I meant analytics. >>And so what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically to capture in video the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics, our safe user experience and adoption. So for our safe or a mission was to have 10 hours per week per employee save on average user experience or ambition was 4.5 and adoption, 80% in just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings. I used to experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%, really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from it, legal communications, obviously the operations teams and the users in HR safety and other areas that might be, eh, basically stakeholders in this whole process. >>So just to summarize this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You hire a change agent, you need to have the courage to make this decision and understand that. I feel that in this day and age, with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very souls for this organization. And that gave me the confidence to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it says to say, thank you for everybody who has believed, obviously in our vision, everybody wants to believe in, you know, the word that we were trying to do and to make the life for, you know, workforce or customers that in community better, as you can tell, there is a lot of effort. >>There is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied. We, the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just, I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream, you know, what would mentors, where we, people in this industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of a transformation is not easy to do is high effort bodies, well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well. And it's been a pleasure talking to you. Take care. Thank you, Gustavo. That was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. >>I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners. And I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. And one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time, and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations and you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage employees on the front lines. And of course the data, as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We'll COVID is broken everything. And it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward. So let's get right into, so Gustavo, let's start with you. If, if I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a, I'm a budding data leader. What do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long lasting success? >>I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I say, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I can do this for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing other areas across not only a specific business, as you know, I come from, you know, Sam's club, Walmart, retail, I mean energy management technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to use lean continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do is I try to go into areas, different certain transformations that make me, you know, stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do. So I can help to inform the functions organizations and do the change management decision of mindset as required for these kinds of efforts. A thank you for that, that is inspiring. And, and Sydney, you love data. And the data's pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can add your perspective to this conversation. >>Yeah. So Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine. And it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad. So he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before. And this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working in thinking is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data and the models and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important. And as Michelle said more possible, >>Great perspectives. Thank you, Tom. I want to go to you. I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses in some way, shape or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans. We've seen a massive growth actually in a digital business over the last 12 months, really, uh, even in celebration, right? Once, once COBIT hit, uh, we really saw that, uh, that, uh, in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers. And today that, uh, been a huge need, right? To send money, to support family, to support, uh, friends and loved ones across the world. And as part of that, uh, we, you know, we we're, we are, uh, very, uh, honored to get to support those customers that we across all the centers today. But as part of that acceleration, we need to make sure that we had the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right, to basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. >>So as part of that, uh, we, we did do some, uh, some the pivots and we did, uh, a solo rate, some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in there to support our customers going forward, because there were these times during this pandemic, right? This is the most important time. And we need to support those, those that we love and those that we care about and doing that it's one of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where, uh, really our part that our services come into play that, you know, we really support those families. So it was really a, a, a, a, a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to the next level and supporting our business going forward. Awesome. Thank you. Now, I want to come back to Gustavo, Tom. I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were, you were pushing the envelope too much in, in doing things with, with data or the technology that was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was, it was, it was failing or you're pushing your people too hard. Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >>Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, Hey, how fast you would like to conform. And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions. And I collaborate in a specific way now, in the case of COVID, for example, right? It forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it. When you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension, or you need to be okay, you know, the varying points or making repetitive business cases onto people, connect with the decision because you understand, and you are seeing that, Hey, the CEO is making a one two year, you know, efficiency goal. >>The only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We cannot just stay with the status quo. We need to find a way to accelerate it's information. That's the way, how, how about Utah? We were talking earlier was sedation Cindy, about that bungee jumping moment. What can you share? Yeah. You know, I think you hit upon, uh, right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, that's what I tell my team. This is that you need to be, need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I mean, that we have to be able to basically, uh, scale, right, expand and support that the ever changing needs in the marketplace and industry and our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening. >>Right. And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as you look at what, uh, how you're operating today and your current business model, right. Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan into align and to drive the actual transformation so that you can scale even faster in the future. So as part of that is what we're putting in place here, right. Is how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So, Cindy, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations, and I got to believe that, you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which is pre COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, they're not on my watch for whatever variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that you know, we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >>Yeah. Well, first off, Tom just freaked me out. What do you mean? This is the slowest ever even six months ago. I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, um, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more, um, very aware of the power and politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable. And now I think it's, you know, what? You can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So if you really want to survive as, as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable, the power and politics are gonna happen. Break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not, do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said, and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where's the dish gonna go on to junk >>Guys. Fantastic discussion, really, thanks again, to all the panelists and the guests. It was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in the cube program. Recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things, whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise wide digital transformation, not just as I said before, lip service is sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done, right, the right culture is going to deliver tournament, tremendous results. Know what does that mean? Getting it right? Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. >>And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive you revenue, cut costs, speed, access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization. Data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay. Let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. So these please bring us home. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you. The cube team, and thanks. Thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I had from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I was simply put it. She said it really well. That is be brave and drive. >>Don't go for a drive along. That is such an important point. Often times, you know that I think that you have to make the positive change that you want to see happen when you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk, Cindy talked about finding the importance of finding your voice, taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voices are heard, and if it requires some force and apply that force, make sure your ideas are we start with talking about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone, sometimes building the importance of building the Koran. And that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it, Tom, instead of a single take away. >>What I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years sold 200 companies, 200 countries they're operating in and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time. So in a matter of months, if they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway that is I would like you to go to topspot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle stock. And the last thing is these go to topspot.com/beyond our global user conferences happening in this December, we would love to have you join us. It's again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people, and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year, we, we have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. You'll be sharing things that you have been working to release something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas or engineers. All of those things will be available for you at hotspot beyond. Thank you. Thank you so much.

>>So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Ternopil Chernobyl. What went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic. And yet the culture said, no, we're perfect. Hide it. Don't dare tell anyone which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, the additional thousands, getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there and even be inhabited again, this is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with, and this is why I want you to focus on having fostering a data driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. >>So I'll talk about culture and technology. Isn't really two sides of the same coin, real world impacts, and then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, you know, Cindy, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin. One reflects the other. What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What is the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parameterized reports on premises, data, warehouses, or not even that operational reports at best one enterprise data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency. >>And sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured least cost to serve. So ticks and distrust there it's between business and it or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics search and AI driven insights, not on premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data Lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse, the collaboration is via newer methods, whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish. >>There is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this. Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that. There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas, to fail fast. And they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact what we like to call the new decision makers or really the frontline workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? >>They've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor, 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology. How did we get here? It's because state of the art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on premises on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on premises and state of the art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report over time, visual based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data sometimes coming from a data warehouse, the current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics. >>And this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody's hard coding of report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank top bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pinboard that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. >>You used to be able to create an investment place. A bet for maybe 10 years, a few years ago, that time horizon was five years now, it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different, the search and AI tier the data science, tier data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse and pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So thoughts about was the first to market with search and AI driven insights, competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or, or Azure synapse or Google big query, they do not. >>They re require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate the pace of change. It's acceleration Gartner recently predicted that by 2020 to 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI. And that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gardner it score that I worked on, or the data warehousing Institute also has the maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data driven. As Michelle spoke about it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes. >>And often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders, you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years, but look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, it said, Hey, we're not doing good cross selling customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage. >>The opened fake accounts, basing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive effects, samples, Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker spinal implant diabetes, you know, this brand and at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers. And even though the us federal government said, well, you can't turn them off. >>He said, we'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, he said, you know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people, giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent, identify the relevance, or I like to call it with them and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, chief analytics, officer chief, digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that. Oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe, you have the CDO of just eat a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, national Australian bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD bank going to NAB. >>So these change agents come in disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again. I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is with them, what is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor, okay. We could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your seventies or eighties for the teachers, teachers, you ask them about data. They'll say we don't, we don't need that. I care about the student. So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is with them. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget what is the value we're trying to deliver with it? And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard business review study found that 44% said lack of change. Management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data driven insights. >>The third point organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC a BI competency center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact the most leaders. So as we look ahead said to the months ahead to the year ahead and exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty. And I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture. That's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at thoughtless.

>> Voice Over: Data is at the heart of transformation, and the change every company needs to succeed. But it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions, all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you, it's time to lead the way, it's time for thought leaders. (soft upbeat music) >> Welcome to Thought.Leaders a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot, my name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers, and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not, ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics, by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core, requires not only modern technology but leadership, a mindset and a culture, that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action? And today we're going to hear from experienced leaders who are transforming their organizations with data, insights, and creating digital first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot. First, chief data strategy officer of the ThoughtSpot is Cindi Howson, Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience, and the author of Successful Business Intelligence: Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data. Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics Magic Quadrant. In early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CEOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi great to see you, welcome to the show. >> Thank you Dave, nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of theCUBE is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair Hello Sudheesh, how are you doing today? >> I'm well, good to talk to you again. >> That's great to see you, thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh, please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course to our audience, and what they're going to learn today. (upbeat music) >> Thanks Dave, I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Look, since we have all been you know, cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our sort of effort to reach out to you with, invites for events like this. So we are getting very more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one, that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time, we want to make sure that we value your time, then this is going to be used. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, generally good people, that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, you know we are living through these difficult times we want this event to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is how do you do that with the team being change agents, because teens and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do or likes to do. The way I think of it, changes sort of like, if you've ever done bungee jumping, and it's like standing on the edges, waiting to make that one more step you know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step today. Change requires a lot of courage, and when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation most businesses, it is somewhat scary, change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage, courage to first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that you know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs, sometimes they feel like I don't have the skills, sometimes they may feel that I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. You know, that are people in the company who are going to have the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract, they know how to speak data, they have the skills to do that. But they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is the silo of people with the answers, and there is a silo of people with the questions, and there is gap, this sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all know the business needs. And the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool, it could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is you may need to bring some external stimuli to start the domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we are brought in, the four people, including Cindi that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to dress the rope, that you will be safe and you're going to have fun, you will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump, all four of them are exceptional, but my owner is to introduce Michelle. And she's our first speaker, Michelle I am very happy after watching our presentation and reading your bio that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool parents, because she will beat all of us. Because when her children were small, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney and she was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL, what a cool mom. I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen this slides, a bunch of amazing pictures, I'm looking to see the context behind it, I'm very thrilled to make that client so far, Michelle, I'm looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle, it's over to you. (soft upbeat music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one, and I thought this is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So I want to talk to you about quarterbacking our digital revolution using insights data, and of course as you said, leadership. First a little bit about myself, a little background as I said, I always wanted to play football, and this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child, but when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines, and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football, I grew up in the South, you can tell from the accent and in the South is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn University working in the Athletic Department, so I'm testament to you can start the journey can be long it took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well, not actually not so little, he played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SEC football you know, this is a really big rivalry. And when you choose sides, your family is divided, so it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL he just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands. Delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight from Universal Studios, Disney to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with the team, that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests, or customers. But today I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage. Because behind every event every game, every awesome moment is execution, precise repeatable execution. And most of my career has been behind the scenes, doing just that, assembling teams to execute these plans, and the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels, is making good decisions, the right decisions at the right time and based upon data, so that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves. And it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kinds of world-class experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute. A little bit first about Disney, in the 90s I was at Disney, leading a project called destination Disney, which it's a data project, it was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool. And then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up. But way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today, like the magic band, just these magical express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around, and it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team, asking for data more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems, all of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems, and so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately leading to moving into IT, and I haven't looked back since. In the early 2000s I was at Universal Studios Theme Park as their CIO, preparing for and launching the wizarding world of Harry Potter. Bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wand selects you at a wine shop. As today at the NFL, I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies using things like sensors, AI, machine learning, and all new communication strategies, and using data to drive everything from player performance, contracts to where we build new stadiums and hold events. With this year being the most challenging, yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contract tracing devices joined with testing data. Talk about data, actually enabling your business without it we wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies, where data and collaboration are paramount. First RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform, and collaboration with video message and phone, all in one solution in the cloud. And Quotient Technologies, whose product is actually data. The tagline at quotient is the result in knowing. I think that's really important, because not all of us are data companies, where your product is actually data. But we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about, as thought leaders in your companies. First just hit on it is change, how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how to use data to drive performance for your company, and measure performance of your company. Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate, and finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data-driven decisions. First let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it, and thankfully for the most part knock on wood we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved, all the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others, were suddenly called to the forefront. Because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, the 2020 Draft. We went from planning, a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights red carpet stage to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately to one where everyone coaches, GMs, prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements. And we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time being in the live broadcast event space, talking about bungee dress jumping, this is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable, because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary, it was certainly very risky but it ended up being Oh, so rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at this level, highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field, you can see points being scored and stats, and you immediately know that impact, those with the best stats, usually win the games. The NFL has always recorded stats, since the beginning of time, here at the NFL a little this year as our 100 and first year and athletes ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us, is both how much more we can measure, and the immediacy with which it can be measured. And I'm sure in your business, it's the same, the amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled recently and how fast you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it, is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to a next level, it's powered by Amazon Web Services, and we gathered this data real time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast, and of course it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize, route patterns speed, matchups, et cetera, so much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too, that we'll gather more and more information about player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes it's important to think about for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, you know more than 10 years ago, agile practices began sweeping companies or small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive and innovative way, and it proved to be transformational. However today, of course, that is no longer just small teams the next big wave of change, and we've seen it through this pandemic is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%, we made a decision, we implemented it, we were a collaborative culture but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy in from the top down, you got the people from the bottom up to do it, and you executed. At Universal, we were a joint venture, our attractions and entertainment was licensed, our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties. So influence and collaboration and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL and even the bigger ecosystem. We have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration not only within your own company, but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top down decision making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation, yet competition to coexist. I mean the NFL is a great example of what we call coopertition, which is cooperation and competition. When in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data-driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough, you must be able to turn it to insights, partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data, and business units who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be, data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask? It's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with first of all making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave, and drive, don't do the ride along program, it's very important to drive, driving can be high risk but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen, is how you become brave, get more and more comfortable with uncertainty be calm and let data be your map on your journey, thanks. >> Michelle, thank you so much. So you and I share a love of data, and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback, I'm more an old wine person. (Michelle laughing) >> Well, then I can do my job without you. >> Great, and I'm getting the feeling now you know, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My boat is when we're past this pandemic, we both take them to the Delaware Water Gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> That sounds good, I'll watch. >> You'll watch, okay, so Michelle, you have so many stakeholders when you're trying to prioritize the different voices, you have the players, you have the owners you have the league, as you mentioned to the broadcasters your, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there's so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? I think balancing across stakeholders starts with aligning on a mission. And if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread ties them all together you sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work, and I think that's very important. So for us at the NFL, and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose is so well known, and when anything challenges that we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic, and I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent. And that means listening to every single stakeholder even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic and having a mission and understanding it, is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling. So I thank you for your metership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. (soft upbeat music) >> So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl, Chernobyl, what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic and yet the culture said, "No, we're perfect, hide it. Don't dare tell anyone," which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure the additional thousands getting cancer, and 20,000 years before the ground around there and even be inhabited again, This is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with, and this is why I want you to focus on having fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard, I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology, isn't really two sides of the same coin, real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology, and recently a CDO said to me, "You know Cindi, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin. One reflects the other, what do you think?" Let me walk you through this, so let's take a laggard. What is the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parameterized reports on-premises data warehouses, or not even that operational reports, at best one enterprise data warehouse very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to. Or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency and sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy, it's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured on least cost to serve. So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded, let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics, search and AI-driven insights not on-premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data lake, and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is being a newer methods whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust, there is a trust that data will not be used to punish, that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this, oh, well, I didn't invent that, I'm not going to look at that. There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas to fail fast, and they're energized, knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact what we like to call the new decision makers. Or really the frontline workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? They've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor. 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data-driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools, the sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this, these are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology, how did we get here? It's because state of the art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on-premises, on small datasets really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on-premises, and state of the art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time visual based data discovery vendors, disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data sometimes coming from a data warehouse, the current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics, at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI-driven analytics. And this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on-premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses, and I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders, will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights, and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot I'll just show you what this looks like, instead of somebody's hard coding a report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank, top, bottom getting to a visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pinboard that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard, because the pace of change has accelerated. You used to be able to create an investment, place a bet for maybe 10 years. A few years ago, that time horizon was five years, now it's maybe three years, and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse. And pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI-driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like Power BI or SAP Analytics Cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift or Azure Synapse or Google BigQuery, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate. The pace of change, it's acceleration, Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI, and that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you've read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there whether the Gartner IT score that I worked on, or the data warehousing institute also has a maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven, as Michelle spoke about, it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources. It's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes, and often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar, and in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is, as a barrier to becoming data-driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is, and let's take an example of where you can have great data but if you don't have the right culture there's devastating impacts. And I will say, I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years, but look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, that said, "Hey, we're not doing good cross selling, customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts, facing billions in fines, change in leadership, that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying that culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples, Medtronic a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world, they may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant, diabetes you know, this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients, they took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available, that is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization, looking at late payments of their customers, and even though the US federal government said "Well, you can't turn them off." They said, "We'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines," and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, he said, "You know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics," for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent identify the relevance, or I like to call it WIIFM, and organize for collaboration. So the CDO whatever your title is, chief analytics officer chief digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear, that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example in Europe, you have the CDO of Just Eat takeout food delivery organization, coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian Bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD Bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in disrupt, it's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus, I make one step forward and I get knocked down again, I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIIFM, what is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL they want to perform better, and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services this may be a wealth management advisor, okay, we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true whether it's putting their children through college, or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s. For the teachers, teachers, you asked them about data, they'll say, "We don't need that, I care about the student." So if you can use data to help a student perform better that is WIIFM. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget what is the value we're trying to deliver with it. And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard Business Review Study, found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point, organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI Competency Center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model, centralized for economies of scale, that could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future, within every business unit, every functional domain, and as you see this top bar, all models are possible but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead, an exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy lock in the customer loyalty, and I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at thought leaders, and next I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent Thomas Mazzaferro, chief data officer of Western Union, and before joining Western Union, Tom made his mark at HSBC and JP Morgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology operations, risk compliance, and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (soft upbeat music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable, different business teams and technology teams into the future. As we look across our data ecosystems and our platforms and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive over the shift from a data standpoint, into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that, as part of that partnership, and it's how we've looked to integrated into our overall business as a whole. We've looked at how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives, right? Are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go on to google.com or you go on to Bing, or go to Yahoo and you search for what you want, search to find an answer. ThoughtSpot for us as the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company, to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone or an engineer to go pull information or pull data, we actually can have the end users or the business executives, right? Search for what they need, what they want, at the exact time that action needed, to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on the journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology or our (indistinct) environments, and as we move that we've actually picked to our cloud providers going to AWS and GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive into organize our information and our data, then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So big portion of us though is culture, so how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together to really drive these holistic end to end solutions and capabilities, to really support the actual business into the future. That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven, this is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked, and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what does is be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it. That is really becoming a data-driven organization. And as part of that, it's really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, based upon products, solutions, or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward right into this new age, especially with COVID, with COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating, and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times. As part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation, ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities, and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both of my career but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only a celebrating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes both on the platform standpoint, tools, but also what our customers want, what do our customers need, and how do we then surface them with our information, with our data, with our platform, with our products and our services, to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data-driven organization such as how do you use your data to support the current business lines. But how do you actually use your information your data, to actually better support your customers better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams and so forth, and really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from these investments into the future. With that being said I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data-driven organization, and looking forward to talking to you again soon, thank you. >> Tom, that was great, thanks so much. Now I'm going to have to brag on you for a second, as a change agent you've come in disrupted, and how long have you been at Western Union? >> Only nine months, I just started this year, but there'd be some great opportunities and big changes, and we have a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams, and our colleagues to support those customers forward. >> Tom, thank you so much that was wonderful. And now I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe, and he is a serial change agent. Most recently with Schneider Electric, but even going back to Sam's Club, Gustavo welcome. (soft upbeat music) >> So hi everyone my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much Cindi for the intro. As you mentioned, doing transformations is a you know, high effort, high reward situation. I have empowerment in transformation and I have led many transformations. And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North Star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today, is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI, and also how do you communicate, especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are nontraditional sometimes. And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is, you have to start for you, yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean you need to understand not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very into what is happening in society, socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing, you know, the common example is a great example. And for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow, wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned, it's great to be you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes and your swimming upstream. But what gives me the courage is the empathy part, like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business, and what the leaders are trying to do, what I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make change for the bigger, you know workforce so the bigger good, despite the fact that this might have a perhaps implication, so my own self interest in my career, right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices, that are not well seeing politically speaking what are the right thing to do, and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that, I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past, and what they show is that if you look at the four main barriers, that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to add, cultural issues, politics, and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, this topic about culture is actually gaining more and more traction, and in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was for about 45%. I believe today, it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand, and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set us deadline to say, "Hey, in two years, we're going to make this happen, what do we need to do to empower and enable these search engines to make it happen?" You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So I'll give you samples of some of the roadblocks that I went through, as I think the intro information most recently as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset, and what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time, and here is how we have been successful. We're working the past is not going to work now, the opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a digital mindset, and their up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people you know, three to five years for them to develop, because the world is going to in a way that is super fast. The second area and this is specifically to implementation of AI is very interesting to me, because just example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? We went to an implementation and a lot of the way the IT team functions, so the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior or success criteria for the traditional BIs, and that's not going to work. Again, your opportunity here is that you need to really find what success look like, in my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same as your experience you have at home. It's a very simple concept, and so we need to think about how do we gain that user experience with this augmented analytics tools, and then work backwards to have the right talent, processes and technology to enable that. And finally, and obviously with COVID a lot of pressure in organizations and companies to do more with less, and the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize cost sometimes and cut budget. We have to do the opposite, we have to actually invest some growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function, if you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent, your leadership, to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform is not just an incremental cost, it's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work in working very hard but it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there, and you just to put it into some perspective, there have been some studies in the past about you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously this is going to vary by organization, maturity there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with, and I think with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level, but in this study what I think is interesting is, they try to put a tagline or attack price to what is a cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work, when you have data that is flawed as opposed to have imperfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be a $100. But now let's say you have any percent perfect data and 20% flow data, by using this assumption that flow data is 10 times as costly as perfect data, your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100, this just for you to really think about as a CIO, CTO, you know CSRO, CEO, are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our infrastructure? If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact, but as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these barriers, right? I think the key is I am in analytics, I know statistics obviously, and love modeling and you know, data and optimization theory and all that stuff, that's what I can do analytics, but now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value, and in this case, for example for Schneider, there was this tagline coffee of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically how to bring in the right leaders, because you need to, you know, focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress. You know, again, low effort, high value, you need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can, you need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics, you know, solution, and finally you need to make it super simple for the you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, IT, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics, I pulled up, it was actually launched in July of this year. And we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers, but one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know, you're going from Excel, you know in some cases or Tableau to other tools like you know, ThoughtSpot, you need to really explain them, what is the difference, and how these two can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kind of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool, there are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit. But in my case, personally I feel that you need to have one portal going back to seeing these points that really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to these stations. Like I said it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership and chasing culture, so people can understand why you truly need to invest what I meant analytics. And so what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, you know a tool to capturing video, the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics, hours saved, user experience and adoption. So for hours saved, our ambition was to have 10 hours per week per employee save on average, user experience or ambition was 4.5 and adoption 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot we were able to achieve five hours, per week per employee savings. I used to experience for 4.3 out of five, and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications obviously the operations things and the users, in HR safety and other areas that might be basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize this kind of effort takes a lot of energy, you are a change agent, you need to have a courage to make these decision and understand that, I feel that in this day and age with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very souls for this organization, and that gave me the confidence to know that the work has been done, and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me it safe to say, thank you for everybody who has believed obviously in our vision, everybody who has believed in, you know, the word that we were trying to do and to make the life for, you know workforce or customers that are in community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort, there is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied with the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream you know, what would mentors what people in this industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of a transformation is not easy to do is high effort but is well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well and it's been a pleasure talking to you, talk to you soon, take care. >> Thank you Gustavo, that was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (soft upbeat music) >> I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners, and I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community, and one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time, and it is critical to have support from the top, why? Because it directs the middle, and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard, is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations, and you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that, and create leverage, employees on the front lines, and of course the data. That was rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, well COVID's broken everything. And it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward, so let's get right into it. So Gustavo let's start with you if I'm an aspiring change agent, and let's say I'm a budding data leader. What do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I say, in tune to what is happening not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I can do this for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing other areas across not only a specific business as you know, I come from, you know, Sam's Club Walmart retail, I mean energy management technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to use lean continuous improvement that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is and that's what I tried to do is I try to go into areas, businesses and transformations that make me, you know stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do, so I can help transform the functions organizations, and do these change management and decisions mindset as required for these kinds of efforts. >> Thank you for that is inspiring and Cindi, you love data, and the data is pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can add your perspectives to this conversation. >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice, I'm still working on finding mine. And it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad, so he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment. But why I think diversity matters more now than ever before, and this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working and thinking is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data and the models, and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority, you are finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important. And as Michelle said more possible >> Great perspectives thank you, Tom, I want to go to you. I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses in some way, shape or form become a COVID expert but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth actually you know, in a digital business over the last 12 months really, even in celebration, right? Once COVID hit, we really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers and today, that there's been a huge need, right? To send money, to support family, to support friends and loved ones across the world. And as part of that, you know, we are very honored to support those customers that we across all the centers today. But as part of that celebration, we need to make sure that we had the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right? To basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did celebrate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in, and to support our customers going forward. Because there were these times during this pandemic, right? This is the most important time, and we need to support those that we love and those that we care about. And in doing that, it's one of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where really are part of that our services come into play that, you know, I really support those families. So it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to this level, and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now I want to come back to Gustavo, Tom, I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were pushing the envelope too much and doing things with data or the technology that was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing, or you pushing your people too hard, can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization I ask the question, Hey, how fast you would like to conform?" And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions and I collaborate in a specific way. Now, in the case of COVID, for example, right? It forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way, so to me it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster. But make no mistake about it, when you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension, or you need to be okay, you know debating points or making repetitive business cases onto people connect with the decision because you understand, and you are seeing that, hey, the CEO is making a one, two year, you know, efficiency goal, the only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We cannot just stay with the status quo, we need to find a way to accelerate transformation... >> How about you Tom, we were talking earlier was Sudheesh had said about that bungee jumping moment, what can you share? >> Yeah you know, I think you hit upon it. Right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right? That's what I tell my team is that you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I mean, that we have to be able to basically scale, right? Expand and support that the ever changing needs the marketplace and industry and our customers today and that pace of change that's happening, right? And what customers are asking for, and the competition the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as we look at what how you're operating today in your current business model, right? Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan into align, to drive the actual transformation, so that you can scale even faster into the future. So as part of that, so we're putting in place here, right? Is how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> We're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So, Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations, and I got to believe that you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which is pre COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, they're not on my watch for whatever variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now, but knowing what you know now that you know, we're all in this isolation economy how would you say that advice has changed, has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah well, first off, Tom just freaked me out. What do you mean this is the slowest ever? Even six months ago, I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more, very aware of the power in politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable, and now I think it's, you know what? You can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud, have been able to respond and pivot faster. So if you really want to survive as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable, the power and politics are going to happen. Break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy as Michelle said, and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where's Sudheesh going to go on bungee jumping? (all chuckling) >> That's fantastic discussion really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests, it was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in theCUBE program recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things, whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise wide digital transformation, not just as I said before lip service. And sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done right, the right culture is going to deliver tremendous results. Yeah, what does that mean getting it right? Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today, is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions that can drive you revenue, cut costs, speed, access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization. Data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay, let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh please bring us home. >> Thank you, thank you Dave, thank you theCUBE team, and thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us, and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I had from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I was simply put it, she said it really well, that is be brave and drive. Don't go for a drive along, that is such an important point. Often times, you know that I think that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen. But you wait for someone else to do it, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding the importance of finding your voice, taking that chair, whether it's available or not and making sure that your ideas, your voices are heard and if it requires some force then apply that force, make sure your ideas are good. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes building the importance of building the courtroom. And that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom instead of a single take away, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in, and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time. So in a matter of months, if they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway that is I would like you to go to thoughtspot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is, please go to thoughtspot.com/beyond, our global user conferences happening in this December, we would love to have you join us. It's again, virtual, you can join from anywhere, we are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people, and we would love to have you join and see what we would have been up to since the last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing, you'll be sharing things that you have been working to release something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas for engineers I've been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at ThoughtSpot Beyond, thank you, thank you so much.

(speaks in foreign language) >> Narrator: Data is at the heart of transformation and the change every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent, and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions, all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way, it's time for thought leaders. >> Welcome to Thought Leaders, a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis, and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core, requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. And today, we're going to hear from experienced leaders, who are transforming their organizations with data, insights and creating digital-first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot. First, Chief Data Strategy Officer for ThoughtSpot is Cindi Hausen. Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of Successful Business Intelligence Unlock The Value of BI and Big Data. Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi, great to see you, welcome to the show. >> Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of theCUBE is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair. Hello Sudheesh, how are you doing today? >> I am well Dave, it's good to talk to you again. >> It's great to see you. Thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh, please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today? (gentle music) >> Thanks, Dave, I wish you were there to introduce me into every room that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. It makes me feel also good. Look, since we have all been cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our, you know, sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting way more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time, and this is going to be useful. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, and generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, you know, we are living through these difficult times, we want an event to be, this event to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is, how do you do that with the team being change agents? Because change and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do or likes to do. The way I think of it, change is sort of like, if you've ever done bungee jumping. You know, it's like standing on the edges, waiting to make that one more step. You know, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take. Change requires a lot of courage and when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation, in most businesses it is somewhat scary. Change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage. Courage to to, first of all, challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that, "You know, maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes I feel like I don't have the skills." Sometimes they may feel that, I'm probably not the right person to do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. You know, there are people in the company, who are going to hog the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data, they have the skills to do that, but they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is this silo of people with the answers and there is a silo of people with the questions, and there is gap. These sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all I know the business needs, and the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool, it could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is. You may need to bring some external stimuli to start that domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we have brought in, the four people, including Cindi, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to trust the rope that you will be safe and you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping for a bungee jump. All four of them are exceptional, but my honor is to introduce Michelle and she's our first speaker. Michelle, I am very happy after watching her presentation and reading her bio, that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool patents, because she will beat all of us because when her children were small, you know, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney and she was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age, where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL. What a cool mom. I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen the slides with a bunch of amazing pictures, I'm looking to see the context behind it. I'm very thrilled to make the acquaintance of Michelle. I'm looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle. It's over to you. (gentle music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one. This is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So, I want to talk to you about quarterbacking our digital revolution using insights, data and of course, as you said, leadership. First, a little bit about myself, a little background. As I said, I always wanted to play football and this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child but when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football. I grew up in the South. You can tell from the accent and in the South football is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn University working in the athletic department, so I'm testament. Till you can start, a journey can be long. It took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well not actually not so little, he played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SEC football, you know this is a really big rivalry, and when you choose sides your family is divided. So it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL, he just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands, delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight. From Universal Studios, Disney, to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job, I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with a team that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often, I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests or customers. But today, I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage. Because behind every event, every game, every awesome moment, is execution. Precise, repeatable execution and most of my career has been behind the scenes doing just that. Assembling teams to execute these plans and the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels is making good decisions, the right decisions, at the right time and based upon data. So that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves, and it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kind of world class experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute. A little bit first about Disney. In '90s I was at Disney leading a project called Destination Disney, which it's a data project. It was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool and then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up. But way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today. Like the MagicBand, Disney's Magical Express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around. And it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team asking for data, more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems. All of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems. And so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately, leading to moving into IT and I haven't looked back since. In the early 2000s, I was at Universal Studio's theme park as their CIO preparing for and launching the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wand selects you at a wand shop. As today at the NFL, I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies, using things like sensors, AI, machine learning and all new communication strategies, and using data to drive everything, from player performance, contracts, to where we build new stadiums and hold events. With this year being the most challenging, yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contact tracing devices joined with testing data. Talk about data actually enabling your business. Without it we wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies, where data and collaboration are paramount. First, RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform and collaboration with video message and phone, all-in-one solution in the cloud and Quotient Technologies, whose product is actually data. The tagline at Quotient is The Result in Knowing. I think that's really important because not all of us are data companies, where your product is actually data, but we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about as thought leaders in your companies. First, just hit on it, is change. how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how to use data to drive performance for your company and measure performance of your company. Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate and finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data-driven decisions. First, let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it. And thankfully, for the most part, knock on wood, we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved. All the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others were suddenly called to the forefront because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, The 2020 Draft. We went from planning a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights, red carpet stage, to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately, to one where everyone coaches, GMs, prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements and we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time, being in the live broadcast event space. Talking about bungee jumping, this is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary, it was certainly very risky, but it ended up being also rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at its level, highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance, obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field, you can see points being scored and stats, and you immediately know that impact. Those with the best stats usually win the games. The NFL has always recorded stats. Since the beginning of time here at the NFL a little... This year is our 101st year and athlete's ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us is both how much more we can measure and the immediacy with which it can be measured and I'm sure in your business it's the same. The amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled recently. And how fast do you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to the next level. It's powered by Amazon Web Services and we gather this data, real-time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast. And of course, it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize, route patterns, speed, match-ups, et cetera, so much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too, that will gather more and more information about a player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really, I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes, it's important to think about, for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, you know, more than 10 years ago agile practices began sweeping companies. Where small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive and innovative way and it proved to be transformational. However today, of course that is no longer just small teams, the next big wave of change and we've seen it through this pandemic, is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career, when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%. We made a decision, we implemented it. We were a collaborative culture but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy-in from the top down, you got the people from the bottom up to do it and you executed. At Universal, we were a joint venture. Our attractions and entertainment was licensed. Our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties, so influence and collaboration, and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL an even the bigger ecosystem. We have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses, 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved, centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration, not only within your own company but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies, that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top-down decision-making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation, yet competition to co-exist. I mean, the NFL is a great example of what we call co-oppetition, which is cooperation and competition. We're in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data-driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough. You must be able to turn it to insights. Partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data and business units, who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be, data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask? It's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with, first of all, making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today, looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave and drive. Don't do the ride along program, it's very important to drive. Driving can be high risk, but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen is how you become brave. Get more and more comfortable with uncertainty, be calm and let data be your map on your journey. Thanks. >> Michelle, thank you so much. So you and I share a love of data and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback. I'm more an a line person. >> Well, then I can't do my job without you. >> Great and I'm getting the feeling now, you know, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My vote is when we're past this pandemic, we both take him to the Delaware Water Gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> Oh that sounds good, I'll watch your watch. >> Yeah, you'll watch, okay. So Michelle, you have so many stakeholders, when you're trying to prioritize the different voices you have the players, you have the owners, you have the league, as you mentioned, the broadcasters, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there are so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? >> I think balancing across stakeholders starts with aligning on a mission and if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread that ties them all together. You sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work and I think that's very important. So for us at the NFL and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose is so well known and when anything challenges that, we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic, and I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent and that means listening to every single stakeholder. Even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic, and having a mission, and understanding it is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling, so thank you for your leadership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. >> (gentle music) So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, "This is going to be catastrophic," and yet the culture said, "No, we're perfect, hide it. Don't dare tell anyone." Which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, additional thousands getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there can even be inhabited again. This is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with and this is why I want you to focus on having, fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology, is it really two sides of the same coin? Real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to disrupt and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, "You know, Cindi, I actually think this is two sides of the same coin, one reflects the other." What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting, largely parametrized reports, on-premises data warehouses, or not even that operational reports. At best one enterprise data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change, complacency. And sometimes that complacency, it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, "No, we're measured on least to serve." So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm, so data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with the leader, a data and analytics leader, what does their technology look like? Augmented analytics, search and AI driven insights, not on-premises but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place but it's in a data lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is via newer methods, whether it's Slack or Teams, allowing for that real-time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish, that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals. Whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers, it's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this, "Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that." There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas, to fail fast and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized and democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact, what we like to call the new decision-makers or really the frontline workers. So Harvard Business Review partnered with us to develop this study to say, "Just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years, why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor." 87% said they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data-driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture and technology, how did we get here? It's because state-of-the-art keeps changing. So the first generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on-premises, on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on-premises and state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time, visual based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data, sometimes coming from a data warehouse. The current state-of-the-art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics. At ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics, and this was pioneered for large scale data sets, whether it's on-premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point, oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders, will look at these two components separately. But you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lock-step with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody hard coding a report, it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank, top, bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing pin board that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non-analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. You used to be able to create an investment, place a bet for maybe 10 years. A few years ago, that time horizon was five years. Now, it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization but I would also say, equally important is the cloud data warehouse. And pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful, if you look at products like Power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Azure Synapse, or Google BigQuery, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in-memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter-operate. The pace of change, its acceleration, Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI and that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple of years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture and if you've read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gartner IT Score that I worked on or the Data Warehousing Institute also has a maturity model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven. As Michelle spoke about, it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology and also the processes. And often when I would talk about the people in the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for thought leaders. You have told me now culture is absolutely so important, and so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data-driven. It's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years, but look at what happened in the face of negative news with data. It said, "Hey, we're not doing good cross-selling, customers do not have both a checking account and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts facing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture and they're trying to fix this, but even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples. Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant, diabetes, you know this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers and even though the U.S. Federal Government said, "Well, you can't turn them off." They said, "We'll extend that even beyond the mandated guidelines," and facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, They said, "You know what? We will spend the time upskilling our people, giving them the time to learn more about the future of work, the skills and data and analytics for 20,000 of their employees rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions. Bring in a change agent, identify the relevance or I like to call it WIIFM and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, Chief Analytics Officer, Chief Digital Officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe you have the CDO of Just Eat, a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian Bank taking a CDO within the same sector from TD Bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in, disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again, I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIIFM What's In It For Me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So, if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor. Okay, we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s. For the teachers, teachers you ask them about data. They'll say, "We don't need that, I care about the student." So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is WIIFM and sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget, what is the value we're trying to deliver with this? And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard Business Review study found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point, organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI competency center was considered state of the art. Now for the biggest impact, what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then embed these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead, an exciting time because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty and I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at Thought Leaders. And next, I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Mazzaferro Chief Data Officer of Western Union and before joining Western Union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JP Morgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (gentle music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable different business teams and the technology teams into the future? As we look across our data ecosystems and our platforms, and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive an organization from a data standpoint, into the future. That includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data, at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that. As part of that partnership and it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole. We've looked at, how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives, right? Are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go onto google.com or you go onto Bing or you go onto Yahoo and you search for what you want, search to find an answer. ThoughtSpot for us is the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability is it's allowed us to actually enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone, or an engineer to go pull information or pull data. We actually can have the end users or the business executives, right. Search for what they need, what they want, at the exact time that they actually need it, to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on a journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology, our... The local environments and as we move that, we've actually picked two of our cloud providers going to AWS and to GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive and to organize our information and our data, then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So a big portion of it though is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together, to really help to drive these holistic end-to-end solutions and capabilities, to really support the actual business into the future. That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven. This is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what decisions need to be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it. That is really becoming a data-driven organization and as part of that, it really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon industries, based upon markets, based upon products, solutions or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward, right, into this new age, Especially with COVID. With COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are celebrating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times. As part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation, ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both in my career but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only accelerating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes, both on the platform standpoint, tools, but also what do our customers want, what do our customers need and how do we then service them with our information, with our data, with our platform, and with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data-driven organization, such as how do you use your data to support your current business lines, but how do you actually use your information and your data to actually better support your customers, better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams and so forth. And really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from these investments into the future. With that being said, I hope you enjoyed the segment on how to become and how to drive a data-driven organization, and looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. >> Tom, that was great. Thanks so much and now going to have to drag on you for a second. As a change agent you've come in, disrupted and how long have you been at Western Union? >> Only nine months, so just started this year, but there have been some great opportunities to integrate changes and we have a lot more to go, but we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >> Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now, I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe and he is a serial change agent. Most recently with Schneider Electric but even going back to Sam's Clubs. Gustavo, welcome. (gentle music) >> So, hey everyone, my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindi, for the intro. As you mentioned, doing transformations is, you know, a high reward situation. I have been part of many transformations and I have led many transformations. And, what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North Star and you know where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so, in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started, barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI and also, how you communicate. Especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are non-traditional sometimes. And so, how do we get started? So, I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand, not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be very in tune what is happening in society socioeconomically speaking, wellbeing. You know, the common example is a great example and for me personally, it's an opportunity because the number one core value that I have is wellbeing. I believe that for human potential for customers and communities to grow, wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned, it's great to be, you know, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes and you're swimming upstream, but what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. But I do it thinking about the mission of, how do I make change for the bigger workforce or the bigger good despite the fact that this might have perhaps implication for my own self interest in my career. Right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that are not well seen, politically speaking, but are the right thing to do and you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that, I don't think we're they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is, I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past and what they show is that, if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to act, cultural issues, politics and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, these topic about culture is actually gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was about 45%. I believe today, it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set a deadline to say, "Hey, in two years we're going to make this happen. What do we need to do, to empower and enable these change agents to make it happen? You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So, I'll give you examples of some of the roadblocks that I went through as I've been doing transformations, most recently, as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset and what that means is that, we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time and here is how we have been successful. What worked in the past is not going to work now. The opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders, who have a digital mindset and they're up and coming leaders that are perhaps not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talents, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, you know, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going in a way that is super-fast. The second area and this is specifically to implementation of AI. It's very interesting to me because just the example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right? We went on implementation and a lot of the way the IT team functions or the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior or success criteria for the traditional BIs, and that's not going to work. Again, the opportunity here is that you need to redefine what success look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same user experience you have at home. It's a very simple concept and so we need to think about, how do we gain that user experience with these augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent, processes, and technology to enable that. And finally and obviously with COVID, a lot of pressure in organizations and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs sometimes and cut budget. We have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest on growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent and your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work and working very hard but it's not efficient and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there and just to put in terms of perspective, there have been some studies in the past about, you know, how do we kind of measure the impact of data? And obviously, this is going to vary by organization maturity, there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with and I've been with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level. But in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put a tagline or a tag price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work when you have data that is flawed as opposed to having perfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be $100. But now let's say you have 80% perfect data and 20% flawed data. By using this assumption that flawed data is 10 times as costly as perfect data, your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100. This just for you to really think about as a CIO, CTO, you know CHRO, CEO, "Are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure?" If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact, but as you can tell, the price tag goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these barriers, right? I think the key is, I am in analytics, I know statistics obviously and love modeling, and, you know, data and optimization theory, and all that stuff. That's what I came to analytics, but now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value and in this case, for example, for Schneider. There was this tagline, make the most of your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that, I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically, how to bring in the right leaders because you need to, you know, focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress, you know. Again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can, you need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics, you know, solution. And finally, you need to make it super-simple for the, you know, in this case, I was working with the HR teams and other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused and looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to, you know, IT, get leadership support, find the budgeting, you know, get everybody on board, make sure the success criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics portal. It was actually launched in July of this year and we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many, many factors but one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you know. You're going from Excel, you know, in some cases or Tableu to other tools like, you know, ThoughtSpot. You need to really explain them what is the difference and how this tool can truly replace some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kinds of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit but in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal. Going back to Cindi's points, that really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to this stage and like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership, initiating culture so people can understand, why you truly need to invest on augmented analytics. And so, what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, you know, a tool to capturing video, the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics. Hours saved, user experience and adoption. So for hours saved, our ambition was to have 10 hours per week for employee to save on average. User experience, our ambition was 4.5 and adoption 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings, a user experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications, obviously the operations things and the users. In HR safety and other areas that might be basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize, this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You are a change agent, you need to have courage to make this decision and understand that, I feel that in this day and age with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these great resource for this organization and that give me the confident to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it's just to say, thank you for everybody who has belief, obviously in our vision, everybody who has belief in, you know, the work that we were trying to do and to make the life of our, you know, workforce or customers and community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort, there is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied with the accomplishments of this transformation and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream, you know, work with mentors, work with people in the industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of transformation. It's not easy to do, it's high effort, but it's well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Talk to you soon. Take care. >> Thank you, Gustavo. That was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (light music) Now I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners and I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. Now one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision making in your organizations. And you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage, employees on the front lines, and of course the data. Now as as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. You know, the old saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, well COVID has broken everything and it's great to hear from our experts, you know, how to move forward, so let's get right into it. So Gustavo, let's start with you. If I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a budding data leader, what do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long-lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I said, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I've been doing it for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing of the areas across not only a specific business. As you know, I come from, you know, Sam's Club, Walmart retail. I've been in energy management, technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to just continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do, is I try to go into areas, businesses and transformations, that make me, you know, stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do, so I can help transform the functions, organizations, and do the change management, the essential mindset that's required for this kind of effort. >> Well, thank you for that. That is inspiring and Cindi you love data and the data is pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can, you know, add your perspectives to this conversation? >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine and it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad, so he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before and this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working and thinking, is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data, and the models, and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are, finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important and as Michelle said, more possible. >> Great perspectives, thank you. Tom, I want to go to you. So, I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses is in some way, shape, or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth, actually, in our digital business over the last 12 months really, even acceleration, right, once COVID hit. We really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers in today, that there's been a huge need, right, to send money to support family, to support friends, and to support loved ones across the world. And as part of that we are very honored to be able to support those customers that, across all the centers today, but as part of the acceleration, we need to make sure that we have the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right? To basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did accelerate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in and to support our customers going forward, because during these times, during this pandemic, right, this is the most important time and we need to support those that we love and those that we care about. And doing that some of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where really our products and our services come into play that, you know, and really support those families. So, it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to the next level and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now, I want to come back to Gustavo. Tom, I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were pushing the envelope too much in doing things with data or the technology that it was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing, or you're pushing your people too hard? Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, "Hey, how fast you would like to conform?" And, you know, based on the agreements on the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions and I collaborate in a specific way. Now, in the case of COVID, for example, right, it forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it, when you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension or you need to be okay, you know, debating points or making repetitive business cases until people connect with the decision because you understand and you are seeing that, "Hey, the CEO is making a one, two year, you know, efficiency goal. The only way for us to really do more with less is for us to continue this path. We can not just stay with the status quo, we need to find a way to accelerate the transformation." That's the way I see it. >> How about Utah, we were talking earlier with Sudheesh and Cindi about that bungee jumping moment. What can you share? >> Yeah, you know, I think you hit upon it. Right now, the pace of change will be the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, this is what I tell my team, is that you need to be, you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. Meaning that we have to be able to basically scale, right? Expand and support the ever changing needs in the marketplace and industry and our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening, right? And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, you know, as you look at how you're operating today in your current business model, right? Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan and to align and to drive the actual transformation, so that you can scale even faster into the future. So it's part of that, that's what we're putting in place here, right? It's how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations and I got to believe that, you know, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which was pre-COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. You know, not my watch or for whatever, variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that, you know, we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah, well first off, Tom, just freaked me out. What do you mean, this is the slowest ever? Even six months ago I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more very aware of the power in politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable and now I think it's, you know what, you can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So, if you really want to survive, as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable. The power and politics are going to happen, break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where Sudheesh is going to go bungee jumping. (all chuckling) >> Guys, fantastic discussion, really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests, it was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really, virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in theCUBE program recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things. Whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise-wide digital transformation, not just as I said before, lip service. You know, sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done right, the right culture is going to deliver tournament results. You know, what does that mean? Getting it right. Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive new revenue, cut costs, speed access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization, data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay, let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh, please bring us home. >> Thank you, thank you, Dave. Thank you, theCUBE team, and thanks goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us, and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I heard from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I will simply put it, she said it really well. That is be brave and drive, don't go for a drive alone. That is such an important point. Often times, you know the right thing that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen, but you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding, the importance of finding your voice. Taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voice is heard and if it requires some force, then apply that force. Make sure your ideas are heard. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes. The importance of building the quorum, and that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom, instead of a single takeaway, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in and they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time in a matter of months. If they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway, that is I would like you to go to ThoughtSpot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is, please go to ThoughtSpot.com/beyond. Our global user conference is happening in this December. We would love to have you join us, it's, again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. We'll be sharing things that we have been working to release, something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas our engineers have been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at ThoughtSpot Beyond. Thank you, thank you so much.

>> Data is at the heart of transformation and the change every company needs to succeed, but it takes more than new technology. It's about teams, talent and cultural change. Empowering everyone on the front lines to make decisions all at the speed of digital. The transformation starts with you. It's time to lead the way it's time for Thought leaders. >> Welcome to "Thought Leaders" a digital event brought to you by ThoughtSpot. My name is Dave Vellante. The purpose of this day is to bring industry leaders and experts together to really try and understand the important issues around digital transformation. We have an amazing lineup of speakers and our goal is to provide you with some best practices that you can bring back and apply to your organization. Look, data is plentiful, but insights are not. ThoughtSpot is disrupting analytics by using search and machine intelligence to simplify data analysis and really empower anyone with fast access to relevant data. But in the last 150 days, we've had more questions than answers. Creating an organization that puts data and insights at their core requires not only modern technology, but leadership, a mindset and a culture that people often refer to as data-driven. What does that mean? How can we equip our teams with data and fast access to quality information that can turn insights into action. And today we're going to hear from experienced leaders who are transforming their organizations with data, insights and creating digital first cultures. But before we introduce our speakers, I'm joined today by two of my co-hosts from ThoughtSpot first chief data strategy officer at the ThoughtSpot is Cindi Howson. Cindi is an analytics and BI expert with 20 plus years experience and the author of "Successful Business Intelligence "Unlock the Value of BI & Big Data." Cindi was previously the lead analyst at Gartner for the data and analytics magic quadrant. And early last year, she joined ThoughtSpot to help CDOs and their teams understand how best to leverage analytics and AI for digital transformation. Cindi, great to see you welcome to the show. >> Thank you, Dave. Nice to join you virtually. >> Now our second cohost and friend of the cube is ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair Hello, Sudheesh how are you doing today? >> I'm well Dave, it's good to talk to you again. >> It's great to see you thanks so much for being here. Now Sudheesh please share with us why this discussion is so important to your customers and of course, to our audience and what they're going to learn today. (upbeat music) >> Thanks, Dave. I wish you were there to introduce me into every room and that I walk into because you have such an amazing way of doing it. Makes me feel all so good. Look, since we have all been cooped up in our homes, I know that the vendors like us, we have amped up our sort of effort to reach out to you with invites for events like this. So we are getting very more invites for events like this than ever before. So when we started planning for this, we had three clear goals that we wanted to accomplish. And our first one that when you finish this and walk away, we want to make sure that you don't feel like it was a waste of time. We want to make sure that we value your time and this is going to be useful. Number two, we want to put you in touch with industry leaders and thought leaders, generally good people that you want to hang around with long after this event is over. And number three, as we plan through this, we are living through these difficult times. We want an event to be this event, to be more of an uplifting and inspiring event too. Now, the challenge is how do you do that with the team being change agents because change and as much as we romanticize it, it is not one of those uplifting things that everyone wants to do, or like to do. The way I think of it sort of like a, if you've ever done bungee jumping and it's like standing on the edges waiting to make that one more step, all you have to do is take that one step and gravity will do the rest, but that is the hardest step to take. Change requires a lot of courage. And when we are talking about data and analytics, which is already like such a hard topic, not necessarily an uplifting and positive conversation in most businesses, it is somewhat scary. Change becomes all the more difficult. Ultimately change requires courage. Courage to first of all challenge the status quo. People sometimes are afraid to challenge the status quo because they are thinking that maybe I don't have the power to make the change that the company needs. Sometimes they feel like I don't have the skills. Sometimes they may feel that I'm probably not the right person do it. Or sometimes the lack of courage manifest itself as the inability to sort of break the silos that are formed within the organizations, when it comes to data and insights that you talked about. There are people in the company who are going to hog the data because they know how to manage the data, how to inquire and extract. They know how to speak data. They have the skills to do that. But they are not the group of people who have sort of the knowledge, the experience of the business to ask the right questions off the data. So there is the silo of people with the answers, and there is a silo of people with the questions. And there is gap. This sort of silos are standing in the way of making that necessary change that we all know the business needs. And the last change to sort of bring an external force sometimes. It could be a tool. It could be a platform, it could be a person, it could be a process, but sometimes no matter how big the company is or how small the company is, you may need to bring some external stimuli to start the domino of the positive changes that are necessary. The group of people that we are brought in, the four people, including Cindi, that you will hear from today are really good at practically telling you how to make that step, how to step off that edge, how to dress the rope, that you will be safe and you're going to have fun. You will have that exhilarating feeling of jumping, for a bungee jump. All four of them are exceptional, but my honor is to introduce Michelle and she's our first speaker. Michelle, I am very happy after watching her presentation and reading our bio, that there are no country vital worldwide competition for cool patterns, because she will beat all of us because when her children were small, they were probably into Harry Potter and Disney. She was managing a business and leading change there. And then as her kids grew up and got to that age where they like football and NFL, guess what? She's the CIO of NFL. What a cool mom? I am extremely excited to see what she's going to talk about. I've seen the slides, tons of amazing pictures. I'm looking to see the context behind it. I'm very thrilled to make the acquaintance of Michelle and looking forward to her talk next. Welcome Michelle, it's over to you. (upbeat music) >> I'm delighted to be with you all today to talk about thought leadership. And I'm so excited that you asked me to join you because today I get to be a quarterback. I always wanted to be one. And I thought this is about as close as I'm ever going to get. So I want to talk to you about quarterbacking, our digital revolution using insights data. And of course, as you said, leadership, first a little bit about myself, a little background, as I said, I always wanted to play football. And this is something that I wanted to do since I was a child. But when I grew up, girls didn't get to play football. I'm so happy that that's changing and girls are now doing all kinds of things that they didn't get to do before. Just this past weekend on an NFL field, we had a female coach on two sidelines and a female official on the field. I'm a lifelong fan and student of the game of football. I grew up in the South. You can tell from the accent. And in the South football is like a religion and you pick sides. I chose Auburn university working in the athletic department. So I'm Testament to you can start the journey can be long. It took me many, many years to make it into professional sports. I graduated in 1987 and my little brother, well, not actually not so little. He played offensive line for the Alabama Crimson Tide. And for those of you who know SCC football, you know this is a really big rivalry. And when you choose sides, your family is divided. So it's kind of fun for me to always tell the story that my dad knew his kid would make it to the NFL. He just bet on the wrong one. My career has been about bringing people together for memorable moments at some of America's most iconic brands, delivering memories and amazing experiences that delight from Universal Studios, Disney to my current position as CIO of the NFL. In this job I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to work with the team that gets to bring America's game to millions of people around the world. Often I'm asked to talk about how to create amazing experiences for fans, guests, or customers. But today I really wanted to focus on something different and talk to you about being behind the scenes and backstage because behind every event, every game, every awesome moment is execution, precise, repeatable execution. And most of my career has been behind the scenes doing just that assembling teams to execute these plans. And the key way that companies operate at these exceptional levels is making good decisions, the right decisions at the right time and based upon data so that you can translate the data into intelligence and be a data-driven culture. Using data and intelligence is an important way that world-class companies do differentiate themselves. And it's the lifeblood of collaboration and innovation. Teams that are working on delivering these kinds of world casts experiences are often seeking out and leveraging next-generation technologies and finding new ways to work. I've been fortunate to work across three decades of emerging experiences, which each required emerging technologies to execute a little bit first about Disney in the 90s, I was at Disney leading a project called destination Disney, which it's a data project. It was a data project, but it was CRM before CRM was even cool. And then certainly before anything like a data-driven culture was ever brought up, but way back then we were creating a digital backbone that enabled many technologies for the things that you see today, like the magic band, Disney's magical express. My career at Disney began in finance, but Disney was very good about rotating you around. And it was during one of these rotations that I became very passionate about data. I kind of became a pain in the butt to the IT team asking for data more and more data. And I learned that all of that valuable data was locked up in our systems. All of our point of sales systems, our reservation systems, our operation systems. And so I became a shadow IT person in marketing, ultimately leading to moving into IT. And I haven't looked back since. In the early two thousands, I was at universal studios theme park as their CIO preparing for and launching "The Wizarding World of Harry Potter" bringing one of history's most memorable characters to life required many new technologies and a lot of data. Our data and technologies were embedded into the rides and attractions. I mean, how do you really think a wan selects you at a wan shop. As today at the NFL? I am constantly challenged to do leading edge technologies, using things like sensors, AI, machine learning, and all new communication strategies and using data to drive everything from player performance, contracts, to where we build new stadiums and hold events with this year being the most challenging yet rewarding year in my career at the NFL. In the middle of a global pandemic, the way we are executing on our season is leveraging data from contract tracing devices joined with testing data, talk about data, actually enabling your business without it w wouldn't be having a season right now. I'm also on the board of directors of two public companies where data and collaboration are paramount. First RingCentral, it's a cloud based unified communications platform and collaboration with video message and phone all in one solution in the cloud and Quotient technologies whose product is actually data. The tagline at Quotient is the result in knowing I think that's really important because not all of us are data companies where your product is actually data, but we should operate more like your product is data. I'd also like to talk to you about four areas of things to think about as thought leaders in your companies. First just hit on it is change how to be a champion and a driver of change. Second, how do you use data to drive performance for your company and measure performance of your company? Third, how companies now require intense collaboration to operate. And finally, how much of this is accomplished through solid data driven decisions. First let's hit on change. I mean, it's evident today more than ever, that we are in an environment of extreme change. I mean, we've all been at this for years and as technologists we've known it, believed it, lived it and thankfully for the most part, knock on what we were prepared for it. But this year everyone's cheese was moved. All the people in the back rooms, IT, data architects and others were suddenly called to the forefront because a global pandemic has turned out to be the thing that is driving intense change in how people work and analyze their business. On March 13th, we closed our office at the NFL in the middle of preparing for one of our biggest events, our kickoff event, the 2020 draft. We went from planning a large event in Las Vegas under the bright lights, red carpet stage to smaller events in club facilities. And then ultimately to one where everyone coaches GM's prospects and even our commissioner were at home in their basements. And we only had a few weeks to figure it out. I found myself for the first time being in the live broadcast event space, talking about bungee jumping. This is really what it felt like. It was one in which no one felt comfortable because it had not been done before. But leading through this, I stepped up, but it was very scary. It was certainly very risky, but it ended up being all so rewarding when we did it. And as a result of this, some things will change forever. Second, managing performance. I mean, data should inform how you're doing and how to get your company to perform at it's level. Highest level. As an example, the NFL has always measured performance, obviously, and it is one of the purest examples of how performance directly impacts outcome. I mean, you can see performance on the field. You can see points being scored in stats, and you immediately know that impact those with the best stats usually when the games. The NFL has always recorded stats since the beginning of time here at the NFL a little this year is our 101 year and athletes ultimate success as a player has also always been greatly impacted by his stats. But what has changed for us is both how much more we can measure and the immediacy with which it can be measured. And I'm sure in your business it's the same. The amount of data you must have has got to have quadrupled and how fast you need it and how quickly you need to analyze it is so important. And it's very important to break the silos between the keys, to the data and the use of the data. Our next generation stats platform is taking data to a next level. It's powered by Amazon web services. And we gathered this data real-time from sensors that are on players' bodies. We gather it in real time, analyze it, display it online and on broadcast. And of course it's used to prepare week to week in addition to what is a normal coaching plan would be. We can now analyze, visualize route patterns, speed match-ups, et cetera. So much faster than ever before. We're continuing to roll out sensors too that will gather more and more information about a player's performance as it relates to their health and safety. The third trend is really, I think it's a big part of what we're feeling today and that is intense collaboration. And just for sort of historical purposes, it's important to think about for those of you that are IT professionals and developers, more than 10 years ago, agile practices began sweeping companies where small teams would work together rapidly in a very flexible, adaptive, and innovative way. And it proved to be transformational. However, today, of course, that is no longer just small teams, the next big wave of change. And we've seen it through this pandemic is that it's the whole enterprise that must collaborate and be agile. If I look back on my career, when I was at Disney, we owned everything 100%. We made a decision, we implemented it. We were a collaborative culture, but it was much easier to push change because you own the whole decision. If there was buy-in from the top down, you've got the people from the bottom up to do it and you executed. At Universal we were a joint venture. Our attractions and entertainment was licensed. Our hotels were owned and managed by other third parties. So influence and collaboration and how to share across companies became very important. And now here I am at the NFL and even the bigger ecosystem, we have 32 clubs that are all separate businesses. 31 different stadiums that are owned by a variety of people. We have licensees, we have sponsors, we have broadcast partners. So it seems that as my career has evolved, centralized control has gotten less and less and has been replaced by intense collaboration, not only within your own company, but across companies. The ability to work in a collaborative way across businesses and even other companies that has been a big key to my success in my career. I believe this whole vertical integration and big top-down decision-making is going by the wayside in favor of ecosystems that require cooperation yet competition to co-exist. I mean, the NFL is a great example of what we call co-op petition, which is cooperation and competition. We're in competition with each other, but we cooperate to make the company the best it can be. And at the heart of these items really are data driven decisions and culture. Data on its own isn't good enough. You must be able to turn it to insights. Partnerships between technology teams who usually hold the keys to the raw data and business units who have the knowledge to build the right decision models is key. If you're not already involved in this linkage, you should be. Data mining isn't new for sure. The availability of data is quadrupling and it's everywhere. How do you know what to even look at? How do you know where to begin? How do you know what questions to ask it's by using the tools that are available for visualization and analytics and knitting together strategies of the company. So it begins with first of all, making sure you do understand the strategy of the company. So in closing, just to wrap up a bit, many of you joined today, looking for thought leadership on how to be a change agent, a change champion, and how to lead through transformation. Some final thoughts are be brave and drive. Don't do the ride along program. It's very important to drive. Driving can be high risk, but it's also high reward. Embracing the uncertainty of what will happen is how you become brave. Get more and more comfortable with uncertainty, be calm and let data be your map on your journey. Thanks. >> Michelle, tank you so much. So you and I share a love of data and a love of football. You said you want to be the quarterback. I'm more an old line person. (Michelle and Cindi laughing) >> Well, then I can do my job without you. >> Great. And I'm getting the feeling now, Sudheesh is talking about bungee jumping. My vote is when we're past this pandemic, we both take them to the Delaware water gap and we do the cliff jumping. >> That sounds good, I'll watch. >> Yeah, you'll watch, okay. So Michelle, you have so many stakeholders when you're trying to prioritize the different voices. You have the players, you have the owners, you have the league, as you mentioned, the broadcasters, your partners here and football mamas like myself. How do you prioritize when there's so many different stakeholders that you need to satisfy? >> I think balancing across stakeholders starts with, aligning on a mission. And if you spend a lot of time understanding where everyone's coming from, and you can find the common thread that ties them all together, you sort of do get them to naturally prioritize their work. And I think that's very important. So for us, at the NFL and even at Disney, it was our core values and our core purpose, is so well known and when anything challenges that we're able to sort of lay that out. But as a change agent, you have to be very empathetic. And I would say empathy is probably your strongest skill if you're a change agent. And that means listening to every single stakeholder, even when they're yelling at you, even when they're telling you your technology doesn't work and you know that it's user error, or even when someone is just emotional about what's happening to them and that they're not comfortable with it. So I think being empathetic and having a mission and understanding it is sort of how I prioritize and balance. >> Yeah, empathy, a very popular word this year. I can imagine those coaches and owners yelling. So, thank you for your leadership here. So Michelle, I look forward to discussing this more with our other customers and disruptors joining us in a little bit. (upbeat music) So we're going to take a hard pivot now and go from football to Chernobyl. Chernobyl what went wrong? 1986, as the reactors were melting down, they had the data to say, this is going to be catastrophic. And yet the culture said, "no, we're perfect, hide it. "Don't dare tell anyone." Which meant they went ahead and had celebrations in Kiev. Even though that increased the exposure, the additional thousands getting cancer and 20,000 years before the ground around there can even be inhabited again, this is how powerful and detrimental a negative culture, a culture that is unable to confront the brutal facts that hides data. This is what we have to contend with. And this is why I want you to focus on having, fostering a data-driven culture. I don't want you to be a laggard. I want you to be a leader in using data to drive your digital transformation. So I'll talk about culture and technology. Is it really two sides of the same coin, real-world impacts and then some best practices you can use to and innovate your culture. Now, oftentimes I would talk about culture and I talk about technology. And recently a CDO said to me, "Cindi, I actually think this is two sides "of the same coin. "One reflects the other." What do you think? Let me walk you through this. So let's take a laggard. What does the technology look like? Is it based on 1990s BI and reporting largely parametrized reports, on premises data, warehouses, or not even that operational reports at best one enterprise data warehouse, very slow moving and collaboration is only email. What does that culture tell you? Maybe there's a lack of leadership to change, to do the hard work that Sudheesh referred to, or is there also a culture of fear, afraid of failure, resistance to change complacency. And sometimes that complacency it's not because people are lazy. It's because they've been so beaten down every time a new idea is presented. It's like, no we're measured on least cost to serve. So politics and distrust, whether it's between business and IT or individual stakeholders is the norm. So data is hoarded. Let's contrast that with a leader, a data and analytics leader, what is their technology look like? Augmented analytics search and AI driven insights, not on premises, but in the cloud and maybe multiple clouds. And the data is not in one place, but it's in a data Lake and in a data warehouse, a logical data warehouse. The collaboration is being a newer methods, whether it's Slack or teams allowing for that real time decisioning or investigating a particular data point. So what is the culture in the leaders? It's transparent and trust. There is a trust that data will not be used to punish that there is an ability to confront the bad news. It's innovation, valuing innovation in pursuit of the company goals, whether it's the best fan experience and player safety in the NFL or best serving your customers. It's innovative and collaborative. There's none of this. Oh, well, I didn't invent that. I'm not going to look at that. There's still pride of ownership, but it's collaborating to get to a better place faster. And people feel empowered to present new ideas to fail fast, and they're energized knowing that they're using the best technology and innovating at the pace that business requires. So data is democratized. And democratized, not just for power users or analysts, but really at the point of impact what we like to call the new decision-makers or really the frontline workers. So Harvard business review partnered with us to develop this study to say, just how important is this? We've been working at BI and analytics as an industry for more than 20 years. Why is it not at the front lines? Whether it's a doctor, a nurse, a coach, a supply chain manager, a warehouse manager, a financial services advisor. Everyone said that if our 87% said, they would be more successful if frontline workers were empowered with data driven insights, but they recognize they need new technology to be able to do that. It's not about learning hard tools. The sad reality, only 20% of organizations are actually doing this. These are the data-driven leaders. So this is the culture in technology. How did we get here? It's because state-of-the-art keeps changing. So the first-generation BI and analytics platforms were deployed on premises on small datasets, really just taking data out of ERP systems that were also on premises. And state-of-the-art was maybe getting a management report, an operational report. Over time visual-based data discovery vendors disrupted these traditional BI vendors, empowering now analysts to create visualizations with the flexibility on a desktop, sometimes larger data, sometimes coming from a data warehouse. The current state of the art though, Gartner calls it augmented analytics at ThoughtSpot, we call it search and AI driven analytics. And this was pioneered for large scale datasets, whether it's on premises or leveraging the cloud data warehouses. And I think this is an important point. Oftentimes you, the data and analytics leaders will look at these two components separately, but you have to look at the BI and analytics tier in lockstep with your data architectures to really get to the granular insights and to leverage the capabilities of AI. Now, if you've never seen ThoughtSpot, I'll just show you what this looks like. Instead of somebody hard coding, a report it's typing in search keywords and very robust keywords contains rank top bottom, getting to a visual visualization that then can be pinned to an existing Pin board that might also contain insights generated by an AI engine. So it's easy enough for that new decision maker, the business user, the non analyst to create themselves. Modernizing the data and analytics portfolio is hard because the pace of change has accelerated. You use to be able to create an investment place a bet for maybe 10 years, a few years ago, that time horizon was five years, now it's maybe three years and the time to maturity has also accelerated. So you have these different components, the search and AI tier, the data science tier, data preparation and virtualization. But I would also say equally important is the cloud data warehouse and pay attention to how well these analytics tools can unlock the value in these cloud data warehouses. So ThoughtSpot was the first to market with search and AI driven insights. Competitors have followed suit, but be careful if you look at products like power BI or SAP analytics cloud, they might demo well, but do they let you get to all the data without moving it in products like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Azure synapse or Google big query, they do not. They require you to move it into a smaller in memory engine. So it's important how well these new products inter operate. the pace of change, its acceleration Gartner recently predicted that by 2022, 65% of analytical queries will be generated using search or NLP or even AI. And that is roughly three times the prediction they had just a couple years ago. So let's talk about the real world impact of culture. And if you read any of my books or used any of the maturity models out there, whether the Gartner IT score that I worked on, or the data warehousing Institute also has the money surety model. We talk about these five pillars to really become data-driven. As Michelle, I spoke about it's focusing on the business outcomes, leveraging all the data, including new data sources, it's the talent, the people, the technology, and also the processes. And often when I would talk about the people and the talent, I would lump the culture as part of that. But in the last year, as I've traveled the world and done these digital events for Thought leaders, you have told me now culture is absolutely so important. And so we've pulled it out as a separate pillar. And in fact, in polls that we've done in these events, look at how much more important culture is as a barrier to becoming data-driven it's three times as important as any of these other pillars. That's how critical it is. And let's take an example of where you can have great data, but if you don't have the right culture, there's devastating impacts. And I will say, I have been a loyal customer of Wells Fargo for more than 20 years. But look at what happened in the face of negative news with data, it said, "hey, we're not doing good cross selling, "customers do not have both a checking account "and a credit card and a savings account and a mortgage." They opened fake accounts facing billions in fines, change in leadership that even the CEO attributed to a toxic sales culture, and they're trying to fix this. But even recently there's been additional employee backlash saying the culture has not changed. Let's contrast that with some positive examples, Medtronic, a worldwide company in 150 countries around the world. They may not be a household name to you, but if you have a loved one or yourself, you have a pacemaker, spinal implant diabetes, you know this brand. And at the start of COVID when they knew their business would be slowing down, because hospitals would only be able to take care of COVID patients. They took the bold move of making their IP for ventilators publicly available. That is the power of a positive culture. Or Verizon, a major telecom organization looking at late payments of their customers. And even though the U.S federal government said, "well, you can't turn them off. They said, "we'll extend that even beyond "the mandated guidelines." And facing a slow down in the business because of the tough economy, they said, you know what? "We will spend the time up skilling our people, "giving them the time to learn more "about the future of work, the skills and data "and analytics," for 20,000 of their employees, rather than furloughing them. That is the power of a positive culture. So how can you transform your culture to the best in class? I'll give you three suggestions, bring in a change agent, identify the relevance, or I like to call it WIFM and organize for collaboration. So the CDO, whatever your title is, chief analytics officer, chief digital officer, you are the most important change agent. And this is where you will hear that oftentimes a change agent has to come from outside the organization. So this is where, for example, in Europe, you have the CDO of Just Eat a takeout food delivery organization coming from the airline industry or in Australia, National Australian bank, taking a CDO within the same sector from TD bank going to NAB. So these change agents come in disrupt. It's a hard job. As one of you said to me, it often feels like Sisyphus. I make one step forward and I get knocked down again. I get pushed back. It is not for the faint of heart, but it's the most important part of your job. The other thing I'll talk about is WIFM. What is in it for me? And this is really about understanding the motivation, the relevance that data has for everyone on the frontline, as well as those analysts, as well as the executives. So if we're talking about players in the NFL, they want to perform better and they want to stay safe. That is why data matters to them. If we're talking about financial services, this may be a wealth management advisor. Okay we could say commissions, but it's really helping people have their dreams come true, whether it's putting their children through college or being able to retire without having to work multiple jobs still into your 70s or 80s for the teachers, teachers, you ask them about data. They'll say we don't, we don't need that. I care about the student. So if you can use data to help a student perform better, that is WIFM. And sometimes we spend so much time talking the technology, we forget what is the value we're trying to deliver with it. And we forget the impact on the people that it does require change. In fact, the Harvard business review study found that 44% said lack of change management is the biggest barrier to leveraging both new technology, but also being empowered to act on those data-driven insights. The third point organize for collaboration. This does require diversity of thought, but also bringing the technology, the data and the business people together. Now there's not a single one size fits all model for data and analytics. At one point in time, even having a BICC, a BI competency center was considered state-of-the-art. Now for the biggest impact what I recommend is that you have a federated model centralized for economies of scale. That could be the common data, but then in bed, these evangelists, these analysts of the future within every business unit, every functional domain. And as you see this top bar, all models are possible, but the hybrid model has the most impact, the most leaders. So as we look ahead to the months ahead, to the year ahead an exciting time, because data is helping organizations better navigate a tough economy, lock in the customer loyalty. And I look forward to seeing how you foster that culture that's collaborative with empathy and bring the best of technology, leveraging the cloud, all your data. So thank you for joining us at Thought Leaders. And next I'm pleased to introduce our first change agent, Tom Mazzaferro chief data officer of Western union. And before joining Western union, Tom made his Mark at HSBC and JPMorgan Chase spearheading digital innovation in technology, operations, risk compliance, and retail banking. Tom, thank you so much for joining us today. (upbeat music) >> Very happy to be here and looking forward to talking to all of you today. So as we look to move organizations to a data-driven, capability into the future, there is a lot that needs to be done on the data side, but also how does data connect and enable different business teams and technology teams into the future. As you look across, our data ecosystems and our platforms and how we modernize that to the cloud in the future, it all needs to basically work together, right? To really be able to drive and over the shift from a data standpoint, into the future, that includes being able to have the right information with the right quality of data, at the right time to drive informed business decisions, to drive the business forward. As part of that, we actually have partnered with ThoughtSpot, to actually bring in the technology to help us drive that as part of that partnership. And it's how we've looked to integrate it into our overall business as a whole we've looked at how do we make sure that our business and our professional lives right, are enabled in the same ways as our personal lives. So for example, in your personal lives, when you want to go and find something out, what do you do? You go onto google.com or you go on to Bing we go onto Yahoo and you search for what you want search to find and answer. ThoughtSpot for us as the same thing, but in the business world. So using ThoughtSpot and other AI capability it's allowed us to actually, enable our overall business teams in our company to actually have our information at our fingertips. So rather than having to go and talk to someone or an engineer to go pull information or pull data, we actually can have the end-users or the business executives, right. Search for what they need, what they want at the exact time that action need it to go and drive the business forward. This is truly one of those transformational things that we've put in place. On top of that, we are on the journey to modernize our larger ecosystem as a whole. That includes modernizing our underlying data warehouses, our technology, or our Eloqua environments. And as we move that, we've actually picked two of our cloud providers going to AWS and GCP. We've also adopted Snowflake to really drive and to organize our information and our data then drive these new solutions and capabilities forward. So they portion of us though is culture. So how do we engage with the business teams and bring the IT teams together to really drive these holistic end to end solutions and capabilities to really support the actual business into the future? That's one of the keys here, as we look to modernize and to really enhance our organizations to become data-driven, this is the key. If you can really start to provide answers to business questions before they're even being asked and to predict based upon different economic trends or different trends in your business, what does this is maybe be made and actually provide those answers to the business teams before they're even asking for it, that is really becoming a data-driven organization. And as part of that, it's really then enables the business to act quickly and take advantage of opportunities as they come in based upon, industries based upon markets, based upon products, solutions, or partnerships into the future. These are really some of the keys that become crucial as you move forward, right, into this new age, especially with COVID. With COVID now taking place across the world, right? Many of these markets, many of these digital transformations are accelerating and are changing rapidly to accommodate and to support customers in these very difficult times, as part of that, you need to make sure you have the right underlying foundation ecosystems and solutions to really drive those capabilities and those solutions forward. As we go through this journey, both of my career, but also each of your careers into the future, right? It also needs to evolve, right? Technology has changed so drastically in the last 10 years, and that change is only accelerating. So as part of that, you have to make sure that you stay up to speed, up to date with new technology changes both on the platform standpoint tools, but also what do our customers want? What do our customers need and how do we then service them with our information, with our data, with our platform and with our products and our services to meet those needs and to really support and service those customers into the future. This is all around becoming a more data organization such as how do you use your data to support the current business lines, but how do you actually use your information, your data to actually put a better support your customers, better support your business, better support your employees, your operations teams, and so forth, and really creating that full integration in that ecosystem is really when you start to get large dividends from this investments into the future. But that being said, hope you enjoy the segment on how to become and how to drive it data driven organization. And, looking forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you. >> Tom that was great thanks so much. Now I'm going to have to brag on you for a second as a change agent you've come in disrupted and how long have you been at Western union? >> Only nine months, so just started this year, but, doing some great opportunities and great changes. And we have a lot more to go, but, we're really driving things forward in partnership with our business teams and our colleagues to support those customers going forward. >> Tom, thank you so much. That was wonderful. And now I'm excited to introduce you to Gustavo Canton, a change agent that I've had the pleasure of working with meeting in Europe, and he is a serial change agent, most recently with Schneider electric, but even going back to Sam's clubs, Gustavo welcome. (upbeat music) >> So, hey everyone, my name is Gustavo Canton and thank you so much, Cindi, for the intro, as you mentioned, doing transformations is high effort, high reward situation. I have empowered many transformations and I have led many transformations. And what I can tell you is that it's really hard to predict the future, but if you have a North star and where you're going, the one thing that I want you to take away from this discussion today is that you need to be bold to evolve. And so in today, I'm going to be talking about culture and data, and I'm going to break this down in four areas. How do we get started barriers or opportunities as I see it, the value of AI, and also, how do you communicate, especially now in the workforce of today with so many different generations, you need to make sure that you are communicating in ways that are non-traditional sometimes. And so how do we get started? So I think the answer to that is you have to start for you yourself as a leader and stay tuned. And by that, I mean, you need to understand not only what is happening in your function or your field, but you have to be varying into what is happening in society, socioeconomically speaking wellbeing. The common example is a great example. And for me personally, it's an opportunity because the one core value that I have is well-being, I believe that for human potential, for customers and communities to grow wellbeing should be at the center of every decision. And as somebody mentioned is great to be, stay in tune and have the skillset and the courage. But for me personally, to be honest, to have this courage is not about not being afraid. You're always afraid when you're making big changes when you're swimming upstream, but what gives me the courage is the empathy part. Like I think empathy is a huge component because every time I go into an organization or a function, I try to listen very attentively to the needs of the business and what the leaders are trying to do. What I do it thinking about the mission of how do I make change for the bigger, workforce? for the bigger good. Despite this fact that this might have a perhaps implication on my own self-interest in my career, right? Because you have to have that courage sometimes to make choices that I know we'll see in politically speaking, what are the right thing to do? And you have to push through it. And you have to push through it. So the bottom line for me is that I don't think they're transforming fast enough. And the reality is I speak with a lot of leaders and we have seen stories in the past. And what they show is that if you look at the four main barriers that are basically keeping us behind budget, inability to act cultural issues, politics, and lack of alignment, those are the top four. But the interesting thing is that as Cindi has mentioned, these topics culture is actually gaining, gaining more and more traction. And in 2018, there was a story from HBR and it was about 45%. I believe today it's about 55%, 60% of respondents say that this is the main area that we need to focus on. So again, for all those leaders and all the executives who understand and are aware that we need to transform, commit to the transformation and set a state, deadline to say, "hey, in two years, we're going to make this happen. "What do we need to do to empower and enable "this change engines to make it happen?" You need to make the tough choices. And so to me, when I speak about being bold is about making the right choices now. So I'll give you samples of some of the roadblocks that I went through as I think transformation most recently, as Cindi mentioned in Schneider. There are three main areas, legacy mindset. And what that means is that we've been doing this in a specific way for a long time and here is how we have been successful what was working the past is not going to work now. The opportunity there is that there is a lot of leaders who have a digital mindset and there're up and coming leaders that are not yet fully developed. We need to mentor those leaders and take bets on some of these talent, including young talent. We cannot be thinking in the past and just wait for people, three to five years for them to develop because the world is going to in a way that is super fast. The second area, and this is specifically to implementation of AI is very interesting to me because just example that I have with ThoughtSpot, right, we went to implementation and a lot of the way is the IT team function of the leaders look at technology, they look at it from the prism of the prior all success criteria for the traditional Bi's. And that's not going to work. Again the opportunity here is that you need to really find what successful look like. In my case, I want the user experience of our workforce to be the same as user experience you have at home is a very simple concept. And so we need to think about how do we gain the user experience with this augmented analytics tools and then work backwards to have the right talent processes and technology to enable that. And finally, with COVID a lot of pressuring organizations, and companies to do more with less. And the solution that most leaders I see are taking is to just minimize costs, sometimes in cut budget, we have to do the opposite. We have to actually invest some growth areas, but do it by business question. Don't do it by function. If you actually invest in these kind of solutions, if you actually invest on developing your talent, your leadership to see more digitally, if you actually invest on fixing your data platform, it's not just an incremental cost. It's actually this investment is going to offset all those hidden costs and inefficiencies that you have on your system, because people are doing a lot of work and working very hard, but it's not efficiency, and it's not working in the way that you might want to work. So there is a lot of opportunity there. And you just to put into some perspective, there have studies in the past about, how do we kind of measure the impact of data. And obviously this is going to vary by your organization maturity, is going to, there's going to be a lot of factors. I've been in companies who have very clean, good data to work with. And I think with companies that we have to start basically from scratch. So it all depends on your maturity level, but in this study, what I think is interesting is they try to put attack line or attack price to what is the cost of incomplete data. So in this case, it's about 10 times as much to complete a unit of work when you have data that is flawed as opposed to have perfect data. So let me put that just in perspective, just as an example, right? Imagine you are trying to do something and you have to do 100 things in a project, and each time you do something, it's going to cost you a dollar. So if you have perfect data, the total cost of that project might be $100. But now let's say you have any percent perfect data and 20% flawed data by using this assumption that flawed data is 10 times as costly as perfect data. Your total costs now becomes $280 as opposed to $100. This is just for you to really think about as a CIO CTO, CHRO CEO, are we really paying attention and really closing the gaps that we have on our data infrastructure. If we don't do that, it's hard sometimes to see the snowball effect or to measure the overall impact. But as you can tell the price that goes up very, very quickly. So now, if I were to say, how do I communicate this? Or how do I break through some of these challenges or some of these various, right. I think the key is I am in analytics. I know statistics obviously, and love modeling and data and optimization theory and all that stuff. That's what I came to analytics. But now as a leader and as a change agent, I need to speak about value. And in this case, for example, for Schneider, there was this tagline called free up your energy. So the number one thing that they were asking from the analytics team was actually efficiency, which to me was very interesting. But once I understood that I understood what kind of language to use, how to connect it to the overall strategy and basically how to bring in the, the right leaders, because you need to focus on the leaders that you're going to make the most progress. Again, low effort, high value. You need to make sure you centralize all the data as you can. You need to bring in some kind of augmented analytics solution. And finally you need to make it super simple for the, in this case, I was working with the HR teams in other areas, so they can have access to one portal. They don't have to be confused in looking for 10 different places to find information. I think if you can actually have those four foundational pillars, obviously under the guise of having a data-driven culture, that's when you can actually make the impact. So in our case, it was about three years total transformation, but it was two years for this component of augmented analytics. It took about two years to talk to IT get leadership support, find the budgeting, get everybody on board, make sure the safe criteria was correct. And we call this initiative, the people analytics portal, it was actually launched in July of this year. And we were very excited and the audience was very excited to do this. In this case, we did our pilot in North America for many, many manufacturers. But one thing that is really important is as you bring along your audience on this, you're going from Excel, in some cases or Tableau to other tools like, ThoughtSpot, you need to really explain them what is the difference and how these tools can truly replace, some of the spreadsheets or some of the views that you might have on these other kind of tools. Again, Tableau, I think it's a really good tool. There are other many tools that you might have in your toolkit. But in my case, personally, I feel that you need to have one portal going back to Cindi's point. I really truly enable the end user. And I feel that this is the right solution for us, right? And I will show you some of the findings that we had in the pilot in the last two months. So this was a huge victory, and I will tell you why, because it took a lot of effort for us to get to the station. Like I said, it's been years for us to kind of lay the foundation, get the leadership, and shaping culture so people can understand why you truly need to invest on (indistinct) analytics. And so what I'm showing here is an example of how do we use basically, a tool to capture in video the qualitative findings that we had, plus the quantitative insights that we have. So in this case, our preliminary results based on our ambition for three main metrics, hours saved user experience and adoption. So for hours saved or a mission was to have 10 hours per week per employee save on average user experience, or ambition was 4.5. And adoption, 80%. In just two months, two months and a half of the pilot, we were able to achieve five hours per week per employee savings. Our user experience for 4.3 out of five and adoption of 60%. Really, really amazing work. But again, it takes a lot of collaboration for us to get to the stage from IT, legal, communications, obviously the operations teams and the users in HR safety and other areas that might be, basically stakeholders in this whole process. So just to summarize this kind of effort takes a lot of energy. You are a change agent. You need to have a courage to make the decision and understand that I feel that in this day and age, with all this disruption happening, we don't have a choice. We have to take the risk, right? And in this case, I feel a lot of satisfaction in how we were able to gain all these very source for this organization. And that gave me the confidence to know that the work has been done and we are now in a different stage for the organization. And so for me, it to say, thank you for everybody who has believed, obviously in our vision, everybody who has believe in the word that we were trying to do and to make the life of four workforce or customers or in community better. As you can tell, there is a lot of effort. There is a lot of collaboration that is needed to do something like this. In the end, I feel very satisfied. With the accomplishments of this transformation, and I just want to tell for you, if you are going right now in a moment that you feel that you have to swim upstream what would mentors, what would people in this industry that can help you out and guide you on this kind of a transformation is not easy to do is high effort, but is well worth it. And with that said, I hope you are well, and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Talk to you soon, take care. >> Thank you, Gustavo, that was amazing. All right, let's go to the panel. (air whooshing) >> Okay, now we're going to go into the panel and bring Cindi, Michelle, Tom, and Gustavo back and have an open discussion. And I think we can all agree how valuable it is to hear from practitioners. And I want to thank the panel for sharing their knowledge with the community. And one common challenge that I heard you all talk about was bringing your leadership and your teams along on the journey with you. We talk about this all the time, and it is critical to have support from the top. Why? Because it directs the middle and then it enables bottoms up innovation effects from the cultural transformation that you guys all talked about. It seems like another common theme we heard is that you all prioritize database decision-making in your organizations and you combine two of your most valuable assets to do that and create leverage, employees on the front lines. And of course the data. And as you rightly pointed out, Tom, the pandemic has accelerated the need for really leaning into this. The old saying, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Well COVID is broken everything. And it's great to hear from our experts, how to move forward. So let's get right into it. So Gustavo, let's start with you if I'm an aspiring change agent and let's say I'm a budding data leader. What do I need to start doing? What habits do I need to create for long lasting success? >> I think curiosity is very important. You need to be, like I say, in tune to what is happening, not only in your specific field, like I have a passion for analytics, I can do this for 50 years plus, but I think you need to understand wellbeing other areas across not only a specific business, as you know I come from, Sam's club Walmart, retail, I mean energy management technology. So you have to try to push yourself and basically go out of your comfort zone. I mean, if you are staying in your comfort zone and you want to use lean continuous improvement, that's just going to take you so far. What you have to do is, and that's what I try to do is I try to go into areas, businesses, and transformation that make me stretch and develop as a leader. That's what I'm looking to do so I can help transform the functions organizations and do the change management, change of mindset required for these kinds of efforts. >> Michelle, you're at the intersection of tech and sports and what a great combination, but they're both typically male oriented fields. I mean, we've talked a little bit about how that's changing, but two questions. Tell us how you found your voice and talk about why diversity matters so much more than ever now. >> No, I found my voice really as a young girl, and I think I had such amazing support from men in my life. And I think the support and sponsorship as well as sort of mentorship along the way, I've had amazing male mentors who have helped me understand that my voice is just as important as anyone else's. I mean, I have often heard, and I think it's been written about that a woman has to believe they'll 100% master topic before they'll talk about it where a man can feel much less mastery and go on and on. So I was that way as well. And I learned just by watching and being open, to have my voice. And honestly at times demand a seat at the table, which can be very uncomfortable. And you really do need those types of, support networks within an organization. And diversity of course is important and it has always been. But I think if anything, we're seeing in this country right now is that diversity among all types of categories is front and center. And we're realizing that we don't all think alike. We've always known this, but we're now talking about things that we never really talked about before. And we can't let this moment go unchecked and on, and not change how we operate. So having diverse voices within your company and in the field of tech and sports, I am often the first and only I'm was the first, CIO at the NFL, the first female senior executive. It was fun to be the first, but it's also, very challenging. And my responsibility is to just make sure that, I don't leave anyone behind and make sure that I leave it good for the next generation. >> Well, thank you for that. That is inspiring. And Cindi, you love data and the data's pretty clear that diversity is a good business, but I wonder if you can add your perspectives to this conversation? >> Yeah, so Michelle has a new fan here because she has found her voice. I'm still working on finding mine. And it's interesting because I was raised by my dad, a single dad. So he did teach me how to work in a predominantly male environment, but why I think diversity matters more now than ever before. And this is by gender, by race, by age, by just different ways of working in thinking is because as we automate things with AI, if we do not have diverse teams looking at the data and the models and how they're applied, we risk having bias at scale. So this is why I think I don't care what type of minority you are finding your voice, having a seat at the table and just believing in the impact of your work has never been more important. And as Michelle said more possible. >> Great perspectives, thank you. Tom I want to go to you. I mean, I feel like everybody in our businesses in some way, shape or form become a COVID expert, but what's been the impact of the pandemic on your organization's digital transformation plans? >> We've seen a massive growth actually in a digital business over the last, 12 months, really, even in celebration, right? Once COVID hit, we really saw that in the 200 countries and territories that we operate in today and service our customers, today, that there's been a huge need, right? To send money, to support family, to support, friends and support loved ones across the world. And as part of that we are very, honored to get to support those customers that we, across all the centers today. But as part of that acceleration we need to make sure that we had the right architecture and the right platforms to basically scale, right, to basically support and provide the right kind of security for our customers going forward. So as part of that, we did do some pivots and we did accelerate some of our plans on digital to help support that overall growth coming in and to support our customers going forward, because there were these times during this pandemic, right? This is the most important time. And we need to support those that we love and those that we care about and doing that it's one of those ways is actually by sending money to them, support them financially. And that's where, really our part of that our services come into play that we really support those families. So it was really a great opportunity for us to really support and really bring some of our products to this level and supporting our business going forward. >> Awesome, thank you. Now I want to come back to Gustavo, Tom I'd love for you to chime in too. Did you guys ever think like you were, you were pushing the envelope too much in doing things with data or the technology that was just maybe too bold, maybe you felt like at some point it was failing or you're pushing your people too hard. Can you share that experience and how you got through it? >> Yeah, the way I look at it is, again, whenever I go to an organization, I ask the question, hey, how fast you would like transform. And, based on the agreements from the leadership and the vision that we want to take place, I take decisions. And I collaborate in a specific way now, in the case of COVID, for example, right. It forces us to remove silos and collaborate in a faster way. So to me, it was an opportunity to actually integrate with other areas and drive decisions faster, but make no mistake about it. When you are doing a transformation, you are obviously trying to do things faster than sometimes people are comfortable doing, and you need to be okay with that. Sometimes you need to be okay with tension, or you need to be okay debating points or making repetitive business cases until people connect with the decision because you understand, and you are seeing that, "hey, the CEO is making a one two year, efficiency goal. "The only way for us to really do more with less "is for us to continue this path. "We cannot just stay with the status quo. "We need to find a way to accelerate the transformation." That's the way I see it. >> How about you Tom, we were talking earlier with Sudheesh and Cindi, about that bungee jumping moment. What could you share? >> Yeah, I think you hit upon it, right now, the pace of change with the slowest pace that you see for the rest of your career. So as part of that, right, that's what I tell my team is that you need to be, you need to feel comfortable being uncomfortable. I mean, that we have to be able to basically scale, right, expand and support that the ever-changing needs in the marketplace and industry our customers today, and that pace of change that's happening, right. And what customers are asking for and the competition in the marketplace, it's only going to accelerate. So as part of that, as you look at what, how you're operating today in your current business model, right. Things are only going to get faster. So you have to plan into a line into drive the agile transformation so that you can scale even faster in the future. So as part of that, that's what we're putting in place here, right, is how do we create that underlying framework and foundation that allows the organization to basically continue to scale and evolve into the future? >> Yeah, we're definitely out of our comfort zones, but we're getting comfortable with it. So, Cindi, last question, you've worked with hundreds of organizations, and I got to believe that, some of the advice you gave when you were at Gartner, which is pre COVID, maybe sometimes clients didn't always act on it. They're not on my watch for whatever variety of reasons, but it's being forced on them now. But knowing what you know now that we're all in this isolation economy, how would you say that advice has changed? Has it changed? What's your number one action and recommendation today? >> Yeah, well, first off, Tom just freaked me out. What do you mean? This is the slowest ever even six months ago I was saying the pace of change in data and analytics is frenetic. So, but I think you're right, Tom, the business and the technology together is forcing this change. Now, Dave, to answer your question, I would say the one bit of advice, maybe I was a little more, very aware of the power and politics and how to bring people along in a way that they are comfortable. And now I think it's, you know what you can't get comfortable. In fact, we know that the organizations that were already in the cloud have been able to respond and pivot faster. So if you really want to survive as Tom and Gustavo said, get used to being uncomfortable, the power and politics are going to happen. Break the rules, get used to that and be bold. Do not be afraid to tell somebody they're wrong and they're not moving fast enough. I do think you have to do that with empathy, as Michelle said, and Gustavo, I think that's one of the key words today besides the bungee jumping. So I want to know where's the dish going to go bungee jumping. >> Guys fantastic discussion, really. Thanks again to all the panelists and the guests. It was really a pleasure speaking with you today. Really virtually all of the leaders that I've spoken to in the Cube program. Recently, they tell me that the pandemic is accelerating so many things, whether it's new ways to work, we heard about new security models and obviously the need for cloud. I mean, all of these things are driving true enterprise wide digital transformation, not just, as I said before, lip service. Sometimes we minimize the importance and the challenge of building culture and in making this transformation possible. But when it's done, right, the right culture is going to deliver tremendous results. Yeah, what does that mean getting it right? Everybody's trying to get it right. My biggest takeaway today is it means making data part of the DNA of your organization. And that means making it accessible to the people in your organization that are empowered to make decisions, decisions that can drive new revenue, cut costs, speed access to critical care, whatever the mission is of your organization. Data can create insights and informed decisions that drive value. Okay. Let's bring back Sudheesh and wrap things up. Sudheesh, please bring us home. >> Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, the Cube team, and thank goes to all of our customers and partners who joined us and thanks to all of you for spending the time with us. I want to do three quick things and then close it off. The first thing is I want to summarize the key takeaways that I had from all four of our distinguished speakers. First, Michelle, I will simply put it. She said it really well. That is be brave and drive. Don't go for a drive along. That is such an important point. Oftentimes, you know that I think that you have to do to make the positive change that you want to see happen but you wait for someone else to do it, not just, why not you? Why don't you be the one making that change happen? That's the thing that I've picked up from Michelle's talk. Cindi talked about finding the importance of finding your voice. Taking that chair, whether it's available or not, and making sure that your ideas, your voices are heard, and if it requires some force, then apply that force. Make sure your ideas are heard. Gustavo talked about the importance of building consensus, not going at things all alone sometimes building the importance of building the quorum. And that is critical because if you want the changes to last, you want to make sure that the organization is fully behind it. Tom, instead of a single takeaway, what I was inspired by is the fact that a company that is 170 years old, 170 years old, 200 companies and 200 countries they're operating in. And they were able to make the change that is necessary through this difficult time. So in a matter of months, if they could do it, anyone could. The second thing I want to do is to leave you with a takeaway that is I would like you to go to topspot.com/nfl because our team has made an app for NFL on Snowflake. I think you will find this interesting now that you are inspired and excited because of Michelle's talk. And the last thing is please go to thoughtspot.com/beyond our global user conference is happening in this December. We would love to have you join us. It's again, virtual, you can join from anywhere. We are expecting anywhere from five to 10,000 people, and we would love to have you join and see what we've been up to since last year. We have a lot of amazing things in store for you, our customers, our partners, our collaborators, they will be coming and sharing. We'll be sharing things that we've have been working to release something that will come out next year. And also some of the crazy ideas our engineers have been cooking up. All of those things will be available for you at the Thought Spot Beyond. Thank you. Thank you so much.

>> Live from Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Inforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the live cube coverage here in Boston Massachusetts. This is theCUBE's coverage, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Special guest Shira Rubinoff, president of Prime Tech, Cybermind genius, VIP influencer. Love havin' her on. We are here at AWS re:Inforce, AWS inaugural event. Great to have you on, be host with us and to do more hosting and co-hosting with us as we bring the community cube to security. >> Excellent, I think this is the perfect conference to do that. >> Shira and Dave, so day one's in the books. We got another full day of coverage, a lot of action happening. I think the seminal point of this event is that you have Amazon Web Services. They already run the biggest event, re:Invent. They have summits all around the world. Some summits get huge numbers but this has been rebranded, re:Inforce, by design, this is not another summit, Dave, this is a game statement from Amazon. >> Well, Pat Gelsinger, several years ago, told us on theCube security's a do over, it's got to be reinvented and Amazon is reinforcing that message. And, rebuilding it from the ground up with developers and the security is code mindset. Your thoughts. >> Now certainly as technology advances, cloud security has to advance as well and the cloud is looking towards technology to know how to differentiate itself and continue to add to it and change up. And, as we talk about AWS, they secure the cloud and the customers have to secure in the cloud. Which is a very important piece because it almost lends itself. When people are talking about, how do you secure an environment and even if you look at organizations, there's a talk between the CIO, what's the role of a CIO and what's the role of a COO. Almost look at it like how AWS really positions itself. Securing the cloud, securing in the cloud, securing the industry itself, securing within the company. And, what AWS really has seen and really is doing is it's saying you got to work hand in hand, it has to be a partnership. And, a partnership is able to secure things much better than a one person. Because then you're putting the ownness on everybody and if everybody is actually thinking about security all the time, it's going to yield best security. >> And the things we heard, Shira, I want to get your thoughts on, encryption always on, everyone's watching, so, shared responsibility, these are the buzz words, reasoning. This is industry wide. I know you do a lot of traveling, do a lot of public speaking. You do a lot of work with some of the big companies and their transformations. What are you seeing? Because, you're out there getting the data, we got some data. What's the big trend, what's the macro trend right now, the most important story that needs to be told in this new reimagined security renaissance? >> Well, I think it's just that. I think that people are moving towards the cloud for the reasons of, one plus one equals three. You're going to have the security of the cloud and you're also going to have the security of the organization within the cloud. And the organizations are realizing today moving to the cloud they could have better overall security. So, that is the trend that I'm seeing, certainly from the larger companies out there and the smaller ones are building it from the ground up. They're saying, you know what, let's make it a solution that we're going to build, going right from day one and not putting band-aids on it to try to make it to secure after. So, they're really learning from the experts. >> Dave, I want to get your thoughts with Shira on this because all three of us do a lot of content. We make content for a living, we kind of think about that with users in mind, the audience. Well I overheard a couple of things at this event that I've been hearing at other events. Open ecosystems and the partner networks are developing. And so that makes a lot of sense, integration's a big part of security but I hear people saying, I want to meet more people, I wannna meet the person who runs, partners of that company. So, you have, I've seen for the first time a real hunger-- >> Yeah >> for social interaction at the events, more hunger for understanding who the other partners, not just what they sell-- >> You know what? >> but what's on their mind. >> So interesting, you bring that up and that's a very new piece we are seeing today. It used to be, this is my information and I'm not sharing it with you. I'm going to build something and you're going to have to guess what I'm doing because that's my secret sauce but companies were realizing that's not going to work. We need to collaborate, we need to share ideas. And the biggest companies are all banding together to share the best breed of technology and the best breed of way how to deal with security. Because, they realize that we're all trying to protect also from the same bad actors out there and they realize by collaborating, they're all stronger as a whole and stronger by themselves as well. So, this collaboration is a big deal and that's taking the trends forward >> Dave, what's your take on this? >> Well and it comes back to something we've talked about a lot today and over the years in theCube is this whole API economy. For decades, we've been trying to solve the distributed systems problem. You saw it in little pockets, obviously the internet, but it's in limited work loads. >> Amazon kind of did that. >> And Amazon has solved that problem. Massively scalable distributed systems and then, now it's okay, how do you secure it? So the shared responsibility model is very interesting and I think misunderstood. The number one problem we're hearing here, that customers are having is keeping up with Amazon because Amazon's moving at such a fast pace. That's so rare in the technology industry, where the vendors are always a little bit ahead of the customers but not light-years ahead. Amazon is just, like, pushing them out of the plane. And, so, I think the shared responsibility model is very important, I think it's misunderstood. >> Yes. >> I think people were expecting, oh, Amazon can take care of everything in the cloud and that's not the case. >> Correct. >> So-- >> Well if you're going to use the pushing out of the airplane analogy, you got to say, you got to make sure the parachute opens. >> Well. >> So when you pull the ripcord, this is what companies have to understand, that they got to be compatible with the way the architecture of cloud-native works and the right way to lift in shifts. So, there's a way to lift in shifts and there's a way not to lift in shifts. You can lift and shift infrastructure but you can't lift and shift entire workloads. >> Very true but also, making somebody responsible for their can of worms is important too. Because that also leads back to culture of the organization. If security is part of culture and they have responsibility as within the cloud that Amazon is pushing. You handle within the cloud, that's your wheelhouse, you do that, that's becoming something that becomes part of culture and is a everyday thing. Which, in turn I talk a lot about cyber-hygiene within organization, it's not just training, it's not just awareness, it's not just security and patching, and not just zero, there's also being aware of it and making it an everyday item, that has to be utilized. Amazon is right on the button with this. >> You know, I heard a phrase. >> Yeah. >> The best thing about doing these Cube interviews is that, you meet such smart people and learn a lot. But, I love the quote I heard from the co-founder of Sumo Logic. He was awesome and he said, "Process is a reflection of culture." And so in a digital transformation equation, which we all know, it's the cliche, people process technology. >> People process technology. >> People with talent gaps or skill gaps get it, technology plenty of tech, now, the process. >> Well, the process-- >> That's always the hardest nut to crack and most people won't give it up and they won't fight for it. >> Yeah. >> It's the most important. >> But, that's also the glue between the two. You're not going to have a secure environment if you're just dealing with security and you're not going to have a secure environment just dealing with the people. The process in the middle, the process, yes, the Canadian land of it. That's the glue between it. That's what makes it run and you have to get to that. As you were saying, you have to get to the process, you got to make that run well and then you nail the two together, that's full security. >> The other big thing here, not this conference but a theme that we've talked about for quite some time on theCube, is this notion of big tech. So it's been said that Amazon, Facebook, Google, maybe even Microsoft. Elizabeth Warren saying, break up big tech. Amazon, people have said, split AWS out from core Amazon retail. What do you guys think about that? Is that the right thing to do? >> No, I don't think it's the right thing to do. >> Why not? >> Like I said we had, Jimmy on earlier. They're not breaking any laws. And then, why would you want to take down what could be a competitive advantage for national security. >> Correct. >> AI is going to be, and machine learning, and the role of data is going to be a power source for good and also for safety. >> Of course. >> So why would you want to take the best companies, who are doing the best work, and handicap 'em, over one argument? That Facebook wasn't responsible in dealing with making billions of dollars in free cash flow. >> So the argument is-- >> And , in the election they broke democracy-- >> Okay, too big. That's not a good argument. >> No. >> Maybe, appropriating our data to sell more ads that should be looked at, don't you think? >> I just don't buy the tech for bad argument because, yes, some bad things have happened but the regulators and the law makers, you can't legislate what you don't understand, you can't regulate what you don't understand. So, as it's been coming out from the biggest minds in tech and in government, the law makers aren't smart enough yet. It's like they're in kindergarten, crayon outside the lines, they're tryin' to write. They don't even know what tech is, so. >> You know what, you've been taking about the Chernobyl, push the buttons, I feel like that's what public policy is putting forth. Just push the buttons now and blow it up. Rather, public policy should catch up, understand it and maybe set a framework and put in laws. So that we have a clear understanding. >> Our current government is like that scene in Chernobyl. >> Oh my god. >> That is exactly what's happening, Dave. You can apply that metaphor, just do it. >> The problem is there's no proper regulation yet. >> Right. >> You got to get everyone in the room and everybody has to agree, at least on a initial framework. We've started but we're no where near where we need to be. You have to look at safety of our nation and that's a big factor. I've gone to Congress, as a part of Cybersecurity Women, testifying for Congress and talking about this and they still don't have a handle. There's nobody who's running the ship. >> Describe what it was like there. >> Well, I went down with the executive woman for Women's Forum, which was an amazing group. We went down there, we talked to different people in Congress. They're very open to it and they realize that we really need to do something. The problem is it's very disorganized. Sadly, it's way too disorganized. Nobody knows who's calling the shots. There's a nice bunch of different groups that are working towards it but there's no one at the helm of it saying, all right, let's all fall into place and do it. Little pockets, doing little things, but not everybody banding together. That needs to change, that has to change. I'm hoping it's coming down to where it's going to be something. >> I think there's going to be a revolution in a positive way. Where again, back to my tech for good thing. I don't think people yet know how to articulate what tech for good is. There's plenty more use cases where tech could be used for good, than there are bad. Bad is always an early adopter before good. We've seen that in the web, the underbelly of multiple trends. But, the reality is, I see the bad as bad but I see so much more good going on that could be enabled. That's what I'm afraid of, that they litigate what's happening for bad and they screw the good. >> It's almost like technology, right? You have to be proactive, as well as reactive. Everybody is running to be reactive to a problem but no one was being proactive. Now, technology is understanding we have to be proactive, as well as reactive. Same like your saying, John, it has to happen from the front. >> All right, so, while you're here, I want to get you and Dave to weigh in on this, cause it's been near and dear to my heart for many years, over a decade. Humans and machines, this conversation's been discussed, here again, Dave, some of the smartest people in the industry are reiterating, Brian from, again, Sumo Logic, he's got a great view on this and there's others as well. The role of the human really is important, not just having machines do all this automation. It's not about job replacement, it's more the craft of creating outcomes that are going to be acceptable for defense, or for good, the human's critical. Your guys thoughts. >> Sure, so, we talk automation, right? People are afraid of that, they're saying, robots and machines are going to replace us. Not true. Downright it takes away menial tasks which will be giving jobs and actually creating jobs in a more meaningful way. I talk a lot about the human factors of technology and cybersecurity. Think about it, a human is developing technology to help a human, a human is using technology to hurt a human, what's the common factor? The human. We're dealing with people, they're not being replaced. There's always going to be humans there. So machines are going to help us with automation. It's going to help us with digital transformation, we'll throw the buzz words out there but they're actually meaningful, if you dial back and understand that. I think people are weary of it because they don't understand it. If they're not understanding, how it could actually help an organization, how it can be used right, then there's fear. So, we couple back to education. Education coupled with humans, machines, technology, we're going to have something very strong and really, really good. So, it's not something to be fearful of. It's something to educate yourself and be excited about and move along with technology, as it advances. >> Well, machines have always replaced humans, for various tasks. So, that's sort of natural. For the first time in history, we're replacing cognitive tasks and I think that's scares a lot of people. And, I think you're right on Shira, the answer is not to protect the past from the future, it's education. >> Correct. >> Because, innovation, we've talked about this, innovation comes from now a combination of things, it's not just Moore's law or new products that are coming out at some rapid pace. It's the combination of data, artificial intelligence, the cloud for scale. This combinatorial innovation is going to require new creativity, new thinking, and education is at the heart of that. So, I think the question is, what can public policy be to foster that? Are we teaching the right things? Is public policy and public and private partnerships fostering that type of innovation? And, so, I think there's reasons to be concerned in terms of productivity, impacts on wages, et cetera, et cetera. But, I'm an optimist, I think the future is very, very, bright. >> Okay, so, as we wrap down day one, great to have you on as a guest host, we're going to do a lot more coverage, so, we're going to be collaborating and we're going to initiate coverage of the security sector with theCube. You're going to start seeing us do a lot more events, distracting you from the noise, a lot more community involvement outreach, looking for participation and help from our friends, Cube alumni, the 8000 plus Cube alumni's that are out there, join us if you got some security chops, you know people in security have something to add, we're always open. We're here at re:Inforce. What's your guys thoughts here? I think it's a great event. I think it's going to be one of those moments, where we were present at creation, again, for another big wave, it's coming. Your thoughts about re:Inforce. >> Well, I think re:Inforce has found it's niche. I think it's needed. I think cloud security is being embraced. I think there's a real need for it. And, I think just highlighting those actions, that their taking is very much needed and we're going to see a lot more out of re:Inforce, for sure. >> Yeah, I agree, I mean critical mass here. I guess 8000 or so people that care about security, specifically care about cloud security, it's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. >> I mean, I was impressed by, first of all, that great cloud security across the board. I was really impressed by the amount of heavy hitters that are here and it's the heavy hitters that aren't the big exec brand names, the CEO of this company. You had the working CEOs of the startups, CEOs of the startups, the key biz dev people, the key marketing people-- >> CECOs >> and the CECOs are here, because they're investing. >> That's the pain point, they're feeling like they know. >> They're investing together and they're building out, in real time, it's really fast, a community around cloud security. >> So, it's interesting. So, you know, Andy Jassy's not here. You don't see Theresa. But, what you do see, is the CECO saying, I'm betting my business on the cloud, I can't scale without the cloud. I have to be at this show. And, your seeing, maybe, it's a little bit of Andy and Theresa, let go to grow and then sort of pyramid out. That innovation. >> Well, I saw Jassy at Public Sector Summit. I should of asked him this-- >> They can't be anywhere. >> I inferred from his response, when I did ask him if he's coming, is that in looking at how they're executing, they don't need the big guns here because the team's doing it. It's one of those, when you have organic chemistry coming together. You don't want the big execs being go do it. >> Sure >> You got to let it foster on it's own and that's why I'm impressed by the people here because they're the ones that are putting the sparks of creativity together, they're putting deals together, relationships are forming. That's how organic community is built. >> And, I don't think the people here want to hear, frankly, from Andy. They can hear from Andy at re:Invent. And, so, what they want to hear is the substance that they heard in the key notes today >> Security, call security. >> those are some serious-- >> Well for an inaugural event, this is amazing, right? For the sheer size of it, for a first time event is amazing and having the heavy hitters, like you said, really invested, and time, people don't have time. And to actually invest their time here and want to be here and want to learn and want to share. That speaks volumes. >> And, that's not to say Andy Jassy doesn't have substance. His key notes are among the best and there always-- >> But, you know, he's scripted >> super substantive >> But, here's the thing-- >> But, when it comes to security deep dives, you don't want to hear from him. You want to hear from somebody like Shmidt today. >> Well, some public information that I found out, that's now public is that there are a 100,000 security subscriptions in AWS marketplace. >> Wow. >> One million subscriptions paid for in AWS marketplace, as a whole. 100,000 plus security software buys there. >> Wow. >> Okay. That's huge. >> Yes >> Huge for a little cottage industry going on called Cloud Security. >> Look at the rate the industry's growing. Look at Cisco, we were just at Cisco a couple weeks ago. Cisco's a huge company, 40 billion dollar company. Their security practice is growing 21% a year. I mean, that's huge for a company that's growing basically single digits. >> Well, we'll have Josh on, sorry go ahead. >> Yeah, no, I said, just looking at all these large companies that we're all talking to and that we're dealing with, some that I'm consulting to. People are moving to the cloud and they're saying, that one of the big reasons or the reason, is for extra and more leveled security. So, I think cloud is going to be taking the forefront and I think it's going to be much bigger than people really think. >> And, customers are telling us, they want more innovation from the security vendor community and, again, that comes from cloud. The data comes from cloud, comes from machine intelligence. You put those things together-- >> Shira, great to have you on. Dave, as always profound insight, taking a red eye, you're an all day warrior. Energizer bunny. Cube coverage here, AWS re:Inforce, day one. Day two tomorrow, thanks for watching. >> Thank you. (techno music)

>> Brought to your by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. (smooth music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante at AWS, Amazon Web Services' inaugural conference called re:Inforce. This is the first conference that Amazon Web Services is putting on around security, and we've got a great guest, we've got CISO, Brian Lozata, CISO for Dataminr, also on the advisory board for Twistlock, which was recently purchased by, well, intent to purchase by Palo Alto Networks, really cracked the code on DevSecOps, scaling up. Great to have you on, thanks for coming on. >> No, thanks for the opportunity. >> Love getting down and dirty and talking to CISOs, because you know, besides the, you know, which regime controls security, which is always evolving, a lot of the state-of-the-art activity going on in the security sector. Clearly the path of catching up to the DevOps Agility has been the big focus. >> It absolutely has. As innovation has been, you know, really pushed forward with cloud I think security's had to catch up and really start pushing towards innovation, looking at ways that we could be disruptive in the space with solving these problems that, look, CISOs, we've been facing this for 20 years and we're putting old technology at the same problem trying to fix it. Now that there's new services, you know, new emerging technology with cloud, we should be taking advantage of that and innovating ourselves in the security-- >> Brian, what's the most important story that should be told, or is being told, or isn't being told that needs to be told and covered by the media when it comes to the security industry, what's your view on this? >> The lack of talent, I mean, we're starving for talent. Cyber security's the only field in the world with negative unemployment. We just don't have the actual bodies to actually fill the gaps that we have, and in that lack of talent CISOs are starving. We're looking for the right things that, or tools to actually patch these holes and we just don't have it. Again, we have to force the industry to patch all of those resource gaps with innovation and automation. I think CISOs really need to start asking for more automation and innovation within their programs. >> It's a multidimensional challenge. I want to just get your thoughts on it. I mean, what pops into my head when you say that, I think "Oh, entrepreneurial." I'm an entrepreneur, it's like, "Oh, I can start a company." So, one, build something. >> Yeah. >> Build a tool, or work for a company, be talent within an enterprise, and then three, you know, be part of that, you know, game changing ecosystem community and do something. >> Yeah, how about all three, right? You could do all three, right? Like, I think security can't be thought of as that arm to go check things anymore. I think security needs to be thought of that arm that pushes innovation forward and helps the business, you know, move forward. We need to be business enablers, and the only way we're going to do it is by building something, like by shortening up the time to actually get code out there or get products out there. >> So, I want to dig into some of the Dataminr stuff we were just chatting before we came on camera, but I do want to dig into Twistlock because I think, you know, you've been in advise, you've seen that journey from day one, from seed financing to now where they're, you know, exiting to a large company. The success has been, very short period of time, only a couple years, five years or so, magic happens, it's a good thing. What happened, what's the story there? (chuckles) I mean, what's-- >> They found. >> Why so successful? >> Well, they found the gap. They found the gap that everybody's facing is the lack of talent to actually solve all of these issues with automation, and they helped fill that gap and fill it pretty quickly, right? So, I think it went from selling to taking orders very quickly because they actually helped solve a lot of, give visibility and put more security into actual the, you know, cloud-based platforms, and it helps companies modernize their tech stack quickly, right? That's what we're all about is pushing things out quickly, and to do it with security in mind. >> If you look at a typical budget pie in IT it's usually about two-thirds people. You know, one-third, you know, hardware, software services. Is it the same in your world, or is it different? >> Depends on the industry and it depends on the company. Some companies don't put security as that much of a focus, so you sometimes you are trying to get those dollars to actually fund your program, others it just depends on the risk, right, how the company's-- >> Well, if it's financial services they'l throw it in, no problem. >> Oh, they'll throw, you know, financial services will totally, totally do it, but if it's an industry or a company that hasn't had security in there and you're evangelizing security, hey, the first six, eight months you're going to be struggling for that budget. You're going to have to, you know, have that articulation that you, you know, speak on technical risk into business risk so you can fund your program, right? That's why the most important talent or skill that a security professional needs is communication skills. If you can't articulate technical risk into a business risk to fund your program, it's, you know, it's very hard for you to actually be successful in security. >> So, you speak wallet and geek, is that what... >> You have to. (chuckles) I think, yeah, (laughs) I think wallet and geek is definitely, it's a required skill in this space, probably more and more than others, right? The other thing is security, you can actually see how it equates to dollars, too, right? >> So, to whom are you speaking wallet, line of business, CEO, C-suite, CFO? >> I think it's definitely going to be up to C-suite. I think in more mature organizations you're going to get to the product line. You're going to get, you know, security into that product aspect, so as products are starting to be developed, those product managers and that product line can start funding their own security within that product development, right, and you need to have that communication style so that you can push that initiative through that product line. So, maturity-wise you'll get there, but I think initially it has to start at that C-suite at the board level. >> And how does that conversation start and what's the flow like, what's the key message that you're getting across? >> You have to talk about risk to that product line. Where's the risk that you can articulate to them and say if this product is impacted in this way, this is the damage to the brand, you know, financial, or financial damage. Once they see that and they can absolutely put dollars next to it, it'll absolutely help them fund that program when it comes to security. >> And you spend time quantifying that >> You have to. >> Is that right? >> Yeah, you absolutely have to. Everything nowadays needs to be quantified so you can put the appropriate amount of resources towards it, both in human capital and financial, right? >> How do you make that argument credible? Is it based on experience, you pull in different data sources from lines of business? >> It's different data sources. You've definitely got to leverage your experience, but it's looking at data lifecycle, where that data's being stored, process transmitted, the risk to losing it, and then quantify that type of data. There's different levels of sensitivity to data, right? Certain data, like you take a hit on your website, just the brochure site versus transactional data, different risk levels, different, you know, different impact to the brand, to the company. >> So, you're taking a portfolio view-- >> Absolutely. >> Weighing different values. >> Totally, you have to. >> And helping people understand where to put their bill. >> Yep. >> So, the CISO, the CIO, they care about production, what's in production, also on the DevOps ethos you've got Agility, you've got hackathons, so you have the kind of the cultural shift, so how do they mitigate the risk, from your standpoint how do you view this, and what do other CISOs think, because you want to foster that creativity to get that incubating going for new ideas, hackathons for instance, great tactic in the DevOps community. We're seeing that now happen in security-- >> Totally. >> Where the people who are close to the action are getting involved in a very DevOps way, but they're kind of not getting sanctioned clearance from the boss, but that's the production side, so again, Ops, different. How is that migration or transition between I've got a hackathon, this feature that if we roll this out this could really help us with our visibility intro threats or better quality alerts. I'm just making that up, but you see where innovation's going to come from, at the same time dealing with all the other pillars of the compliance, and audit, and security, and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff that's in production. How do CISOs deal with this? >> So, it's taking a view, look, a risk-based approach to that entire lifecycle and seeing where is the biggest risk, and then to fix that risk where the gap is and to get into that innovation piece. At my previous company we developed what's called security as code. We had a big gap that we were finding a lot of issues out there with our environment that we were finding three and four days after they were actually rolled out, so we were able to take advantage of AWS services so that we could actually get visibility live, and then we did it we actually remediated the issues with Lambda functions, right? That was innovation, we were able to do it. Now, convincing DevOps to put it into production, that took some time as well, but it was that partnership and showing them we're not going to be bothering you. >> Ballpark timeframe-- >> Yep. >> Ballpark a timeframe to invention, innovation to selling it through to production, ballpark? >> Maybe a month. >> What's the difference between infrastructure as code and security as code? >> So, infrastructure as code is you're putting out the environment, you're creating that VPC, you're setting up the routes. Security as code, what we're calling security as code is that it finds an issue with that environment and it automatically fixes it with a Lambda function or something like that, right? So, it could find the vulnerability, it knows what the fix is, and it automatically goes and fixes it. That's the benefit of cloud, immutable technology. You can fix things pretty quickly. >> Yeah. >> Well, let's, now that we have that ability, let's innovate on security so that we do do those fixes instead of waiting days for it to come back. >> And the secret sauce for that comes from what? >> Developing-- >> Homegrown math, doing. >> Homegrown, homegrown. >> No problem >> You have, like the, I think cloud has allowed emerging technology and security to get back into being innovative and not just coming in to protect or to have visibility. Like security engineers are now saying, "Now we can create," right? AWS has that, the logo, what is their motto, "Build on," right, well that should apply to security practitioners as well. We should be building just as quickly as developers. >> And by the way, the old model was hire a firm to come in, buy a product. >> Totally, yes. >> Now you're saying is let's code up some security. >> Let's do it ourselves. >> Because the practitioners are close to the action-- >> Absolutely. >> They have the innovative device, doesn't take a lot of time to whip something up, find the discovery... >> And do it. And the other thing is we spent years buying tools, buying tools, buying tools. Tools were built to solve one use case. Who knows better their environment than CISOs that are working in it, right? So, let's build tools that our customers-- >> It's like a tool shed, open up the doors, like "I bought that 10 years ago. "We're still amortizing that." It's like there's too many tools. >> Too many tools, so let's build what's appropriate for the environment based on our knowledge, right, of being working in it. >> Describe a great day for a security practitioner. >> (chuckles) A great day is that I don't get called at two in the morning, right? I think every day is a great day in security, and I'm going to tell you why, because it's growing so quickly I think organizations are starting to realize the value of security, that security is a value prop to a customer or to a client. They like to see security being baked into the products, so I think it is good for security to see it grow. I love to see that AWS has now invested in re:Inforce. I think it was about time. I had been going to re:Invent for, I don't know, maybe four or five years now, and I saw that grow and it was absolutely time for this, so-- >> It's interesting-- >> It's good. >> You hear the chatter, you hear the chatter also around security not, not just being not being a call center and being strategic, which clearly it is, because one breach and you go out of business, that's a business model problem. But as a revenue generator, seeing a trend now-- >> Totally. >> Of people who are building in-house because they have their own problems are taking the Amazon playbook. Do it for yourself first and then expose that out as a service-- >> Totally. >> With Marketplace. Dave McCann's kicking butt over there. He's got services, so the idea is that if people have a good foundation you're just buying services. >> Totally. >> Not tools. >> Yep, and investing in and buying services, not tools, and then pushing those, your resources and your talent to actually be creative and innovative, and be just as hungry when they see new services come out. I love when developers come up to us and say, "There's this new service that's "going to launch tomorrow, AWS is." Can I mess around with it? Can I throw, like I like to see that because then we can get insight into it and say yes, right? Fear is a greater threat to progress than hardship. I don't want my developers to have fear. I want them to feel, "Security team's got my back." The platform has the-- >> Yeah. >> ability to visualize it, so let's move forward with that. >> So, let's talk about fear, uncertainty, and doubt, AKA known as FUD. >> FUD, yeah. >> All right. So, it used to be that the suppliers would put FUD onto the customer saying, "No, don't buy that other product." You could, you know, use that fear. It's now flipping around with CISOs, you know, the way we're hearing that one of the mandates is to get the supplier account from hundreds to single or double digits, and so the fear is being pushed back out, saying if you don't have this kind of stack integration, this kind of API support, you're not going to be a vendor. >> Yeah. >> This is shifting. >> You agree? >> 1000% agree. I think we needed to, like we should not have taken our tempo for so many years from vendors. They were dictating our programs at that particular point. Now we can take control of our program, saying we don't want to partner with you if you don't integrate with the way we've built our program, that we know our environment, right? So, I think we're taking a little bit more control of our destiny and our platforms versus just taking the tempo from vendors. >> And the key here is having that platform built-- >> Absolutely. >> To start thinking through the critical thinking around tech stack, purpose, and this is their shift, this is what, and some families aren't there yet. They, because they have to build it up. >> They have to build it up, and-- >> How long does it take to do that? >> The most important thing to build that up, talent. Look, you're only as good as the talent you have. If you don't have the talent to build that platform up you're going to be stuck in that vendor loop forever. I mean-- >> Had a CISO saying to me privately, "Love multi-cloud, love the vision, "but honestly I'm not investing in Diamond multi-cloud "until I get my team on one cloud, "and I'll use secondary clouds for, you know, "either rollover, backup, or some other point feature, "or inherited workload through an M&A or other project. "No big deals, shadow IT, but in terms of my talent "I don't want to have three different teams. "I want one team to build the stack "and continue to think about automation, "then we'll get to multi-cloud when it's ready." Your thoughts to that. >> I 1000% agree. I think that we need to get one cloud right first before we start thinking about putting our talent, our limited talent resources, again, everybody's starving for talent, into investigating and remediating other cloud issues. I think you definitely have to get one thing right first before moving over. I do think, though, that the time's going to come where there's going to be a lot of companies doing, you know, production workloads in multiple clouds. I, you know, I'm actually eager to see that day, and see it publicly and see how it's being managed, right? >> Well, the one who cracks that nut is going to win big lottery ticket. >> Oh, totally, totally. >> Metrics. I want to quickly defrost on metrics. Metrics is something that if you, if you, if you serve the metrics master too hard you could actually miss out on what your real purpose is. The joke I heard was that you could turn into Chernobyl, like that movie that's on Netflix, or Prime, I forget which show. Oh, it's on HBO actually, it's an HBO series where they were pressing buttons. They had no idea what was going on with the reactor, it blew up, and the rest is history. That's the metrics problem and challenge, isn't it? What's your thoughts on metrics? >> I agree, I'm not a fan of metrics. I don't think security programs should be either built or measured against metrics. I don't think metrics really provide too much detail behind any of that. Metrics are just there I think to provide a little bit of insight of where you could double-click and actually do a little bit more diligence, but they should not be measured, they should not be used to measure your program. I don't run my program on metrics. It's not like I'm escalating metrics, either, up to the board or anything like that. Providing relevant data and how that data impacts the business from a security perspective is how I like to escalate, not putting up, you know, charts or anything like that of what, you know, how many vulnerabilities were remediated. Guess what, you did your job. I don't want to put a metric up there that actually says, you know, something like that. I want to show some real value with some real data. >> So, what are you communicating to the board specifically? >> How we've integrated information security, the security program, into the workflow without slowing down the business. I think that's the key part, and how, security at the end of the day it's a culture change, right, and you are changing behavior, right? So, how you're able to do that without slowing down production, especially in technology companies, because you don't want to slow down that development pipeline, that's a key metric to put out there. >> Mm-hm. >> And we've been able to, you know, enable static and dynamic code analysis without slowing things down. Things are still getting to product at that time, or using container security for our infrastructure so that it takes that out of the developer's mind when they're actually building out a, you know, new environment, right? >> Digital transformation equations, people, process, technology. >> Totally. >> Heard that over and over, and it's cliche, but the people part, okay, you could get more people, totally agree, technology, plenty of tools and services, that's a huge opportunity, but the process is where the focus has been, and I heard a quote earlier on theCUBE today. It says, "Process is a reflection of your culture." >> True. >> And a lot of those cultures won't yield the process control to either CISOs or teams. Your thoughts to that comment and where that kind of goes. That's the key breakdown on digital transformation, isn't it? >> It is, it is. That is true, I think the one thing that CISOs need to remind themselves is when they introduce themselves to the organization they need to be a customer service organization. CISOs need to be available to the users and to the business, and offer their services as a partnership instead of as a mandate. I think that warms the waters a little bit for that behavioral change and that culture change so that process can change into the new, innovative way of actually pushing security as code and infrastructure as code as the new way of actually doing business. >> And success has got, is contagious. >> Totally. >> Like at Twistlock. You're advising that company. Boom. >> Yeah. Absolutely is contagious, and showing those type of examples actually throughout the business actually help, you know what I'm saying? Breaking down those old silos of security is viewed is important, right, so. >> You kind of implied before in the earlier days vendors sort of controlled the table. You were sort of beholden to their way of doing things. Steve Schmidt today made the statement that, you know, all the negative fear factor is not helping our industry. It really, the state of cloud security, anyway, is good, the union is strong. Do you agree with that and are there other things that vendors are doing that drive you crazy as a practitioner that they shouldn't be doing? >> So, two great questions. I think the first one, I think cloud security absolutely is, does exist, and it gives power back to the CISOs, so they can actually make more controlled decisions over their environment, you know, instead of being beholden to vendors. I think understanding the shared responsibility model between a company in the cloud is crucial for CISOs to make those decisions. >> Mm-hm. >> And I think for years that was misunderstood and that's why it took time, probably, to migrate to the cloud or to be born in the cloud initially, but I think once that's understood it empowers, you know, the CISOs and the technology organizations, I think that's one. On your second questions, I think everybody in the world has vendor fatigue. I think vendors, what drives me nuts about all of them is that they say they integrate with everything and that they're going to give me more visibility than before. Great, man, like that's what everybody's been doing for the past 20 years. They're giving me a lot of information. I want them to fix things, don't give me alerts. Don't give me alarms unless you're going to say, "Here's the alert, here's the alarm, "here's the automated script that you can "put into your environment to fix it." Knowing that every CISO in the world is starving for talent, we don't have the resource to double-click on that, due diligence, and write it, do it for me. I think vendors need to start innovating and stop doing the same thing that we've been doing for the past 20 years. >> So, you're seeing, furring from that is a lot of incrementalism, kind of taking safe bets, and really you're looking for a step function. >> Totally, I want vendors to take a more aggressive approach in their innovation, I don't want, so you're giving me more alerts that I've seen in different shapes, in different sizes from different vendors. Tell me how you're going to fix it, or fix it for me. That's what I really want, we need to push, we need to exceed that more from vendors, and look, since we're not getting it it's making us, or I'm happy to do it actually, is to start innovation. >> Do it. >> And doing it ourselves, right? >> Yeah. >> So, it, I'm investing more in resources, in talent, doing it that way-- >> Yeah. >> Instead of outsourcing and getting a vendor, so-- >> And that's a trend that's happening more and more. >> Totally. >> And that's an indictment on the community itself and the vendors. >> Yeah. >> Brian-- >> We need to exceed more from the vendors. >> Thanks so much for coming on. Great insights, profound commentary. Great to have CISOs on theCUBE, thanks for sharing. It's theCUBE's live coverage, Boston. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Day one of two days of CUBE coverage of the inaugural AWS re:Inforce conference, we'll be right back. (smooth music) People want to work for a mission--

(upbeat music) [Narrator] Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Inforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Everyone, welcome back to the CUBE'S live coverage here in Boston for AWS re:Inforce, Amazon Web Service's inaugural event. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, two days of wall to wall coverin'. Christian Beedgen is the CTO and co-founder of Sumo Logic. A couple we've covered on theCUBE many times as well as on our siliconANGLE.com. Great to see you thanks for coming out. >> Thanks for having me. >> Being the co-founder you've seen it, you guys are celebrating your tenth year. >> That's right. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> theCUBE is now 10 years old this year too, >> Oh right on. >> So we're kind of in school together growing up. (laughing) >> Started right here. >> We're going to graduate together, right on. >> We'll go have a cocktail later maybe talk about some tech. I love talkin' tech. >> Yeah of course. >> Lets get into it. As the co-founder and CTO you've seen your journey. You guys have been doing great. You've seen the waves of big data. >> Yep. >> You've seen the evolution of cloud coming in. >> Yep. >> The infrastructures standing up more and more efficient, more effective. Game is changing, stakes are higher, what's your view of this industry right now? >> I think its on fire really, right? So, you know, on one level we have this, I think its fairly well known at this point that the data now today follows Moore's law right? So we have basically data grows you know, roughly two x year over year. That's exponential growth and that's pretty incredible, right? I think every business now knows or, you know, they either know or they act on it or they sort of know it at least, you know, subconsciously right? That they are essentially in a race to sort of optimize, their own business mostly based on data. >> In your opinion, Christian, what was the inflection point of the past few years? When did the data market really change for the highly accelerated we're seeing now because back in 2010 when you guys started when we started, we saw Hadoop just getting out of the blocks. >> Yep. >> People were standing up Hadoop clusters and being proud of it but then cloud came. Was there a point in time when you say, you know that was really the flash point where things started tipping over, or was cloud adoption or was it AI machines, was the machine learning? Where do you see that kick up on the growth of emphasis? >> So you know the Hadoop stuff basically came out of the ad optimization being you know businesses and that was like a small set of companies that really had to do that in order to basically compete with each other. And then we sort of got open source versions of that and then we'd got behind them after we'd do a small model and teaching people how to do that. I think in my mind I have sort of two things. One was you know, the whole of management space that I came out of and you know where I still am today coming out of, the security information of in management and you know a lot of management underneath. Semi-structure data, you know nasty data that doesn't fit into our relational data base. You know they are sort of-- and then lots and lots of that data as you put all the firewall data in there, we saw that back at dark side, where I spent a considerable amount of time. You know that becoming a problem that, like enterprise software that was kind of delivered, you know on a CD and then oh now go scale Oracle behind it, as in even data warehouses. That's kind of how I experience it. It just didn't really work very well, and we were kind of doing big data or trying to do big data. There were like various levels of success, right. We've already knowing about the term and then, you know, obviously, picked up on a new Windows type, so things and then, you know, but if you want to do big data or something like Hadoop, then you're suddenly running into having to run, you know, I don't know, a hundred instances. I'm already saying instances. A hundred boxes, 80 you know back then, or like maybe 500 boxes, and now you're running into all of the management, you know, challenges that distributed infrastructure brings. And in my mind, you know since you're like asking for an inflection point, I think Amazon EMR, you know, and my friends at Cloudera, they're not going to like me saying that because that's a long story but I think having something like Hadoop, put on an infrastructure as a service platform like Amazon and I think they did that fairly early on, right. I think it's still a great product. >> Cloud-scale's a lot faster, it emphasizes, it more, you can do more with it. >> Exactly. >> IoT comes around now you're connected, devices are coming in, natural place to just put that data lake as they now called it, and work with it. >> Exactly, exactly. So I think that's one inflection point and then the second one I think clearly was sort of the advancements especially around deep learning and so forth, right, where, you know, I think a lot of that, you know the deep mind stuff and so forth, where now along with the sort of exponential growth of data where there's also now much more sophisticated analysis that people want to run. I think that's another inflection point. >> Yeah, so 2010 you saw cloud and data coming together and obviously you guys saw the need to secure that. What are the challenges of securing these massively distributed systems? >> Oh, there's a number of challenges, but, you know, it starts with sort of this basic law that says that, you know, that, you know processing data creates more data. Right, and if you look what business systems do, they're basically, you know, just like really fancy pocket calculators at life scale, right, but it's all about processing data. That's what computing means, right. And then as you do that it actually turns out that you create more data, which is all the logs, all the telemetry, the metrics tracing all of this type of stuff. And so these data sets become their own kind of, you know, big data nightmares potentially, right, but at the same time, they're full of, you know, really useful information to maintain availability performance, you know, to secure your systems and so forth. And I think the main challenge that we are seeing today with systems like ours and what's out there in the market is, you know, actually being able to scale. And it becomes almost an aggressive thing, it's kind of funny. >> You know, I got to ask you about the digital transformation equation that's out there. People, process, technology. I think people generally would agree that, hey, cloud's great, love deep learning, I mean how could you not, you know, get intoxicated on large-scale resources that's almost free and AI around the corner. It's good stuff, I mean pretty cool, right? And then the reality sits in, like you can't just hand wave it in, You got to hire people, you got to have the tech to do it, and then the process. And you made a profound comment before we came on camera, process is a reflection of culture. This is a really a big deal in the digital transformation. So, there are people out there, people are getting trained, there's a course you can take, you can buy technology that's getting better every day. Process seems to be where everyone's getting caught up on it and there's new ways to break through it and it's just a reality. What's your thoughts on process as a reflection of culture and how people can handle that and what people should think about? >> That's a good question. So I think what I'm seeing is that when we, we see a lot of companies at various stages of their sort of journey into the cloud. We come from the Bay Area so we have a lot of born in the cloud guys like ourselves and there's sort of a new culture that's kind of baked in from the beginning, but that's interesting. The even more interesting bits, in my mind, are when we are looking at companies that have been around for a long time. They basically, they're starting to realize that cloud transformation is almost more about basically picking up a culture of agile DevOps and then DevSecOps or whatever you want to call it. Apparently somebody at the keynote today made a nasty comment about it. Personally I didn't see it but again the whole Shift Left paradigm, but it's essentially a culture where you actually remove the silos that have been in place between departments, keeping people from working closely together, throwing stuff over the wall we all know how well that works, trying to keep your fiefdoms. And I find that all the successful cloud transformations stories that we've seen are really a decor, you know, cultural transformation stories, along the sort of plus minus DevOps route. >> So you're talking about the big challenge being scale, so two things you just said, well one is bringing together the mindset of infrastructure's code, we were talking about security as code. The other is automation, right. >> Absolutely. >> So that seems to be big focus of security practitioners. >> Yep. >> My question is, what's a good day look like to a security practitioner? >> Oh, I think, that's another really good question. I think there's an obvious answer, but I think the obvious answer would be I'm still in business, right, and I haven't leaked millions of Social Security numbers. >> Nothing happened, good day! >> And so I think that is definitely a good day but I think the sort of slightly more, I think, interesting answer is that I think a good day is day where you as a security practitioner have a bunch of good interactions with the rest of the folks in the company that are part of building products, on the operational side, on the development side, giving good feedback maybe to a bunch of developers maybe on secure coding practices, plugging in additional Veolia monitoring or code monitoring or scanning tools into the bill pipeline and so forth. And then also actually getting a bunch of alerts from all your monitoring systems and being able to very quickly figure out whether those are true positives or false positives and when they are true positives, being able to quickly react on them. >> So you guys, obviously cloud focused, that's a huge area for you, but I'm interested in how you say you differentiate. It's an extremely competitive market. What's your big differentiator? When you win, why do you win? >> So, it goes back to somewhat of a fundamental kind of things that led us to start the company. It's a little philosophy heavy, I guess, but it actually plays its way out in every single customer conversation, and every displacement and every time we end up expanding in the customer. And it's fundamentally that our philosophy is that this needs to be delivered as a service. That, you know, our philosophy is that enterprise software is just not a thing anymore. And our philosophy has always been that. >> It's very true. >> It's a good philosophy. >> It some days feels like, man, Christian, you've been saying the same thing for the last 10 years and here we are. Our philosophy is that you need monitoring, you need troubleshooting tools, you need security tools. Those tools themselves should not become behemoths in their selves where you're going to sink endless amount of resources and money into scaling and building them out and then who's going to monitor those? It's kind of you have a huge installation of vendor X and then how does that get monitored because if you don't monitor it then that thing will blow up and then you're blind again. So we just felt that this idea, what was really appealing to us from our experience was the idea that build the code but also run the code with ultimately get the customer back to actually using the tool rather than worrying about how the tool works underneath and having to worry about how to make it works. And we're all nerds and I love it and I wish I could understand all the stuff that happens in AWS underneath and every once in a while I meet some of these guys and it's very cool but that's where they deliver differentiation. And for us we can basically focus on delivering value to the customer. >> I think the cloud model, I think, shows everyone that you can deliver stuff as service, you have horizontal integration points that you need to keep aware of, certainly the data, you need horizontally scalability and freedom of access to the data and that brings up the goodness. I think that's a great philosophy, we subscribe certainly with you on that. You had mentioned earlier about alerts and one of the conversations that we're hearing around workforce and people is how many extra people are being deployed properly cause if everything's a service, then you can, if automation kicks in, and things are at service, you can eliminate things. So, one of the trends that we're hearing is the move from threat detection to alerts. >> Okay. >> Threat detections you can automate that and you can share data so the shared stuff kicks in. So that's a new kind of trend we're seeing alerts, quality alerts, having your people work on those kinds of problems, what to pay attention to on the monitoring side, becomes super important. Two years ago you couldn't walk down the street without threat detection, threat detection, threat detection. Although important, these mechanisms for that now. So what's your thoughts on the ongoing evolution from threat detection to alerts? >> I think it's about dehumaning the end. And all the machines are just sitting there, creating signals and we can have the discussion about AI and you know generally AI and all these sorts of things, I don't really believe that that's going to happen anytime soon. But I do like algorithmic approaches, I like the power of data analytics. Sometimes it's simple analytics that give good signals, sometimes it's complicated and very sort of sophisticated analytics, but in the end, none of these things can really capture any sort of objective truth and so it ends up in somebody's queue and then they got to burn through it. And that is fundamentally, again, a human problem in the best sense because I think that's we as humans, we have processing capabilities that have not been matched. >> And also humans want to hoard the data too. They're, "Aw I want to protect." And if you share the data, more transparency, better algorithms, better visibility, better alerts. >> Exactly. I do think, to a point, I think in the security space now, of course there's still a lot of hype around just add AiN you're going to be better but the reality is that this can only go so far. And it ends up in somebody's queue and analyst workflow, how do you treat ash incidents and so forth. How much time do you spend trying to figure out whether it's a true positive or a false positive, that all matters because no detection system will be perfect at only alerting you on true positives. >> I heard a comment the other night in the bar area, someone was commenting around security analytics and they said, "Yeah, if you don't really know what you're looking for, and you rely too heavily on these metrics, you end up with Chernobyl." Which, the Netflix series that's out about how they just following data >> AC-5 >> So they're you can just, if you're looking at the data too hard, not zooming out and taking a humanistic approach, why are you measuring something, why are you monitoring something, what is a quality signal? >> Look, I think it's fundamentally, this is all just tools. I'm a strong believer in, I don't know whether, I'm sort of a strong believer in the humans run the show. And I think that's what makes us human, right, I think outsourcing everything to an algorithm, especially when algorithms are making decisions about humans, that's like a wider topic, it gets very tricky and it usually backfires pretty quickly. >> So the security marketing narrative for decades has been fear. You're in trouble, you're in trouble, you got to be sure. Amazon put forth today in the keynote that the state of cloud security, the state of the union, is actually quite good and the focus should be on how to implement new tooling and we're actually really doing a great job. Do you buy that? >> To some degree. I do think that they're paying a lot of attention. I do like stuff that they've done from the beginning like security groups being deny all and all of those things. And they have a bunch of really smart guys over there that really care and worry about this type of stuff. I think they've also learned over the years in their own move towards selling from this side that's selling to a bunch of hipsters and then it started becoming a real enterprise play that all of these things are important, including having really good outage fail data and cloud trail and these types of things. The part that I like and we've argued this from the very beginning with our prospects when they basically kept saying you're putting the data in the cloud and how can I trust that? And we walk them through carefully in how we had designed our own security processes and a lot of what that was about automation and basically leveraging the APIs that we had. So basically at its core AWS has turned the data center into an API. And an API is something that I can automate and I can do a good job or I can do a bad job at that, that depends on the individual and so forth, but it's fundamentally a very powerful abstraction that allows one guy to do the work of potentially hundreds of people running around checking network connections. For me as a customer, that I can build a secure system on top of AWS. >> So they've turned the data center into an API, which is a very powerful metaphor, but they've turned it into a lot of APIs. How does that affect the complexity and the impact on security? >> Yeah, I know they are, look the reality is complex and I feel like their approach has been very carefully build from the bottom up, Lego by Lego, and then put other Legos on top of that. And I can very much appreciate that approach. I don't believe in one button security. I think it's just basically, everybody in the space knows that that's not a reality. >> Well we've asked Andy Jassy about this, John, and he said we want the fine grained access to primitives because when the market moves, we can move with it. If we don't have that, we put in all these abstraction layers that has implications on performance and, down the line, our agility. >> Power to the people, man, I think ultimately so many guys at Amazon, they're all very reasonable but you know they shouldn't make all the decisions. And everybody's use case is fundamentally a little bit different. And at the same time they're adding additional things because they realize that there's a lot of complexity even just looking at IM in these types of things is like, wow, okay, there's a lot of footguns built into this. The reality is that the entire industry is a giant footgun, on some level, so I like the fact that they ended up doing stuff like cloud trail and then pull all the cloud trail and repeat C logs that say flow logs into something like guard duty, for example, which they then try to do some correlation on there and they're trying to automate some of the detection as far as they can see it, as well. So I overall think they have a good approach to that. I think it's bottoms up. I think that works. I'm a builder type so for me that works. >> So Christian, final question, what're you looking at, CTO in the industry right now, what are some of the things you're looking at in the industry that's getting you excited and you guys are integrating into the vision? >> Well, it's really two things. I think one of the things we are seeing is as far as just general how people deploy software. We had containers and then nobody knew what to do with containers and it was orchestration and we now have Kubernetes basically having won all of the orchestration awards and I think that's going to be an industry standard that everybody has to deal with for the next couple of years. A lot of enterprise folks, is what I'm seeing, are now starting to kind of land on Kubernetes as part of sort of their cloud transformation, even if it's just pooling all the monoliths and then refactoring them afterwards. So I think that there's a lot of stuff going on there that Kubernetes adds its own layer of complexity. And there's opportunity for us there as a monitoring vendor. I'm extremely, I am probably more excited, almost irrationally excited about all the serverless stuff. I think I am a big proponent of not having to do undifferentiated heavy lifting. It feels to me that the sort of serverless track will get people to build better applications even faster in time to market everything that counts. And then on the security side I think that's an evergreen thing. You call it fear and then of course I've always said it's basically insurance. On some level, that's why the security market continues to be essentially evergreen and our customers are using us for their own security monitoring. We are building a lot of additional functionality there and I think that's going to continue to be a big and ongoing discussion because the underlying primitives, now you have Kubernetes, how do you secure that, how do you even build security in the serverless phase and whatever comes next after that. >> And I think also that point, I think you're seeing new brands are emerging as suppliers because they have that architectural, horizontal, the view. They're thinking holistically around the tech stacks and thinking about the role of data and just IoT is just a mind-blowing conversation around, where are you going to pour, where are you going to store that data? >> Yeah. >> Okay, so again, all this is kind of moving into a whole 'nother generational shift and you're either on the wrong side of the street or the right side of the street. This is like really binary at this point. >> And it's accelerating, right? Folks probably had one or two transformations in the last 30 years and now they're running through a transformation every three years, it's like getting whiplash, right? >> Buckle up. Christian, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great insights. >> Thanks again for having me. >> Great insights here on theCUBE. Bringing you all the action Boston for AWS re:Inforce, Amazon Web Service's inaugural event around security's key developers, the new security pros and engineers out there. CUBE coverage continues after this short break. (upbeat music)