okay we're back here live at IBM iod this is the cube our flagship program about the advances in there from the noise i'm john furrier the founders look at an angle enjoy my co-host David on to the co-founder Wikibon or go to SiliconANGLE calm for the reference point in tech innovation Kotobuki bun or for free research research analysts they're putting out free content and of course you always come by the Cuban see where we are in the events wouldn't be at Amazon Web Services event with all the events extracted sniffle noise and share that with you our next guest is Tom de Klerk CIO of superior group welcome to the queue thank you Dave you and I'd love to talk about CEOs because you know maybe we get the real scoop on things so first why you here at IBM iod let's get that out of the way to talk about some of the things you doing here and what you're seeing here sure so we something with the company three years we're a staffing organization why I'm here I was actually here last year and we've implemented three major systems in the last three years one was SI p and embrace the ERP system second being IBM connections and the third being IBM cognos and so over the course of the three years you know trying to roll off these projects so I'm here to to learn more about you know the capabilities of cognos and the biggest one for me is that with cognos and SI p SI p when they bought their in iowa city i'm sorry when IBM bought cognos it was 881 they had a report pack specifically for SI p customers so when they went to 10 1 and 10 2 they didn't offer that product so there they just started developing a year ago I sat down with some senior executives if the IBM organization and said you guys are losing an opportunity here customers that have an implementation of SI p and trying to get information out other than using SI piece product business analytics so they over the course of the year have been developing a rapport pack that they can offer the customers so we were part of the beta testing program for IBM and so that's I'm here to actually talk to some other people and understand something listen to you see how they impact on product development that's good well yeah there's there's the continuous improvements even I'm even on the well you look at the report pack now it's still in my mind and I fed this feedback back night there's it's a do list oh absolutely but that's not any type of a rollout of any product you can expect that so tell us a little bit more about superior group you guys your staffing company would yes we're a we're a company that's headquartered in Buffalo New York and we started back in nineteen fifty-seven it's a privately held company we have a total of 400 staff employees and roughly anywhere from seven to nine thousand contract employees so we provide workforce solutions as well as outsourcing and primarily in three areas people process as well as the outsourcing project outsourcing so on the people side it's your traditional recruiting for staff augmentation executive Research recruiting as well as direct placement and then on the process ID we offer managed services program we also offer vendor managed services independent independent contractor compliance and then on the outsourced and we have IT outsourcing HR outsourcing so that's pretty much our companies make up and tell we were talking off-camera about sort of the role the CIO and you'd like to everybody would like to be more strategic if they had time but a lot of the cios especially mid-sized organizations she doesn't don't have as many you know people to to be able to sit back and do some of those more strategic things but so a lot of CIOs talk about transforming their organization you've kind of transformed it with three huge projects in the past what would you say this was two years yes sir yeah the solicitors perspective SI p was started in july of 2010 and then started last year with the IBM connections and the Cognos reporting okay so but still over sure yeah let me that's that's some major disruptions to talk about how you manage that so it was extremely challenging especially given the number of resources that we have were a mid-sized company and when I came from a manufacturing organization spent 15 years working for manufacture Murray so going from that vertical into professional services vertical I was used to used to having a lot of IT resources to be able to support an organization so you highly leveraged the contractors and consultants both with sa fie they're implementing partner as well as an IBM it was critical for us to leverage IBM's knowledge and their skill set in order to be successful in rolling out our products so the SI p rollout was was the most complicated i'm sonia to me by far by far it took yeah we rolled out ECC six-point lead us with the full suite payroll sore we provide pay Rowling's one of our services so HCM which is human capital management the sales and distribution material management so a lot of the fundamental components of sa p we rolled out so it was it was quite a an interesting experience that was that core yes he went capital measurement or success factors no ms core we've looked at successfactors about it about a year ago and it just doesn't fit quite fit at this point in time as they start to develop in the product becomes a little more mature that may be a better fit for our organization and connections what was the driver behind bringing them in and talk about that a little bit sure so for us connections we did some analysis early this year breaking in january went a project strategy where we looked and discussed with some of our internal associates and interviewed about 30 staff employees and one of the only two fundamental things that came back out of that analysis was one we don't communicate properly our business goals throughout our organization so we're headquartered in Buffalo but we have over 50 locations worldwide so we have a lot of connect you know offices remotely and people that aren't sitting at our headquarters and that was another concern of feedback that was brought back to us was that we don't have the ability or the people with the remote offices felt like they weren't part of the the whole process or communicating properly with a corporate headquarters so we felt that this was the perfect platform to allow us to enable them so we did quite a bit of research we have a director of marketing and mobile strategy that went through a complete analysis and we looked at the SharePoint product but what's nice about the this product as opposed to the SharePoint is the the look and feel of you know like a linkedin the Twitter and that social media aspect of it so it really leveraged us leverage for us an opportunity to to collaborate and to reach out to these locations so the objectives were collaboration better communication so how is that being used how widely is it being used how did it change things it's really curious as to the outcome so actually it wasn't very positive outcome in it you know as you roll out of when you take a company you actually do a transformation into a social media type organization it's never in my opinion ever done it's a continuous process so we're still evolving as we go along I think the key is to be a front is that have the right adoption strategy so last year in january i attended the IBM connect down in florida and i actually participated an event with some senior execs with sandy sandy carter from IBM who heads up that part of the organization the social media and so it really it was about adoption strategy it's keith really not only is it just to implement it that's an IT thing and that's pretty straightforward but i've seen in the past it's always the challenge of not only just implementing the technology but then it's it's adopting and getting your users to use that and so because it had that look and feel that a lot of the people are familiar with you and your facebooks and that it's X have been extremely successful in rolling that out now that said we still think there's additional opportunities and we're looking at doing some enhancements social dashboarding looking at executive blogs a big value at four ization it's just when we roll it out not just internally to our staff employees but rolling it out to our contractors so we have anywhere between seven to nine thousand contractors working for superior and so they'll be working in our business there's a high turnover rate yoko and we'll place someone at a company but maybe work there for a month two months a week and that when they leave that now which goes away with them so we're really targeting our value add to be able to roll this out to even to our contract employee so when they go work on site they start to collaborate share information and invent that they do leave we still harvest that information that's bi-directional too I mean they're a representation of your company even though they are transient but so you can communicate to them like you say executive blogs what the what the corporate messaging is policies whatever it is that they can take it to as representing you essentially as an extension of your workforce and as you say you get knowledge back right oh absolutely and so one of the key values that we places that when we did that analysis I said earlier is that we didn't feel like there was a communication so now with the social media platform in place now we have people that are in our bangalore office can communicate and feel like they're in touch with our corporate headquarters and also their co-workers that are saying it on-site facilities that our customers so it really is improved that collaboration and communication it's really brought the organization together did you ever think at one point we just used you know publicly available social tools Facebook or LinkedIn just start a blog yet we and our organization has done that we have the Twitter count the facebook account but this was an opportunity for us to develop it and Taylor more customized it more for hours or specific names you've integrated those public network lots of little works right you if you go to our website you'll see the links and connections right into that yeah so functionally it's obviously a more rich environment connections right so why don't we talk about that a little bit what sort of what additional value did that bring to you is paying for it well sure is you how to justify it what value did you get there several areas that we feel it brought value one is you can it's a platform that can accessed anywhere so you don't have to be on our internal network to be able to access and collaborate and communicate right so that was a huge value add for our organization allows us to connect and stay stay together it empowered our users to be able to contribute openly be able to collaborate to be able to innovate and be able to take calculated risks from IT standpoint we see a reduction in email I don't have the actual numbers to tell you what percentage reduction an email but I'm pushing very strongly that we have an opportunity to use and leverage connections instead of sending emails traditionally you know people send an email check this where with connections you put the hosts the content or you put the files upload the files in there and they'll send a notification so you're not plugging you know plugging up your email system with additional data so yeah there's a Productivity aspect of that absolutely I think oh god I was Christian and the other thing is that you know the time to market for solutions has definitely reduced and even the the increase in efficiency so I know we spent some time looking at like this ed brillz book on opting in and then there's his situation identifies in the book is the traditional product manager they find him in manufacturing is really moving more towards a social product manager leveraging the IBM connections or for superior we took an opportunity to do that so I got to ask you about the social software Dave and I've been tracking jive all these other companies amor the facebook for the enterprise is kind of what they've been calling it but the feedback we've been hearing from CIOs was that I just favorited I signed something is it's in the social media team is running it that other team and so we were talking about the metaphor that the social media teams are a lot like the web teams in the 90s oh yeah we need a website yeah the kids are doing it right like the new guys the young guys are putting a web pages searchable it grew obviously it's relevant the websites grew and became big business e-commerce social media is the same way it's like everyone can see that it's real they know it's gonna be important it's not a lot of budget associating there's not a lot of personnel so the issue is is that they get implemented these say if they get sold these software packages and then they got to implement it kind of like communities yet this other stuff happening twitter facebook linkedin events live streaming so a lot of other social activations going on so so i want to get your take on as a CIO do you look at get involved in levels like that on the app's side is those apps decisions made with that in mind of like the personnel costs and and and the actual to run it and i've got some guys just for the hey i bought that i don't use anymore why it's just too much hassle right so there's a hassle factor what do you take what's your to my taste first of all I'm very big on when i get an asset or acquire an asset as best you realizing that asset you know and i came to this organization i saw several situations where assets were purchased to your point and just sitting idle because maybe it was a head take additional initiative to implement that so in our situation i work very closely with a gentleman that really did most of the work and doing all the research and its name is Franco he handles our he's a director of digital mobile strategy and so he went out and did all the work for us came back and sat down with myself and our president reviewed what makes the most sense I came from a manufacturing facilities it utilized the SharePoint so I was big at SharePoint so I was kind of was pushing in that direction but when I actually sat down with him i we went through really the true value adds what we can gain from that it was really a no-brainer for us do you ever have a situation where you put you put your fist down so hey you know what we just got to abandon that right now let's cut our losses move on in physics for example is another use case where same same situation I won't name the vendor was an IBM it was another one where hey want to do some new things we don't the staff the guys making us drive this engine until we get an roi out of in other words they were like we're going to ride this Pony until either collapses or ROI comes out of it when in reality they just driving down a cul-de-sac yeah so at some point in an emerging market like we're in agile is the option to abandon right you got to know and to cut the cord right oh absolutely and I'm not you know I'm not in a position where I'd say absolutely one band if it made sense it's right it's got to be a business decision well altima tlie position has always been it's got to work with the business and let the business drive and not i.t i.t is there to enable the business so we can provide our input and on the day they let them make the decisions now we didn't talk about the Cognos implementation any kind of depth so tell me tell me what you're doing with with cognos we talked a little bit about the essay p extension but how are you using cognos so primarily we have as i mentioned before part of our businesses and the managed services programs we offer MSPs which we have a tool called work nexus which is our vendor management solution involves our MSP they our customers will use this tool for recruiting for looking at time clocks looking at the proving timesheets invoicing and so forth so we have some pretty strict requirements of pulling that information now in providing reports to our customers we use our platform developed on it's based on abdominal environment so we in order to give them the reports we create what's called ad-hoc reports out of Domino very limited capabilities so that was our first target area was to use cognos to provide more enrich type dashboards active type reports for our customers we're just about completed with that part of the project the next is really to pulp reports out of sa p and so the standard reports that that i have with that IBM has provided is really more in the SD area as well as in the MM area so for our organization we're so heavily on payroll and people we really need to have report start in that area so and the next year i'm trying to work with a partner local partner in our area LPA systems to help develop more reports tailored towards SI p to provide workers compensation but i need to run a report that pulls out the work of compensation to do an essay p is so much more costly than to do it out of out of the Cognos so that's our goal in the next year's really to pull more reports using cognos out of sa p okay um what if we could talk a little bit about cloud which you're sort of stance on that you know some cio say no way others say yes others get you know shadow I t he coming to the cloud what's the state of cloud from an infrastructure standpoint and even a SAS you organization sure so we're currently in the process actually I'm looking at our organization and a traditional IT become a cost center so I'm trying to actually move it into a profit Center by offering services so we're targeting in the Buffalo area anyways small companies we're offering hosting cloud-based service whether it be private or rather be a public cloud services I'm not opposed at all to using a cloud-based solution in fact I'm on my essay p side for my dr site i'm doing just that i have a contract with a where the company is providing me a a cloud-based solution for my dr ok so but so you use it for disaster recovery are you doing any sort of Production apps in the cloud or would you ever consider doing that or no because we would consider i'm not sure if i consider this company because our information is very this very controlled we fall under the ssae 16 because we house that we host data that has in the HIPAA regulations all the different regulations so we have people social security number in that so to offer that in the cloud not to say that's not secure but we have much better control and we have an infrastructure in our organization that has enough bandwidth has enough cooling all the normal environmental that you have for data center so right now for us it makes more sense for us but in three to five years from now maybe even sooner that will probably look at possibly what's the cost differentiation between doing it in house having the resources to a versus offering what about test endeavor you do any tested dev stuff oh yes we have in our SP environment have a traditional three-tier landscape so we've got a dev quality in the production all of which is housed inside the decision actually to have that to have that done was before I joined the company so we the decision was made at say in May of 2010 I joined in July had I been before and I really would have pushed to have that hosted somewhere else because my opinion for an organization mostly like ours we don't have the technical expertise to be able to you know the basis capabilities the architecture the hardware all that type of stuff so I think that's a better fit for most people in do an essay p implementations of looking at that may be the first second or third year if you trust me we don't have that experience if you're new to an essay p type environment no no no no use case for it right no using Bitcoin at all no you have a from Association last night about Bitcoin still look at the next to look crazy were down yeah PayPal's looking at is that in the news it's not mainstream enterprises yeah we loved we loved talking to see iOS housley Wikibon community we have a lot of CIOs with a lot of CEOs in our network and you know this is challenging opportunity but the days the good days are ahead i mean we're seeing huge investment opportunity growth new top line drivers that are changing the business where the CIO is kind of CEO like dealing with all the normal cost side but really drop driving profits so so i got to get the question before we end the segment is cost center versus profit center and you guys mentioned you guys are down pnl profit center right how does that change the game mindset wise and how you execute and what you can adopt and how fast well obviously the owners of the organization love the fact that we're offering that as a as an opportunity to generate some additional revenue i'm assuming you took the facilities equation out of your pnl yeah right what was it so good before i joined the organization write that down at her i keep track of that for sure okay go ahead but before join the our organization i joke jokingly say this we had more bandwidth in some banks I mean we really had the the infrastructure in place I fully redone it and so forth so we had long-term contracts so I've got five-year contracts with services with companies that I have to keep otherwise you can pay the penalty and get out but so we said you know why not leverage and we did a virtualization project when I first joined we recovered over fifty percent of our data center space so I have all this empty space I've all this band was sitting here I've got all the redundancies in the environment to be able to support that why not go after a small company i'm not going to be able to compete you know with the bigger companies and that but we're targeting some of the local companies and we're doing quite successful yeah why not that's great yeah awesome okay we're here live at the iod conference this is the cube we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break stay with us the q