(energetic electronic music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special Cube interview here at the Schneider Electric offices in Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Hervé Coureil, who is the Chief Digital Officer at Schneider Electric. Thank you so much for having us-- >> Oh, thanks for having me. >> It's a little rainy, but that's what we can expect in Boston-- >> Don't say that. >> But, lovely view. Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> Great, so first of all, give us a little bit about your background. You're the Chief Digital Officer today, we love talkin' to the CDOs, you've been a CIO, you've been a CFO, and we'll definitely get into some of the organizational dynamics as to who reports to whom and who owns what and the like. >> Sure, so, you know, in the day, I started in finance, actually, I did a lot of work in M&A. After a while, we are quite a pretty large company called APC and I became the CFO, and really, working essentially on post-modular integration, right? So how do we put all those pieces together? And when you do that, you quickly realize that actually technology is on the critical path all the time, so you know, I developed quite a keen interest at that time for technology, and that's when Schneider decided, really, to change its setup, to evolve its organization with a program called One Schneider. We created the CFO position and that's where, basically, I took the helm as the CIO for Schneider Electric. And you know, over time, when digital became a thing, it was not just about, you know, how you digitize the company, it was also how you create a digital business, so that's how we created Schneider Digital and I became the CDO. So all of this sounds like super logical right now, of course it was more complicated than that. But that's a view of the whole arc of the story. >> Yeah, lots of politics, we understand, organizations, large M&As, we understand that there's challenges, things to work through. If you could, for our audience, just frame Schneider Electric. I actually, you know, disclaimer, I worked for American Power Conversion way back longer than I'd like to even admit, but you know, uninterrupted power supplies, they really helped create a market, and had some excellent technology, strong engineering background, which is what led me to that company, but Schneider Electric today, of course, much bigger than just APC, give us a little bit of a frame. >> So, Schneider Electric is a pretty large global corporation, I think we employ something like 140,000 people, so pretty large multi-billion company. We basically are in the business of energy management and industry automation, we are specialists of that. Our core value proposition is really bringing efficiency and sustainability to our customer. We do that in a number of areas, whether it's buildings, whether it's, you know, large infrastructures, data centers, factory floors, and industry all processes, but sort of a core common thread, if you will, is how you bring efficiency, sustainability to our customers. >> Great, you talked a little bit about your background as a CFO was to help with the merger. Bring us up to what is your role as a Chief Data Officer, what is the mandate you have? We're going to spend some time unpacking digital transformation. We always say the difference between a company before and after that digital transformation is, you know, data is so important, you must be data driven, you must understand it, and therefore often there is a CDO involved. So, what led to this role? And what is that specific mandate that you have? >> Sure, so, you know, I did mention just before that, you know, we had the concept of efficiency, right? We try really, we have a value prop about, you know, safety, reliability that over time evolves towards efficiency and sustainability. And in order to provide efficiency, whether it's in a building, whether it's an industry, or building a process, what needs to happen is not just with hardware, right? You need to be able to extract data from products, from systems, you need to be able to make sense of that data, to analyze it and then to act on it, right? To sort of close the loop from data to insight, insights to action, so that's where for us, the digital transformation was not just about digitizing ourselves, but it was also about augmenting the value proposition that we have for our customers, augmenting what we can offer our customer base. We offer services that could push the boundaries of, you know, efficiency and sustainability and then we're all about adding an information component, right? A data component on top of, you know, the best hardware and software. So that's sort of of the evolution and you were speaking about the mandate. So the mandate is really around four things. First is really, is of a digital business so how we create digital offers that are going to augment to complement our existing offers, making, you know, taking advantage of cloud, taking advantage of analytics, AIs, and providing, you know, predictive maintenance, providing optimization services, right? That can augment our value prop. It's also about bringing the ecosystem of partners that can really reinforce those value props for those digital affairs. So it's really first about that digital business, then it's about digitizing our sales and it's three things. It's first how we engage customers, so customers and partners who're thinking about what's our digital footprint? How we create basically a digital experience for our customers and partners that is even better than the one we're having in the physical world. Then it's about operation, so our backend systems, you know, making sure that we have a backend system that scales. And the last mandate is security. >> Okay, it's a pretty broad mandate. A lot of things going on, 140,000 people working for Schneider, not to mention you talked about your customers, your partners, all of these things. >> Hervé: Absolutely. >> You know, what's the scope of this, how many years ago did this start? Is there a phased rollout that you're looking, is there, you know, was there just a budget assigned to it? Bring us a little bit as to how this all rolls out. >> So, sure, a couple of things. I would say, so we started three years ago, really, with digital mandate. Only that started well before because actually, you know, if you're in the business of industrial automation, you haven't waited the advent of IOT to connect machines to a supervisor regulator to controls, etc. Now what happened is, of course, the power of a cloud, the power of analytics, and you could take things even further. So really three years ago was when we started thinking about Schneider Digital, and the way we thought about it is we didn't want it to be something totally on the side of the business, so it's not a separate P&L, it's not, you know, a separate organization, we're serving the businesses, we're augmenting the businesses, we're providing them with transversal capabilities, we're providing our businesses with digital services platform-level component that they can reuse, etc. So that they can go faster in addressing their customers. And it was critical for us to find that sort of appropriate distance, if you will, because you need to incubate a digital business, but at the same time, if it just happens on the side, you never augment the core. And so you kind of lose, right? The main benefit out of it. >> Yeah, it's nice that you have the background of also being a CIO. Everything that I'm hearing you talking about is what we hear from many leading companies out there, that it's, right, it's not just doing what the business asks, it's helping to often create new products or, you know, in many cases, even, you know, it's innovation helping to drive the business. I want to, you mentioned at the end of one of your last pieces, talked about security. That's something critical when you're talking about data, and in your CDO role, tell us a little bit about the security of how that's involved in this total solution. >> Sure, so far as you know, it's of course became, you know, more and more important over time. And we're really here to rethink how we're approaching security, right? Going away from this idea of defending the perimeter, moving to concepts much more like a zero trust approach because the world has changed with employees that like to work from, you know, their taxis and planes, and we had really to rethink the posture, right?, of Schneider Electric, and also how we work with customers, and we can help, how we can help our own customers improving the cybersecurity of their building or industrial operations, right? So we have, we see it as a pretty broad mandate, actually, quite end-to-end, it's not just about, you know, building thick walls, I think the times of perimeter defense are long gone, but it's really about thinking about it as a full cycle from identification to recovery and putting a risk-based approach and some, you know, continuous improvement approach into it. A lot of discipline, basically. >> All right, and Hervé, are there some partners that were important in this digital transformation? >> So overall or specific in security? >> Both, yeah. >> So yes, I mean, we have big partners, and you know, you wouldn't, you could guess, right? I mean, of course you know we are working a lot with Amazon, we're working a lot with Microsoft, we're working a lot with Salesforce, on the system integration side, you know, we work with Cap Gemini, with Accenture, so we have, of course, a bunch of yeah, of traditional partners, you know, you would expect. I mean, we try to be more and more very considerate about what we want to do ourselves and when we basically, you know, delegate some functional points to partners. And then we also created an ecosystem of partners around security and Schneider is a very partner-centric company because we actually work with through partners most of the time. So, you know, working as an ecosystem is actually something that's pretty natural to us, we just had to learn how to do it in the digital age. >> Yeah, that's great, a company of your size, right? It's not only the suppliers there, but building that ecosystem, yeah. Anything more on the security side that you want to call out, regarding that journey? >> So, you know, we've been working, we've developed a lot. I mean, we felt that security was, it takes a village, right? And the ecosystem approach was even more important, so we've been working with Zscaler on a network-level security, we've been working with IBM and Deloitte, on other areas, we've been working with Cylance as well, I mean, I wouldn't, there's a long list, right? But we've tried to build an ecosystem both at a surface level and at a solution level 'cause the problem often with security is that, you know, you can have a lot of point solutions that would solve a very narrow problem, but it's really, you know, what really makes a difference is your ability to integrate, is your ability to have a pane of glass where you can figure out correlations and then pretty quickly take action, so it's striking that balance between adding solution that would add you a new source of information, you understanding of your context with the ability to act on this information. >> Yeah, and Hervé, what lessons have you learned going through this? You talked about the balance between what you do in-house versus what you look to outside, that's a general trend we've seen in cloud for the last 10 years or more, so, you know, looking back at what you've done so far in three years, any advice that you'd give to your peers? >> Probably three things. So the first thing you mentioned is the ecosystem, right? Is that it's not us versus them, it's how you embark an ecosystem of partners and how you bring some logic in that ecosystem. So that's really key. The second thing is really scale. I think I always say that in digital, it's always super easy, you know, to come with the latest shiny object, do a proof of concept, etc. But usually, that doesn't matter. The key sauce, the secret sauce is how you scale. Often and in particular in today's world, people tend to have a misconception of scale, that this is just size. Actually, very often in, you know, in digital, scale is about replicability, it's how easy can you replicate? Which is a slightly different concept when you think about it. But thinking scale first, I mean, you know, is so critical to us. And the third point would be performance management, actually, we've spent a lot of time defining, or maybe that's my roots as a finance person a long time ago, but it's, you know, what does success mean, right? What are the metrics of success? We'll call them the true north. What true norths are we pursuing? And how do we allocate resource? Because at the end of the day, you'll only scale if you're able to allocate resource, so if you want to have a sophisticated digital organization, you need to start by having a sophisticated resource allocation process. >> Yeah, how about the outcomes? You know, what if ultimately your end user customers, what do they see out of this digital transformation? And also would love if there's any commentary on the employees, we understand, you know, getting them involved in training and the like can be challenging, but you know, ultimately, you know, how does digital impact both your external and internal customers? >> Sure, so, let me unpack that, right? In terms of true north or outcomes, the key thing we look at first is how we create the digital business, on how much are we creating adoption, right? With our customers. So we really track, you know, how many new things we and our ecosystem, how much more value are we creating to our customers? Are those customers adopting those new value points? Those new solutions? Those new ideas? So, and of course, you know, how much are we growing behind that, etc.? But it's really this idea of value and adoption to start with. When we look at the engagement, the customer side, we look at the customer satisfaction in the physical world and we compare it with the customer satisfaction in the digital world. And we want the two to be at par. When it comes to the backend, we look at how much we're simplifying that backend, so we're tracking technical depth and so forth. And then on security, we look at external scoring so that we always, you know, keep ourselves (laughs) right next to the external assessment and how we're doing. So that's basically, you know, how we look at the four dimensions that I was mentioning at the beginning. To answer the second part of your question, which was more about employees, I mean, it's a huge effort, of course, you know, creating the organization, a lot of recruitments, a lot of training, we've been working a lot on, you know, providing you with a digital citizenship course on up to very technical course we found completely our approach to learning, and there are many, many aspects of the employee experience that we've been working on, I mean, providing mobility, providing, you know, on finding that balance, right? Between security and enabling the new world of work where people are going to work on the go and offering them a much better level of access basically to the corporate resources, mobile, and so forth. This has been a massive transformation over a year. >> Hervé, the last thing I'd like to ask you, Just, you know, the changing dynamics of organizations today, as we started out talking, you know, CDO is still a relatively new role out there. The role of the CIO has changed an awful lot, you know, over the length of our careers, so, you know, what are you seeing in those dynamics? You've worn both of those hats and you know, where do you see things going and any feedback you'd give to the industry to make the lives easier of the CDOs and CIOs out there? >> Well, I think it's, you know, I would say I've seen the roles held very differently from an industry to another. So, you know, it's probably hard to replicate from, you know, the energy management and industrial automation industry to others, but in an industry like ours, where the products are becoming digital because basically, you know, you want to create data in the real world, you want to be able to process that data, create insights from that data, and then you want to be able to act in the real world based on those data. You really need to look at those two aspects, and there was a great, actually, paper from MIT a while ago about digitized on digital, so really, I really like to say digital is really about creating this digital business, you know? Real world data, transforming this real world data in insights and action and then acting in the real world, while CIO is mostly being about how you are digitizing the company, right? So, the employee experience, the customer experience, the partner experience, having transforming your backend into a machine that scales, and both equally share that last mandate that's even a broader mandate, at the level of the enterprise that goes with security. So that's how I would roughly, if you will, you know, define the space. >> Hervé Coureil, thank you so much for sharing your experiences, it's been a pleasure talking with you. >> Hervé: Thanks for having me. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, we're here at Schneider Electric's office in Boston, Massachusetts, and as always, thanks for watchin' theCUBE. (energetic electronic music)