>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to The Cube. We are live in sunny Las Vegas at the inaugural IBM Think 2018 event. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, this weather has got to beat Boston hands down, right? >> It was beautiful yesterday, about 15 degrees in Boston, snowy. >> So you thawed out since you've gotten here? >> I took the snowshoes out, actually. Life makes lemons. >> Exactly, and we have another cold-weather guest who's probably thawing out as well, Ranjana Young, the senior vice president of Enterprise Data Services from Northern Trust, welcome. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> We're excited to chat with you. You have a role at Northern Trust, and your mission is all-around data, five-core competencies, including data governance and stewardship, data quality, master data management, enterprise integration with data platforms. Tell us a little bit about your role, how long you've been doing that, and really what this focus on data is enabling for Northern Trust. >> Sure, I want to talk first about our mission as you had mentioned. I think it was critical to establish a broad mission for Northern Trust. We wanted to make sure that we establishing an enterprise data program that enabled our customer needs and overall our customer experience, but also truly helped support our regulatory needs that we had, and it was critical to establish those two as the main goals, not just one or the other. And then the role, I call myself a change agent because establishing capabilities that you talked about, it is difficult to do, with a lot of legacy that we have. The firm has been in existence for 128 years To establish a data-driven culture was very different. I think we were known to do provide good business solutions, but a lot with the gut, given that we were good at it, but how do you make sure that you change that culture and have a relationship managers and others really think differently and use data to provide those solutions to our clients. >> I remember when I met Inderpal Bhandari, I'm sure you know him, and he said that he has a framework for a data leader, and he said there are five things a data leader has to do to get started, and three are in parallel, or sorry, three are linear, two are in parallel. I don't know if you've heard this rap, but I'd like to sort of explore them and see how your three are generally. He said you start with understanding how the organization monetizes data, not directly, maybe selling data, but how it contributes, and then the next one was sort of data access and then data quality. Those are the sort of sequential activities, and then the parallel ones were form relationships with a line of business and then re-skill. So those are his five. How did you approach it, what was different, what was similar, what were some of the challenges that you had in doing that? >> Sure. If I had to think about kind of, to correlate some of the components of the strategy, skills is an important thing. When I started establishing the team three years ago, it was critical that we had to bring some of the core skills within the firm because they had the business capabilities, they understood the systems, they understood kind of the skeletons that were in the closets and knew the culture and also embraced the challenges and still could find solutions. And then you had to bring external folks that really had the capability to drive that change, had the mastery of management skills to really support and set up an account domain and a party domain, a reference data domain, especially an asset domain, et cetera. So we had to look at kind of a conglomerate of individuals to do that. And then if you look at kind of where was the starting point in terms of really establishing the program was, we were going through a transformation to really re-platform a lot of our legacy, whether it was our valuation system or our cash platform, others, and data was a thread throughout all of those programs, so it was critical to establish and think and take bite-sized chunks, it was important to think about, okay, throughout all the programs, what is the important data that we could kind of understand, so we focused quite a bit on initially looking at critical data and looking at critical data from a master data perspective, so asset data, which is very critical to the work that we do on the institutional side. As you know, we had a management asset servicing company. Data is an asset for us, we enrich the data. We provide services around that today, and have been, and so embedding data governance through that process was important, and also our clients were really looking for the enriched data but also were looking for clean information but also were looking for where did that data come from? Where does the definition of this data? So kind of giving them that external catalog of here's the data, but here's the enriched data and here's the metrics for data quality around it, and then here's the definitions for it. So to some extent, that drove change because of customers were looking for it, and a lot of the capabilities that were foundational to the firm, we're starting to externalize, especially the meta-data catalog, et cetera. >> So if I could play that back, so you started the team, all right, you said, okay, I need to build a team. I think I heard that, and then the data quality, and then presumably, okay, who has access to this data? Is that about right? >> So I started with the mission to say, we have to do this for both arms, the left arm being our customer experience and making sure that we change the way we're doing our work there, or enhance the work so that our customer experience was better, and then obviously the regulatory, make sure that we need the regulatory. So for that, we needed five core competencies. We knew that we had to establish a role of the steward, a role of the custodian, so the team started to become very critical then, and then we knew that we had some gaps in our master data management capability, a complete gap in having integrated data platforms. I notice I've talked a little bit about we established a whole strategy and architecture for ING. I totally relate to how we had to do the same. Each silo did their own particular thing. The management did their own thing. >> David: By data. >> The institutional side did their own thing. Asset management was, I would say, a lot more mature. So I would say if you were to think about it, it's establishing the mission and establishing the team. >> And then, just one last follow-up. The services that you're providing, data services, those are delivered through your organization, the IT organization, what's the practice? >> We have a partnership, a very collaborative partnership that we work together. The technology team does all the build for the work, we work collaboratively to kind of build a strategy of what solutions need to be first versus later, given the client priorities and our institutional side, our business unit priorities, so that's a collaborative effort, working together. >> So speaking of collaboration, you mentioned earlier that it was really key to have both the veterans within Northern Trust and their expertise that you said kind of the skeletons, that they know where things are buried, as well as that maybe external, you might say more fresh perspective. You also talked about, we chatted before we went live, about governance. Seems like what you guys have done is kind of flipped governance from being viewed as potentially an inhibitor to really empowering, being an empowering capability. Can you tell us how you've leveraged data governance to empower a data-driven culture within a business that is 128, I think, years old, you said? >> Yes, that's right. So, for us, I think that while we were establishing the program, it was very critical to understand kind of the challenges on the institutional side first because they had the maximum number of challenges with data. Again, because we're an asset servicing company, a data is an asset, we enrich that information and provide that information, but what was happening was it was taking us so much longer to provide these solutions to our clients, so we've embedded, now, the data governance framework as a part of that solution, and our clients are seeing the value, so if you look at one of the customers that we're working with, we actually have externalized our catalog where they understand now what data that they're receiving, and you're speaking the same language, and that was not the case before. But again, as I said, if we didn't do the foundational work of cataloging the information, understanding what the data is, where the data is, what the data assets are, we just couldn't have done that, so it's really paying off because of that. >> How has that affected your ability to be prepared for GDPR, which obviously went into effect last year, the fines go into effect in May of this year? What was the relationship there? >> So we have worked very, very closely with our chief privacy officer, and we've really done a phenomenal job of identifying where our highly sensitive data assets are. We're in the process of cataloging all of them through the unified governance framework that we've established, so we leverage IBM's IGC NIA to do all that work, and the lineage all the way to the authentic source, which is something the regulators definitely are looking for, so are we fully, completely done yet? No, so we're in that journey, and with unstructured data, we're looking at discovery tools to kind of provide that. We have a solution that's a little manual at this point, but we hope to kind of make more progress on that side. >> I got to ask you, so around 17%, the data suggests, 17% of the IT, technology industry is women, but I was at an IBM, it was a Data Divas breakfast that I crashed, I snuck in, one of the few guys there. >> Oh, very cool. And there was a stat that around 30% of data leaders are women, I don't know, it was a sort of a small sample, who knows? Sounded a little high. Somebody said it's because it's a thankless job and women have to take it on, so thoughts on women in tech, women in this role, perspectives. >> So I am excited to meet a few here at the conference. That statistic is pretty high that you're stating. I don't see that. >> David: It's outside that. >> In the industry, I do find myself sometimes as a lone warrior, at least in the industry forums, but I think it's growing. I think especially women in technology, women in leadership on the line of business side is growing, and Northern Trust, I'm very proud to say, is big around diversity and providing opportunities to women, so from that perspective, I think I'm excited that women are taking interest in data, yes, it is a very hard job, so I think, I feel like we are organized, we get a lot done at the same time, so I think it's really helped. >> Other than it's the right thing to do, are there other sort of business dimensions? Is it Mars versus Venus? Are there sort of enrichments that a woman leader brings to the equation, or is it just because it's the right thing to do? >> I've seen tenacity women have. No offense to anyone, I think the higher tenacity to be persistent. >> I don't take offense. >> To be methodical, to be methodical, and also to have the hard discussions in a very factual way sometimes, but also in, yes, this is the right thing to do, but is there ways we could make this change happen in a systematic, bite-size chunk way. Sometimes I think those coercive conversations help a lot more than the others, and I think, to me, I would say tenacity, tenacity. >> I love that word. I have to say, that's a word that's oftentimes associated with males. A lot of times a tenacious woman, it's a different adjective, right? It's a term, I don't know, Lisa, what your experience has been, so that's good, a good choice of words in my view. >> I've heard pushy before, and I think what they really meant >> David: There you go, okay. >> Is persistence. (laughs) >> That's right. >> A man is tenacious, a woman is pushy. You hear that a lot. >> Right, I think it's persistence. So last question for you. Here we are at the inaugural IBM Think 2018. You guys are an IBM Analytics Global Elite Partner. Can you talk to us a little bit about that strategic partnership and what it means for Northern Trust? >> This partnership has really helped us tremendously in the last three years while we were putting the strategy to action while operationalizing data governance, while operationalizing a lot of the capabilities we thought we would have but really kind of bringing that to life. We're also really excited because lot of the feedback that we've provided has gone into kind of redoing some of the products within IBM, so we've definitely partnered and done lot of testing for some of the ones, the beta versions, and it's also helped us, I think, sometimes it's been like a marriage. We've had hard times getting through certain hurdles, but it really has paid off, and I think the other thing is we've really operationalized governance to the core at Northern Trust. I think IBM is also seeing value in sharing that our story with others because others have started the journey but may have taken certain different approaches to making that happen, so all in all, I think that the unified governance framework has really helped us, and I think we really love the partnership. >> As a client, what's on their to-do list? What's on IBM's to-do list for you? >> So I think one of the things that we've been talking quite a bit is we have a new CIO, and he's really interested in the cloud strategy, I know you've been talking about that. Again, we're a bank, so due to regulation there's strategies in terms of private versus public cloud. That's one conversation we'll definitely want to take further. We want more integrated tooling within the unified governance platform. That's something that's been a topic that we've discussed quite a bit with them. AI, machine learning, robotics is huge for us, so how do we leverage Watson much more? We've done a few POCs, how do we really operationalize and make sure that that's something that we do more of, so I think I would say those three. >> So sounds like a very symbiotic relationship. >> Ranjana: It is. >> Slash marriage that you have. Ranjana, we want to thank you for joining us and sharing how really kind of you're exhibiting the term change agent in a tenacious way. >> Okay, thank you. >> I feel like I want to say I'm flanked between two data divas, you don't take offense at that, do you? >> No, not at all. It's a compliment. >> You crashed an event. I'm seeing a new >> I like that. >> Twitter handle come up here. We want to thank you so much again for stopping by and sharing. Congrats on your success, and we hope you have a great time here. Enjoy the sunshine! Maybe bring some back to Chicago. >> Will do, will do, yeah. Thanks again, very much. >> And for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. We want to encourage you to check out thecube.net to watch all of the videos that we have done so far and will be doing at IBM Think 2018, and of course on all of the shows that we do. Also, head over to siliconangle.com. That's our media site where you're going to find pretty much in near real time synopsis and stories on not just what we're doing here but everything around the globe. Again, for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, live from IBM Think 2018 in Vegas. We'll be right back after a short break with our next guest.