>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE here at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier. We're on the ground with theCUBE. In theCUBE studio today we have a live audience on break but I had a chance to meet with the Chief Digital Officer of Hybrid Cloud, Janine Snead, who's just appointed. She's here in set on theCUBE. Great to see you at IBM Think. >> Hi, great to see you. Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for coming on. I'm super excited. When I interviewed Bob Lord last year, Chief Digital Officer, you know we love digital on theCUBE so we get really excited. We're like great, that's awesome. Now IBM's got more Chief Digital Officers being appointed >> Janine: That's right. >> You're the first Chief Digital Officer in a business unit. That's awesome, congratulations. >> Thank you. Yeah we're excited about it. We know and we believe that the future is really in the hands of the web. And we know that customers are engaging with us differently. They want much more of a self service. They want to experience the products without always I'll say a person interacting with them. And we know that from a product perspective there's things that we need to do to make our offerings much more digitally consumable. So we're taking this very seriously. And we put an organization in place Digital within Hybrid Cloud, that truly focuses on the time from a customer goes out and actually does a search, all the way through the buyer journey to the time they get to the product. >> John: You know I've been a student of IBM I actually worked at IBM as a co-op back in my early days. IBM has always been on the leading edge of marketing. And you guys are looking at socially you looked at social in an early way, digital in an early way, but now with the cloud you can actually engage customers digitally. So I've got to ask you, you know, how are you going to do that? >> Janine: Yeah >> John: Because you've got to remember websites are now the fabric of all this that's 30 year old tech stack. You've got cloud now, you've got APIs with the synchronous software packages. You've got blockchain. All these new things. So what's the vision as you guys go out and start putting stakes in the ground for a digital strategy. How are you guys doing it, can you share the vision? >> Yeah, I think it starts with using our own technology. So within the Hybrid Cloud organization, we have a lot of software and we're putting that software out on the cloud. We want customers to engage with us digitally through a technical experience. So we're taking our products, putting product demos, we're putting POTs, we're putting even proof of concept secure in the cloud, guided demos where they can come and experience these offerings without ever engaging with us. Now of course once they're ready they can engage with us but this is truly about a low touch, self service way for customers to engage with our products. >> Now a lot of people, and we talk about this all the time, but the general sentiment online now is you have the kind of crazies out there you've seen that on Reddit, fake news, weaponizing content. Then you have the other side of the spectrum where people are like, I don't want to be sold to. I'm discovering, I want to learn. >> Janine: Yes. >> John: I'm in communities. I know you guys address that. I want you to just clarify, because there's a model now where people just want to be ingratiated in. You know, kick the tires. Which by the way, kicking tires right now is much different than it was years ago because you have APIs. You have SARS source code. You have credits for cloud. >> Janine: That's right. >> What is the digital motion there? I mean obviously it's a light touch. >> Yeah >> But is it still an IBM.com? >> It is. So we're still on IBM.com properties. And we're nurturing with the ecosystem and the communities to also go where they are, but bring them back to the IBM.com properties and engage with them when they're ready. You know, we've done the research. We know that 70% of b2b buyers learn about your products and your services without ever talking to you. So we want to be where those users are and eventually that will be back on our property but we also want to find them where they are. >> You know, one of the things we were talking about before you came on camera here, We've been doing theCUBE for seven years or so plus six shows now to one show. But the thought leadership on theCUBE has always been powerful. And that's seemed to be a great way to get into communities. And IBM's got a lot of thought leaders. So I'm sure you have a plan for thought leaders. You have IBM Fellows. You've got R&D. You've got a lot of content opportunities. >> We do. We've got a lot of partners. So here at this conference we've been talking to a lot of our partners who want to be a part of this experience. We've got great solutions and all of our solutions a lot of them are delivered with partners. And so it's working the community. It's working the ecosystem. And it's doing this together with partners to allow them to contribute and allow customers to come and consume solutions. In much of a use case way, of course you can have product by product by products, but how do you essentially deliver solutions based on use cases. >> So I'll ask you a personal question. How did you get here? Was it like hey, I want to do the digital job, was it an itch that you were scratching, did Bob Lord lure you into the job? (Janine laughs) Did he recruit you? I mean -- >> No, it's -- >> How did you get it? >> It's a great question >> Because this is a great opportunity. >> It is. I'm a product person by training. And I spent the last 18 months in sales. And I enjoyed every minute of that and listening and understanding how our sellers want to consume. Short, snackable type of learning and training and watching what was going on with the digital ecosystem I thought it was a great way to really mix my skills that I have within product with what I just learned from my sales role. And I did nine months in marketing. So I felt like it was kind of a mixture. And we have a huge opportunity here. So the opportunity presented itself. >> Sales always has a my favorite sales expression is people love to buy from people that they like. How are you going to make IBM likable digitally? Is there a strategy there? >> Oh, it's simple. (John laughs) It is so dead simple. It's about the user experience. When users come, you have to give them the best experience possible because you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. So I want to basically set the bar. And we're an MVP right now with a lot of the stuff that we're doing out. >> You mean software and tools and stuff? >> Yeah, no, well, our experience right now so when you come and you experience our tools I'm sorry, our demos and our proof of technologies and our tutorials out on our site it's MVP. We're 45 days old. But it's about the user experience. And so we've been serving users here that are coming to try our stuff. >> So the Digital Technical Engagement, that's the DTE? >> Janine: DTE, yep. >> That's the one that's 45 days? >> That's the one that's 45 days old. >> The IBM site's not 45 days old. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But this new program. So take a minute to explain what the DTE, the Digital Technical Engagement program is. What was the guiding principles behind it >> Yeah >> What's some of the deign objectives is there any new cool tech under the covers? Share a little bit of color on that. >> Sure, sure. Happy to. So back in the fourth quarter of last year we took a look and we said, how are customers consuming? How are we engaging? How are we showing up? And what do we need to do to shift to become more agile and lighten the way that we showed up. And so we really gathered a few smart creatives from the CIO's office, from IBM design, from product and from marketing and we said guys, we're going to run an experiment. We want to set up a site off of IBM.com a page off of IBM.com and it's very simple. Keep it so clean. Keep the user experience clean. Take something like IBM Cloud Private. Give me three product demos. Give me one guided demo where in 10 minutes a client can get through IBM Cloud Private without getting stuck and then give them a way to try it for two weeks. Just experiment. Well, in 90 days we've had 10,500 users try that guided demo and our NPS is 56. >> What does NPS mean? - Net Promoter Score >> That's what I figured, okay. >> So it's about experimentation. And so in this world that we're going into we want to experiment. And so from there, what happened, that proved to be successful. We now have an organization of about 60 people within digital technical engagement deep product experts, but we also have a platform team to drive that experience. >> So there's some real value there. I mean, a lot of people look at website and digital technologies as ad tech, you know, and there's a lot of bad press out there now with Facebook where a lot of people are looking at Facebook as content that got weaponized for fake news and the ad tech has a bad track record of fill out a form, they're going to sell me something. How are you going to change that perception? >> That's a great question. So a lot of the folks that we're working with right now say you have to capture user information capture user information. And for me, I don't want to be bothered. So I'm kind of looking at this maybe a little bit too selfishly saying I want to demo without giving you my information. We have our product demos and our guided demos, we don't collect any information from the user. When you are going to reserve our software for two weeks, up to a month, we do collect some information about you. >> John: You got to. >> We have to. >> At some point. >> So we're keeping it very low touch because we know that's how users want to engage. >> You don't want to gate the hell out of it. >> No, we don't want to gate the hell out of it. We want to keep it just, let them explore without being all over them. Right? >> Talk about the new IBM. You know, one of the things that's transforming right now that I'm impressed with is IBM's constantly reinventing themself. I was impressed with Ginni's keynote. The way she talks about data in the middle, blockchain on one side and AI on the other. I call it the innovation sandwich. >> Janine: Yeah >> How are you applying that vision to digital? I mean not yet obviously, you're only at the beginning. >> Right But that vision is pretty solid. And she brought up Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law. >> That's right. >> Moore's Law is making things faster, smaller, cheaper. >> Right >> Component wise and speed. >> Yes >> Metcalfe's Law is about network effect and the future of digital is either going to be token economics or blockchain with programatic tooling that gives users great experiences. So how do you tie that together? Maybe it's too early to ask, but-- >> No, no. It's simple. I'm a consumer of this stuff. I'm using the cloud. I'm using the IBM Design Thinking because I brought in three designers from Phil Gilbert's group. Right? I'm embedded in the digital organization basically, regardless of where I sit. So we are adopting best practices that come from IBM's big chief digital office. >> So you get to use your own tools, that's one of the things she said. >> Yeah and we'll embed, we'll get there. Right? >> Yeah >> Well actually, we already are doing, we embedded chat. So we've got Watson Chat running on our SPSS statistics page So it's about the cloud, it's about user experience. It's about applying digital practices from Bob Lord's organization and then it's about Watson. >> I was having a great Twitter thread with a bunch of people that were on Twitter just ranting on the weekend a couple weekends ago about digital transformation. Tom Peters actually jumped in, the famous Tom Peters who wrote the books there, a management consultant, about digital transformation. I love digital transformation, it's overused, but it's legit. People are transforming. So the question was, how do you do it successfully? And all the canned answers came out. Well, you need commitment from the top. You've got to have this and that. And I said look, bottom line, if people don't have the expertise, and if they don't know what they're doing, they can't transform. So it begs the question for skills gap. A lot of people are learning, so there's a learning environment. It's not just sales. Proficiency, getting the product buying. There's a community thirst for learning. How is that incorporated in, if any? >> I think I have a little bit of a different hurdle. The people that we're working with are learning. They're out in the communities they're engaging. I think one of the things that we have to continue to do is continue to show the value of digital transformation. Remember, IBM is a big company. I'm not a ten person startup. Right? We're a bigger organization so what we have to do is show why digital is important back in with our product teams. I think for the most part our marketing teams get it. Because you have to make trade offs. Am I going to invest in this feature in the product or am I going to put in something like eCommerce so you can subscribe and buy. >> Priorities. But you're a product person, so it's all about the trade offs. >> Yeah, it's all about the trade offs, right? So the skills are part of it but some of it is just education on why this is so critical. And then the last thing is passion. You have to bring the skills, the education and then that passionate team that really believes that they can get this done. >> Okay so given that, let's go back to some of the comments I made about the people who we were talking about on Twitter >> Janine: Sure >> Commitment from the top. IBM commitment at the top is there? What are they saying, what's the marching orders? >> The marching orders is we got to go and we're not moving fast enough. Speed, speed, speed, right? So we got to move fast. >> So in an interview with Bob Lord, one of the things we talked about was interesting. He's like I like to just get stuff done. I think he might have used another word. Maybe it was off camera he said that. IBM's got a lot of process. How do you take the old IBM process and make it work for you rather than having digital work for the process? >> Yeah >> It's a lot of internal things but no need to give away too much but it's a management challenge. How do you cut through it? >> I think from a process perspective, these are conversations and you have to explain why. If you could go in and explain why you need to do something differently, then people will listen. I'd like to give an example, okay? I had 26 days to get five products out the door. I formed a team January 2nd. By January 26th, I had to be live. Now I worked with my marketing team and I said I will get into your buyer journey, but I have to launch my Digital Technical Engagement site and my products. They understood. So I went live. Now, will I back back into the process? Sure I will. >> John: But you had good alignment. >> But yeah, we have to move fast, right? So it's explaining why and having mature conversations and then people that really believe in digital they'll support you. >> Great conversation. I'm looking forward to chatting more with you. We're at theCUBE. But I want to ask you one final question before we break. What's your objective? What's the roadmap for you, what's your top priorities? Are you hiring? Who're you looking for? What kind of product priorities, what's the sales priorities? What's your to-do list? >> I think let's start with the customer. So the customer priority is to deliver the best experience possible as they engage with IBM digitally. And that's all about the user experience. From a talent perspective, it's all about diversity, inclusion, and people that come with different skills from technology, to growth hacking, to marketing, and to engineering. And some people that think differently. We want people that, no idea is a bad idea, just come and bring great ideas. >> Well, diversity and inclusion, first of all, half of the users are women. And you also have to have an understanding of the use cases. >> Yeah >> It's not just men using software. >> Yeah, that's right. >> It's a huge deal. >> That's right, that's right. >> Alright well, Janine, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for spending the time. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations on the new role. Janine Sneed, Chief Digital Officer from IBM Hybrid Cloud. First IBM Chief Digital Officer in a business unit. I also today have Bob Lord and a lot of other folks doing digital but great to see the digital momentum. >> Thank you. >> It's not just a selling apparatus. It's all about value for users. It's theCUBE bringing you the value here at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier, back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)