>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017, brought to you by Oracle. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live here at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for the Oracle Modern Customer Experience conference. This is theCUBE's special coverage. I'm John Furrier, joined with my co-host, Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Roland Smart, Vice President of Social and Community at Oracle and also the author of The Agile Marketer book, which we'll get into in a minute. He'll hold it up so you can make sure, it's also available on audio books, you can hold it up, go ahead. The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experiences into Your Competitive Advantage. Roland, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks so much for the invite. >> Great to have that book there because it sets the table for what we want to talk about which is we love cloud, we've been loving dev-ops since the cloud hit the scene years and years ago, but now that it's gone mainstream, it's going into marketing, you're seeing marketing cloud, it really opens up this notion of agile and changing things, modern platforms, the replatforming. We heard Mark Heard on the keynote, we've heard through our interviews. There's a replatforming going on in the enterprise across the board, and so it's super exciting. I know that you're also doing some cool stuff, modernization inside Oracle, employing Oracle cloud for Oracle, it's pretty comprehensive, so let's start there. What's your role at Oracle? It's kind broad, social and community, which is cutting edge and being operationalized in real time. What are you working on? >> Yeah, so, I've worn a couple different hats in my tenure at Oracle. I've been with the company for about four years. I was one of those marketers who came into the company through an acquisition of a social technology company, and so, I ended up landing in the corporate marketing group. I've, as I said, done a couple different things. I've led the Oracle Technology Network for a while, I was involved in establishing and upgrading our corporate social programs, but right now, I'm really focused on some modernization initiatives, and those are very connected to our inbound marketing practice. That means taking some of these amazing solutions that are part of the Oracle marketing cloud and implementing them for the corporate marketing group. The ones that are really core to my focus are, because it's an inbound marketing focus it's Compendium, which is our content publishing platform. Of course, we also integrate that with Eloqua for subscription and there are other adjacent technologies that we're going to use to improve the service, things like Maximizer, which will allow us to iterate and do testing and improve the service over time. And of course, integrating into all the other major parts of the corporate marketing stack, which includes a DMP and a customer experience database and all the rest. >> So, here at the show, you're seeing marketing cloud being broader defined because it's the customer on a digital life cycle, no analog, I mean, from inception to the moment of truth the experience is digital. It changes things a bit. What is your observation that you could point to as you look at these changes that're going on, tweaks here and radical changes there, what's the big shift, what's the digital value in that digital journey of a customer when it comes to marketing? I mean, it seems that marketing's involved in all touch points. >> It is, I mean, I think, sorry, I think you're talking a little bit about the fact that digital transformation is kind of dominating the marketer's consciousness at the moment. We're very, very focused on really transitioning the experiences that we deliver and to engage with customers and to a digital environment, and that means that there's two side of that. Of course, there's the technology side, but there's also the practices side. I think that a lot of the conversation to date has really been dominated by just an incredible proliferation of marketing technology, the Martech stack, right, is growing at an incredible pace. One of the things that I see, for example-- >> Peter: It's almost daunting, it's huge. >> Rolad: It is. >> It's growing and churning. >> And there's still much more proliferation in the Martech space than there is consolidation even with companies like Oracle acquiring just an incredible number of companies in a relatively short period of time. We've built this amazing stack, but still, there's a lot of venture dollars that are still chasing unmet needs. There are niches that aren't being met, and that says something about the overall maturity of the marketing stack, right. We're still fairly early days in that process, and the technology, what's interesting is that the technology piece in some ways is actually easier than the process change and the culture change that is associated with actually trying to be, develop a strong competency when it comes to these digital channels. I think there's an agile transformation that needs to take place as the digital transformation takes place, and that is really focused on that cultural change and the way that we work, so that we can get the most value out of these digital channels. One of the things that I would just add about an agile transformation, though, is that I think it is a little bit broader than just digital transformation in the sense that you can apply agile to analog channels as well, it's more of an approach or a philosophy, a way of working that happens to be the best practice when it comes to digital platforms, 'cause agile came out of the software development world. Agile's not new, agile really started over 15 years ago when the Agile Manifesto was written by some very, very smart software developers. In the last 15 years, it's become the dominant approach to software development, but beyond that, product management has adopted it, and it's a big part of what has led to the empowerment of product management leaders, I think, is the most influential leader at the most influential, or innovative companies in the world, right. I think marketers have an opportunity to take a page from that book as, of course, marketers are managing more software than ever before. And as we transition to a world in which we're moving away from this campaign-oriented mindset where there's a campaign that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and more towards a product, a program-oriented mindset where there's an ongoing service. >> It's an always-on environment. >> It's an always-on environment where we need to continually iterate and evolve that experience. >> And I think that is the key, I mean, your book you held up called The Agile Marketer, it really does make sense, and I truly believe this, and people who know me, I always rant on this, but I believe that agile and these principles that are well-founded in practice, certainly on the software development side, are moving into data and apps, and ultimately, content and marketing and all the stuff that's in the platform because it's the same trajectory, it's the same concepts. You're doing things that require speed, there's a user component, app component, there's technology involved, so there's a lot of moving parts with it, but it's all threading together. Is that what the book is touching on? Talk about the book. >> Yeah, it is. I mean, so we touched on some of the reasons why marketers are coming to agile. One of them is kind of a no-brainer, we're managing more software than ever before. I don't think anybody's going to argue about that. I think there are some second order things, though, that you touched on with your comments there that are worth calling out. Marketers, well first off, agile is really an approach or a philosophy, which is predicated on this idea that we're working in contexts where it's very difficult to predict the future. There's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of disruption, so the traditional methods that we've used, waterfall which is really, waterfall is based on our ability to predict the future. Create a perfect strategy that's going to unfold over a period of time, but I would challenge you to talk to any marketer here and ask them what marketing plan that they've developed that survived implementation more than three months. Marketers are working in this environment with this tremendous amount of change, so. >> Well, Peter and I were talking about the intro, about the role of data, and I'll give you a case in point is that when, to be agile and to be fast and be, I won't say command and control, but to use that metaphor is, the CEO or business leader, or even someone in the trenches, a hero, an innovator, says, "Wow, there's an opportunity to move the needle," innovate or whatever they see, 'cause some data insight, surfaces insight, and they go, "Wow, that changes everything. "Deploy X, Y, and Z," or "Tweak this." >> Let's do something small, validate if we're heading in the right direction quickly, and then, if we get a signal that says, hey, there's something that's working here, we'll invest more and iterate, and it really removes waste from the process of developing marketing programs. >> This is the thing, I think you're on to something with this, and this is what we talk about in the cloud wards. In cloud, we hear things like standing up servers, Horizontally scalable. In marketing it's stand up that campaign now, which you might have an hour notice. Imagine rolling up and standing up a multi-geography campaign in an hour. >> Roland: Right. >> That should be doable. >> Absolutely, and I think, so, going back to some of the second order things, one of the things that marketers are challenged to do is if we want to stand up a campaign, it's not just that the marketer's world is changing more quickly, right. Product management adopted agile because their world is moving very quickly, so if you have a situation where product management is deploying something on a monthly basis or even on a daily basis, marketing needs to work at that same pace. And so, agile can be a collaboration layer where because they speak the same language and share a similar process, they can stay in sync. When you do that, you can deliver experiences that kind of blur the boundary between what I would call traditional marketing and what we think of as product. This is a really interesting space, and I would say one of the most fun spaces where I've ever had the opportunity to work is when you can blur that boundary. And so, having agile means not just that we can deploy our own programs quickly and test them quickly and validate that we're heading in the right direction, but it means that we can do that in close collaboration with our product management peers. And really, that's where you get to incredible value. >> One of the reasons why it's diffused into product management as aggressively as it has is because increasingly the products are being rendered as services that have significant digital components to them. You mentioned the idea of philosophy, and it's kind of an interesting case to show how the agile philosophy has hopped from software development into products, it's now into marketing. My observation, I want to test this with you and see if you have anything to add is that the agile philosophy is founded on three core principles. One is that you have to be empirical. Two is that you have to be iterative. And three is that you have to be opportunistic. And you can add others, like you got to be people focused, and you got to recognize time-bound, et cetera, and all those types of things, but as you look at marketing, is marketing starting to adopt that notion of you got to be empirical, you got to be iterative, and you got to be opportunistic? You can't, you know, hold onto your babies, so to speak. Is that kind of what's at the base of some of this new philosophical changes, or are you seeing some other things as well? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you've definitely touched on some of the drivers. I think that there are, something that I would recommend people who, marketers who are interested in agile should check out a document called The Agile Marketing Manifesto, which interprets The Agile Manifesto for marketers, and like The Agile Manifesto, it has a set of values and a set of underlying principles. The three things that you called out relate pretty tightly to some of the values that are baked into The Agile Manifesto and The Agile Marketing Manifesto. I think one of the central ideas is that because we can't predict the future, we need to do, or we're operating in sort of a chaotic domain where we're in this domain with this unknown unknowns. We don't really know how people are going to react, we can't predict that well, and so, we need to get into this different modality or mindset where we say, you know what, instead of trying to build a perfect strategy, we're just going to do lots of small things. We're going to test things, we're going to validate that we're heading in the right direction or not. >> Peter: Test empirical. >> Yeah, that's all about the testing and validation with empirical data. >> Peter: The iterative. >> Yep, and then, you just keep iterating on that and zeroing in on product market fit or the value that the program-- >> Or the option seems best, which is the opportunistic, and there are others as well, but are marketers having a hard time doing that, or in your experience, do they start? >> It's a pretty significant, yeah, it's a very significant change. Most marketers are, grew up with or started their career with waterfall, and waterfall is still very dominant. If you were to look, for example, what is the, what in the context of, or in the parlance of crossing the chasm, where are we with agile marketing? >> I think we've crossed that. >> I think we're at a place where we see early adopters who are out there really proving value but the pragmatists in the marketplace, the people who adopt something because they're getting on the bandwagon, because their peer are doing it, it's not there yet. It's on their radar, but it's not there yet. What I see happening is that there's, we're just at the beginning of starting an ecosystem that is going to support taking agile more mainstream. What I mean is if you look at, for example, the biggest management consulting firms, the McKinseys, the Bains, they are now building out agile transformation practices that are coupled to their digital transformation practice that already exists and has existed for a while. If you look at the company's out there that do certification and training, folks who will come into your organization and train you on Scrum or Kanban, the two most popular agile methods, they have traditionally been focused on engineers and product managers. They are now starting to build offerings for business-oriented folks. We're starting to see agile sessions and tracks at conferences like this one. Obviously, people like me are writing books, and there are more books coming to market, so these are the signals that marketers, this is getting on marketers' radar and that they're transitioning. I think where you see the most traction for agile, there are certain silos within the marketing function where you see more traction with it. >> Peter: Social being a big one. >> Social being a big one. >> Because the data's available. >> Marketing automation being a really big one, 'cause fundamentally, it's about testing and validation, and these programs are always running, so you're constantly evaluating the performance of messages that you're sending out, and tweaking them and optimizing them. Solutions like the ones, we have a solution in the Oracle marketing cloud called Maximizer, which is just, it is fundamentally an enabler, an enabling technology to allow a marketer to be agile. We can do things in the context of our publishing platform where we can show multi-variant, we can run multi-variant tasks and show them to users and quickly validate what's working and what's not, and so, that's a very different way of working than I think marketers have traditionally adopted. We talked already about the fact that just bringing in the technology is actually, I think, easier than trying to drive the cultural change. The cultural change is really, really hard, and we're still at the beginning of that process, I think. >> And your final thoughts, I want to get to the final question here on this evolution, the progress bar, if you will, crossing the chasm. This is a sea change, so I think a lot of people, we live in the bubble in Silicon Valley, but middle of the industry, middle of America, they're still doing waterfall, which they need, in my opinion, need to move to agile, but because of the benefits of having a platform and enabling technologies and products, 'cause apps is where the action is, we agree. What is your big takeaway from this year in terms of this show and the impact of this platform, this enabling concept that you guys are pushing for? What's the most important thing folks should understand about agile, social, platform, modern customer experience? >> We talked a minute ago about the Martech ecosystem, and the fact that overall the ecosystem is still, there's immaturity for the overall ecosystem, but within that ecosystem there are some very mature solutions, and I think that particularly for enterprises that are using those more mature solutions, they are now transitioning from this period where they've been very focused on building that technology stack, and they're starting to think about how do we more dramatically make changes to the way that we work so that we can develop a stronger competency in digital, and I think that this connects to, if you were to ask me, connecting this back to modern marketing, at what point can a company sort of say, okay, we meaningfully positioned ourselves. >> We're modern, we're modernized. >> What is modern? >> What is modern, and so, >> That's a great question. >> from my perspective, I would connect it back to the role that the CMO plays or the marketing organization plays within the larger company. We talked a little bit about the fact that the product management leader has really been empowered over a long period of time in large part because they've adopted agile, and they're working in a different way. They are serving as the steward of innovation. The marketer has this aspiration to really serve as the steward of customer experience. Now today, we're at a place where most marketers, we're really in the best position to measure and understand the customer experience, but we have limited influence when it comes to changing those touch points. A lot of those touch points aren't under our direct purview. So, we need to get that influence. One way to get that influence is to share the process of the people who have control over those things, that means when we, again, we have agile, we can share process with project management, we can influence those touch points more, that is when the marketer can step up and truly serve as the steward of customer experience, that's when I would say that we've sort of reached the status of modern era. >> A modern era. I think you're on to something. I think the checkbox immediately is are you agile. That's a quick acid test, yes or no. I think that's so fundamental, but I think the user experience is really key, and you've seen the platforms become the enabler where the apps are just coming out, it's a tsunami of apps, and that's an okay thing, but the platform has to be stable. I think that's just an evolution of the role of software, from shrink wrap, from downloading on the internet, to web 2.0 to mobile to platform. >> I'd step back even one level before that, John, and say are you empirical? At the end of the day, is your culture ready to make changes based on what the data says? Because then it says you're going to go out and get the data, you're going to use the data, then you can-- >> And the data has to be good, data has to be legit. >> It has to be good. >> And not dirty. >> 'Cause if you are, then you can have that, we talked about this earlier, then you can have that conversation with the leader and empower the leader to actually lead change. >> Data orientation, customer orientation is a really, those are both critical values that are baked into agile. >> Absolutely. You have to test your organization on whether or not they're really able to do those things. If they are, then a lot of the other stuff that you're talking about falls, starts falling a little bit more naturally into place. >> Well, Roland, we need to follow up, certainly, back in Palo Alto in our studio. This has been really, I think, an important conversation that's worthy of more dialogue, what is a modern organization in this new era of computing where the expectations of the customers and the users and the consumers are at an all-time high? You're seeing the demand and the need for a platform that's truly enabling innovation and value. Certainly great conversation, thanks for joining us on theCUBE today. Sharing the insight as we stay agile, modern here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. Be right back with more after this short break. (electronic keyboard music)