>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum DC 2018 brought to you by Infor. >> And good afternoon, or I guess at least Eastern Time, good afternoon. We're in Washington DC, theCUBE live here at Inforum '18. We're at the Washington D.C. Convention Center along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. It's a pleasure to welcome Nanzio Esposito who's a VP and Head of Experience at Infor and you can tell he's the coolest guy in the room right now. (all laughing) Yeah, Nanzio, good to see ya. Thanks for joining us, we appreciate that. >> Thank you, thank you for asking. >> So you had a, as part of your primary responsibility, the in-house creative agency. >> Yep. >> Hook and Loop. First off, let's just deal with design, from an approach standpoint. Why is that so important for Infor to have its own in-house agency? >> Well I mean, we have amazing capabilities, and a lot of, and those capabilities really differentiate us against our competitives that. But what ends up happening is that our end users essentially want to have a more enjoyable and more satisfying experience, through their work. So, the reason why design is extremely important to Infor is because, through design, we get to do things like provide efficiency through workflows. We get to do things like create a design system that helps to escale and empower and enable our development teams to pick up UX best practices and UI assets so that they can build quicker. Or open-sourcing those kind of capabilities to be able to empower our partners and our customers to build apps with kind of a standard code base. So, I would tell you that the reason why design is so important is because we look at things from a very macro view, strategically. Design is very holistic, it's problem-solving. And it's taking the best of some of design's key attributes of modernizing the UI, being able to apply design thinking to understand kind of what the business value needs to come out of the system or the solution that's put in play. And how that mutually creates a beneficial kind of delivery mechanism to each user as they're doing their work. And also looking at kind of just the raw, sheer amount of assets that we have from data and being able to find ways to essentially come up with solutions that businesses today really need. And it's a very competitive landscape. And what best to have a designer be able to try to solve some of your business application needs. >> And does it change depending upon the vertical in which you're working? So, I mean, those have to be considerations too, and the environment, right, from the mobile if you're going to be at the desktop, you're going to be on a laptop or? >> Yep, yep. >> On iPad or whatever. All that factors into that. >> Yeah, definitely. You know, it is interesting. I mean, part of Infor strategy has always been to, you know, have industry-focused cloud suites. And from a design perspective, for us, we do tend to see patterns. So, it depends on user roles, kind of access points, you talked about devices. So we see the use of device in, say, healthcare industry, very different, say, than to the use of a device in manufacturing. But mobile, is really starting to kind of blur those lines. And you brought up something that was part of our mobile strategy, internal that was kind of finished out in October of 2017. Which is essentially what we call mobility in context. So context is very important. Knowing situationally where a user is in a moment so that they can, from one moment, work with, say, some portal. And that portal may be a laptop to a, say, an iPhone or even just an Alexa device, and be able to understand where they are, allow them to continue on in that workflow and make sure that it's integrated, it's smooth and it's direct and to the point. So, that's what has kind of transpired through the evolution of Hook and Loop because design has evolved and it's bigger than just modernizing our user interfaces here at Infor. >> So when we first heard about Hook and Loop, it was through Infor. It was the early part of this decade. The mobile was only five or six years old. I mean, smart phones. >> Yeah. >> At the time. So in was early days, you guys were first, certainly, of all the major software company enterprises to focus on that. Now, subsequently, we hear you've always heard a lot about UI. >> M-hmm. >> And UX. Subsequently, much more recently we're hearing much more around design. You're seeing, you know, you go to conferences like Service Now and they're focusing on this stuff and you guys have always been there. What's the difference between UX, UI, and sort of design at the core? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it, sometimes the lines are blurred, right, and it depends on the industry and it depends on where you're speaking as far as when you say user experience design or if you say just design in general. So, I'm going to just take two steps back. The reason why I didn't go for head of design at Hook and Loop was just because design means, has a certain definition here at Infor. We are obviously an enterprise, it's very vast, it's extremely broad and at that point, each, say, of our major constituents, product management, it could be a product development, it could be a customer, they have different mental models on what design means. So, we wanted to go with something that's a little more elusive. Alright, so Head of Experience. But, essentially, now, through our evolution in our sixth year, we're really focused on product experience. So what that means is taking kind of all the learnings that we've had in the industry around modernizing UI, so that's essentially the way in which the solution manifests itself, how it looks, and the best of user experience. Essentially, what is the flow? What are the click states? How can we provide efficiency in form fields? But now you bring in A.I. and that obviously puts a different dimension on that process. But when it kind of all comes together, it's really just about making a strategic call on what the solution needs to be able to satisfy, all the different configurations in which it needs to account for, and then how to package that in a very lightweight manner. So, it's almost to the point that a company or a user doesn't need any instructional information on how to use it. And that's always been a goal at Hook and Loop. Through the six-year journey, strategically, even with some prior leadership, there was a very amazing strategic call to focus on a more mobile first initiative and mobile first, that brought forward kind of all the responsive web behaviors to our applications. So, that's great. Because that just essentially means that on any device, the application will conform, will render, to kind of provide the best usability that it can. As we're evolving, though, we're realizing that the future of work, and I mentioned this to the analysts yesterday, the future of work, which is now post-Millennial, and I know that sounds crazy 'cause I think we're all still seeing millennials in our workforce and trying to reconfigure, figure out what the company culture is, the purpose is, and how business solutions help to support that. But the article in the New York Times talked about iGen, and you know, the theme that Inforum here is all about human potential. Well, in the iGen generation, it's all about the personal aspects of the way in which they communicate, the way they do work, the way they have social gatherings. And I found it very profound because that essentially really supports what the vision of Hook and Loop is now in this era, which is the personal enterprise. And there's nothing more personal than the device that we choose on a daily level, which is the mobile device. So, at that point, it's extremely innate. And it definitely kind of personifies who we are in our digital world, our digital selves, and because it actually has all this tons of capability that's packed into it, what ends up happening is not about kind of the nine to five anymore, and I think you guys, and myself, we all know that. We're getting notifications and communication to, say, a loved one or some kind of social event that's going on and then getting pinged through some kind of communication or notification of work that we have jobs to do, there's things that have to get done. So, it moves from work-life balance to a work-life blend. And for our enterprise, and through kind of I think the investment that we've done with design, that allows us at Hook and Loop to really push the boundaries of user experience and think about the balance of all those to kind of give our customers always only exactly what the user needs right now. And that's been our new mantra, where we've kind of strategically pivoted, evolved, and been essentially looking at our principles and re-looking at our work, given all this investment in our capabilities. >> We heard this morning in the keynotes that you're basically infusing A.I. into your applications, in an effort to create better outcomes. Giving users advice as to how they maybe could have done things differently, maybe tracking some KPI's and giving feedback to the user, so that they can have better outcomes. How does A.I. from a design standpoint change the way in which you have to think about presenting data and information to the user? And not being intrusive, but being helpful? >> Yeah. I could probably talk about that for like the next two to five hours, but the reality is there's different versions or flavors of A.I. So, some of it could be more backend processes, like you alluded to and presenting, say, best potential outcomes that a user, or paths that a user can navigate or select or go down. One thing that we saw from a design perspective is the fact that you don't want to just present the recommendation. You don't want to lose the human factor. You have to establish trust with A.I. over time. So, in just saying, hey I got that or I got that done or here's the best KPI to use, you want to still have a system that can offer up why. And be able to kind of promote choice. A user doesn't want to feel, essentially, controlled. They want the system to be able to make them feel like they're in control. So, those are some nuances there. When it gets into kind of the more conversational aspects of A.I., you know, and I'm going well beyond kind of chat bots, having conversations and having it kind of leverage some of our CIR capabilities, find business objects and promote it, say through our GUI, conversations get intense. And why I say intense, it's some of the terminology we use at Hook and Loop. But that's just because utterances and variancing in the way in which we communicate, are complex. You might say, OK and I might say yeah. You might say I am on it and I might say, yo, I'm doin' that. And just through-- >> That's exactly right, as a matter of fact, that's exactly what David would say. (all laughing) >> I wasn't trying to say this or that. But they all mean the same thing, or in different contexts or whatever the inquiry was, we have to understand that kind of user intent and be able to map all those correlations. So, it's not so easy as just saying hey, we have A.I. and we'll put it into play. And from a design perspective, the last thing we want to do is ever alienate a user. So. >> A frustrated user. >> And frustrated user, exactly. So, just because you can doesn't mean you should and we really need to think strategically in a way in which we ultimately empower a user. So when I say user we're saying a name for customer's employee, or a new force customer customer. So it's a very interesting strategic place that we sit within Infora in our product development teams. >> Yeah, within user experience and best practices, so obviously there are some general trends or general concepts, what do you find out though amongst your clients and your user base maybe that offers additional insight or is giving you maybe a little sneak peak about something that you are uniquely discovering, if you can talk about that? >> Oh yeah, sure. I mean, I think as we evolved kind of our business model this year and our services, I think one of the things that we've learned over the years is that, like, we're no subject matter experts. Like at all. So it's kind of like, well, how do we get this information? How can we learn more? How can we provide or satisfy or create solutions that satisfy these certain pain points? So what we ended up doing is, ya know, I hear this from my team constantly, it's like who's the customer? Or who's the user? And we need personas. And we need to understand the journey maps. And we lose sight of some of the more internal mechanisms that we have that really kind of give us that information. So, we've, over the last few months, have gotten access to Infor Concierge, which is a tool that Infor created for our customers to be able to kind of understand what's new in the product. If they have any product enhancement requests, issues, that they would love to see, bugs, defects. They're finding that their Infor is working really well in creating kind of a two-way conversation. Well, what best to have design team, which, you know, product experience team, to be able to have access to all of that information. Be able to comb and sift through it. So, we're learning kind of what the customer and the user wants, but they're participating in that. So it's a really interesting orchestration or concert. And then on the flip side, we have a ton of subject matter experts. So, and that goes well beyond just our solution, industry solution, architects. This goes into like, our sales teams, or our solution consultants, or our channel partners. So, strategically over these last six to eight months, I think what we have uncovered is that we have a lot of support. And there's like ways for us to make decisions quicker and be able to test or have successes or failures in a very like small, confined box, so to speak. So that we make decisions that don't necessarily create massive ramifications in the enterprise but get us to kind of create value quicker in a more kind of sizeable chunk in deployment mechanism. So, I think the biggest thing that we've uncovered is the fact that, not only do we have a lot of talent but we have a lot of amazing, bright ideas. And that is why we moved from an in-house design agency to product experience because essentially Infor has grown and our team is everyone's becoming a designer. And that's you want. You want to go from a design organization which was the goal in 2012 to now in 2017, 2018 and where we're headed, to move from a design org to a design culture. And I think that's what is going to definitely going to get Infor to differentiate against its competitive landscape. >> 'Cause one of the problems with design is oftentimes the design, the ideal design, there's a gap between that and the actual functionality of the product. And then you end up with this kind of hybrid. Some of the design intent matches the outcome but then the functionality is sort of becomes roadmap. >> Yeah, and a lot of that was happening, I think 'cause we were going through an evolution. What we noticed is we need to move design closer to our product development teams in Hyderabad, Manila. You know, development is getting done all over the globe. So what we did was, we wanted to ensure that UX practitioners were, ya know, sitting side by side of our development teams so that in a moment's time they can have a conversation, quickly make a decision, and obviously just continue on their way. Another piece, though, is what is the right balance between having massive amounts of engineering capacity to, say, a designer that's in partnership with them? So we started practicing and growing our team to be less focused on some of the more baseline design capabilities and we brought in some really smart and talented engineers that understand design, find ways to translate it. And we're doing that kind of translation right now in building native mobile applications inside of Hook and Loop. And that gives us a mechanism to prove out our work, understand some of our decisions, get kind of the feasibility more done upfront so that when we make strategic calls or we want to scale from there, we start to minimize the gap between wouldn't this be amazing if it could render or do this, to, oh, God, we just did like, patchwork, or it was a quill that we created to get it done. We want to bridge that gap and get closer and closer to what the original concept or the idea was. >> So you announced one of those apps this week. >> Yeah, that was super exciting! >> If you want to talk about that. Congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I mean leveraging the best of human-centered design, I can't mention the customer's name given the NDA, but we did work with a very large consulting firm that had 18,000 users. And they're kind of road warriors. So, strategically working with our C suite, we were focusing on more agnostic solutions and then scale to more industry-focused solutions, so this is in expense management. But we needed something that was insanely high consumer grade. So really driven by usability. But offered more of the baseline utility. So leveraging the capabilities of XM, this was all kind of like the road warrior, I just need to capture my receipt, potentially build a queue, wait 'til my credit card feeds in these data points, my expenses, match these expenses, submit a report, and like can I just get back on my day 'cause we all hate doing that. So the app that we just released, it's available on Apple iTunes, the Apple Store, today. It's called Infor Expense. It acts as a companion to Infor Expense Management. We say companion because if you're an Infor Expense Management customer today, you have access to it. And it really is a mechanism to kind of promote the best of what Hook and Loop is trying to scale, continues to scale, inside of Infor. At the same time, it's a playground for us. It's a playground for us to test new capabilities, leverage capabilities that are on the device. You know, evolve our design patterns and our UI assets. So that we kind of always stay at the tip of the spear. And that's essentially where Hook and Loop sits for Infor from a product strategy perspective. >> Well if you make expense reports easy, I'm all for it. >> Me too, right? >> I got my parking ticket right here, we can start as soon as we're done. >> Alright, you want me to take a picture of that? (all laughing) >> Nunzio, thanks for the time. >> Awesome. >> Congratulations. I know you're moving into your second year, it'll be an exciting time for you I'm sure. >> Yeah, I'm excited. >> Keynote tomorrow, right? >> Yeah, I'm opening up day two. >> Just give us real quick, sneak peak, what are you going to talk about? >> Yeah, it's, I think it's really just all about design's evolution inside of Infor, really setting the stage that Hook and Loop went from an internal kind of creative agency and is really moving towards product experience. So that's product strategy, product thinking, how do we aggregate all of that capability, from a data and A.I. perspective, and then find deployment mechanisms that not only inspire our internal teams, but more importantly, inspire our customers in the market. >> Good deal. >> Thank you again for the time. Pleasure. >> Alright, thank you. >> See you tomorrow morning. Nunzio Esposito joining us from Infor. Back with more, we're at Inforum '18. We're live in Washington D.C. and you are watching theCUBE. (light upbeat music)