>>live from Stanford University. It's the queue covering Stanford women in Data Science 2020. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >>and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host Sonia category, and we're live at Stanford University, covering the fifth annual Woods Women in Data Science conference. Joining us today is Tilapia Williams, who's the associate professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and host of Nova Wonders at PBS to leave a welcome to the Cappy to be here. Thanks for having me. So you have a lot of rules. So let's first tell us about being an associate professor at Harvey Mudd. >>Yeah, I've been at Harvey Mudd now for 11 years, so it's been really a lot of fun in the math department, but I'm a statistician by training, so I teach a lot of courses and statistics and data science and things like that. >>Very cool. And you're also a host of API s show called Novo Wonders. >>Yeah, that came about a couple of years ago. Folks at PBS reached out they had seen my Ted talk, and they said, Hey, it looks like you could be fund host of this science documentary shows So, Nova Wonders, is a six episode Siri's. It kind of takes viewers on a journey of what the cutting edge questions and science are. Um, so I got to host the show with a couple other co host and really think about like, you know, what are what are the animals saying? And so we've got some really fun episodes to do. What's the universe made of? Was one of them what's living inside of us. That was definitely a gross win. Todo figure out all the different micro organisms that live inside our body. So, yeah, it's been funded in hopes that show as well. >>And you talk about data science and AI and all that stuff on >>Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, one of the episodes. Can we build a Brain was dealt with a lot of data, big data and artificial intelligence, and you know, how good can we get? How good can computers get and really sort of compared to what we see in the movies? We're a long way away from that, but it seems like you know we're getting better every year, building technology that is truly intelligent, >>and you gave a talk today about mining for your own personal data. So give us some highlights from your talk. Yeah, >>so that talks sort of stemmed out of the Ted talk that I gave on owning your body's data. And it's really challenging people to think about how they can use data that they collect about their bodies to help make better health decisions on DSO ways that you can use, like your temperature data or your heart rate. Dina. Or what is data say over time? What does it say about your body's health and really challenging the audience to get excited about looking at that data? We have so many devices that collect data automatically for us, and often we don't pause on enough to actually look at that historical data. And so that was what the talk was about today, like, here's what you can find when you actually sit down and look at that data. >>What's the most important data you think people should be collecting about themselves? >>Well, definitely not. Your weight is. I don't >>want to know what that >>is. Um, it depends, you know, I think for women who are in the fertile years of life taking your daily waking temperature can tell you when your body's fertile. When you're ovulating, it can. So that information could give women during that time period really critical information. But in general, I think it's just a matter of being aware of of how your body is changing. So for some people, maybe it's your blood pressure or your blood sugar. You have high blood pressure or high blood sugar. Those things become really critical to keep an eye on. And, um, and I really encourage people whatever data they take, too, the active in the understanding of an interpretation of the data. It's not like if you take this data, you'll be healthy radio. You live to 100. It's really a matter of challenging people to own the data that they have and get excited about understanding the data that they are taking. So >>absolutely put putting people in charge of their >>own bodies. That's >>right. >>And actually speaking about that in your Ted talk, you mentioned how you were. Your doctor told you to have a C section and you looked at the data and he said, No, I'm gonna have this baby naturally. So tell us more about that. >>Yes, you should always listen to your medical pressures. But in this case, I will say that it was It was definitely more of a dialogue. And so I wasn't just sort of trying to lean on the fact that, like, I have a PhD in statistics and I know data, he was really kind of objectively with the on call doctor at the time, looking at the data >>and talking about it. >>And this doctor was this is his first time seeing me. And so I think it would have been different had my personal midwife or my doctor been telling me that. But this person would have only looked at this one chart and was it was making a decision without thinking about my historical data. And so I tried to bring that to the conversation and say, like, let me tell you more about you know, my body and this is pregnancy number three like, here's how my body works. And I think this person in particular just wasn't really hearing any of that. It was like, Here's my advice. We just need to do this. I'm like, >>Oh, >>you know, and so is gently as possible. I tried to really share that data. Um, and then it got to the point where it was sort of like either you're gonna do what I say or you're gonna have to sign a waiver. And we were like, Well, to sign the waiver that cost quite a buzz in the hospital that day. But we came back and had a very successful labor and delivery. And so, yeah, >>I think >>that at the time, >>But, >>you know, with that caveat that you should listen to what, your doctors >>Yeah. I mean, there's really interesting, like, what's the boundary between, Like what the numbers tell you and what professional >>tells me Because I don't have an MD. Right. And so, you know, I'm cautious not to overstep that, but I felt like in that case, the doctor wasn't really even considering the data that I was bringing. Um, I was we were actually induced with our first son, but again, that was more of a conversation, more of a dialogue. Here's what's happening here is what we're concerned about and the data to really back it up. And so I felt like in that case, like Yeah, I'm happy to go with your suggestion, but I could number three. It was just like, No, this isn't really >>great. Um, so you also wrote a book called Power In Numbers. The Rebel Women of Mathematics. So what inspired you to write this book? And what do you hope readers take away from it? >>A couple different things. I remember when I saw the movie hidden figures. And, um, I spent three summers at NASA working at JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And so I had this very fun connection toe, you know, having worked at NASA. And, um, when this movie came out and I'm sitting there watching it and I'm, like ball in just crying, like I didn't know that there were black women who worked at NASA like, before me, you know, um and so it felt it felt it was just so transformative for me to see these stories just sort of unfold. And I thought, like, Well, why didn't I learn about these women growing up? Like imagine, Had I known about Katherine Johnsons of the world? Maybe that would have really inspired Not just me, but, you know, thinking of all the women of color who aren't in mathematics or who don't see themselves working at at NASA. And so for me, the book was really a way to leave that legacy to the generation that's coming up and say, like, there have been women who've done mathematics, um, and statistics and data science for years, and they're women who are doing it now. So a lot of the about 1/3 of the book are women who were still here and, like, active in the field and doing great things. And so I really wanted to highlight sort of where we've been, where we've been, but also where we're going and the amazing women that are doing work in it. And it's very visual. So some things like, Oh my gosh, >>women in math >>It is really like a very picturesque book of showing this beautiful images of the women and their mathematics and their work. And yes, I'm really proud of it. >>That's awesome. And even though there is like greater diversity now in the tech industry, there's still very few African American women, especially who are part of this industry. So what advice would you give to those women who who feel like they don't belong. >>Yeah, well, a they really do belong. Um, and I think it's also incumbent of people in the industry to sort of recognize ways that they could be advocate for women, and especially for women of color, because often it takes someone who's already at the table to invite other people to the table. And I can't just walk up like move over, get out the way I'm here now. But really being thoughtful about who's not representative, how do we get those voices here? And so I think the onus is often mawr on. People who occupy those spaces are ready to think about how they can be more intentional in bringing diversity in other spaces >>and going back to your talk a little bit. Um uh, how how should people use their data? >>Yeah, so I mean, I think, um, the ways that we've used our data, um, have been to change our lifestyle practices. And so, for example, when I first got a Fitbit, um, it wasn't really that I was like, Oh, I have a goal. It was just like I want something to keep track of my steps And then I look at him and I feel like, Oh, gosh, I didn't even do anything today. And so I think having sort of even that baseline data gave me a place to say, Okay, let me see if I hit 10 stuff, you know, 10,000 >>steps in a day or >>and so, in some ways, having the data allows you to set goals. Some people come in knowing, like, I've got this goal. I want to hit it. But for me, it was just sort of like, um and so I think that's also how I've started to use additional data. So when I take my heart rate data or my pulse, I'm really trying to see if I can get lower than how it was before. So the push is really like, how is my exercise and my diet changing so that I can bring my resting heart rate down? And so having the data gives me a gold up, restore it, and it also gives me that historical information to see like, Oh, this is how far I've come. Like I can't stop there, you know, >>that's a great social impact. >>That's right. Yeah, absolutely. >>and, um, Do you think that so in terms of, like, a security and privacy point of view, like if you're recording all your personal data on these devices, how do you navigate that? >>Yeah, that's a tough one. I mean, because you are giving up that data privacy. Um, I usually make sure that the data that I'm allowing access to this sort of data that I wouldn't care if it got published on the cover of you know, the New York Times. Maybe I wouldn't want everyone to see what my weight is, but, um, and so in some ways, while it is my personal data, there's something that's a bit abstract from it. Like it could be anyone's data as opposed to, say, my DNA. Like I'm not going to do a DNA test. You know, I don't want my data to be mapped it out there for the world. Um, but I think that that's increasingly become a concern because people are giving access to of their information to different companies. It's not clear how companies would use that information, so if they're using my data to build a product will make a product better. You know we don't see any world from that way. We don't have the benefit of it, but they have access to our data. And so I think in terms of data, privacy and data ethics, there's a huge conversation to have around that. We're only kind >>of at the beginning of understanding what that is. Yeah, >>well, thank you so much for being on the Cube. Really having you here. Thank you. Thanks. So I'm Sonia to Gary. Thanks so much for watching the cube and stay tuned for more. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in Downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine: A Better World, A Global Education Conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Seattle, Washington, at the AWS, I think it's called the Meeting Space. There's a lot of AWS buildings around here. It's AWS Imagine: Education, first year of the conference, about 900 registered folks, 22 countries represented. Really excited, this thing is going to grow. We've seen it before with AWS. We saw it with Summit: Reinvent. AWS Public Sector. We're excited to be here for the very first time and our next guest is Dr. Scott Ralls. He is the President of Northern Virginia Community College. Scott, great to see you. >> Thank you, it's good to be here Jeff, appreciate it. >> A lot of mentions of NOVA, and that's you guys. >> That's us, yeah. >> That's not the PBS programming. You guys are kind of out front on some of these initiatives, with 3sa and AWS Public Sector. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about the Veterans' Apprenticeship Program, which has been in place for a little while. >> Just a little bit about NOVA, we're a community college just right outside of the Virginia suburbs of D.C. We're the, I'd say, the biggest college that nobody's heard of outside of our region. We have about 100,000 students. >> 100,000? >> 100,000. >> And how many campuses? >> Six campuses. >> For us, our niche is information technology. It's where the internet runs through our region, and so that cloud computing, we have the highest concentration of cloud computing cyber degrees. That's why the AWS partnership is so key for us, because it's about the opportunity for our students. And for AWS, it's about filling those jobs. Also, we have a lot of employers in our region that hire based on AWS credentials. AWS is the backbone for them. That's why for us as a community college, being jobs-focused, filling that gap, that's why it's key for us. >> That's Tyson's corner, right? That's where AOL started-- >> That's right, that's right, that's right. >> and there's a whole history. >> You've got all the cyber right around there. One writer has said that we're the bullseye of the internet. It's a unique place, but it's a unique opportunity for our students. >> Right, and the smart money's on the AWS second headquarter being in that neighborhood, but we don't-- >> Knock on wood. >> Knock on wood. We would love to see that. >> I'm just curious then if you've been educating people to get jobs in this IT sector, how you've seen that evolve over time? Because it used to be there were a lot of sys admin jobs or a lot of jobs that now automation and cloud is taking away. On the other hand, there's a lot of new jobs that the technology's enabling, like happens every time. How are you seeing the landscape change? >> I really think that's the way it has been. 30 years ago, when I was breaking into this workforce and world, that same conversation was going on. Automation was going to take all the jobs. There's been all kinds of new opportunities that emerge and that's the same thing we see, and certainly in Northern Virginia we see that so, for us, as a community college, we're doing it two ways. You asked about the apprenticeship program, that was our first entree with AWS so we are one of their primary training providers, education providers for apprenticeship. Those are the veterans and others that are hired by AWS, they come to our college for the education component, the certifications, the IT skills. The second part for us is the new cloud degree which we introduced in February, which is a two-year, first cloud degree in the country that will help other students who are not those coming through apprenticeship to also break into this important area. >> This is an associate's degree like all the other degrees you guys offer >> That's right. as a two-year program. I'd be just curious, what are some of the curricula? What are some of the core classes that they take that are part of that degree? >> One of the things that we've been doing, we use a lot of data analytics on the workforce side that others do not so part of it's our engagement, talking with the AWS leaders about what's needed. Part of it's also watching what AW, what credentials, what skills AWS is hiring for and then others who use the AWS platform, so you will see certain types of credentials that are built in, security plus, Linux plus, AWS Solutions Architect built in. Also even programming language, it's like Python because of its importance in that regard. We kind of use that as the, using that intelligence, if you will, to be able to build out what the degree should look like. Because we're paying attention to how AWS hires and how the IT users of AWS, how they're hiring and what the skills are that they're looking for. >> How hard is it to get that through at the school, to actually have an associate degree based on cloud? Were they receptive of the idea, did everybody see it coming, was it a hard push? >> We did it within one year, we did it within one year. >> Did it in one year? >> Within one year. >> Everything in the cloud happens fast. >> We moved fast on this. It is built off of our IT degree, so it's a specialization of that degree, so it was really, I think what made it move faster for us was two things. One is AWS has a great program called AWS Educate, which essentially provides a lot of the curriculum content. It's the kind of things if you were starting a degree, you would have to go out and create on your own. Having that rich content. Other partners, like Columbus State, who is also, Santa Monica, others that are working on cloud degrees and we can partner with each other. Then having the apprenticeship as sort of a North Star to tack on with respect to how companies are hiring and what skills are needed. That allowed us to move fast. >> Beyond Educate and the actual materials and curriculum materials, what does partnering with AWS do for you guys? What has that enabled you to do as part of this program that you couldn't do or it'd be a whole lot harder? >> Not everybody looks at community colleges. Being partnered with AWS, who they are, is key for us, it's important for us. I think it's also they recognize how important it is for them. Not everybody recognizes that. One thing that's unique for us as a community college, we have a lot of students who come to us who already have four-year degrees to get that skills part. It's almost like a graduate school. The apprentices are that way. Most of the apprentices already have four-year degrees in computer science, and we're providing that finishing piece. I think AWS sees in us how to broaden the, to scale, to fill that talent gap. I really think the only way you're going to diversify the talent gap and scale the talent gap is through institutions like ours. >> It's really an interesting statement on the role of community colleges in this whole refactoring of education. One, as you said, a lot of people have four-year degrees, so this concept of ongoing education, continue to get new skills as the opportunities dictate. Have that very specific knowledge and these certifications that are not Intro Philosophy or English Lit 205. These are very specific things that people can apply to their job today. >> The curriculum changes so fast, so we have to be willing to change, our instructors have to be willing to get that new thing. The history curriculum doesn't change that quickly, but the IT curriculum and particularly as it relates to cloud and cyber and other areas. If we're not doing that, then we're out of the ballgame, and when we're out of the ballgame that means our students are out of the ballgame, and that's what it's all about. >> When you come to an event like this, what are you hoping to get out of an event like this? Flew across the country, unfortunately through all the terrible smoke and stuff we have on the west coast. What are some of the things you hope to gain here with some of the other educators? >> One thing that always happens at AWS events is the connections that you make. Part of it is you do hear people, like we heard this morning, that you wouldn't have the opportunity to hear before, on machine learning and other areas. A lot of it's about the connections, so actually tomorrow morning a lot of the community colleges and others who are creating cloud programs will be working together tomorrow. AWS does a great job of maximizing our time, so we're part of the program, but we're also breaking off to really partner and that allows us all to move quicker. When we can build off of each other and then have the resources like AWS makes available to us. >> Sounds like you're moving pretty quick-- >> We're trying, we're trying. >> To get all that done and to get it done in a year. >> We have to keep up with where they're going. >> It's not what academic institutions are generally known for, speed and change. >> We're not your average academic institution. >> There ya go, alright. He's Dr. Scott Ralls,-- >> Thank you, 'preciate it. thanks for taking a few minutes with ya. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, we're at AWS public sector, Imagine, in downtown Seattle. Thanks for watching, catch ya next time. (electronic tones)

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in Downtown Seattle, it's the theCUBE. Covering, Imagine: A Better World, a global education conference, sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're in Downtown Seattle Washington at the AWS Imagine Education Conference. First one they've ever done about 900 registrants. People from over 20 countries are here. Theresa Carlson gave the kickoff and it's a pretty exciting event. We've seen this movie before with Amazon. They get involved in a project, and it grows and grows and grows. So this is all about education. It's about education institutions. It's about students obviously, which are the core of education, and we're really excited to have our next guest. It was a big announcement that happened today. He's Marvin Martinez, the President of East Los Angeles College. Marvin great to see you. >> Thank you, pleasure to be here. >> So you're getting ready to go up on stage. it's a big announcement so tell about what it is. It's called the California Cloud... >> Computing. >> Computing Initiative. >> So this is what we've done. We've been developing for the last year a certificate where students can take a number of classes, which is basically a total of 15 units, and they're able to earn at the end of 15 units, a certificate in cloud computing. And the goal is to get them trained quickly to get them out to work quickly. Eventually we hope that the certificate evolves into a degree program, so then we're hoping that the students come back and they get their associate of our certificate and they're able to get even a better job, which is really the goal of this program is we want to get them started, want to get them excited, get them into an entry-level type of job, then they will know they like it. They're going to come back. They'll get that degree, you know do even better right. >> So let me, I just want to make sure I get this. This is a California Cloud Workforce Project. So it's really about the workforce and giving these kids the skills. So it's funny though Marvin where everybody says technology is taking away jobs. They forget yeah they take away some jobs, but there's new jobs created. >> All the time. >> All the time, there's a ton of openings especially in the engineering field and in the cloud, but so what are some of the cloud skills specifically that that kids are taking to get the certificate? >> Well you know the skills they're taking specifically so they could eventually work with some of the major industries in our area. Obviously from Amazon and other similar industries and similar businesses, and there's many of them. Los Angeles you know quickly is becoming the new Silicon Valley. So a lot of industries are moving. They call us all the time, they call me all the time, and say that you have trained students. We will hire them right now and we'll pay them a good salary. So no doubt it's a motivation for us because that's who we are as community colleges. We are here to serve students. We are here to get them trained, get them up there quickly and respond to the needs of industry, that area. >> So it's a really interesting planning that it's the community colleges that you guys have all come together. I think the number's 19 as part of this. So A, you know that you're doing it as a unified effort. So kids at a broad area can take advantage, and also you're also partnering with individual high schools. Each Community College is partners with an individual high school. So how does that work? How does that kind of come into fruition? >> Well you know, one thing that we want to do is that as we work with high schools, high schools today are also under pressure to ensure that their students are being trained well and that if they just get a high school diploma they can go and work somewhere. But also today high schools are getting smart. They're saying hey how do we work with a local college so that when students graduate, they graduate with a high school diploma and a degree from a college. So and why are they doing that because they know in order to be competitive, a young person needs to have these degrees. Today if you want to be competitive a high school diploma may not be enough. So we notice that motivation there. Secondly we're able to get students on a college campus, get them developed get them, they're mature, get them to take a college-level course and then they're able to go out and obviously and work once they complete this program. So the relationship is a natural one. It's one that high schools are seeking from us, which is great. That has not been the case all the time. Usually we've gone to them, but now they're coming to us and saying we need you help us out. >> The part I like about it too is the kids are smart. And they're like why am I taking philosophy? How am I going to use philosophy in my job, that or why am I taking this or why am I taking that? These are really concrete skills that A, they can go look in the newspaper today or I guess I don't know if they look in newspaper for jobs because couldn't find a newspaper if you threw it at them, but they could go seek the job listings at the Amazon sites and also they are working with this technology, they live in this technology, so it's not something foreign or something new. It's something they experience every day. So it's got to be a pretty easy sell I would imagine. >> It's an easy sell. Young people today are different than the way that we grew up. I grew up at a time where there were no cell phones, there was no bottled water. It was a whole different time. Young people today as you're seeing grow up with these technologies. It's part of the who they are. They more than just embraced it. So they welcome to use it in any way they can. So when we propose programs like these, guess what happens? They enroll en masse and that's because they understand it. They identify with it. Will they be willing to enroll in a Shakespeare class? They might but not as much as a class like this one. So no doubt the population today has changed, so part of my job is to introduce programs on the campus that I know will generate that kind of enrollment and interest. So we know that a program like this will do that and we just need to recognize the fact that the world has changed. Let me just add that we don't do that world's education institutions. As institutions we're some of the most conservative institutions in the history of this country. So for us to change it takes quite a lot. So what's forcing us to change, what was forcing us to change is that enrollment is down and not just in many of our colleges in LA but throughout the country. Enrollment is-- >> In Community colleges generally or colleges in general? Community colleges. >> Community colleges throughout the nation enrollment is down. And enrollment is down for a number of reasons. There's more jobs out there, so students are looking to go out and work, but also enrollment is down because of the curriculum and the courses that we have are just not interesting to them. So I think a program like this will help the campus. A program like this will get more students to come and take advantage of an incredible education that they can get at our campuses. >> I was just curious kind of what were the drivers of enrollment before that have kind of fallen away? Was it a particular type of skill set? Was it just that they don't want it generic anymore? They got to go get a job? I'm just curious if there was something that you had before that was appealing that you have now that's just not appealing anymore? >> Good questions. So the last time our economy was in bad shape when the employment was down. That was back around 2008-2009. Well guess what happened in our campuses? Enrollment was up. So when the economy is in bad shape people come back to school. When the economy is in great shape like it is today where there is a lot of jobs, enrollment is down. So we don't see the economy going down at all in a number of years. >> Anytime soon. >> So we have to develop programs that we think will be of interest to students first. Secondly we have to respond to the needs of the new economy. The new economy is now being dominated by these new technologies. We know about it, young people know about it. So when we develop a program like this and we know that it will generate interest. It will generate enrollment. And in many ways that's what drives the funding for a college. We're funded on the basis of how many people we enroll. So if we don't enroll a lot people, we have less money, so no doubt there's a motivation for us, a motivation for the entire system, to really partner with Amazon. And figure out a way for us to really get students train and to get them, hopefully get them a good job. >> So you segued perfectly. My last question was going to be kind of the role of Amazon in AWS, in terms of being a partner. I mean they obviously you know are thinking about things. Theresa's fantastic. She just talked about being from an education family, but at the same time you know they have their own reasons to do it. They need workers right? They need people to fill these jobs to fulfill Amazon's own growth beyond their ecosystem, their partners and customers etcetera. So what does it mean for you as an educator and part of this consortium of community colleges to have somebody like AWS come in and really help you codevelop and drive these types of new programs? >> Well it means everything. Number one we know that Amazon is a major employer. We know that the jobs that they have available are good-paying jobs. They have a career path and so we know it's a good direction for young people to take. So part of my job as an educator is many ways it's like a parent. You want to take care of your family, you want to take care of the kids and put them in the right path so they have the most success possible. Amazon offers that kind of path. So for us to partner with someone like Amazon is great. Secondly, students know who Amazon is. I don't have to sell them. They know who they are, and they know what Amazon can do and they know that it's a great career path for them. So now that I think it could be a great partnership for us but also it's an opportunity for Amazon to even continue further developing that workforce in Los Angeles in California. >> Alright Marvin, well thank you so much for spending a few minutes and I wish you nothing but the best with this California Cloud Workforce Project. Make sure I get it right? >> It's right. Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, alright he's Marvin, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in Seattle at the Amazon Imagine Education event. First time ever, keep watching. It's going to grow and grow and grow. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine A Better World. A global education conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Educate Show. It's a public sector show. It's the first time they've ever done it really focusing just on education as opposed to the regular public sector show or the AWS Summits and re:Invent that you're very familiar with. We're excited to be here. One of the big themes here is colleges partnering with high schools. And we're excited to have our next guest really talk about how that's working in this program. We have Howard Stahl. He's a professor at Santa Monica College. Howard, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> And with him is Koda Kol. He's a teacher at Roosevelt High in East L.A. and also an adjunct professor at Santa Monica College. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So, let's just jump into it. There's a big conversation about training people for the next generation of cloud skills. It's good for the kids, it's also good for the employers, it's good for Amazon, it's good for their customers and their partners. How are the kids feeling about this? How is this program being accepted by kids? Is it cool, is it something they want to do? How hard of a sell is it? >> The students are engaged. They're learning something that is immediately relevant to societal's demand. Our students, they're setting up, spinning up web servers, file servers, even VPN, and the VPN servers is going to disrupt the way schools strategize and implement security, because now when they go back to the high schools they're bypassing all these web securities using VPN. >> Right. >> But they really do love it. The students seem to really drink it up. >> They get it. >> Yeah, they do. >> So is there a particular classification of app or of all the different things that you're teaching 'em, database, security, this or that, that resonates more than others or what is it that connects to what they do every day that makes them think, "Hey, this is cool, I engage "these things every day. "What a great career to get into." >> Yeah, I think, they see Amazon in their daily life every day. Delivering them stuff, making them buy stuff, having them deliver things. And they can see as they peel apart the layers and see behind the scenes how Amazon actually gets that done. >> Right. >> And it seems immediately relevant to them. >> Right. >> And so the student interest has been fantastic. >> Been fantastic. And Koda too, I think it's always the thing too with, especially the kids when they're in high school, 15, 16 right, they're starting to get a little bit of attitude. "Why should I read 400-year English novels Dad, "how's that going to help me in my job?" or "Why am I taking chemistry, I don't want to be a doctor? "I get it I got to take it to get into college "but I don't really want to take Chemistry." This is probably something a little bit different in terms of direct visibility into the application. I mean, those other things have applications too, you just don't see it when you're 15. But this they can see, right? They can see how it's going to directly impact them in a positive way. >> Yes, and it also puts everyone at the same playing field. Students that normally fail their English classes, Math classes, now they're in the same classroom and learning content where everyone is on the same page. So, you got your high performing students also with your students that are failing a class, trying to discover what they want to do in life. >> Right. >> They're together, they're working together. Find a common interest and excelling, engaged and asking for more. "Where can we take more classes? "This is what I want to do, "this is where I want to be." >> That's great. Another thing, we were just at a high school competition called Technovation earlier this week where mainly girl's teams from all over the world building applications. Same kind of a thing. Get 'em involved in an application that they can really see a difference and they get it. And I wonder if some of your kids talk about, everybody wants to be mission driven today, and kids want to do stuff that has a higher impact on society, right? We've got four different garbage cans we have to sort our stuff in 'cause we want to be renewable and take care of the environment. Do they see that software is the easiest way to make a huge impact globally, do they get that? >> They get that, they see it. They're instantly creating servers in 5-10 minutes. Going on their servers, setting up websites. They see the relevance. They're taking advantage of the technology. >> Yeah, that's great. So Howard, I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how a partnership with AWS enables you to do things that you wouldn't be able to do if they weren't helping in this whole process? >> At SMC we've been working with AWS for about four years now to spin up this program. The partnership has been fantastic. AWS has been really giving and helpful. They helped train faculty. So we got professional development from them. Now, as part of this program students get credits on the platforms. Faculty get credits on the platform. They've been helping us with advertising and all kinds of other great things and it's really been a wonderful, wonderful partnership, really fantastic. And that industry connection really makes a big difference in making the program succeed. >> You mentioned something I want to follow up on in terms of the staff. We talk a lot about the kids here and the impact on the kids and their education, but I'm curious to get your take on how this has impacted the staff. This new classification of learning if you will, around cloud computing specifically. This subset of computer science which has had a hard time squeezing in between science and math, especially at the high school level. But how are the staff, the teachers taking to this? Do they see this as a great new opportunity? A bunch of new skills to learn? That's got to be kind of invigorating for them, I imagine as well. >> I think so. I think it's really invigorated people who've been around. It keeps us on our toes, makes us learn new things. It's very exciting for many of us and it has been great. And the wonderful thing about computer science is that it changes a lot. As I often say in math, "They haven't invented any new numbers." But in computer science, what I learned when I was in school. Oh my gosh, things have changed a great deal. And so there's a commitment to keep current. And in the community colleges definitely we try to keep our curriculum current with what industry needs. >> Right, I think it's a really great statement on the role of community colleges, in a very specific role to help match skills with needs in jobs. I mean just really concrete, really straightforward, really kind of a simple mission. >> Yeah, and Amazon actually has connected us with local employers near SMC that have helped us validate our curriculum and actually are very interested in hiring the graduates out of our program right away, 'cause there is such a dearth of industry talent in this particular field. >> Which is great, just to close that loop, right. And if I recall, your certificate program is the model now that's been rolled out to all 19 of the L.A. community colleges. >> Yeah, so this program has really spun up, and become much, much bigger than just one particular college. So we developed a number of classes at SMC and a certificate, and we're using that now as a model throughout L.A. county to bootstrap AWS skills in all the local community colleges. 19 other colleges are working with us. >> Right, right. Agreeing to run the same classes at their institutions. And that's very exciting as well. They've also agreed to find local partner high schools to work with as well. So we're really trying to build a hub of AWS experience down in L.A. in what we call "Silicon Beach". >> Right, right. And then the goal ultimately is to get an associate program, right, over some period of time when you get whatever the certification is, or that process. >> Yeah, so we're working on building an AA Degree in cloud computing as well. >> That's great. Koda, you look like you had something to jump in there. All good? >> All good. >> Okay, good. So I want to give you the last word in terms of what would you say to educators that are not in L.A. about what this type of program has brought to you, and more importantly your students in your everyday life at Roosevelt High? >> It has changed the lives of many students. It's changed my perspective on how I see education because in fact it was a little difficult getting the students to be engaged initially, but ever since we launched this cloud computing every student, we can't get enough classes, sections, open. We open one section up and it gets filled. The students are in class. They want to learn the material. It's a good time to be in education. I love it. >> Well good. Well thanks for sharing the passion, it comes through. >> Well the passion starts with our department chair, Howard Stahl here. He's very passionate and it resonates with all the staff members, which resonates with the students. So now we have the synergy that's happening that we hope to eventually distribute to all the other campuses, and make a model. Use Santa Monica as a model. >> Great. Well Koda, Howard, thanks for taking a few minutes. And, really enjoy this story. I look forward to the follow up next year. >> Thank you. >> Alright he's Koda, he's Howard, I'm Jeff! You're watching theCUBE from downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group welcome back I'm Stu minimun and you're watching the cube at wtg transform 2018 happy to welcome to the program two gentlemen from the Boston Architectural College to my left is Carl Jasperson who is the systems administrator and to his left is Jason O'Brien who's the director of IT gentlemen thanks so much for joining us thank you for having us all right so Jason why don't we start with you help us power up this conversation to tell us a little bit about the college so Boston Architectural college we started in the late 1800s it's a small design at school and we offer programs in landscape interior and traditional architecture yeah so I love that to talk to a little bit more about you know that the charter of the school and how IT fits into that so we we are a mission of the schools to provide excellent education to a diverse population technology factors in is very important and over the last ten years the Carll I've been at the school technology has use has increased immensely our students are using it more and more every year and meeting those needs has become you know difficult and it's a challenge we we strive to achieve every year well Design Thinking is is so important these days I I studied engineering as an undergrad in which I've learned more about design one of my favorite authors so I have an interview about a month ago Walter Isaacson you know the ones he studies are the ones that can take that design thinking and technology and bring them together Carles bring us up to speed on from from the IT standpoint you know how big of a team do you have what are you involved with I said you know things have been changing over the last few years yeah so I mean we've got Jason in addition to running the department he runs our online learning system I'm responsible for all the backend its infrastructure servers networking backup virtualization we recently hired a junior systems administrator to help me out we've got a web guy we've got a DBA to the woodshop is under IT because we have a fabrication guy so 3d printing laser cutting we have the help desk and the help desk manager who also does our purchasing and she and I will take escalations so it's there's not a lot of crossover you know skill crossover in the group but we managed to keep everything going yeah but as you said they've been you know woodworking not something you think of in Italy as you know an IT thing IT an OT or you know really converging a lot when you talk about manufacturing as you know we talk about sensors and IOT it's it's hitting everywhere yeah for us you know 3d printing and laser cutting and we also have a CNC router they all started as experiments at the school and have turned into a major factor in for our students it's a resource that they demand and the increasing use every single year and how we meet those demands is is becoming tricky to accomplish in our you know we're in the Back Bay real estate is very expensive and we have to make our space do amazing things Jason that's great points I mean I've talked to lots of higher education and even you talk to the K 2 through 12 it was you know what mobility has had a huge impact you know therefore stresses and strains on wireless you know how do I get devices into the classroom how do I manage it I had gentleman from bu who's here at the show last year we were talking a lot about MOOCs so you know it's that that role of i TS but it's expanding but luckily they're throwing way more money at you I'm sure well we've been flat headcount over the last eight years we lost someone last year and gain someone this year so you know we we basically have to do more with less every year like most IT departments so you know we've we redesign our spaces periodically to meet those our students needs you know and turn returning what was labs just computer labs into more flexible space where students are can move the tables around and you the computers are available sometimes there we have high end alien wares in a in a cabinet they pull out news or they can use it to make models we have they can put up their designs on a 3d TV they're using VR headsets to walk around their own designs it's really fascinating where the technologies okay I wish we could spend more time anywhere in VR stuff and everything like that our production crews gamers my son's into this stuff but but Karl I'm hearing things like space constrained we need to do more with less we need to simplify this environment wow that seems like a really good set up for kind of infrastructure modernization so how long have you guys been there about 10 years right yeah so it's a change don't want one in ten years so walk us back 10 years ago and give us that point when you went to modernize yeah well when we started there's no virtualization 3 server racks in a room in the basement for 10 years that we've been there there's been water in that room twice so that always gave us the warm fuzzies you're saying it wasn't water cooling I mean no we tried for that but it didn't you know it didn't work out last year we moved to Colo facility in Summerville so and by the time we did that move yeah we did we started virtualization with VMware like three five within a year or two of me starting and the racks got you know less and less full and now in the fall we rolled out VX rail and we're in a single rack in a data center and there's I think three physical servers in that rack that aren't the VX rail at this point so it's it's consolidation power savings stuffs in a much better physical location than it used to be moving that server room out we were able to free up that space for you know the students to be able to have it's a it's a meditation space now so it's it's been really interesting kind of going through all that great what I wanted you know we don't have a ton of time but let's talk about that VX rail was your team were you looking for HCI was it you know just time for a server refresh you know what what kind of led to that was there a specific application that you started with so this event two years ago we saw Brian from bu give this presentation on their tan and that really turns us on to the whole hyper-converged option we we worked with Winslow we actually talked to another vendor and we looked at Nutanix we looked at pivot three we looked at rolling our own you know visa non FX 2 and after kind of comparing everything and seeing the pros and cons VX rail made the most sense from management perspective and a price perspective our old cluster was coming up on the five-year mark things were going out of warranty we had ecologic sand with 7200 rpm drives one gig I scuzzy just flow for most of its life we were just doing lightweight servers and applications two years ago we needed to virtualize our database server and we threw her Knicks in there with 800 gig on VM e drives and that was a great stopgap but you know we we needed something more permanent more robust - that's how we got to be X ray from a management standpoint the hyper-converged model gave us more flexibility it's easier to expand and since we're small we're not talking about you know racks and racks working together ryote you started with just three hosts so from a overview standpoint it's easy for us as we grow to just add another node and we get the compute we get the storage and we get the memory all at once as an expansion so it's the model is just fantastic for our workload that we put on it we've got like 70 servers in there the only stuff that's not in there yet is our student file server and exchange and they're going in there in the next six months yeah yeah good great and that's so so it sounds like you're real happy with the solution you've been with Dell for four years so from an Operations standpoint was there you know a lot of steep learning curve or was this pretty straightforward and very easy I mean I was I was already really familiar with the VMware piece going into this so that you know that wasn't a big deal we were already on Ruby sphere 6 and we started in the it's row of B so 6px role manager is it's kind of a stupid easy interface you know you can go in you can see are there alerts is there an update you know can it see my hardware is all that good there's not a whole lot to learn from there if we were doing V San on our own my understanding is that some a lot more complicated to stand up once you have it going you're good until you try to make a change so the VX rail manager extract abstracts all that away and just kind of gives you the the VMware experience that you're used to yeah any commentary on the economic service you know we actually found it was very interesting because our original assessment of our own needs were there was no way we could afford all flash and we started we focused exclusively on hybrid solutions and after a certain point we saw I think a presentation from Rick on the external platform and we saw the VX rail as inline dedupe and compression with the all flash and we thought wait maybe we could make this work with all flash and so we actually had a very slight reduction in RAW storage in our new platform but the percentage that we're actually consuming is far less than on our old platform simply because of those gains and it is the performance is far far faster and it's a we've just been very pleased with the implementation from a cost perspective the all-flash VX rail came in under the hybrid pivot 3 and the hybrid Nutanix products so you know we it was a huge win from that perspective we were shocked we could be able to do it thrilled with it ok final word it sounds like you're real happy with the solution when it smoothly operates well economics were good what final takeaways would you give for your peers I mean I'd say the implementation was you know the VX rail platform the the installation is as advertised it was it's basically a wizard that walks you through the installation process the very few minor issues we encountered the winslow team and the is EMC no support support people had no problem solving for us it was really a pretty easy migration to the new platform and we were able to do it with essentially zero downtime yeah awesome well gentlemen thanks so much for joining that's the promise is to get that easy button for IT HD I definitely helping to move in that direction next time we'll get to talk a little bit more about cloud and everything like that be back with lots more coverage here from wtg transform 2018 I'm Stu minimun thanks for watching the Q

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, and we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at Knowledge18, ServiceNow's big customer event. 18,000 ServiceNow practitioners and partners and constituents here. As I say, this is day three. This is our sixth year at Knowledge. Jeff Frick and I are co-hosting. When we started in 2013 early on, we saw this ecosystem grow, and one of the first CIOs we had on from the ServiceNow customer base was Link Alander, who is here. He's the Vice Chancellor of College Services at Lone Star College. Link, always a pleasure. Great to see you again. Thanks for coming back on. >> It's always great to get back and talk with you, see what's happening in the industry, and follow you. But, once again, great conference. >> It really is, I mean, wow. Last year was huge. The growth keeps coming. We said that Dan Rogers, the CMO, K18, 18,000. How ironic. >> Yeah, wow, let's see, your first was six years ago, right? >> Dave: Yep, it was 2013. So my first would have been New Orleans, which had been I think 2012, 2011. >> Right, right, the year before we met 'em. >> Three to four thousand in this conference. Actually, that might be the high count. >> Yeah, I mean, it's quite amazing. And the ecosystem has exploded. What's your take on how, not only ServiceNow and the ecosystem have grown, but how it's affected your business? >> Let's start with the, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's start with the ecosystem part because, really, you've got so many more partners out there now. You've got so many more integration points. What was really exciting as we saw this morning with Pat, and some of the enhancements they're doing on the DevOps side, but also what we're going to see with the ability to integrate our cloud linkage, which is really the challenge for everybody as a practitioner today. How do you bring all these cloud services? I've got quite a few of them in my environment. How do I actually integrate those in with my ServiceNow, with my ERP, with all of the other instances? So, seeing what they're doing in that space is great. From the business standpoint, when we came onto ServiceNow, we came on like everybody else, a journey for IT service management. Can we improve our services? Can we help our customers out? In our case, that'd be our faculty and staff. What we didn't realize was the opportunity that came to us with the platform. And one of the first things we did when we brought the platform back to us was we built an app for students. We built a way to help students out with their student financial aid. Now I've got, I think we're roughly at about nine of our areas that are using Enterprise Service Management. I just came back from giving a presentation about legal, and what we've done in the legal space to where that's helped the organization to move forward faster. So that's really cool in what it does, but it also elevates the position of IT in the organization. It really does bring us forward. >> Yeah so, let's talk a little about Lone Star College, 'cause I love your model, you know, and we can both relate. Kids in college, and, you know, the cost of education, the ROI, which I think is a big focus of what you guys provide for your students, so how's that going? How's the model working? >> Well the model's working great. And you know, you hear the pressures out there, 'cause one of the first thing is, how do you help a student complete. So, we're really very focused on student completion, but then now, you've got another focus that, well, it's been there, but it's really getting stronger, on gainful employment. So not only that, how do you get a student in college, how do they complete on time, but then how do they come out and have a livable wage, an earnable wage? And so I'll give a plug on that always because that's what we're focused on. Whether you're just coming to us to transfer to another institution or whether you're coming in the workforce. And we have a very strong workforce development, and one of the things I got out of this conference that I've been working on for quite awhile was for us to become a ServiceNow train, to get that integrated into our curriculum. And I was really excited. We've talked to them before about this, and it's been a discussion, but now what we're looking at is a program that they put in France where they have a six week program that if people are going out of there, coming in, six weeks later, job retrained, 100% placement. A year later, they have 98% retention, and those 2% just went to another company. So I can't think of a better opportunity for us from our standpoints in our workforce development. And I'm really excited we're going to be starting to move that forward now. >> It's interesting to hear John Donahoe on Tuesday talk about their measurement of customer success. And we were asking him on theCUBE, well, your customers measure success in a lot of different ways, so how do you take that input? Your measurement of success is student success, as you just have indicated. >> Absolutely, absolutely. You know, my focus has always been is IT is just a support operation. We're not the mission of the college. And that's important. Because as long as we have that mindset, we realize that it's us helping the faculty to less stress on their life, or the staff, then we've improved their experience, which will improve the student experience. The same goes for the administrative systems. We want administrative systems to have a user interface that's intuitive to today's student. It wasn't designed by a person that was intuitive to today's student. So we have that challenge, and that's what I liked about the change this year and the user interface in ServiceNow and where they're going with UI and UX, and how much of an enhancement that makes for our customers. But it's also, that's the changes that are happening in industry right now. Coach K was at the CIO Decisions, and he was talking about he's headed to go through all this process, and 50 forward years of difference, and he's recruiting 18-year-olds, and he's sending emojis to them, his recruits. But like, yeah, because you have to relate to it. So, we started a process, and this is where coming to a conference like this helps me a lot, because it's like, yeah, I went down the right path. But my team came to me, and I've got a phenomenal team. They came to me and said, you know what, we really need to look at UI, UX, and design thinking. And I'm like, okay. Now let's discuss what we really want to do with this. One group was wanting design thinking to think about analytics. What does the customer need? How do they want to see this data come to them? And how can they make data-informed decisions? Well, we have then rolled that same design thinking into, how do we roll out the fluid technologies in our ERP? How do we become more of a user interface that today's student wants, to what we're trying to do next in mobile? >> That's a really interesting take, because we talk often about millennials entering the workforce, right? And consumerization of IT and expectations. But they're usually a pretty small and growing percentage of the workforce at a particular company. For you, it's like 90% of your customer base, right? And they're on the bleeding edge. They're coming in there 18, 17 years old. So you got to be way out front on this customer experience. So have you really taken that opportunity to redesign that UI, UX, and interface to the applications? That must be a giant priority. >> We've done a lot of incremental items, but really it's been a huge priority for us for the last, we have two really cool items coming down the path. One is the UI UX experience. How do we transform the student experience? The next is a process that our academic success side, the student services side have gone down, with guided pathways. Okay, you and I went to college. What did we do? We saw an advisor every single time we registered. Then we up to the thing, and we filled in a bubble sheet, right? >> Right, right. >> Well right now, the students are registering on a mobile phone while they're sitting down at a Starbucks. They're not seeing an advisor. We want them to see an advisor. So we push them those directions, but this guided pathway says, you know what, I want to do this degree. Then we just line out, here's the classes you're going to take, and whether we use program enrollment, whatever methodology, we can help guide them in their pathway to success and completion, which is a big difference. And that's what needs to happen today. >> Right, well it's interesting, I always like to talk about banking, right? 'Cause banking, you used to go see the banker, go into the teller, and, you know, deposit your check and get your cash. And now most people's experience with their bank is via electronic, whether it's online, on their phone, or their app. You have kind of the dichotomy, 'cause they still have their interaction with the teachers. So there's still a very people element, but I would imagine more and more and more of that administrative execution, as you just described, is now moving to the mobile platform. That's the way they interact with the administration of the school. >> Well, that's their expectation. So, that's what we have to deliver, and it's a challenge because we have resources, we have limitations in resources or capabilities, but it's really keeping that focus going to where you look at it. So as we're doing this UI UX right now, one of our major goals is going to be to bring students in the engagement as we go through the design process, and get their feedback. Not computer science people, not IT people. We want the normal student that's going to go register for a class. And since what you have is such a large transient population, you know, two years, they're in, they're done. 100,000 per semester. 160,000 unique each year. You've got to create that rich experience, but the engagement, the bonding to the institution. And I like the bank for an example because not too long ago I switched banks because I didn't like their app. >> Dave: Absolutely. >> And it's easy to do, it's real easy to do. >> Airlines, you appreciate the good apps. >> Link: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> How does ServiceNow contribute to that user experience, that, your customer experience? >> Well right now from the student side, they don't see much of ServiceNow. They can submit requests, and we can handle their incidents, and those types of items. They have certain things. We have the student financial aid. But it really is about the Enterprise Service Management philosophy. I think if you go back to one of theCUBEs, maybe two or three years ago, I said, "Who would have ever thought they would come to IT to talk about service delivery?" Okay? Now, everybody at Enterprise is like, okay, how do you do this? How do you not let things fall through the crack? So that the legal app was a great one, because that was a challenge that our general council or our COO had when he came in. Everything was falling through the crack. So they worked through their workflows. They built a process. And then they built, we built an app for them in ServiceNow that handles everything. Now when I'm in a cabinet meeting, I get to hear about how legal's doing so great. I'm like, what about me? I think we're still doing a good job. (laughing) >> Well, Link, I'm curious too on, kind of the big theme has always been at this show kind of low code, no code developing, right? Enable people that aren't native coders to build apps, to build workflows. How has that evolved over time within your organization? >> Well, we still want to make sure when we're putting out code. What it's enabled for us is, of course, our developers, it makes it easier to get to time to completion of a project. But we still want to make sure that whatever's built is production ready. You know, so we're not opening up the tool case to everybody. (laughing) But, sad to say, I actually still go in, and I'll build my dashboards, and I'll build my interaction, and I use my performance analytics, which does enable people. And we're seeing that in some of our heavier Enterprise Service Management side, but as far as letting them dive into the no code environment, I still have to put some protection on us. And like any organization, we always have to think of IT security. That's the other piece of it. What are they putting out there? What could be a violation of privacy? How do we handle that? >> Jeff: Right. >> So, we stay completely engaged, but the speed to deliver is what the change is. Our legal app was a three month development project. Three months to go from a, they had a separate system. And to go through the process, redesign it, build it, and put it in production. Three months. >> Three months? >> How many people, roughly? How many people did it take to get there? >> Well, we use a development partner that used three, and then I had two at the time on my own. I still have only three individuals that actually handle our, that are primary to ServiceNow in my organization, as large as our installation base is. >> Really? And that includes the permeation of ServiceNow into the rest of the organization, or? >> Link: Yes. >> Dave: Really? >> 'Cause I added, and before that, if it has been last year, it was one and a half. >> Dave: Wow. >> That's what I had then. And technically, I probably have only two and a half because one person has another job, which is running our call center. >> So what are you using now? You got obviously ITSM, what else is in there? >> ITSM, ITBM, we got a great presentation we gave earlier on project portfolio management, and what we've done with that. And where we're going next. Business operations. We're actually launching this summer, if everything goes right. This is more of an internal, us doing it, but what I've been doing is I've been taking our contract management piece, utilization, incidents request change, and project. Now I'm going to roll it in and then do analytics against it to come back with what is the total cost per service per month per individual. On every license contract I hold. >> It's funny, the contract management software licensing management piece is a huge untapped area that we hear over and over and over again. >> So, two years ago we talked a lot about security. I think ServiceNow just at that point had announced its intentions to get into that business. What do you make of their whole SecOps modules, and is it something you've looked at? State of security, any comments? >> Well this is one of those situations I think we're just a little bit too far ahead of them again. 'Cause we actually had built a modular ourself that handled what we needed. In my environment, I've got an ISO, but I also have the partners that support us. My SOC is operated by a third party. So they feed in the alerts. We ingest the alerts into the security module, and then we take action from there. So basically, they were about, a little bit behind us. And we had just looked at the model saying we need a better way to manage that event. >> So you got that covered. Yeah, I want to ask you, you know, a couple years ago we, when the big data meme was hitting, we were, of course, asking you all these data questions. Now the big theme is AI, and in some regards it's like, same wine, new bottle. But it's different. What's your thoughts on machine intelligence? Obviously ServiceNow talking about it a lot. How applicable is it to you? >> Okay, so. (laughing) >> You know why, that's good. I had to ask. >> Augmented intelligence. Let's just not make it artificial, okay? 'Cause I, when Fred had that conversation during the fireside and he said, you know, a computer takes 10,000 images to know what a cat is. And of course, the computer's a mundane object that can look at 10,000 images to determine that's a cat. You showed me the other ones earlier today, I about rolled over laughing. >> It's allowed on the blueberry, check it out. >> You know, augmented intelligence is going to be a driver. There's no question about it. What we saw on the interface about it abled to, as the machine learning goes through the process, it's picking up the information, and it's helping the agent to get to the resolution faster, that's great. Knowledge bases that are integrated in with that. Can you think about how much quicker it would be for somebody like myself who's going to go to a chatbot, and I'm going to run through a chatbot in automated intelligence and do that type of work. So that's going to make a significant difference. One of the areas we think they will be dramatic, for especially this generation, the millennials coming into the school, will be to put that augmented intelligence in, in that process. Because, trying to explain to a student, you know, yeah, you go to the registrar's office to take care of this, and you go to the bursar's office to take, they have no clue what those mean. Well, if we can take it to their language, but then also add in augmented intelligence to guide them through those navigation points. So augmented intelligence over the next years, it's taking that big data now, it's actually put into use, all that machine learning, and making something happen out of it. >> You know, digital is one of those things where I actually think the customers led the vendor community. So often in the IT business, and the technology business in general, a lot of vendor hype, whether it's hyper converged or software to fund, they kind of jam it down our throats, and then sort of get it adopted. I almost feel like, you've been doing digital for awhile now because your student force has sent you in that direction. And I feel like the vendor community is now catching up, but is that a right perception? I mean that, the digital is certainly real, and then you guys are leaning in in a big way. >> I think between the three of us we could probably come up with all the different hype words that have been used, and probably fill this room with every one of those words, right? But the reality is, as practitioners, you're looking at what is your customer base, what do you need to be able to deal with. So, we've been into digital transformation, absolutely. Is it a good definition? Was cloud a good definition? I mean, what am I really? It's either I'm going to use software as a surface, a platform as a sur, I have a gigantic private cloud. Okay, that's great. We're talking about high availability and scalability. But when you put all those in, we've been in a digital transformation everywhere. Your banks did it, that's why you have a bank app. Airplanes did it because, you know, what was that ticketing system they used to use? >> Dave: Yeah, Sabre. >> Sabre, that's what it was, oh yeah. It's probably still out there somewhere. But the reality is, is that, if you're not transforming digitally, you're going to get left behind. And even some big IT companies, and I'm sure we got a list of those bit IT companies also, that have fallen off the face of the earth, or are struggling to stay on because they didn't go through that digital transformation. They tried to do the same thing the same way and move forward. You can't do that. >> You know, you just reminded me. I just got a, hey, it's been awhile since I goofed on Nick Carr, but you remember, as a CIO, Does IT Matter? Right, in the early 2000s, that book. I mean, IT matters more than ever, right? I mean, Nick Carr obviously very accomplished, but missed it by a mile. >> Well, it's funny 'cause then IT was a support organization. Now that IT is an integrated piece in the way that everything just happens, right? It's not keeping the lights on and support so much anymore. >> I can't remember who brought that up in the keynote. Talking about the fact that, basically, we permeate the organization, okay? 'Cause there's not a function that they're doing that doesn't have some type of IT. And the question is are you sewing it together correctly. Because in the end, what are they going to want? Well, you want a seamless student experience. You want a seamless employee experience. Nobody's perfect, everything needs improvement. I'll always say that. But then at the same time is, you want that data to be all tied together so you can take advantage of big data. You can take advantage of machine learning. And then you can come back and report on it. You know, what we've done, so I guess three years ago is when I took over. I was put in charge of our analytics team. And our focus was unlocking the data so that people could have access and make decisions that are informed. You know, it's not data driven. We need to see the data, look at it, and come forward from there. So things like what ServiceNow did in performance analytics. Our general council highlighted the performance analytics as soon as we, we missed it, as he said. We put it in the first app, we didn't do it. We needed to add it. So we added it in. And he's like, wow, what I always thought was one thing. But now that I'm seeing the data, and I'm seeing the patterns, it's totally different. Because we have assumptions just 'cause we think we're busy. Performance analytics is letting him see exactly what's happening in his organization. >> Let me ask you a question. If somebody on your staff, let's say somebody that you mentored, came up to you and said, "Listen, Link, I really want to be a CIO. I mean, it's my aspiration. What advice would you give me?" >> Well, it's kind of hard when you ask this one, because I've mentored and then partnered, I wouldn't even call it mentored anymore, a great friend of mine, and he's now a CIO at Spellman in Georgia, yeah. In fact I was just chatting with him earlier because I saw something, I was like, hey, you need to check this out. It'll solve your problem. You know, it's a simple key fact. If you want to be in IT, you've got to be agile. You really have to be agile. You can't be rigid. You can't close those doors and keep your focus, and you have to constantly learn. If you don't just constantly learn, then you fall off. And that's something, when we talk about digital transformation and these companies that haven't made the transformation, that aren't here anymore, they stopped learning. They thought they had it. It's the companies that have actually continued to learn, or the CIOs or people coming up the ranks that look at it. And they look at things differently. It really is. The digital transformation is about keeping the CIO transformed, and every one of the staff. Had a discussion not too long ago with one CIO about how does he energize his staff. He's trying to do a transformation, but his staff is entrenched in the old way we did things. And, you know, sometimes you just have to shake things and get 'em excited about this piece of it. And a lot of times, if you're especially in a college, I have the luck of bringing a student in. What was your experience with that application? What did you think about it? They think it's the greatest thing they've ever created. But when you get it in front of a student, it can be something totally different. So, the biggest one right there, you got to have agility, you got to constantly learn, and you really, you know I might have a laser focus about things, I have a very agile planning model I use, but at the same time is I try to keep the door open to any possibilities. >> Well, Link, you're a great leader, and a friend of theCUBE. Can't thank you enough for making some time out of your busy schedule to come back on. Great to see you again. >> Jeff: Good seeing ya. >> It was great seeing you again, as always. As always. >> Alright, keep it right here, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Las Vegas, ServiceNow Knowledge18. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

live from Stanford University in Palo Alto California it's the cube covering women in data science conference 2018 brought to you by Stanford welcome to the cube we are alive at Stanford University I'm Lisa Martin and we are at the 3rd annual women in data science conference or woods whiz if you're not familiar is a one-day technical conference that has keynote speakers technical vision talks as well as a career panel and we are fortunate to have guests from all three today it's also an environment it's really a movement that's aimed at inspiring and educating data scientists globally and supporting women in the field this event is remarkable in its third year they are expecting to reach sit down for this 100,000 people today we were here at Stanford this is the main event in person but there's over 150 plus regional events around the globe in 50 plus countries and I think those numbers will shift up during the day and I'll be sure to brief you on that we're excited to be joined by one of the speakers featured on mainstage this morning not only a cube alum not returning to us but also the first ever female president of Harvey Mudd College dr. Maria Klawe a maria welcome back to the cube thank you it's great to be here it's so exciting to have you here I love you representing with your t-shirt there I mentioned you are the first-ever female president of Harvey Mudd you've been in this role for about 12 years and you've made some pretty remarkable changes there supporting women in technology you gave some stats this morning in your talk a few minutes ago share with us what you've done to improve the percentages of females in faculty positions as well as in this student body well the first thing I should say is as president I do nothing nothing it's like a good job the whole thing that makes it work at Harvey Mudd is we are community that's committed to diversity and inclusion and so everything we do we try to figure out ways that we will attract people who are underrepresented so that's women in areas like computer science and engineering physics it's people of color in all areas of science and engineering and it's also LGTB q+ i mean it's you know it's it's muslims it's it's just like all kinds of things and our whole goal is to show that it doesn't matter what race you are doesn't matter what gender or anything else if you bring hard work and persistence and curiosity you can succeed i love that especially the curiosity part one of the things that you mentioned this morning was that for people don't worry about the things that you you might think you're not good at i thought that was a very important message as well as something that I heard you say previously on the cube as well and that is the best time that you found to reach women young women and to get them interested in stem as even a field of study is the first semester in college and I should with you off camera that was when I found stem in biology tell me a little bit more about that and how what are some of the key elements that you find about that time in a university career that are so I guess right for inspire inspiration so I think the thing is that when you're starting in college if somebody can introduce you to something you find fun engaging and if you can really discover that you can solve major issues in the world by using these ideas these concepts the skills you're probably going to stay in that and graduate in that field whereas if somebody does that to when you're in middle school there's still lots of time to get put off and so our whole idea is that we emphasize creativity teamwork and problem-solving and we do that whether it's in math or an engineering or computer science or biology we just in all of our fields and when we get young women and young men excited about these possibilities they stick with it and I love that you mentioned the word fun and curiosity I can remember exactly where I was and bio 101 and I was suddenly I'd like to biology but never occurred to me that I would ever have the ability to study it and it was a teacher that showed me this is fun and also and I think you probably do this too showed that you believe in someone you've got talent here and I think that that inspiration coming from a mentor whether you know it's a mentor or not is a key element there that is one that I hope all of the the viewers today and the women that are participating in which have the chance to find so one of the things every single one of us can do in our lives is encourage others and you know it's amazing how much impact you can have I met somebody who's now a faculty person at Stanford she did her PhD in mechanical engineering her name is Allison Marsden I hadn't seen her for I don't know probably almost 12 years and she said she came up to me and she said I met you just as I was finishing my PhD and you gave me a much-needed pep talk and you know that is so easy to do believing in people encouraging them and it makes so much difference it does I love that so wins is as I mentioned in the third annual and the growth that they have seen is unbelievable I've not seen anything quite like it in in tech in terms of events it's aimed at inspiring not just women and data science but but data science in general what is it about wizz that attracted you and what are some of the key things that you shared this morning in your opening remarks well so the thing that attracts me about weeds is the following data science is growing exponentially in terms of the job opportunities in terms of the impact on the world and what I love about withes is that they had the insight this flash of genius I think that they would do a conference where all the speakers would be women and just that they would show that there are women all over the world who are contributing to data science who are loving it who are being successful and it's it's the crazy thing because in some ways it's really easy to do but nobody had done it right and it's so clear that there's a need for this when you think about all of the different locations around the world that are are doing a width version in Nigeria in Mumbai in London in you know just all across the world there are people doing this yeah so the things I shared are number one oh my goodness this is a great time to get into data science it's just there's so many opportunities in terms of career opportunities but there's so many opportunities to make a difference in the world and that's really important number two I shared that it's you never too old to learn math and CS and you know my example is my younger sister who's 63 and who's learning math and computer science at the northern Alberta Institute of Technology Nate all the other students are 18 to 24 she suffers from fibromyalgia she's walked with a walker she's quite disabled she's getting A's and a-pluses it's so cool and you know I think for every single person in the world there's an opportunity to learn something new and the most important thing is hard work and perseverance that it's so much more important than absolutely anything else I agree with that so much it's it's such an inspiring time but I think that you said there was clearly a demand for this what Wits has done in such a short time period demonstrates massive demand the stats that I was reading the last couple of days that show that women with stem degrees only 26% of them are actually working in STEM fields that's very low and and even can start from things like how how companies are recruiting talent and the messages that they're sending may be the right ones maybe not so much so I have a great example for you about companies recruiting talent so about three years ago I was no actually almost four years ago now I was talking in a conference called HR 50 and it's a conference that's aimed at the chief human resource officers of 50 multinationals and my talk I was talking for 25 minutes on how to recruit and retain women in tech careers and afterwards the chief HR officer from Accenture came up to me and she said you know we hire 17,000 software engineers a year Justin India 17,000 and she said we've been coming in at 30 percent female and I want to get that up to 45 she said you told me some really good things I could use she she said you told me how to change the way we advertise jobs change the way we interview for jobs four months later her name is Ellen Chowk Ellen comes up to me at another conference this has happens to be the most powerful women's summit that's run by Fortune magazine every year and she comes up and she says Maria I implemented different job descriptions we changed the way we interview and I also we started actually recruiting at Women's College engineering colleges in India as well as co-ed once she said we came in at 42% Wow from 30 to 42 just making those changes crying I went Ellen you owe me you're joining my more my board and she did right and you know they have Accenture has now set a goal of being at 50/50 in technical roles by 2025 Wow they even continued to come in all around the world they're coming in over 40% and then they've started really looking at how many women are being promoted to partners and they've moved that number up to 30% in the most recent year so you know it's a such a great example of a company that just decided we're gonna think about how we advertise we're going to think about how we interview we're gonna think about how we do promotions and we're going to make it equitable and from a marketing perspective those aren't massive massive changes so whether it expects quite simple exactly yeah these are so the thing I think about so when I look at what's happening at Harvey Mudd and how we've gotten more women into computer science engineering physics into every discipline it's really all about encouragement and support it's about believing in people it's about having faculty who when they start teaching a class the perhaps is technically very rigorous they might say this is a really challenging course every student in this course who works hard is going to succeed it's setting that expectation that everyone can succeed it's so important I think back to physics and college and how the baseline was probably 60% in terms of of grades scoring and you went in with intimidation I don't know if I can do this and it sounds like again a such a simple yet revolutionary approach that you're taking let's make things simple let's be supportive and encouraging yet hopefully these people will get enough confidence that they'll be able to sustain that even within themselves as they graduate and go into careers whether they stay in academia or go in industry and I know you've got great experiences in both I have I so I've been very lucky and I've been able to work both in academia and in industry I will say so I worked for IBM Research for eight years early in my career and you know I tribute a lot of my success as a leader since then to the kind of professional development that I got as a manager at IBM Research and you know what I think is that I there's not that much difference between creating a great learning environment and a great work environment and one of the interesting results that came out of a study at Google sometime in the last few months is they looked at what made senior engineering managers successful and the least important thing was their knowledge of engineering of course they all have good knowledge of engineering but it was empathy ability to mentor communication skills ability to encourage all of these kinds of things that we think of as quote unquote soft skills but to actually change the world and and on those sasuke's you know we hear a lot about the hard skills if we're thinking about data scientists from a role perspective statistical analysis etcetera but those soft skills empathy and also the ability to kind of bring in different perspectives for analyzing data can really have a major impact on every sector and socially in the world today and that's why we need women and people of color and people who are not well represented in these fields because data science is changing everything in the world absolutely is and if we want those changes to be for the better we really need diverse perspectives and experiences influencing things that get made because you know algorithms are not algorithms can be hostile and negative as well as positive and you know good for the world and you need people who actually will raise the questions about the ethics of algorithms and how it gets used there's a great book about how math can be used for the bad of humanity as well as the good of humanity and until we get enough people with different perspectives into these roles nobody's going to be asking those questions right right well I think with the momentum that we're feeling in this movement today and it sounds like what you're being able to influence greatly at Mudd for the last twelve years plus there is there are our foundations that are being put in place with not just on the education perspective but on the personal perspective and in inspiring the next generation giving them helping them I should say achieve the confidence that they need to sustain them throughout their career summary I thank you so much for finding the time to join us this morning on the cube it's great to have you back and we can't wait to talk to you next year and hear what great things do you influence and well next twelve months well it's wonderful to have a chance to talk with you as well thank you so much excellent you've been watching the cube we're live at Stanford University for the third annual women in data science wins conference join the conversation hashtag wins 2018 I'm Lisa Martin stick around I'll be right back with my next guest after a short break

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE live from VMworld day one, really exciting day that we're having so far. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Dave Vellante and we're joined by a CUBE alumni and a new CUBE guest. Welcome back to theCUBE Ruya Barrett, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Good to have you here and we also want to welcome Mark Wiseley, the CIO of Palmer Chiropractic College, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> It's great to have you guys. So one of the things we were talking about before we went live is backup. Is backup back? Is backup sexy again? It's hot, why is backup so hot, Ruya? >> Oh my god, yeah, it is. I started years ago and I was in data protection and got forward 20 years, it's back in data protection. It's hotter than ever. In the last six years, I think there's been over 5 billion dollars invested in this space whether from venture capital or big companies and it's hot because of what's happening in the customer's environment. We see a huge restructuring of data centers. So before data used to be in a couple of locations that we called data center and now it's really much more about centers of data, data is moving out of the four walls, moving closer to where decision making is which is with the business, out in the geos so it's moving to the edge and also just cloud. Cloud is really - and cloud deployments are really reshaping where customer's data is so now that data's no longer in a building. How do you secure it? How do you protect it? Where is it? Who owns it? Those are becoming more and more prevalent questions. So that's why backup is sexier than ever. >> So is that what's - What are the drivers for you in terms of your backup? I mean, what keeps you up at night? You wake up in the morning, what are you thinking about in the backup context? >> Well, for us, you know, it's really about not having to think about it, you know, making sure you've got a solid solution that's there to backup that data and make sure it's available when you need it and where you need it and the Dell EMC product we put in place gave us that opportunity where we can backup our servers, our desktops, our laptops, it doesn't matter whether they're offsite or onsite. They can be anywhere, it gets backed up quickly and it doesn't interfere with what they're doing. Users don't want to be interrupted with a backup and have to sit there and wait for it so it's been a great solution for us. >> So Mark, you've been - You've got over 20 years experience in the industry. You've been a CIO at Palmer for nearly two years now. One of the things that I read about you is that you're attracted to neglected IT systems. I imagine you saw a tremendous amount of opportunity but we talked about kind of bringing sexy back with state of protection but you were instrumental in kind of changing the IT direction at Palmer back to Dell EMC, tell us a little about that and why that was so important to you as the leader of IT there. >> Well, when I came into Palmer, we had a number of different issues. Everything from performance to backup windows that we couldn't hit. We were still using tape backup. There was a number of different issues and so we really needed a platform that would be able to come in and solve all those issues and also do it as quickly as possible so we put in a Dell EMC VxBlock which allowed us to, I kind of look at it as a data center in a box type of thing, I mean it solved our networking issues and our backup issues and then because we have multiple sites, we were able to actually back up our data and replicate it to some of our other data centers across the US so it was just a perfect solution for us and then one of the real nice things is when we actually put that product in Dell EMC came in and helped us to implement it and within three days of them arriving we were actually running production workloads on that system so it worked out great for us. >> You know, that reminds me, so Ruya, I've asked this of some of your colleagues, backup forever has been a bolt on and the VxBlock triggered something in my mind, I remember the original Vblock. I remember it said, oh no, Serves up 5,000 vms and my first thought was how do you back that up? And there wasn't and integrated answer. This is a long, long time ago. There is today. >> Ruya: Yeah, absolutely. >> Maybe talk about the philosophy of backup as a core component of a deployment and what you guys specifically have done there. >> Absolutely, we actually today had a really exciting announcement that would really be under what I would call more of a transformational approach to data protection and really the move that we see is it used to be that backup used to be kind of an afterthought, something that you roll out your applications and you're like oh yeah, we have to protect them and figure out what you're going to do and implement what you need from an infrastructure standpoint. We're really seeing a much more of a move to a source-based data protection so we're building data protection capabilities in directly to the applications so today we announced data protection suite for applications and a whole new version of it which really enables the native UIs that the database administrators are using to protect their own workloads and this source-based data protection is going to be more and more critical especially as data is moving closer and closer to where it's getting created so you need to protect it at the source not in the background, not as an afterthought. We also are seeing convergence which is your question around the VxRail. We have integrated data protection now built into VxRail deployments and we've had it for a couple of years now and this year at Dell EMC World, we introduced IDPA, Integrated Data Protection Appliance. Again, bringing all the components that a customer would need, integrated data protection storage, integrated data protection software, into an appliance model so it's all about simplicity, just making it easier for customers to be able to deploy. >> So Mark, you're obviously a VMware customer and as a VMware customer, your backup has sort of been subservient to the VMware momentum. You remember the ascendancy of VMware totally changed your backup requirement. You get less physical servers, backup was very consumptive of resources so you had to think about that. Fast forward, now this whole cloud world, what are you doing in cloud? How is it effecting your backup strategy, specifically? >> So we're looking at, you know, the cloud is one of the areas where obviously we're exploring opportunities. One of the reasons that we put in the VxBlock and the data domain and the data protection suite was really to set us up to be able to make that transition into the cloud simpler. You know, now we have the tools in place so we can decide when we need to move it to the cloud, what data do you need to move in the cloud, where do we need that data to be and it just gives us lots of opportunities and lots of options so >> So let me take that one step further, let's define cloud a little differently, not just as a place you put data but as I want to bring a model to the data wherever the data lives so it's self-service and it's automation and all those things you associated with cloud maybe bringing that on prem or putting it in the cloud. Is that something that as an IT practitioner, you see as viable or is the cloud no, no, it's in Amazon or Google or some other external location? Are you trying to bring that cloud model to the business? >> Yeah, I think as we look at the cloud, I think a lot of it is just options. Figuring out which option or which model or which provider you're going to utilize both from a cost perspective as well as regulatory compliance pieces come into play so you know as we look at cloud, we look at kind of what we've put on site as kind of a private cloud or a cloud in a box type thing and it just opens up lots of different opportunities for utilizing Amazon or Azure or whatever that is. >> So one of the things that I wanted to ask you Mark is really about, you know, Palmer School of Chiropractor was chartered in 1907. >> Mark: 1897. >> Right and then I think I saw that it was chartered, maybe a different name in the early 1900's. >> Mark: Yep. >> It's been around for a very long time so you know, as we see people moving from virtualization to cloud, we're seeing certifications change, you've seen a lot of evolution in data protection Ruya. What's the evolution from an education perspective or maybe even a cultural perspective at Palmer, an organization that's been around for well over 100 years. What's the shift that you have maybe driven within your IT experts to improve their education to remain at Palmer and to help you attract new talent as technologies evolve? >> Well, I think, you know, one of the reasons that Palmer decided to really look at IT, we're kind of the trusted leader in Chiropractic, the founder of Chiropractic and they really wanted to up their game. We're a higher ed institution so most of our students come from large universities and they're used to a lot of technology and instant on and all these different things and so we really wanted to make sure that we could provide an experience for them that gave them that instant on as well as there's a lot of online experiences after you graduate, you know, there's a lot of CEUs and things that they need to come back for and so we're starting to build some of our online programs to give them the opportunities without them having to come on site for everything so it just opens up a whole world of opportunity. >> I had one last question for you Mark, it's the why Dell EMC question, I mean, you've got a lot of options out there, we've talked about all this investment going in, why Dell EMC? What's attractive to them? And a two part question. What's on their to-do list in your view? >> Well I think the thing with the Dell EMC is it really was the one company that gave us everything that we needed. You know, it gave us that full solution, covered all of our issues, everything from performance with the servers and network and data backups and recovery. It just gave us everything that we needed and it was one solution from one vendor so if we do have support issues, we have one vendor to reach out to. We don't have three different vendors or having vendors fighting with each other. It's one solution, one vendor for support, and it just gave us everything that we needed. >> Excellent. Well, Ruya, I heard you say that at Dell EMC World on theCUBE moving from data centers to centers of data. Pat Gelsinger may have gotten that from you, he said that on stage this morning. >> Ruya: I don't know, you heard it first. >> As things are evolving, we thank you for sharing your insights. It sounds like there's a lot of opportunity. Same thing at Palmer, congratulations on the evolution that you have helped >> Thank you. >> To charter there and we want to thank you both taking the time to chat with Dave and myself this afternoon. >> Ruya: Thank you so much. Nice seeing you guys. >> And for our guests and my co-host Dave Vellante, you're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2017 day one. Stick around, we'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco it's The Cube covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pier 70 in San Francisco everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. Ray Smith is here. He is the Assistant Director for Technology at the Mississippi Community College Board. Ray, thanks for coming to The Cube, it's good to see you. >> Glad to be here. >> We were having a good conversation off camera. Tell us a little bit about the college board. >> Well, Mississippi Community College Board is... We are the board that coordinates with the 15 community colleges in the state of Mississippi. Part of our job is to make sure that enrollment figures are taken care of. We look at budgets, we work with the legislature, and more importantly we work with the community colleges in helping to develop good outcomes for our students. >> Okay, so it's obviously a public institution, public funded, you've got a responsibility to report to the public. Do you also have responsibility for, well what services do you have responsibility for? You said enrollment, but.. >> I am, for instance, I'm responsible for a statewide network. The community colleges are a little different than some entities in that we have a shared network. In which all 15 community colleges they are connected back to the board office. We act as the ISP for the colleges. The colleges submit data to us. We also have in place a longitudinal data system in the state of Mississippi in which we collect information and we report that information up the line for our longitudinal data. But more importantly what we do is that we count students and we pay based upon enrollment. >> Community colleges play such a critical role today in education. Which we all know, anybody who has kids know how expensive it is to educate. And the colleges are way more open these days about accepting community college student transfers, allowing students to take summer classes at community colleges. My son, for instance, goes to GW, he's taking some math classes at community college. It really helps address the cost. It helps people who aren't ready to go to college. Talk a little bit about the mission and the role that your college plays. >> Our system, or the board office, what we do again is that we coordinate each community college as a separate entity amongst themselves, governed by a local board. But from the state level, we administer the payment based upon students. And one of the things that we do is we're heavily involved in the workforce. That's a real big issue in our system right now. To train more people for the jobs that we're trying to bring in to Mississippi. In addition to that, we have strong academics in which our students take two year academic courses that transfer to our universities. But more than anything our purpose is to try to make a better Mississippi, in providing our services, education and training to the people of Mississippi. >> You're a feeder system, in essence. It's a fast turnover, it's a two year cycle. So your job of enrollment has a lot of pressure on it. Now what kind of pressure does that put on the technology infrastructure. >> Well, a couple of things. Number one, community colleges are education based institutions but at the same time, people come there because of the lifestyle. Because coming out of high school, a lot of students aren't quite ready for the big universities. So, they come to the community colleges looking for a lot of the things that they have at home. Internet, fast internet, for instance, and also the ability to.. (laughs) that's the big one, and also the ability to have online classes where they don't have to come on campus or so forth. But our students want everything that the major universities have and they want everything they're used to as home as well as within coming out of K-12. >> Okay, so, let's get into the relationship with Pure Accelerate, let's talk about it. What led you to them? Talk about your journey, give us the before and after. >> Well, first of all, I have a real small staff at our agency, and we have a lot of big things to do. >> Dave: What's small? >> Small, three people including myself. >> Oh wow, for 15 colleges? >> 15 colleges for a statewide network, etc, etc. What we were looking for was a system that would allow us to bring all of our technical resources into a smaller unit. We looked at the converge systems of some other competitors to Pure early on. And what we were really wanting to see and what we needed help with was more of a technical infrastructure more than anything. But what we found, it was way too complex. And it actually required all of the additional services that you received in terms of technical support. When we moved to Pure, we looked at the Pure Storage, and one of the main reasons we did that was our current system was coming up for renewal. The renewal itself was triple what it was the year before. >> Dave: The maintenance renewal? >> The maintenance renewal. And it was the traditional forklift. We weren't ready to forklift. So looking at Pure, what we were looking for was number one, simplicity, we were looking for more speed, we were looking for all of those things that would make life easier for us. What we ended up getting was a situation where we were able to purchase the Pure array for the cost of maintenance of what we were looking at before. >> Dave: Wow. >> The cost of mainenance. We got the Pure array with three year maintenance on it. So it was a no brainer from our standpoint. >> And let me just put a point on that. When you say simplicity a lot of people what they say, "Oh well, give you more time to work, "but you're going to pay for it more upfront." But you're saying from a capital expense standpoint this was now a savings for you compared to keeping your old gear. >> Understand this, the Pure array is the first piece of technology equipment that I've ever purchased that would not be classified as an expense. It's an investment, simple as that. Because what we purchased, we will not have to throw it out when we upgrade. We simply, as we saw today in the presentation, we upgrade our software, we get same pieces and parts in place. It is, it's an investment. >> Can you walk us through that a little bit? Because you've got the full converged infrastructure solution. Were you using Cisco before or was that something you added? >> I was using Cisco from a UCS standpoint. But I was using another manufacturer's storage. We actually, we moved to the flat stack on our first conversion we kept our UCS, but we removed the storage and our converted it all to a flat stack. Then we subsequently purchased an additional flat stack. But what it has bought us is exactly what you mentioned earlier. We now have time to do things as opposed to just being a technology person. >> Ray, one thing when you talk about upgrades. You've got your computer, your storage, and your network. Storage sounds like you can upgrade it and move there, with converge you can upgrade it. Your network, too? Because network tends to be install it and don't breathe on it because I don't want to mess it up. So, does the full solution get upgraded or how do you manage it? Do you manage it as a stack or as the individual components? >> We manage our stack itself. Now from the infrastructure standpoint of what we do with internet service, that's handled with another piece of equipment. But we were able to number one, shut down two full racks of storage equipment down to four U, roughly. And it's changed our whole costing structure inside of our data center. The data center is much cooler. And of course, the whole support piece of it is just unbelievable. There's no one coming in to replace blades every other week. >> I was going to say, too. It had to have an IT labor impact. So what would you have done? You've got a small staff. It's yourself plus three individuals, correct? >> Ray: That's correct. >> What would you have done if you didn't get there? Would you just have to work more nights and weekends? >> That's what we would have done. We would have continued to do that. >> Dave: And you were doing that? >> That's what we were doing. >> Is it fair to say you got a lot of your nights and weekends back? >> Absolutely. >> So, presumably, people are more productive during the day. They're happier because they have more time with their families. >> Absolutely, and access to our data is a lot quicker than it was before. >> So, working less, you get more done. >> Correct. >> That's a good do more with less story, right? Because usually do more with less means you figure out how to work nights and weekends. I mean you remember that cycle of 20, ten, 15 years of hell after the dot come burst. It was like do more with less, do more with less, do more with less. And all it meant was more hours for IT people. I guess we hit the breaking point, and now technology's got us into this problem. Is technology finally getting us out of this problem? >> From our standpoint, it is solved. At least 50% of man hours that we have been using just to keep our systems up and running. Now I work it all from one pane of glass or from my cell phone. >> And here's the thing. What value did that really provide, that extra nights and weekends, to the organization? I guess the value was, if it didn't get done, IT would fail, was the value. But it wasn't incremental value, right? >> Well, what we've been able to do is move more into the job responsibilities that are actually there more along with the technical side. >> Dave: So the strategic stuff? >> Absolutely, I have a developer now that can spend his whole time developing as opposed to responding to some error message on a hard drive or whatever. >> I'll make a prediction. I think it was, it might have been Greenspan, but he said during the 80's, we all went to PC's, they said you see the productivity numbers aren't up ticking. But we're spending all of this money on technology, but you don't see it in the productivity numbers. And of course in the 90's we had this productivity boom. You're kind of seeing some flatness in productivity, but the stories that we get like this, I think we're going to have another boom. Do you feel that way as a technology practitioner? >> Absolutely. Even myself, I deal more with the infrastructure so far as our servers and so forth. I have time to do a whole bunch of things. We're redesigning, for instance, our websites. We're doing a lot of other things now that honestly we didn't have time to do. >> And I think that's a big factor in the flash. It's not just speed. >> Yeah, and Dave, it's something we've been talking about for years, some of the MIT guys. As automation and tools and platforms are actually going to free us up to do more. Stories like your developer wasn't developing and now they are. So, yeah, what are you seeing that's going to enable you to do even more? Is there anything you're asking for from the community that, either some announcements you've seen this week or other things you're looking for? >> Believe it or not, the announcement that I just heard today about the active active scenario, that's it. I have two data centers. >> The multi site replication? >> Absolutely. >> You used to work at EMC in the heyday and they referenced it today. SRDF was kind of the gold standard, expensive, complicated... >> Stu: In 1994 >> Dave: But it changed the business. What I heard, and maybe you alpha geeks can help me, but what I heard is that we're going to dramatically simplify that whole process. So, that's what you heard, but add some color to that. What does that mean for you? >> What that means for me is now my two sites will operate as one. And that I actually have a real active active configuration that I'm not afraid if something goes down that the other one's not going to be there. I don't have to go through the process of rebuilding on the other side because it's all automatic. There are a number of things that were said that if you understood what we have gone through in the past couple of years in working, trying to get together an active active environment, it was just like the creation of fire, as far as I'm concerned. >> It's something we've had in storage forever. The reason we over provision and get such low utilization is because if I have a failure or something goes wrong. If something's a little slow, I have trouble. If I go down, I'm out of a job. >> The traditional vendors weren't able to solve this problem for you. I mean they've been trying for a while, right? But you didn't see anything from those guys. >> If you attempted to do that using hardware base, using software base, it's more than just a notion. I have reasonable assurances, based on what I've seen with Pure that it is going to be as straightforward and as simple as they have described. >> That's great. Alright, Ray, give you the last word. Pure Accelerate, where you here last year? >> Ray: I was not here last year. >> So this is your first year? >> This is my first year, and it's great, it's wonderful. >> Are there things you are seeing that are interesting to you? >> Absolutely, everything, everything. >> Why do you come to these shows? >> Well, number one, I come to learn something new. I like to hear about the announcements number one. And I like to be able to have the opportunity to meet some of the people who actually building, designing, writing the source code for this stuff. It's amazing. >> I got to ask you a personal question. You shared with me you like to funkify, you're a bass player, do you play in a band? >> My band is getting back together for kind of a short reunion here. We have some roots that go back to hip-hop. And it'll be interesting to see Snoop tomorrow night. >> That's awesome, fantastic. Well, Ray, thank you so much for coming to The Cube. >> Appreciate it, appreciate it. >> Alright, keep right there and we'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, this is The Cube, we're live from Pure Accelerate 2017 in San Francisco. We'll be right back. (exciting music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Fransisco It's theCUBE Covering PURE Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by PURESTORAGE. >> Welcome back to PURE Accelerate. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. This is PURE Accelerate. We're here at Pier 70. Brian McDaniel is here he's an infrastructure architect at the Baylor College of Medicine, not to be confused with Baylor University in Waco Texas, anymore. Brian Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me appreciate it. >> You're very welcome. Tell us about the Baylor College of Medicine. >> So, Baylor College of Medicine is a, first and foremost, a teaching facility but also the leader in research and development for healthcare in the Texas Medical Center in Houston Texas. We currently employ roughly 1,500 physicians and so they occupy a multitude of institutions, not only at Baylor but other facilities and hospitals in and around the Texas Medical Center. >> So, it's kind of' healthcare morning here Stu. We've been talking about electronic medical records, meaningful use, the Affordable Care Act, potential changes there, HIPAA, saving lives. These are big issues. >> We're not at the HIMSS Conference Dave? >> We should be at HIMMS. So these are big issues for any organization in healthcare. It's just exacerbates the challenges on IT. So, I wonder if you can talk about some of the drivers in your business, compliance, and in new tech and maybe share with us some of the things that you're seeing. >> Absolutely so first and foremost, we are an Epic system shop. That's our EMR. So, from a enterprise and clinical operation, that is our number one mission critical application. It provides your electronic medical records to our staff, regardless of where they're physically located at. So that alone is a demanding type of solution if you will, the mobility aspect of it. Delivering that in a fast manner and a repeatable manner is upmost important to our physicians because they're actually seeing patients and getting to your records and being able to add notes and collaborate with other institutions if necessary. So, time to market is very important and accessibility is also up there. >> Right so, you mentioned that collaboration and part of that collaboration is so much data now, being able to harness that data and share it. Data explodes everywhere but in healthcare, there's so much data to the extent we start instrumenting things. What are you guys doing with all that data? >> Right now, it lives within the clinical application, right in Epic, but as you pointed out that is where the value is. that is where your crown jewels so to speak are at. That data is now being looked at as a possible access point outside of the clinical operation. So, it's environment is going to be even more important going forward, when you look to branch out into some of the basic sides in more of a research, to gain access to that clinical data. That historically has been problematic for the research to be done accessing that information. >> So, in the corporate we like to think of, from an IT perspective, you got to run the business, you got to grow the business, you got to transform the business. It's a little different in healthcare. You kind of got to comply. A lot of your time is spent on compliance and regulation changes and keeping up with that. And then there's got to be a fair amount that's at least attempting to do transformation and in kind of keeping up with the innovations. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely, particularly on the innovation side, we work closely with out partners at Epic and we work to decide roadmaps and how that fits into the Baylor world. Case in point, a year ago we were set to go to the new version of Epic, which was 2015. And Epic is nice enough to lay out requirements for you and say, here's what your system needs to meet in order to comply with Epic standards. So, they give you a seal of approval, so to speak. And there's monetary implications for not meeting those requirements. So it's actually dollars and cents. It's not just , we want you to meet this. If you do then there's advantages to meeting it. So, they provided that to us and went though the normal testing phases and evaluations of our current platform, both from compute and storage. And honestly we struggled to meet their requirements with our legacy systems. So the team was challenged to say well, what can we do to meet this? We have our historical infrastructures, so if we're going to deviate from that, let's really deviate and look at what's available to the market. So, Flash comes to mind immediately. So, there's a multitude of vendors that make Flash storage products. So we started meeting with all of 'em, doing our fact finding and our data gathering, meeting with all of 'em. First and foremost, they have to be Epic certified. That eliminated a couple of contenders right off the bat. Right? You're not certified. >> I would expect some of the startups especially. >> It did. Some of the smaller, Flash vendors, for example, one of 'em came in and we said, well, what do you do with Epic? And they said what's Epic. And you kind of scratch your head and say thank you. >> Thank you for playing. >> Here's the door. So, it eliminates people but then when we meet with PURE, and we talked to them and we meet 'em and you get to really know that the family and the culture that they bring with the technology. Yes it's got to be fast but Flash is going to be fast. What else can you do? And that's where you start learning about how it was born on Flash, how it was native to Flash and so you get added benefits to the infrastructure by looking at that type of technology, which ultimately led us there, where we're at running Epic on our Flash arrays. >> And Brian, you're using the Flash stack configuration of converge infrastructure. It sounds like it was PURE that lead you that way as opposed to Cisco? Could you maybe walk us through that? >> That's very interesting, so we're a UCS shop. We were before PURE. So when PURE came in, the fact that they had a validated design with the Flash stack infrastructure, made it all that more easier to implement the PURE solution because it just is modular enough to fit in with our current infrastructure. That made it very appealing that we didn't have to change or alter much. We just looked at the validated design that says, here's your reference architecture, how it applies to the Flash stack. You already have UCS. We love it, we're a big fan. And here's how to implement it. And it made the time to market, to get production work loads on it, very quick. >> And the CVD that you got from Cisco, that's Cisco plus PURE but was it healthcare Epic specific or was that the PURE had some knowledge for that that they pulled in? >> So, that was one of the value adds that we feel PURE brought was the Epic experience. And whether that's scripting, the backups, and if you're familiar with Epic, the environmental refreshes that they have to do. There's seven Epic environments. And they all have to refresh off of each other and play off of each other so, >> So you have a window that you have to hit right. >> And you do right? And historically that window's been quite large. And now, not so much which makes everybody happy. >> Hey, that's what weekends are for. >> Absolutely, yeah, our DBAs attest to that right? So, we would like to think we've made their world and life a little bit more enjoyable 'cause those weekends now, they're not having to babysit the Epic refreshes. Back to the point of Epic experience, that was instrumental in the decision makings from a support with the PURESTORAGE help desk, awareness of what it takes to run Epic on PURE, and then going forward knowing that there's a partnership behind Epic and PURE and certainly Baylor College of Medicine as we continue to look at the next versions of Epic, whether that's 2018 and on to 2020, whatever that decision is, we know that we have a solid foundation now to grow. >> And Brian I'm curious, you've been a Cisco shop for a while, Cisco has lots of partnerships as well as, they've got a hyper-converged offering that they sell themselves. What was your experience working with Cisco and do they just let you choose and you said, I want PURE and they're like, great? Do you know? What was that like? >> To your point, there's validated designs for many customers and Cisco is kind of at the hub of that, that core with the compute and memory of the blade systems, the UCS. They liked the fact that we went with PURE 'cause it does me a validated design. And they have others with other vendors. The challenge there is how do they really integrate with each other from tools to possibly automation down the road, and how do they truly integrate with each other. 'Cause we did bring in some of the other validated design architecture organizations and I think we did our due diligence and looked at 'em to see how they differentiate between each other. And ultimately, we wanted something that was new and different approach to storage. It wasn't just layering your legacy OS on a bunch of Flash drives and call it good. Something that was natively born to take advantage of that technology. And that's what ultimately led us to PURE. >> Well, PURE has a point of view on the so called hyper-converged space. You heard Scott Dietzen talking this morning. What's your perspective on hyper-convergence? >> Hyper-converge is one of those buzz words that I think gets thrown out of there kind of off the cuff if you will. But people hear it and get excited about it. But what type of workloads are you looking to take advantage of it? Is it truly hyper-converged or is it just something that you can say you're doing because it sounds cool? I think to some degree, people are led astray on the buzzwords of the technology where they get down to say, what's going to take advantage of it? What kind of application are you putting on it? If your application, in our case, can be written by a grad student 20 years ago that a lab is still using, it does it make sense to put it on hyper-converged? No, because it can't take advantage of the architecture or the design. So, in a lot of ways, we're waiting and seeing. And the reason we didn't go to a hyper-converged platform is a, Epic support and b, we were already changing enough to stay comfortable with the environment and knowing that come Monday morning, doctors will be seeing patients and we're already changing enough, that was another layer that we chose not to change. We went with a standard UCS configuration that everyone was already happy with. That made a significant difference from an operational perspective. >> Essentially, your processes are tightly tied to Epic and the workflow associated with that. So from an infrastructure perspective, it sounds like you just don't want it to be in the way. >> We don't. The last thing we want in infrastructure getting in the way. And quite frankly, it was in the way. Whether that was meeting latency requirements or IOPS requirements from the Cache database or the Clarity database within the Epic system, or if was just all of are just taking a little bit longer than they expect. We don't want to be that bottleneck, if you will, we want them to be able to see patients faster, run reports faster, gain access to that valuable data in a much faster way to enable them to go about their business and not have to worry about infrastructure. >> Brian, PURE said that they had, I believe it's like 25 new announcements made this morning, a lot of software features. Curious, is there anything that jumped out at you, that you've been waiting for and anything still on your to do list that you're hoping for PURE or PURE and it's extended ecosystem to deliver for you? >> Great question, so at the top of that list is the replication of the arrays, whether that's in an offsite data center or a colo and how that applies to an Epic environment that has to go through this flux of refreshes, and from a disaster or business continuity standpoint, we're actively pursuing that, and how that's going to fit with Baylor. So, we're very excited to see what our current investment, free of charge by the way, once you do the upgrade to 5.0, is to take advantage of those features, with replication being one of 'em. >> And then, I thought I heard today, Third Sight is a service. Right? So you don't have to install your own infrastructure. So, I'm not sure exactly what that's all about. I got to peel the onion on that one. >> To be determined right? When we look at things like that, particularly with Epic, we have to be careful because that is the HIPAA, PHI, that's your records, yours and mine, medical records right? You just don't want that, if I told you it's going to be hosted in a public cloud. Wait a minute. Where? No it's not. We don't want to be on the 10 o'clock news right? However, there's things like SAP HANA and other enterprise applications that we certainly could look at leveraging that technology. >> Excellent, we listen, thank you very much Brian for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate your perspectives and sort of educating us a little bit on your business and your industry anyway. And have a great rest of the show. >> Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. This is theCUBE. We're back live right after this short break from PURE Accelerate 2017. Be right back.

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

>> From Las Vegas. It's the cute covering knowledge sixteen Brought to you by service. Now carry your host David, Dante and Jeffrey. We're >> back. This is knowledge. Sixteen. This is the Q. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is day one of a three day Walter Wall coverage. The Cube has of knowledge. Sixteen Hashtag No. Sixteen like a lander is here. He's the CEO and vice chancellor of college services at Lone Star College. Longtime Cuba Lem like it's great to see again. >> Good scene again to >> another is >> great to catch up with this >> place, Another knowledge have a bigger and better than ever. You're you're speaking later on this afternoon. You've been over at the CIA event house this year going for you. You know, it's going >> great. The CIA oven, of course, is excellent lot of leadership foundations. Keynote TOC where, you know, service now is heading right now. Kind of. You know, that the shift and I always were still back to one of the themes from eons ago. Let's kill email. But the reality is emails not dead. So as we focus on it, you know, I came into this from the stance of moving the enterprise service management. So as I bring a team here, we really get the opportunity to see where we're at today in that comparison, and then how we can leverage the platform and move yourself forward >> So your role is evolving at Lone Star College, You said off camera, you're not giving up a title. A CIA, your CEO. >> Yes, I am the CEO >> and bread. That's not Teo, but your responsibilities are expanding. Talk about that side of things well, >> so well, last year actually been a year and a half. Now human resource is put underneath me. That's why the title change and all that to fit better and then analytics because, you know, analytics is not it much. People want us to think it should be buried inside of it. It never should, because it's about the business process. About the business service human resource is was just around the concept of aligning that service management what we had completed in it around service excellence. One of my right hand's basically put it as customer delight. Our focus is on customer no light. So it is about that communications piece. How do you talk to your customer? How do you move forward? How do you understand what their challenges are and help them find a solution. It may not be its instead of saying no, I can't do that for you. Sorry. You're out of luck. So in that, in that evolution, we've really moved ourselves forward on the enterprise service management platform side and early days, financial aid. We brought in student call centers. Now you've got human. Resource is were talking earlier about We're moving our legal in there. It's going to accelerate the pace it takes to get a contract illegal down TTO one day, maybe two days or some way didn't catch their approvals fast enough. So that's the big transformation from an organization >> of automated. That whole process over I actually, before going, I want to ask you questions about analytics. So you have. Ah, datas are that's working for you outside of it. Is that right or you? The days are >> well, you know, I actually have a team, >> have a data >> team s o. We're talking two different sets. Analytics too, because we're actually using service now. Analytics when it comes to the Service management analytics. Right. But for the organizational analytics, we actually have a large team that that does our analytics everything from dash boarding through, You know, in our case, core institutional reporting that's required. >> And is there a chief data officer as part of that team? >> I have a personal leading that group. >> De facto even >> factor. Yes. >> So there's a lot of discussion to about whether the CDO should report to the c. E. O. In this case, it does. But you had you had said things questions as to whether or not that Data Analytics function should be in it. It's not a night function. We kind of agree on that, but yes, but what kind of reports in to the head of, Well, >> you know, But see, when I when I sit down at that table, I sit down as the vice chancellor college services. So I have to sit down with three separate hats in front of me. Andi, I can't favor one over the other. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing my job currently. So when I look at the analytic side from a perspective, I will get on my team that provides the data, my database services and, you know, why are you not getting this done or what's happening here? So I've gotta look at it from all areas >> like Bill Belichick, GM coach way Tom Brady. You got to figure out who >> you are. At that point, I'm >> well. So is this how the role of the CEO is evolving? I mean, we've heard of this event previously. Frank's Lupin one year a couple years ago, said CEO should be a business person. Absolutely certainly seen examples of that. Now you're sort of given responsibility for you. No other services beyond just services. How was that role evolving? >> Well, rolls about for years. The question is, Is the CIA evolving? So? And that's where the challenges in the organization. So a lot of CEOs they're going through this process now where they're understanding that, Yes, I need to understand what are the business goals and objectives howto achieve those goals howto I had value to the organization. How did not become a cost center that has a target on my back? How you become an enabler enabler for the business And that's really where we came into that part of the process because we're recognized that Alcide nightie was here trying to help find solutions and provide better customer service. I myself come from a background in higher it for a long time through different institutions. And so when somebody talk to me about student services or student success, these air topics, I understand. I came to Lone Star originally because I didn't feel I had the strength in the academic side. And so when I first arrived there, I was really focused on academic understanding how the academic side operates and what they need in it. So I've had the opportunity to get well rounded in education, but it doesn't. It really is just about anybody that comes into this role. You must understand the business you're in, and then the next part is you need to be able to talk. I have an intelligent conversation around a topic area, bring value to the organization and come back with ideas. Well, you know, if we did this so the legal one was rather interesting because we had a new general counsel. Come on, and we're trying to help him, and he's like, Well, there has to be something better. You ask me. It's a better way to approach this. And we were able to dig through. Is that you know, What service? Now we've been doing this in HR. We're doing this here. So finally, we've got them into service now. And they see an opportunity the same way we see it. Which is we're improving. We're getting rid of the little stuff, the mundane work, You know that the task orientated work and we're focusing on the things that are really a challenge. And it has been there for a while because self service and all the other opportunities we've given the customer. Now we can shift that back and say, Okay, I cannot focus on what does the hard thing to get completed. How Doe I really put in effort in and a lot of a lot of staff hours into this one piece. >> So you started service management You mentioned hr Legal >> Financial Aid General Student Carlson are We're looking at scholarships right now. We tell a little bit ideas around our foundation in scholarships and what we could do for them. Grants. Grants are very big challenge because you have to really track and trend your grants. When you look at it, sm the areas that we've matured there are phenomenal, and then we're getting ready now to move and I Tom, which we didn't do because we already built a complete structure around that we were feeding that to service now. So now I'm looking at from opportunity that if I can eliminate a lot of the tools, I put in a play and get into one single tool and maximize the value of that tool. So I think you heard me many times when we talked in this. It's never about the tool. It's always about people in a process first. And then how does the tool come in? Well, this platform, we can actually adjust that because we're not We're not bound by the tool. Like the legal module. They have a great legal module. Well, it didn't fit what we needed. So it's been adjusted accordingly. T meet our needs from the platform side by keeping the core components so we haven't customized. We haven't taken it to a path where we can never upgrade. But at the same time as we looked at the process they had and how do we take that process and then actually put it into play with service now? >> And they were all inward service now do you worry about locking? >> Always. I think >> that Do you manage that risk? >> Well, the very first thing, to be honest with you is any time you enter in any cloud situation or any product situation, you want an exit strategy of some kind In case something goes wrong, something happens. You have to be at that point. So the only way to manage it really is to one. Keep a good, strong partnership. I believe that I have a strong partnership was service now. I don't believe it's a vendor relationship and I think that's critical because as we look at what we're doing each time as a partner, were were engaged with things like Where you heading? What's happening next? You know what? And then the same thing with the user group community were engaged with that group. So from a partner standpoint, we look at that first. But if the worst case scenario came, I've got to be able to get out of the solution. I've gotta have an exit strategy which we actually had designed before we went into it. Now the question becomes is we get further and further entrenched. What do we do and I'm comfortable. I'm comfortable that the company and the operations are going the right direction for me at the same time. If I'm gonna protect my organization to make sure we're safe. >> And that's a big, big part of transparency on the part of service now and your ability to communicate, you know your road map and your needs, I mean, a scale of one to ten ten being, you know, really transparent. How Where would you put service now as an organization >> who? That's a tough one, Especially when I'm sitting here. >> Uh, Frank's not around is a freaking God. He's breathing guy. Let's see. You know, >> a CZ forest transparency. I would give him good, strong seven. >> Yeah, >> I think I would. No company can be completely transparent. They've got a lot of things working in the back room or ideas that they're moving forward >> because they don't know. They don't know what they don't know. Going. Yeah, >> but there's there's ideas that they have that they're moving forward. It's gonna like today with the watch demo. I'm like, Oh, yeah, I love wearables. I you know, I live off. I could very easily now just say Oh, yeah, I just >> got an e mail. Sorry. Yeah, but, >> uh, at the same time is, you know, for them to bring that forward at this point. So they're creative and looking at these items, but they don't want to get out there too soon. >> I'm curious on the partner vendor, you know, mentioned a couple aspects of what defines that relationship of all the vendors you have. How many do you consider to be? You know, close business partners where your, you know, really sitting at the table and building a long term relationship, You gotta have an exit, but its life so much easier. If >> you're working with a partner verse a vendor right now, I would stay out of our partner strategy. We've got four. That's it. But those are four core providers for the organisation. Their leaders in the market space. That's the other key. Most my partnerships or with leaders, of course service. Now, at the time when we first engaged with them and actually I would say, from a partnership standpoint, a strong partner was service. Now, probably since about two thousand ten, we've been on the platform since two thousand eight. So we built that partnership over that first couple of years. You got past that vendor relationship and then moved on from there. But right now, just our core technology stack would be sitting in that partnership room, and I've got others than in that court Technologies. Technically, I'm not a partner there. A vendor there there were by cell. They have a great product, but they don't really want to bring us into that point. And we really haven't approached that point. >> We had a great discussion off camera about you had mentioned. You're looking at potentially expanding into this security realm with service now. And you were sharing with me like your philosophy on security. So I want to document that The premise that I'm going to put forth summarizing our conversation is, you should organizations increasingly should treat security as an ongoing part of their business continuity plans, not necessarily as a sort of separate stovepipe managed by a few security practitioners. Is that a fair summary? >> Yeah, Service continuity is what I use. I don't have >> service continuity, service continuity, that your business. Yeah, it always comes >> out to service continuity. How do you How do you continue that process and provide the same level of service in the in the event. It's very simple to me as I look at all those events as like problem management incident management, you have a response that you have to take, so it has to be inherit. It has to be natural. You just do it way we're talking about that. That response, specially for security, is what's more important is that you have everything planned out and you're ready to deal with that incident in that rock response because it's gonna happen. So how you handle that response can actually dictate your future, right? Wei had that little bit of that discussion there, too. So it does come down to that service continuity. How do you continue to move forward as and get through that threat and then afterwards make sure that you prevent that from happening again. >> Unlike many CEOs that I talked to, your discussions with the overseers at the college are not entrenched largely in the security discussion. You've earned some level of trust with regard to your capabilities. Is a business your ability to respond. Can you talk about that a little bit? How you actually achieve that, what expectations you were able to set and how you're able to execute on that? >> Well, the biggest, biggest part, especially when you look at it at that event, it's how. How is it performed overall over the history? You've gotta have some history. You've gotta have some credentials. How do you deal with these responses in these emergencies? That gives you a little bit more slack in that process, but it is about constant communications. So what the board received for me is communications. It's very straightforward. Typically, in an annual report type format, Short updates clear, concise updates. But then, when event happens, we're talking about the flood that happened in Houston, and very quickly I had an email out and my service test team was already on it. They already implemented their service continuity because while we may be shut down, we have students online taking classes. We have students that need to know what's going on, what's happening so they're calling in, and our service desk continued on through that entire process without issue. So they see that as an example on a regular basis. If we have a system down, everybody gets to see exactly. We did X, Y and Z or if we even have a like today, I should say today Monday we had a blip. We did, Nam. We have. We saw performance degradation. We immediately had a team on. We had a WebEx open with everything running. So we're preparing for a service continuity event that didn't happen. And they see those two because the business units are getting these notifications. Hey, we've gotta WebEx open. We have this issue coming up, and when they see that, they realize how fast we are to respond to what could be a potential issue that we built that trusting relations. >> So that's a good example. If I understand it correctly, the regime that you've put in place puts a heavy emphasis on the response. I mean, obviously you're trying to stop the bad guys who wouldn't go innovated on the response as well. Is that a fair assessment? >> Yes. I mean, the threats, goingto threats gonna happen. The threat happens all the time. So it is about that response. It is being quick to respond to communicate and take care of the problem. >> Do you think that's changed amongst the CEO community in the last ten years that that the shift in mindset toward that response versus so to keep him out big dig a bigger mode, Wider moat. >> Well, you can dig a big, wide moat. Doesn't matter. >> I think I've >> got these big, robust to hot data centers. Amazing firewalls. They're redundant. You tried overload him. They're going to take over. I've got next gen firewalls behind that. I've got you. Just you, layer layer. This tax of protection I have put in you still have to prepare that we're talking about it is Okay, so that's the perimeter. Well, inside my perimeter is one hundred thousand students, those hundred thousand students around my network. So how do I protect against that? So now I have inside perimeter protection. You can build all this entrenchment that you want to build. But the reality is you need we prepared Just gonna happen that you are. Somebody is going to get to that point. Or at least then the alarms up that you have to respond to >> service now is talking yesterday at the financial analyst meeting about you know, the statistic. And I've heard a range here, but it's large that that after an intrusion it takes, on average two hundred five days for the average organization toe. Realize that there's been an intrusion. I've seen numbers as high as three, three, three, fifty, etcetera. Um, first of all, does that sound consistent with what you see in there in the real world and conservative now help compress that time. >> So the interest was service. Now, of course, is tracking and trending those responses. I, tom and Service watch. There's a lot opportunities with those tools and course we have a perimeter we have a pile of tools were using. In our case, our threats are a bit different because, of course, we're not a big financial institutions. So we were not right with all those other pieces. But you're from the days to recover from a major event and my peers and what that have actually experienced a data loss event? Yeah, it easily is that it is easy. That >> and you think, feel is, though that service now could help you attack that compress that >> yes, mainly through the data collection and then the reporting and then as the events going on all of this information that's happening in the problem management side. What you're seeing from outside information coming in and technicians on the inside updating information as they go through it. You have a comprehensive log of the event from start to finish. >> Now you're speaking just right after this. I think you're just what? You're what you're talking about. >> The shift for my tea service management. Teo Enterprise Service Management. It's actually Enterprise. Wow. But I'm actually walking through the journey. But the best part about that is it's the pitfalls we learned along the way because Wei didn't know we went to Enterprise Service Management. It's kind of I think we had a discussion when we went to the cloud. I didn't know we went to cloud. Exactly. I just knew we went to this heavy virtualization, these two out data centers and I kind of realized, Wow, we really pushed into this new this new wage, this new change. >> We've got a new operating model on on, >> you know. But now yeah, it really is about how we are journey to enterprise service management and the fact that we actually started in a price servicemen before I've even heard of it. It just was around The fundamentals of Hungary. Better service provider. How can we help our customers, uh, achieve their objectives and the business units make it simpler? >> My last question is, what's exciting you these days? A CEO practitioner. What? Float your boat? True. >> What's exciting? You see, I asked if you're gonna give me any hard >> questions for you. That's exciting. >> You know, What excites me is that you're seeing the maturity level of a cloud. The platform side. It is so flexible that you can respond to a customer need quickly that you, khun dynamically spin up the capacity Your When I first started this process, trying to build this high availability was difficult. Now hie availability is really not difficult. It's just around. The process is so that the maturity of the technology and the maturity the service piece that excites me. But it also excites me when I start seeing new team, people come into the market space and they understand that already they're coming in with an idol understanding there they're coming down, understand that business mentality. So original Lighty practitioners didn't have that business background. They didn't have that communication skill you're seeing a lot more of it. The organization now. >> Well, you're a real leader in this space. You've got a lot of experience. Appreciate you sharing your knowledge. And I'm sure the service now community does as well. So good luck with your talk this afternoon. And thanks again for coming. >> Thank you. It's great being here. >> All right, Link a lender. Always a pleasure. Keep right, everybody. This is the cue. We'LL be back Live from Mandalay Bay. This is knowledge sixteen. Right back. >> Service. Now is the time.

(gentle music) >> Hey! Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of WiDS 2023, the eighth Annual Women In Data Science Conference. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are at Stanford University, as you know we are every year, having some wonderful conversations with some very inspiring women and men in data science and technical roles. I'm very pleased to introduce Tracy Zhang, my co-host, who is in the Data Journalism program at Stanford. And Tracy and I are pleased to welcome our next guest, Rhonda Crate, Principal Data Scientist at Boeing. Great to have you on the program, Rhonda. >> Tracy: Welcome. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> Were you always interested in data science or STEM from the time you were young? >> No, actually. I was always interested in archeology and anthropology. >> That's right, we were talking about that, anthropology. Interesting. >> We saw the anthropology background, not even a bachelor's degree, but also a master's degree in anthropology. >> So you were committed for a while. >> I was, I was. I actually started college as a fine arts major, but I always wanted to be an archeologist. So at the last minute, 11 credits in, left to switch to anthropology. And then when I did my master's, I focused a little bit more on quantitative research methods and then I got my Stat Degree. >> Interesting. Talk about some of the data science projects that you're working on. When I think of Boeing, I always think of aircraft. But you are doing a lot of really cool things in IT, data analytics. Talk about some of those intriguing data science projects that you're working on. >> Yeah. So when I first started at Boeing, I worked in information technology and data analytics. And Boeing, at the time, had cored up data science in there. And so we worked as a function across the enterprise working on anything from shared services to user experience in IT products, to airplane programs. So, it has a wide range. I worked on environment health and safety projects for a long time as well. So looking at ergonomics and how people actually put parts onto airplanes, along with things like scheduling and production line, part failures, software testing. Yeah, there's a wide spectrum of things. >> But I think that's so fantastic. We've been talking, Tracy, today about just what we often see at WiDS, which is this breadth of diversity in people's background. You talked about anthropology, archeology, you're doing data science. But also all of the different opportunities that you've had at Boeing. To see so many facets of that organization. I always think that breadth of thought diversity can be hugely impactful. >> Yeah. So I will say my anthropology degree has actually worked to my benefit. I'm a huge proponent of integrating liberal arts and sciences together. And it actually helps me. I'm in the Technical Fellowship program at Boeing, so we have different career paths. So you can go into management, you can be a regular employee, or you can go into the Fellowship program. So right now I'm an Associate Technical Fellow. And part of how I got into the Fellowship program was that diversity in my background, what made me different, what made me stand out on projects. Even applying a human aspect to things like ergonomics, as silly as that sounds, but how does a person actually interact in the space along with, here are the actual measurements coming off of whatever system it is that you're working on. So, I think there's a lot of opportunities, especially in safety as well, which is a big initiative for Boeing right now, as you can imagine. >> Tracy: Yeah, definitely. >> I can't go into too specifics. >> No, 'cause we were like, I think a theme for today that kind of we brought up in in all of our talk is how data is about people, how data is about how people understand the world and how these data can make impact on people's lives. So yeah, I think it's great that you brought this up, and I'm very happy that your anthropology background can tap into that and help in your day-to-day data work too. >> Yeah. And currently, right now, I actually switched over to Strategic Workforce Planning. So it's more how we understand our workforce, how we work towards retaining the talent, how do we get the right talent in our space, and making sure overall that we offer a culture and work environment that is great for our employees to come to. >> That culture is so important. You know, I was looking at some anitab.org stats from 2022 and you know, we always talk about the number of women in technical roles. For a long time it's been hovering around that 25% range. The data from anitab.org showed from '22, it's now 27.6%. So, a little increase. But one of the biggest challenges still, and Tracy and I and our other co-host, Hannah, have been talking about this, is attrition. Attrition more than doubled last year. What are some of the things that Boeing is doing on the retention side, because that is so important especially as, you know, there's this pipeline leakage of women leaving technical roles. Tell us about what Boeing's, how they're invested. >> Yeah, sure. We actually have a publicly available Global Diversity Report that anybody can go and look at and see our statistics for our organization. Right now, off the top of my head, I think we're hovering at about 24% in the US for women in our company. It has been a male majority company for many years. We've invested heavily in increasing the number of women in roles. One interesting thing about this year that came out is that even though with the great resignation and those types of things, the attrition level between men and women were actually pretty close to being equal, which is like the first time in our history. Usually it tends on more women leaving. >> Lisa: That's a good sign. >> Right. >> Yes, that's a good sign. >> And we've actually focused on hiring and bringing in more women and diversity in our company. >> Yeah, some of the stats too from anitab.org talked about the increase, and I have to scroll back and find my notes, the increase in 51% more women being hired in 2022 than 2021 for technical roles. So the data, pun intended, is showing us. I mean, the data is there to show the impact that having females in executive leadership positions make from a revenue perspective. >> Tracy: Definitely. >> Companies are more profitable when there's women at the head, or at least in senior leadership roles. But we're seeing some positive trends, especially in terms of representation of women technologists. One of the things though that I found interesting, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, Rhonda, is that the representation of women technologists is growing in all areas, except interns. >> Rhonda: Hmm. >> So I think, we've got to go downstream. You teach, I have to go back to my notes on you, did my due diligence, R programming classes through Boeings Ed Wells program, this is for WSU College of Arts and Sciences, talk about what you teach and how do you think that intern kind of glut could be solved? >> Yeah. So, they're actually two separate programs. So I teach a data analytics course at Washington State University as an Adjunct Professor. And then the Ed Wells program is a SPEEA, which is an Aerospace Union, focused on bringing up more technology and skills to the actual workforce itself. So it's kind of a couple different audiences. One is more seasoned employees, right? The other one is our undergraduates. I teach a Capstone class, so it's a great way to introduce students to what it's actually like to work on an industry project. We partner with Google and Microsoft and Boeing on those. The idea is also that maybe those companies have openings for the students when they're done. Since it's Senior Capstone, there's not a lot of opportunities for internships. But the opportunities to actually get hired increase a little bit. In regards to Boeing, we've actually invested a lot in hiring more women interns. I think the number was 40%, but you'd have to double check. >> Lisa: That's great, that's fantastic. >> Tracy: That's way above average, I think. >> That's a good point. Yeah, it is above average. >> Double check on that. That's all from my memory. >> Is this your first WiDS, or have you been before? >> I did virtually last year. >> Okay. One of the things that I love, I love covering this event every year. theCUBE's been covering it since it's inception in 2015. But it's just the inspiration, the vibe here at Stanford is so positive. WiDS is a movement. It's not an initiative, an organization. There are going to be, I think annually this year, there will be 200 different events. Obviously today we're live on International Women's Day. 60 plus countries, 100,000 plus people involved. So, this is such a positive environment for women and men, because we need everybody, underrepresented minorities, to be able to understand the implication that data has across our lives. If we think about stripping away titles in industries, everybody is a consumer, not everybody, most of mobile devices. And we have this expectation, I was in Barcelona last week at a Mobile World Congress, we have this expectation that we're going to be connected 24/7. I can get whatever I want wherever I am in the world, and that's all data driven. And the average person that isn't involved in data science wouldn't understand that. At the same time, they have expectations that depend on organizations like Boeing being data driven so that they can get that experience that they expect in their consumer lives in any aspect of their lives. And that's one of the things I find so interesting and inspiring about data science. What are some of the things that keep you motivated to continue pursuing this? >> Yeah I will say along those lines, I think it's great to invest in K-12 programs for Data Literacy. I know one of my mentors and directors of the Data Analytics program, Dr. Nairanjana Dasgupta, we're really familiar with each other. So, she runs a WSU program for K-12 Data Literacy. It's also something that we strive for at Boeing, and we have an internal Data Literacy program because, believe it or not, most people are in business. And there's a lot of disconnect between interpreting and understanding data. For me, what kind of drives me to continue data science is that connection between people and data and how we use it to improve our world, which is partly why I work at Boeing too 'cause I feel that they produce products that people need like satellites and airplanes, >> Absolutely. >> and everything. >> Well, it's tangible, it's relatable. We can understand it. Can you do me a quick favor and define data literacy for anyone that might not understand what that means? >> Yeah, so it's just being able to understand elements of data, whether that's a bar chart or even in a sentence, like how to read a statistic and interpret a statistic in a sentence, for example. >> Very cool. >> Yeah. And sounds like Boeing's doing a great job in these programs, and also trying to hire more women. So yeah, I wanted to ask, do you think there's something that Boeing needs to work on? Or where do you see yourself working on say the next five years? >> Yeah, I think as a company, we always think that there's always room for improvement. >> It never, never stops. >> Tracy: Definitely. (laughs) >> I know workforce strategy is an area that they're currently really heavily investing in, along with safety. How do we build safer products for people? How do we help inform the public about things like Covid transmission in airports? For example, we had the Confident Traveler Initiative which was a big push that we had, and we had to be able to inform people about data models around Covid, right? So yeah, I would say our future is more about an investment in our people and in our culture from my perspective >> That's so important. One of the hardest things to change especially for a legacy organization like Boeing, is culture. You know, when I talk with CEO's or CIO's or COO's about what's your company's vision, what's your strategy? Especially those companies that are on that digital journey that have no choice these days. Everybody expects to have a digital experience, whether you're transacting an an Uber ride, you're buying groceries, or you're traveling by air. That culture sounds like Boeing is really focused on that. And that's impressive because that's one of the hardest things to morph and mold, but it's so essential. You know, as we look around the room here at WiDS it's obviously mostly females, but we're talking about women, underrepresented minorities. We're talking about men as well who are mentors and sponsors to us. I'd love to get your advice to your younger self. What would you tell yourself in terms of where you are now to become a leader in the technology field? >> Yeah, I mean, it's kind of an interesting question because I always try to think, live with no regrets to an extent. >> Lisa: I like that. >> But, there's lots of failures along the way. (Tracy laughing) I don't know if I would tell myself anything different because honestly, if I did, I wouldn't be where I am. >> Lisa: Good for you. >> I started out in fine arts, and I didn't end up there. >> That's good. >> Such a good point, yeah. >> We've been talking about that and I find that a lot at events like WiDS, is women have these zigzaggy patterns. I studied biology, I have a master's in molecular biology, I'm in media and marketing. We talked about transportable skills. There's a case I made many years ago when I got into tech about, well in science you learn the art of interpreting esoteric data and creating a story from it. And that's a transportable skill. But I always say, you mentioned failure, I always say failure is not a bad F word. It allows us to kind of zig and zag and learn along the way. And I think that really fosters thought diversity. And in data science, that is one of the things we absolutely need to have is that diversity and thought. You know, we talk about AI models being biased, we need the data and we need the diverse brains to help ensure that the biases are identified, extracted, and removed. Speaking of AI, I've been geeking out with ChatGPT. So, I'm on it yesterday and I ask it, "What's hot in data science?" And I was like, is it going to get that? What's hot? And it did it, it came back with trends. I think if I ask anything, "What's hot?", I should be to Paris Hilton, but I didn't. And so I was geeking out. One of the things I learned recently that I thought was so super cool is the CTO of OpenAI is a woman, Mira Murati, which I didn't know until over the weekend. Because I always think if I had to name top females in tech, who would they be? And I always default to Sheryl Sandberg, Carly Fiorina, Susan Wojcicki running YouTube. Who are some of the people in your history, in your current, that are really inspiring to you? Men, women, indifferent. >> Sure. I think Boeing is one of the companies where you actually do see a lot of women in leadership roles. I think we're one of the top companies with a number of women executives, actually. Susan Doniz, who's our Chief Information Officer, I believe she's actually slotted to speak at a WiDS event come fall. >> Lisa: Cool. >> So that will be exciting. Susan's actually relatively newer to Boeing in some ways. A Boeing time skill is like three years is still kind of new. (laughs) But she's been around for a while and she's done a lot of inspiring things, I think, for women in the organization. She does a lot with Latino communities and things like that as well. For me personally, you know, when I started at Boeing Ahmad Yaghoobi was one of my mentors and my Technical Lead. He came from Iran during a lot of hard times in the 1980s. His brother actually wrote a memoir, (laughs) which is just a fun, interesting fact. >> Tracy: Oh my God! >> Lisa: Wow! >> And so, I kind of gravitate to people that I can learn from that's not in my sphere, that might make me uncomfortable. >> And you probably don't even think about how many people you're influencing along the way. >> No. >> We just keep going and learning from our mentors and probably lose sight of, "I wonder how many people actually admire me?" And I'm sure there are many that admire you, Rhonda, for what you've done, going from anthropology to archeology. You mentioned before we went live you were really interested in photography. Keep going and really gathering all that breadth 'cause it's only making you more inspiring to people like us. >> Exactly. >> We thank you so much for joining us on the program and sharing a little bit about you and what brought you to WiDS. Thank you so much, Rhonda. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Tracy: Thank you so much for being here. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> Alright. >> For our guests, and for Tracy Zhang, this is Lisa Martin live at Stanford University covering the eighth Annual Women In Data Science Conference. Stick around. Next guest will be here in just a second. (gentle music)