>> Okay, we continue now with the theme of turning ideas into insights so ultimately you can take action. We heard earlier that public cloud first doesn't mean public cloud only. And a winning strategy comprises data, irrespective of physical location on prem, across multiple clouds at the edge where real-time inference is going to drive a lot of incremental value. Data is going to help the world come back to normal we heard, or at least semi normal as we begin to better understand and forecast demand and supply imbalances and economic forces. AI is becoming embedded into every aspect of our business, our people, our processings, and applications. And now we're going to get into some of the foundational principles that support the data and insights centric processes, which are fundamental to digital transformation initiatives. And it's my pleasure to welcome two great guests, Michelle Goetz, who's a Cube alum and VP and principal analyst at Forrester, and doin' some groundbreaking work in this area. And Cindy Maike who is the vice president of industry solutions and value management at Cloudera. Welcome to both of you. >> Welcome, thank you. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right Michelle, let's get into it. Maybe you could talk about your foundational core principles. You start with data. What are the important aspects of this first principle that are achievable today? >> It's really about democratization. If you can't make your data accessible, it's not usable. Nobody's able to understand what's happening in the business and they don't understand what insights can be gained or what are the signals that are occurring that are going to help them with decisions, create stronger value or create deeper relationships with their customers due to their experiences. So it really begins with how do you make data available and bring it to where the consumer of the data is rather than trying to hunt and peck around within your ecosystem to find what it is that's important. >> Great thank you for that. So, Cindy, I wonder in hearing what Michelle just said, what are your thoughts on this? And when you work with customers at Cloudera, are there any that stand out that perhaps embody the fundamentals that Michelle just shared? >> Yeah, there's quite a few. And especially as we look across all the industries that were actually working with customers in. A few that stand out in top of mind for me is one is IQVIA. And what they're doing with real-world evidence and bringing together data across the entire healthcare and life sciences ecosystems, bringing it together in different shapes and formats, making it accessible by both internally, as well as for the entire extended ecosystem. And then for SIA, who's working to solve some predictive maintenance issues within, they're are a European car manufacturer and how do they make sure that they have efficient and effective processes when it comes to fixing equipment and so forth. And then also there's an Indonesian based telecommunications company, Techsomel, who's bringing together over the last five years, all their data about their customers and how do they enhance a customer experience, how do they make information accessible, especially in these pandemic and post pandemic times. Just getting better insights into what customers need and when do they need it? >> Cindy, platform is another core principle. How should we be thinking about data platforms in this day and age? Where do things like hybrid fit in? What's Cloudera's point of view here? >> Platforms are truly an enabler. And data needs to be accessible in many different fashions, and also what's right for the business. When I want it in a cost and efficient and effective manner. So, data resides everywhere, data is developed and it's brought together. So you need to be able to balance both real time, our batch, historical information. It all depends upon what your analytical workloads are and what types of analytical methods you're going to use to drive those business insights. So putting in placing data, landing it, making it accessible, analyzing it, needs to be done in any accessible platform, whether it be a public cloud doing it on-prem or a hybrid of the two is typically what we're seeing being the most successful. >> Great, thank you. Michelle let's move on a little bit and talk about practices and processes, the next core principles. Maybe you could provide some insight as to how you think about balancing practices and processes while at the same time managing agility. >> Yeah, it's a really great question 'cause it's pretty complex when you have to start to connect your data to your business. The first thing to really gravitate towards is what are you trying to do. And what Cindy was describing with those customer examples is that they're all based off of business goals, off of very specific use cases. That helps kind of set the agenda about what is the data and what are the data domains that are important to really understanding and recognizing what's happening within that business activity and the way that you can affect that either in near time or real time, or later on, as you're doing your strategic planning. What that's balancing against is also being able to not only see how that business is evolving, but also be able to go back and say, "Well, can I also measure the outcomes from those processes and using data and using insight? Can I also get intelligence about the data to know that it's actually satisfying my objectives to influence my customers in my market? Or is there some sort of data drift or detraction in my analytic capabilities that are allowing me to be effective in those environments?" But everything else revolves around that and really thinking succinctly about a strategy that isn't just data aware, what data do I have and how do I use it? But coming in more from that business perspective, to then start to be data driven, recognizing that every activity you do from a business perspective leads to thinking about information that supports that and supports your decisions. And ultimately getting to the point of being insight driven, where you're able to both describe what you want your business to be with your data, using analytics to then execute on that fluidly and in real time. And then ultimately bringing that back with linking to business outcomes and doing that in a continuous cycle where you can test and you can learn, you can improve, you can optimize and you can innovate. Because you can see your business as it's happening. And you have the right signals and intelligence that allow you to make great decisions. >> I like how you said near time or real time, because it is a spectrum. And at one end of the spectrum, autonomous vehicles. You've got to make a decision in real time but near real-time, or real-time, it's in the eyes of the beholder if you will. It might be before you lose the customer or before the market changes. So it's really defined on a case by case basis. I wonder Michelle, if you could talk about in working with a number of organizations I see folks, they sometimes get twisted up in understanding the dependencies that technology generally, and the technologies around data specifically can sometimes have on critical business processes. Can you maybe give some guidance as to where customers should start? Where can we find some of the quick wins and high returns? >> It comes first down to how does your business operate? So you're going yo take a look at the business processes and value stream itself. And if you can understand how people, and customers, partners, and automation are driving that step by step approach to your business activities, to realize those business outcomes, it's way easier to start thinking about what is the information necessary to see that particular step in the process, and then take the next step of saying what information is necessary to make a decision at that current point in the process? Or are you collecting information, asking for information that is going to help satisfy a downstream process step or a downstream decision? So constantly making sure that you are mapping out your business processes and activities, aligning your data process to that helps you now rationalize do you need that real time, near real time, or do you want to start creating greater consistency by bringing all of those signals together in a centralized area to eventually oversee the entire operations and outcomes as they happen? It's the process, and the decision points, and acting on those decision points for the best outcome that really determines are you going to move in more of a real-time streaming capacity, or are you going to push back into more of a batch oriented approach? Because it depends on the amount of information and the aggregate of which provides the best insight from that. >> Got it. Let's, bring Cindy back into the conversation here. Cindy, we often talk about people, process, and technology and the roles they play in creating a data strategy that's logical and sound. Can you speak to the broader ecosystem and the importance of creating both internal and external partners within an organization? >> Yeah. And that's kind of building upon what Michelle was talking about. If you think about datas and I hate to use the phrase almost, but the fuel behind the process and how do you actually become insight-driven. And you look at the capabilities that you're needing to enable from that business process, that insight process. Your extended ecosystem on how do I make that happen? Partners and picking the right partner is important because a partner is one that actually helps you implement what your decisions are. So looking for a partner that has the capability that believes in being insight-driven and making sure that when you're leveraging data within your process that if you need to do it in a real-time fashion, that they can actually meet those needs of the business. And enabling on those process activities. So the ecosystem looking at how you look at your vendors, and fundamentally they need to be that trusted partner. Do they bring those same principles of value, of being insight driven? So they have to have those core values themselves in order to help you as a business person enable those capabilities. >> So Cindy I'm cool with fuel, but it's like super fuel when you talk about data. 'Cause it's not scarce, right? You're never going to run out. (Dave chuckling) So Michelle, let's talk about leadership. Who leads? What does so-called leadership look like in an organization that's insight driven? >> So I think the really interesting thing that is starting to evolve as late is that organizations, enterprises are really recognizing that not just that data is an asset and data has value, but exactly what we're talking about here, data really does drive what your business outcomes are going to be. Data driving into the insight or the raw data itself has the ability to set in motion what's going to happen in your business processes and your customer experiences. And so, as you kind of think about that, you're now starting to see your CEO, your CMO, your CRO coming back and saying, I need better data. I need information that's representative of what's happening in my business. I need to be better adaptive to what's going on with my customers. And ultimately that means I need to be smarter and have clearer forecasting into what's about ready to come. Not just one month, two months, three months, or a year from now, but in a week or tomorrow. And so that is having a trickle down effect to then looking at two other types of roles that are elevating from technical capacity to more business capacity. You have your chief data officer that is shaping the experiences with data and with insight and reconciling what type of information is necessary with it within the context of answering these questions and creating a future fit organization that is adaptive and resilient to things that are happening. And you also have a chief digital officer who is participating because they're providing the experience and shaping the information and the way that you're going to interact and execute on those business activities. And either running that autonomously or as part of an assistance for your employees and for your customers. So really to go from not just data aware to data-driven, but ultimately to be insight driven, you're seeing way more participation and leadership at that C-suite level and just underneath, because that's where the subject matter expertise is coming in to know how to create a data strategy that is tightly connected to your business strategy. >> Great, thank you. Let's wrap, and I've got a question for both of you, maybe Cindy, you could start and then Michelle bring us home. A lot of customers, they want to understand what's achievable. So it's helpful to paint a picture of a maturity model. I'd love to go there, but I'm not going to get there anytime soon, but I want to take some baby steps. So when you're performing an analysis on an insight driven organization, Cindy what do you see as the major characteristics that define the differences between sort of the early beginners sort of fat middle, if you will, and then the more advanced constituents? >> Yeah, I'm going to build upon what Michelle was talking about is data as an asset. And I think also being data aware and trying to actually become insight driven. Companies can also have data, and they can have data as a liability. And so when you're data aware, sometimes data can still be a liability to your organization. If you're not making business decisions on the most recent and relevant data, you're not going to be insight-driven. So you've got to move beyond that data awareness, where you're looking at data just from an operational reporting. But data's fundamentally driving the decisions that you make as a business. You're using data in real time. You're leveraging data to actually help you make and drive those decisions. So when we use the term you're data-driven, you can't just use the term tongue-in-cheek. It actually means that I'm using the recent, the relevant, and the accuracy of data to actually make the decisions for me, because we're all advancing upon, we're talking about artificial intelligence and so forth being able to do that. If you're just data aware, I would not be embracing on leveraging artificial intelligence. Because that means I probably haven't embedded data into my processes. Yes, data could very well still be a liability in your organization, so how do you actually make it an asset? >> Yeah I think data aware it's like cable ready. (Dave chuckling) So Michelle, maybe you could add to what Cindy just said and maybe add as well any advice that you have around creating and defining a data strategy. >> So every data strategy has a component of being data aware. This is like building the data museum. How do you capture everything that's available to you? How do you maintain that memory of your business? Bringing in data from your applications, your partners, third parties, wherever that information is available, you want to ensure that you're capturing it and you're managing and you're maintaining it. And this is really where you're starting to think about the fact that it is an asset, it has value. But you may not necessarily know what that value is yet. If you move into a category of data driven, what starts to shift and change there is you're starting to classify label, organize the information in context of how you're making decisions and how you do business. It could start from being more proficient from an analytic purpose. You also might start to introduce some early stages of data science in there. So you can do some predictions and some data mining to start to weed out some of those signals. And you might have some simple types of algorithms that you're deploying to do a next next best action, for example. And that's what data-driven is really about. You're starting to get value out of it. The data itself is starting to make sense in context of your business, but what you haven't done quite yet, which is what insight driven businesses are, is really starting to take away the gap between when you see it, know it, and then get the most value and really exploit what that is at the time when it's right, so in the moment. We talk about this in terms of perishable insights, data and insights are ephemeral. And we want to ensure that the way that we're managing that and delivering on that data and insights is in time with our decisions and the highest value outcome we're going to have, that that insight can provide us. So are we just introducing it as data-driven organizations where we could see spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations and lots of mapping to help make longer strategic decisions, or are those insights coming up and being activated in an automated fashion within our business processes that are either assisting those human decisions at the point when they're needed, or an automated decisions for the types of digital experiences and capabilities that we're driving in our organization. So it's going from, I'm a data hoarder if I'm data aware to I'm interested in what's happening as a data-driven organization and understanding my data. And then lastly being insight driven is really where light between business, data and insight, there is none, it's all coming together for the best outcomes. >> Right, it's like people are acting on perfect or near perfect information. Or machines are doing so with a high degree of confidence. Great advice and insights, and thank you both for sharing your thoughts with our audience today, it was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, now we're going to go into our industry deep dives. There are six industry breakouts. Financial services, insurance, manufacturing, retail communications, and public sector. Now each breakout is going to cover two distinct use cases for a total of essentially 12 really detailed segments. Now each of these is going to be available on demand, but you can scan the calendar on the homepage and navigate to your breakout session of choice. Or for more information, click on the agenda page and take a look to see which session is the best fit for you and then dive in. Join the chat and feel free to ask questions or contribute your knowledge, opinions, and data. Thanks so much for being part of the community, and enjoy the rest of the day. (upbeat music)