>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban Cloud brought to you by Silicon Angle. >>Welcome back to the Cubes. Special Presentation on the Future of Cloud. Three years ago, Alan Nance said to me that in order to really take advantage of Cloud and Dr Billions of dollars of value, you have to change the operating model. I've never forgotten that statement have explored it from many angles over the last three years. In fact, it was one of the motivations for me actually running this program for our audience. Of course with me is Alan Nance. He's a change agent. He's led transformations that large organizations, including I N G Bank, Royal, Philips, Barclays Bank and many others. He's also a co founder of Citrus Collab. Alan, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the program. >>Thanks for having me again there. >>All right. So when we were preparing for this interview you shared with me the following you said enterprise, I t often hasn't really tapped the true powers that are available to them to make real connections to take advantage of that opportunity. Connections to the business, That is What >>do >>you mean by that. >>Well, I think, you know, we've been saying for quite a long time that enterprise. It is certainly a big part of our past in technology. But you know, just how much is it going to be in the future on, you know, enterprise, I t has had a difficult time under The pressure's off being a centralized organization with large expanse of large Catholics, while at the same time we see obviously the digital operations growing oftentimes in separate reporting structures and closer to the business on. And what I'm thinking right now is enterprise i t. If it has made this transition to cloud operating models, whether they are proprietary or whether they are public cloud, there's a huge opportunity for enterprise. I t. Thio connect the dots in a way that no other part of the organization can do that. And when they connect those dots working closely with the business, they unleash a huge amount of value that is beyond things like efficiency or things like just just just providing cloud computing to be flexible. It has to be much more about value generation. Andi. I think that a lot of leaders of enterprise I t have not really grasped that, Andi. I think that's the opportunity is sitting right in front of them right now. >>You know what I've seen lately? I wonder if you could. Comment is You know, obviously we always talk about the stove pipes, but you've you've seen, you know, the CEO, >>the chief >>data officer that you just mentioned the chief digital officer, the chief information security officer. They've largely been in their own silos. I'm definitely seeing a move to bring those together. I'm seeing a lot of CDOs and CEO roles come together and even the chief information or the head of security reporting up into that where there's there seems to be as your sort of suggesting just a lot more visibility across the entire organization. Is it Is it an organizational issue? Is it? Ah, is it a mindset? But only if you could comment. >>Well, I would say it zits, two or three different things, but certainly it's an organizational issue. But I think it starts off with a cultural issue. Andi, I think what you're seeing, and if you look at the more progressive companies that you see, I think you are also seeing a new emergence off the enlightened technology leader s O. With all respect to me and my generation, our tenure as the owners off the large enterprise, it is coming to an end. And we grew up trying to master the complexity of the off the silos. As you so definitely pointed out, we were battling this falling technology, trying to get it under control, trying to get the costs down, trying to reduce Catholics. And a lot of that was focused on the partnerships that we had with technology suppliers on DSO. That mindset of being engineers struggling for control. Having your most important part of being a technology company itself that now I think is giving way is giving way to a new generation of technology leaders who haven't grown up with that culture. Onda. Oftentimes what I see is that the new enlightened CEOs are female, and they are coming into the role outside of the regular promotion change. So they're coming to these rolls through finance H R marketing on their bringing. A different focus on the focus is much more about how do we work together to create an amazing experience for our employees and for our customers on an experience that drives value. So I think there's a reset in the culture. And clearly, when you start talking about creating a value chain to improve experience, you're also talking about bringing people together from different multidisciplinary backgrounds to make that happen. >>Well, that's kind of, you know, it makes me think about Amazon's mantra of working backwards. You know, start with the experience and and and a lot of a lot of CEOs that I know would love tow beam or involved in the business. But they're just so busy trying to keep the lights on like you said, trying to manage vendors. And like, you know, I had a discussion the other day, Allen with an individual. We were talking about how you know, you got a shift from a product mindset to a platform mindset. But you know, you've said that that platform thinking you're always ahead of the game platform, thinking it needs to make way for ecosystem thinking, you know, unless you're Internet giant scale business like Amazon or Spotify, you said you're gonna be in a niche market if you really don't tap that ecosystem again. If you could explain what you mean by that. >>I think right now if this movement to experience is fundamental, right? So Joe Pine and Gilmore wrote about the experience economy as far back in 1990. But the things that they predicted then are here now. And so what we're now seeing is that consumers have choice. Employees have choice. I think the pandemic has accelerated that. And so what happens when you, when you when you put an enterprise under that type of external pressure, is that it fragments and even fragment into ways it can fragment dysfunctional E so that every silo tries to go into a a defensive mode protective mode? That's obviously the wrong way to go. But the fragmentation that's exciting is when it fragments into ecosystems that are actually working together to solve an experience problem. And those are not platforms. They're too big, you know, When I was Phillips, I was very enthusiastic about working on this connected health care platform, but I think what I started to realize was it takes too much time. It requires too much investment on you are bringing people to you based on your capability. Where is what the market needs is much more agile than that. So if we look in health care, for instance, and you want to connect patients at home with patient with the doctors in the hospital, in the old model you so I'm gonna build a platform for this. I'm gonna have doctors with a certain competence and they're gonna be connecting into this. And so are the patients in some way. And so are the insurers. I think what you're going to see now is different. We're going to say, Let's get together A small team that understands it's called, For instance, let's get a an insurance provider. Let's get a health care operator. Let's get a healthcare tech company on. Let's pull their data in a way that helps us to create solutions now that that can roll out in 30 60 or 90 days. And the thing that that makes that possible is the move to the public crowd because now there are so many specialized supplier, specialized skill sets available that you can connect to through Amazon through Google, through through azure that that these these things that we usedto I think we're very, very difficult are now much easier. I don't want to minimize the effort, but these things are on the table right now. Thio Revalue. >>So you're also a technologist and I wanna ask you and and everybody always says, it's the technology is easy part. It's the people in the process and, you know, way we can all agree on that. However, sometimes technology could be a blocker. And the example that you just mentioned, I have a couple of takeaways from that. First of all, you know the platform thinking it sounds like it's more command and control, and you're advocating for Let's get the ecosystem who are closest to the problem. To solve those problems, however, they decide and leverage the cloud. So my question is from a technology standpoint, does that echo have system have to be on the same cloud with the state of today's technology? Can it be across clouds can be there pieces on Prem? What's your thinking on that? >>I think I think exactly the opposite. It cannot be monolithic and centralized. It's just not practical because that was that was that would cause you too much time on interoperability and who owns what you see The power behind experience is data. And so the most important technical part of this is dealing with data liquidity. So the data that for instance, um, somebody like Kaiser has or the the Harvard Health Care have or the Philips have that's not going to be put into a central place. But for the ecosystem mobilization, there will be subsets of that data flowing between those parties. So the technical, the heart there is how do we manage data liquidity? How do we manage the security around the data liquidity on How do we also understand that what we're building is going to be ever changing and maybe temporary, because on idea may not work, eh? So you've got this idea that the timeliness is very, very important. The duration is very uncertain. The motor the energy for this is data liquidity data transfer, data sharing. But the vehicle is the combination off. Probably crowd in my mind. >>Somebody said to me, Hey, that data is like water. It'll go. It'll go where it wants to go where it needs to go. You can't try to control it. It's let it go. Uh, now, of course, many organizations, particularly large incumbent organizations there. They have many, many data pipelines. They have many processes, many roles, and they're struggling toe actually kind of inject automation into those pipelines. Maybe that's machine intelligence, uh, really doom or data sharing across that pipeline and and ultimately compress the end and cycle. Time to go from raw data insights that are actionable. What are you seeing there and what's your advice? >>Well, I think the the you make some really good points. But what I hear also a little bit in your observation is you're still observing Enterprises on the end of the focus of the enterprise has been on optimizing the processes within the boundaries of its own system. That's why we have s a P. And that's why we have a sales force and, to some degree, even service. Now it's all been about optimizing how we move data, how we create products and services on. That's not the game. Now that's not an important game. Three important game right now is how do I connect to my employees? How do I connect to my customers in a way that provides them a memorable experience? And the realization is we've seen this already a manufacturing for some years. I can't be allowed things to people. So I have to understand where the first part of data comes in. I have to understand who this person is that I am trying to target. Who is the person that needs this memorable experience on what is that memorable experience gonna look like? And I'm going to need my data. But I'm also going to need the data of other actors in that ecosystem. And then I'm gonna have to build that ecosystem really quickly to take advantage off the system. So this throws a monkey wrench in traditional ideas of standardization. It throws a monkey wrench in the idea that enterprise I t is about efficiency on. But if I may, I just want to come back to the day I because I think we're looking in the wrong places. Things like a I let me give you an example. Today there are 2.2 million people working in call centers around the world. If we imagine that they work in three shifts, that means that any one time there are 700,000 people on the phone to a customer on that customer is calling that company because they're vested. They're calling them with advice. They're calling them with a question. They're calling them with a complaint. It is the most important source off valuable data that any company has. And yet what have we done with that? What we've done with that is we have attacked it with efficiency. So instead of saying these are the most valuable sources of information, let's use a I to to tag the sentiment in the recordings that we make with our most valuable stakeholders on this and analyze them for trends, ideas, things that need to change. We don't do that. What we do is we were going to give every call agent two minutes to get them off the phone. For God's sake, don't ask so many import difficult questions. Don't spend money talking to the customer. Try to make them happy so they get a score and say they hire you at the end of the core and then you're done. So so where the AI and automation needs to come in is not in improving efficiency but in mining value. And the real opportunity with a I Is that Joe Pine says this. If you are able to understand the customer rather than interpret them, that is so valuable to the customer that they will pay money for that. I think that's where the whole focus needs to be in this new teaming of enterprise I t. And that's true business. >>It's a great observations. I think we can all relate to that in your call center example, or you've been in a restaurant. You're trying to turn the tables fast and get you out of there. And that's the last time you ever go to that restaurant and you're you're taking that notion of systems thinking and broadening it to ecosystems thinking. And you've said ecosystems have a better chance of success when they're used to stage an experience for whether it's the employees for the brand and of course, the customer and the partners. >>That's it. That's exactly yet. So every technology leader should be asking themselves what contribution can can my and my organization makes of this movement because the business understands the problem, they don't understand how to solve it, and we've chosen a different dialogues. We've been talking a lot about what cloud could do and the functionality that clown has and the potential that clown has on those aerial good things. But it really comes together now when we work together and we, as the technology group brings in, they know how we know how toe connect quickly through the public cloud. We know how to do that in a secure way. We know how to manage data, liquidity at scale, and we can stand these things up through our, you know, our new learning of agile and devils we can stand. These ecosystems are fairly quickly now. There's still a whole bunch of culture between different businesses that have to work together through the idea that I have to protect my data rather than serve the customer. But once you get past that, there's a whole new conversation enterprise. It you can have that, I think, gives them a new lease of life, new value. And I just think it's a really, really exciting time. Yes, >>so you're seeing the intersection of a lot of different things. You talk about cloud as you know, an enabler for sure, and that's great. We could talk about that, but you've got this what you're referring to before is, you know, maybe you're in a niche market, but you have your marketplace and like you're saying, you can actually use that through an ecosystem to really leave her a much, much broader available market and then vector that into the experience economy. You know, we talk about subscriptions, the AP economy. That really is new thinking, >>yes, and I think what you're seeing here is it zits, not radical. Inasmuch as all of these ideas have been around, some of them have been around since the nineties. But what's radical is the way in which we can now mix and match these technologies to make this happen. That's gone so quickly on, I would argue to you, and I've argued this before. Scale scale is a concept within an organization is dead. It doesn't give you enough value. It gives you enough efficiency, and it gives you a cloud. But it doesn't give you three opportunity to target the niche experiences that you need to do. So. If we start to think off an organization as a a combination off known and unknown potential ecosystems, you start to build a different operating model, a different architectural idea you start to look outside more than you start to look insight. Which is why the cultural change that we were talking about just now goes hand in hand with this because people have to be comfortable thinking in ecosystems that may not yet exist on partnering with people where they bring to the table there, you know, 2030 years of experience in a new and different way. >>Let me make sure I understand that. So you're basically if I understand you're saying that if you're sort of end goal is scale and efficiency at scale, you're you're gonna have a vanilla solution for your customers and your ecosystem. Whereas if you will allow this outside in thinking to come in, you're gonna be able to actually customize those experience experiences and get the value of scale and efficiency. >>Right? So, I mean, Rory Sutherland, who is ah, big finger in the in. The marketing world has always said, ultimately, scale standardization and best practice lead to mediocrity because you are not focused on the most important thing for your employees or your brand, or you're you're focused on the efficiency factors on. They create very little value in fact, we know that they subvert value. So, yes, we need to have a very big mindset change. >>Yeah, You're a top line thinker, Allen. And and always at the forefront. I really appreciate you coming on to the to the Cuban. Participate in this program. Give us the last word. So if you're a change agent, I wanna I'm an organization, and I want to inject this type of change. Where do I >>start? Well, I think it starts by identifying. Are we going to? Is it are we gonna work on the employee experience? Do we feel that we have a model where the employees that are on stage with customers are so important that the focus has to be employees? We go down that route and we look at what happened to the pandemic. What type of experiences are we going to bring to those employees around their ability to have flow in their work, to get returned on energy, to excite the customers? Let's do that. Let's figure out what experience are we driving now? What does that experience need to be if we're the customer side? As I said, let's look ALS. The sources of information that we already have. You know, I know companies to spend hundreds of millions a year trying to figure out what consumers what. And yet if we look in their call centers, you will call up and and they will say to Your call may be recorded for quality purposes and training on this is not true. Less than 10% of those calls that ever listened to on if they are listening to its compliance that's driving that, not the burning desire to better understand the consumer. So if we change that, then we say Okay, so what can we change? What is the experience that we are now able to stage with all we know and with all weaken dio on debts? Start there. Let's start with what is the experience you want to stage? What's the experience landscape look like now? And who do we bring together to make that happen? >>Allen. Fantastic. Having you back in the Cube, it's always a pleasure. And, uh, and thanks so much for participating. >>Thank you, Dave. It's always a pleasure to speak with you. >>Thank you. Everybody, this is Dave Volonte. The Cuban cloud will be right back right after this short break. Stay with