[Music] [Applause] hi I'm Peter Burris and welcome again to another cube conversation from our wonderful studios here in Palo Alto California great conversation today branching out into the world of data governance a lot of things going on in the industry around data and what does it mean for digital business and how do we treat data increasingly as an asset and that obviously raises a lot of questions about how we govern those assets improve their value share them appropriately at the same time privatizing and make sure that they are corrupted and to have this conversation we've got two great guests first off we've got Kelly O'Neil who's the CEO of first San Francisco partners is an information management consultancy here in the Bay Area and Saatchi on sangani welcome back to the cube CEO of relation welcome so let's get started I kind of said in the preamble that this notion of data governance becomes especially acute especially important because we're now trying to treat data as an asset so we're not governing the resources to manage data we're actually trying to govern data itself utilizing resources so Sachin why don't we start with you what does data governance mean from a tool and process standpoint and then Kelly on rescue and let's go deeper into that process part >> yeah I mean I think so there's lots of different definitions of data governance that a wide variety of experts have put out and I'm not sure that I want to sort of put a new definition in the debate very generically it's a set of processes that institutions use to manage the data that's at their disposal and if you think about that generically in terms of where the problem is broadly stated how do I manage my information and in the consumption and the production and the storage of that information you know that is a super hard problem to deal with when you have you know hundreds of thousands of data sources potentially millions of different data sets and thousands of people who are constantly consuming that information and limited resources and so the process of data governance now in a world to your point where every business is trying to become a digital business and where the monetization of data is a huge part of that business is the fundamental problem right how do we have people discover the data how do we have people understand the data that they're seeing how do we have people trust the data that they're seeing that is the consort of province of data governance and that is what people are coming to realize but >> we do have tooling now that is specifically being built including elation which is a great catalog for performing some of these or to facilitate some of these governance activities so there's a enough of a standard set of definitions that we actually can put tooling in place which means now we can really liberate the power and the talent of people to appropriately govern data and use data so Kelly what are you doing with your clients to help them take the tools for data governance and turn it into ideally a strategic capability that really drives the digital business forward yeah >> absolutely so as a services organization we really focus on ensuring that the people in the process are in place so that they can take advantage of the technology right so you've got accountability around who has who's responsible to ensure the data is of a certain sort of quality or a certain sort of standard as well as who has the ability to access that data and use that data and I think one of the things that sahteen brought up is there's just this onslaught of data that's coming in so if you think about that as a construct it's entirely overwhelming there's too much data to be able to say this person owns this data field this person defines that data field it has to be much more organic it has to be much more shared and tools much more communal yeah and so it really is this concept of how do we have a certain level of trust in the data and what does trust mean to the organization to take advantage of that data and to use it as an asset and to use it in business context and so our services help organizations to see what that means to them to right-size that investment in the sense of how much effort do we put towards this and then also how do we make sure that those tools are used that they're adopted and that they're embedded into work processes that it's not a standalone repository that never gets used >> you know we had Aaron Cal bond not too long ago to talk about trust check and I know that's one of the things that's bringing you together is this notion of a communal approach to putting to imbuing data with trust so let's talk a bit about trust check and in particular how your companies are working together to accelerate the prop the processes that you so accurately described what starts at 10 when we start with you let's trust checking and what does it mean for you yeah so trust check is a very simple it's a very simple capability although very complicated to implement the idea behind trust check is that as and when somebody's communing consuming data whether that's in a Salesforce dashboard or in a tableau report or conversely even inside of elation that immediately as they're consuming that information they're presented with context around that data talking about the appropriateness of that data for the use that they particularly have now that could be about timeliness of the data that could be about the availability of the data that could be about the quality of the data that could be about you know the privacy regulations or the security surrounding that data there are lots of reasons why one might not trust the data but often that information is off to the side right and often that information is in a place where the consumer of the data has no awareness that the policy even exists much less where to go get it that information and so what trust check is saying look this notion of governance has to actually be actionable and immediate and available in order for it to be valuable to the person that's using the information yeah and you might say that also that it might be trusted in this context but not in other context as well so how does that inform well how does that facilitate how does that accelerate implementing these processes to make sure that communities of data in an evidence-based world are better able to apply data use data and share information about that data with each other yeah absolutely so it provides a number one just automation right so fundamentally that's a value add it means that it's more available it's more shared it's faster and that can make the governance organization more relevant to the business so that the data is actually used in a more appropriate and higher-value way so first things Automation and then the second thing is that as we start to automate there's this concept of kind of learning and expanding and so being able to leverage a tool within a services practice and phonology it means that we can kind of start within one area and to leverage that learning and extend and extend and extend because fundamentally data is pervasive right it's everywhere and which makes governance really intimidating and hard so that idea of focusing learning doing something well and being agile right and growing over time a tool really helps you to do that because it is a place where people can get focused for that learning and then repeat rinse and repeat rinse and repeat so it many respects it is a reflection of manifestation of some of these good processes absolutely the you guys obviously have an enormous amount of knowledge about data Government's about the tool infer data to government's about where this all goes but ultimately a lot of your customers are still very much in the formative stages of putting this in place so how are other than just having them license elations toolkit how are you coming together to put in place services or training or something else to help diffuse your knowledge I just want to come back to one point that you mentioned is I think I think there's been a shift in the tooling market okay so I wouldn't say that the tooling has not that there's never been any tooling to deal with the problem of data governance in fact I think there's been lots of tooling that hasn't worked particularly very well so so let me put some context on that so when I say tooling as I said kind of upfront to my mind it's tooling for the resources that handle the data not tooling for the data yeah but keep going if I'm wrong I want to hear well know I think even tooling for the resources that handle the data has largely been the province of either there is a category of software that one would traditionally described in the realm of data stewardship and data governance and broadly speaking it allows you to create forms and to administer workflows with those forms right so you know there and so that is a highly unauthorized and so what a traditional you know governance implementing regime might include would be the development of policies and the enactment of those policies through a set of people who have to vary manually check the data at their disposal it is generally speaking disconnected from the data right when you have small sets of data when you have limited quantities of data that could be a perfectly fine solution when you have a very small set of policies that you need to interact or interact with because you have to have a set of goals that are maybe regulatory in nature that is an okay thing to go do when you have petabytes of data across hundreds of thousands of data sets it's an impossible thing to go do right and so I think that that sort of inundation that Kelly was referring to is is is you know born out of this massive volume of data coming up where the traditional methods just just don't work right so your tanks are you talking about such an essentially that were that we're adding that metadata directly to the data itself and creating trusted objects that the organization can use and apply as assets wherever so that is exactly a solution and the analogy that I think will then inform you know most of the people who are sort of listening us today to us today would be the sort of shift from Yahoo to Google right so if you think about Yahoo Yahoo relied upon every single webmaster tagging every single webpage to make sure that the search engine knew which webpages to go look up right that required a whole bunch of trust in your webmasters first of all some of whom were bad actors right you may not have those in the stewardship regime regime inside of a enterprise but you could right people have their own perspectives and it also required for people to have enough knowledge to tag things right so you'd have to know what to tag and that a tag would have to be right for anybody who's developed a folder system you know that those folder systems are constantly changing right and so then Google comes along and says look if we just watch what people are doing with this information and we know what people are linking to then we can say hey what what's more valuable what's more useful by watching the behaviors right and I think that's the sort of shift of a Bottoms Up approach which is different from sort of that top-down declarative approach that's come in the technology for governance and fortunately and and I think that's what people have to understand which is that the problems always been there but what's happened is the volumes and the relevance and the timely the information have just been so critical that now we have to change the way we do things and not what we're working together on it's mercury it's it's it's it has scale issues but also the annoying technology has gotten to the point where we can actually do more automated discovery about how people are using things which means you have to change the process and the people great so let's let's come back to that question what are you guys doing together to ensure that you can in fact diffuse this knowledge and diffuse these insights into organizations faster so they can pick up on some of these changes better yeah so so for San Francisco is taking some of our methodologies and ensuring that they are right size and fit for the elation suite of products especially the trust checks suite of products and so what we're starting with is the data acquisition process and that's important because the supply chain for data is what has become inordinately complex it's no longer primarily internally created data most data is actually acquired and so if we start with that ingestion process and the data acquisition process that's a huge value both to the customers that are using it as well as to the mutual organizations right so right focusing on that as a as a case and then we'll move on to the concept of information stewardship itself so stewardship across the supply chain not just the data acquisition supply chain so we are adapting our methodologies to be specific and unique to alation to help their existing customer base and obviously potentially new customers together yeah so an a great example of that I was just talking to a chief dead officer of a very large financial institution in North America you know this individual was contending with the problem of making good data available to there and you know and business audience for analytical purposes right to solve exactly this problem he said we acquire companies all the time we're acquiring companies constantly and we're getting all of this data in and I have to figure out what this data is and do I already have this data in-house do I have systems that store this sort of data do I have systems that duplicate the data but incorrectly and are there multiple of these sets of data inside the company that I'm acquiring because they've got data duplication just like we do and how do we figure all of that out right so this would be a perfect example where the data acquisition problem is critical to solve in the process of being able to create available useful government data right and so this would be a perfect example for you know the two of our companies to be able to work together because we don't speak to the implementation and the process we speak to the technical capability of simply providing the inventory so that somebody can then figure out what to do with that information but there are practices that are probably going to do better or will generate greater value out of the elation toolkit than others would absolutely yeah and so in many respects we're looking into companies like yours to help correct or define what those practices are defuse them more broadly through C package consulting and through really good partnership that you guys have been working on yeah because I mean you know you know I mean I you know I think Larry Ellison is a controversial character right right but you know I'll quietly say that I worked at Oracle at one point in time what one of the things that Larry one of the things that Larry said is you know people when they buy software are constantly asking the question of how do I figure out how to take my existing business process and fit it on top of the software that exists out there and he's like no that's exactly wrong what people should be doing is figuring out what should my business process be given the capability that I've got right and so we now have a new capability and we're we're enabling people to have more or less super powers relative to what they would have had to do by hunting and pecking through every data set and tagging it manually right and what you know Kellyanne for San Francisco are bringing to the table is the ability to have a new process that would allow them to do that at scale and faster so that's where we see per sighted excellence so in a date of first world data governance becomes more important to thought leaders helping to make that happen Saachi and sigani CEO of elation Kelly O'Neil for San Francisco partners thanks very much for being on the queue thank you Peter thank you and once again this has been a cute conversation from our Palo Alto studios thank you very much for watching until next time [Music] you