in Cambridge Massachusetts it's the cube covering the MIT chief data officer and information quality symposium now here are your hosts Stu miniman and George Gilbert you're watching the cube SiliconANGLE media's flagship program we go out to lots of technology shows and symposiums like this one here help extract the signal from the noise I'm Stu miniman droid joined by George Gilbert from the Wikibon research team and really thrilled to have on the program the keynote speaker from this MIT event Tom Davenport whose pressure at babson author of some books including a new one that just came out and thank you so much for joining us my pleasure great to be here all right so uh you know so many things your morning keynote that I know George and I want to dig into I guess I'll start with you talk about the you know for eras of you called it data today used to be formation from the information sorry but you said you started with when it was three eras of analytics and now you've came to information so I'm just curious we you know we get caught up sometimes on semantics but is there a reason why you switch from you know analytics to information now well I'm not sure it's a permanent switch I just did it for this occasion but you know I I think that it's important for even people who aren't who don't have as their job doing something with analytics to realize that analytics or how we turn data into information so kind of on a whim I change it from four errors of analytics 24 hours of information to kind of broaden it out in a sense and make people realize that the whole world is changing it's not just about analytics ya know I it resonated with me because you know in the tech industry so much we get caught up on the latest tool George will be talking about how Hadoop is moving to spark and you know right if we step back and look from a longitudinal view you know data is something's been around for a long time but as as you said from Peter Drucker's quote when we endow that with relevance and purpose you know that that's when we get information so yeah and that's why I got interested in analytics a year ago or so it was because we weren't thinking enough about how we endowed data with relevance and purpose turning it into knowledge and knowledge management was one of those ways and I did that for a long time but the people who were doing stuff with analytics weren't really thinking about any of the human mechanisms for adding value to to data so that moved me in analytics direction okay so so Tommy you've been at this event before you know you you've taught in written and you know written books about this about this whole space so willing I'm old no no its you got a great perspective okay so bring us what's exciting you these days what are some of our big challenges and big opportunities that we're facing as kind of kind of humanity and in an industry yeah well I think for me the most exciting thing is they're all these areas where there's just too much data and too much analysis for humans to to do it anymore you know when I first started working with analytics the idea was some human analysts would have a hypothesis about how to do that about what's going on in the data and you'd gather some data and test that hypothesis and so on it could take weeks if not months and now you know we need me to make decisions in milliseconds on way too much data for a human to absorb even in areas like health care we have 400 different types of cancer hundreds of genes that might be related to cancer hundreds of drugs to administer you know we have these decisions have to be made by technology now and so very interesting to think about what's the remaining human role how do we make sure those decisions are good how do we review them and understand them all sorts of fascinating new issues I think along those lines come you know in at a primitive level in the Big Data realm the tools are kind of still emerging and we want to keep track of every time someone's touched it or transformed it but when you talk about something as serious as cancer and let's say we're modeling how we decide to or how we get to a diagnosis do we need a similar mechanism so that it's not either/or either the doctor or you know some sort of machine machine learning model or cognitive model some waited for the model to say here's how I arrived at that conclusion and then for the doctor to say you know to the patient here's my thinking along those lines yeah I mean I think one can like or just like Watson it was being used for a lot of these I mean Watson's being used for a lot of these oncology oriented projects and the good thing about Watson in that context is it does kind of presume a human asking a question in the first place and then a human deciding whether to take the answer the answers in most cases still have confidence intervals you know confidence levels associated with them so and in health care it's great that we have this electronic medical record where the physicians decision of their clinicians decision about how to treat that patient is recorded in a lot of other areas of business we don't really have that kind of system of record to say you know what what decision did we make and why do we make it and so on so in a way I think health care despite being very backward in a lot of areas is kind of better off than then a lot of areas of business the other thing I often say about healthcare is if they're treating you badly and you die at least there will be a meeting about it in a healthcare institution in business you know we screw up a decision we push it under the rug nobody ever nobody ever considered it what about 30 years ago I think it was with Porter's second book you know and the concept of the value chain and sort of remaking the the understanding of strategy and you're talking about the you know the AP AP I economy and and the data flows within that can you help tie your concept you know the data flows the data value chain and the api's that connect them with the porters value chain across companies well it's an interesting idea I think you know companies are just starting to realize that we are in this API economy you don't have to do it all yourself the smart ones have without kind of modeling it in any systematic way like the porter value chain have said you know we we need to have other people linking to our information through api's google is fairly smart i think in saying will even allow that for free for a while and if it looks like there's money to be made in what start charging for access to those api so you know building the access and then thinking about the the revenue from it is one of the new principles of this approach but i haven't seen its i think would be a great idea for paper to say how do we translate the sort of value chain ideas a michael porter which were i don't know 30 years ago into something for the api oriented world that we live in today which you think would you think that might be appropriate for the sort of platform economics model of thinking that's emerging that's an interesting question i mean the platform people are quite interested in inner organizational connections i don't hear them as talking as much about you know the new rules of the api economy it's more about how to two sided and multi-sided platforms work and so on Michael Porter was a sort of industrial economist a lot of those platform people are economists so from that sense it's the same kind of overall thinking but lots of opportunity there to exploit I think so tell me what want to bring it back to kind of the chief data officer when one of the main themes of the symposium here I really like you talked about kind of there needs to be a balance of offense and defense because so much at least in the last couple of years we've been covering this you know governance and seems to be kind of a central piece of it but it's such an exciting subject it's exciting subject but you know you you put that purely in defense on and you know we get excited the companies that are you know building new products you know either you know saving or making more money with with data Kenny can you talk a little bit about kind of as you see how this chief data officer needs to be how that fits into your kind of four arrows yeah yeah well I don't know if I mentioned it in my talk but I went back and confirmed my suspicions that the sama Phi odd was the world's first chief data officer at Yahoo and I looked at what Osama did at Yahoo and it was very much data product and offense or unity established yahoo research labs you know not everything worked out well at Yahoo in retrospect but I think they were going in the direction of what interesting data products can can we create and so I think we saw a lot of kind of what I call to point o companies in the in the big data area in Silicon Valley sing it's not just about internal decisions from data it's what can we provide to customers in terms of data not just access but things that really provide value that means data plus analytics so you know linkedin they attribute about half of their membership to the people you may know data product and everybody else as a people you may know now well we these companies haven't been that systematic about how you build them and how do you know which one to actually take the market and so on but I think now more and more companies even big industrial companies are realizing that this is a distinct possibility and we oughta we ought to look externally with our data for opportunities as much as supporting internal and I guess for you talk to you know companies like Yahoo some of the big web companies the whole you know Big Data meme has been about allowing you know tools and processes to get to a broader you know piece of the economy you know the counterbalance that a little bit you know large public clouds and services you know how much can you know a broad spectrum of companies out there you know get the skill set and really take advantage of these tools versus you know or is it going to be something that I'm going to still going to need to go to some outside chores for some of this well you know I think it's all being democratized fairly rapidly and I read yesterday the first time the quote nobody ever got fired for choosing amazon web services that's a lot cheaper than the previous company in that role which was IBM where you had to build up all these internal capabilities so I think the human side is being democratized they're over a hundred company over 100 universities in the US alone that have analytics oriented degree programs so i think there's plenty of opportunity for existing companies to do this it's just a matter of awareness on the part of the management team I think that's what's lacking in most cases they're not watching your shows i guess and i along the lines of the you know going back 30 years we had a preference actually a precedent where the pc software sort of just exploded onto the scene and it was i want control over my information not just spreadsheets you know creating my documents but then at the same time aighty did not have those guardrails to you know help help people from falling off you know their bikes and getting injured what are the what tools and technologies do we have for both audiences today so that we don't repeat that mistake ya know it's a very interesting question and I think you know spreadsheets were great you know the ultimate democratization tool but depending on which study you believe 22 eighty percent of them had errors in them and there was some pretty bad decisions that were made sometimes with them so we now have the tools so that we could tell people you know that spreadsheet is not going to calculate the right value or you should not be using a pie chart for that visual display I think vendors need to start building in those guardrails as you put it to say here's how you use this product effectively in addition to just accomplishing your basic task but you wouldn't see those guardrails extending all the way back because of data that's being provisioned for the users well I think ultimately if we got to the point of having better control over our data to saying you should not be using that data element it's not you know the right one for representing you know customer address or something along those lines we're not there yet and the vast majority of companies I've seen a few that have kind of experimented with data watermarks or something to say yes this is the one that you're allowed to to use has been certified as the right one for that purpose but we need to do a lot more in that regard yeah all right so Tommy you've got a new book that came out earlier this year only humans need apply winners and losers in the age of smart machines so ask you the same question we asked eric donaldson and Auntie McAfee when they wrote the second Machine Age you know are we all out of job soon well I think big day and I have become a little more optimistic as we look in some depth at at the data I mean one there are a lot of jobs evolving working with these technologies and you know it's just somebody was telling me the other day that is that I was doing a radio interview from my book and the guy was hung who said you know I've made a big transition into podcasting he said but the vast majority of people in radio have not been able to make that transition so if you're willing to kind of go with the flow learn about new technologies how they work I think there are plenty of opportunities the other thing to think about is that these transitions tend to be rather slow I mean we had about in the United States in 1980 about half a million bank tellers since then we've had ATMs online banking etc give so many bank tellers we have in 2016 about half a million it's rather shocking i think i don't know exactly what they're all doing but we're pretty slow in making these transitions so i think those of us sitting here today or even watching her probably okay we'll see some job loss on the margins but anybody who's willing to keep up with new technologies and add value to the smart machines that come into the workplace i think is likely to be okay okay do you have any advice for people that either are looking at becoming you know chief data officers well yeah as I as you said balanced offense and defense defense is a very tricky area to inhabit as a CDO because you if you succeed and you prevent you know breaches and privacy problems and security issues and so on nobody gives you necessarily any credit for it or even knows that it's helps of your work that you were successful and if you fail it's obviously very visible and bad for your career too so I think you need to supplement defense with offense activities are analytics adding valued information digitization data products etc and then I think it's very important that you make nice with all the other data oriented c-level executives you know you may not want to report to the CIO or if you have a cheap analytics officer or chief information security officer chief digitization officer chief digital officer you gotta present a united front to your organization and figure out what's the division of labor who's going to do what in too many of these organizations some of these people aren't even talking to each other and it's crazy really and very confusing to the to the rest of the organization about who's doing what yeah do you see the CDO role but you know five years from now being a standalone you know peace in the organization and you know any guidance on where that should sit is structurally compared to say the CIO yeah I don't you know I I've said that ideally you'd have a CIO or somebody who all of these things reported to who could kind of represent all these different interests of the rest of the organization that doesn't mean that a CDO shouldn't engage with the rest of the business I think CIO should be very engaged with the rest of the business but i think this uncontrolled proliferation has not been a good thing it does mean that information and data are really important to organization so we need multiple people to address it but they need to be coordinated somehow in a smart CEO would say you guys get your act together and figure out sort of who does what tell me a structure I think multiple different things can work you can have it inside of IT outside of IT but you can at least be collaborating okay last question I've got is you talked about these errors and you know that they're not you know not one dies in the next one comes and you talked about you know we know how slow you know people especially are to change so what happened to the company that are still sitting in the 10 or 20 era as we see more 30 and 40 companies come yeah well it's not a good place to be in general and I think what we've seen is this in many industries the sophisticated companies with regard to IT are the ones that get more and more market share the the late adopters end up ultimately going out of business I mean you think about in retail who's still around Walmart was the most aggressive company in terms of Technology Walmart is the world's largest company in moving packages around the world FedEx was initially very aggressive with IT UPS said we better get busy and they did it to not too much left of anybody else sending packages around the world so I think in every industry ultimately the ones that embrace these ideas tend to be the ones who who prosper all right well Tom Davenport really appreciate this morning's keynote and sharing with our audience everything that's happening in the space will be back with lots more coverage here from the MIT CDO IQ symposium you're watching the q hi this is christopher

but cute at servicenow knowledge 14 is sponsored by service now here are your hosts Dave vellante and Jeff Creek we're back hi everybody this is Dave vellante with Jeff Frick we're here live at knowledge 14 this is service now it's big customer event about 6,600 people up from about four thousand last year as we've been saying it's kind of tracking the growth of service now which has been pretty meteoric we heard from Mike scarpelli the CFO Frank's loot men they're really doubling down and it's exciting to see we're here in San Francisco where all the action is Jeffrey Moore is here author consultant pundits all-around smart guy cube alum greatly again thank you here so um so you're speaking at the CIO decisions i love the fact that they got so many CIOs here who real CIA a lot of times these conferences you get to you know the infrastructure guys but so what's the vibe like over there well you know it's kind of cool because if you think about service now and you go back to say 10 years this was all about how to make IT more productive around the ITIL model and you know and you'd use these automated services to do this stuff what's happening and Frank nailed it in the keynote he said look this infrastructure can be turned inside out and you can service enable the entire enterprise not just IT need a service enterprise you know HR you can decision a marketing eight-day any other shared service you can turn into a bunch of services that you can sort of call in and use service now as a platform so so the cios it was all about well that that's a different that's a different vision and so how do we map from the old way of sort of thinking about this is an internal productivity facility to this new way of saying no this is an enterprise enablement platform that's a big that's a big move a little bit like Salesforce going to force calm that same flavor yes sir frank's keynote was talking about how the CIO has to become you know more business savvy and of course we've heard that a lot for years and years and years but in fact a number of the folks that we've had on here at the service now are actually of that hill maybe they came from the business but most CIOs didn't necessarily come from the business they weren't P&L managers they weren't running sales do you see that changing yeah I think what happened in the 20th century was IT was sufficiently complex that frankly you had to be a technical person to do it it just it was just really hard and and yes you needed business consultants but the end of the day you needed ten percent business consultants and ninety percent technical people I think we've come a long way since then in the next generation of stuff is more around systems of engagement these things that that communicate with each other as opposed to systems of record and so the profile the winning IT strategy is migrating from help us run information about our business in the back office to help us actually re-engineer the dynamics of our business in the world in the present and that's like going from from data to behavior them it's a big we call it going from systems of record to systems of engagement it's a big show and is that that transition in your mind is very disruptive so what happens to all those purveyors and buyers of systems of engagement to they morph into obsessive record do they morph into systems of engagement do they just get blown away no it's interesting so so so first of all you're never going to get rid of your systems of record but at the margin we've probably extracted most of the lifetime value from that investment already so you need to maintain them and so the industry is consolidating a round of an anchor set of vendors who we trust to do that but the growth is going to be like if you look at systems of engagement we might have gotten five percent of the lifetime value there so at their margin if you have a dollar to spend people want to spend it in there so the challenge of being an incumbent is I'm not going to lose my base but man the growth is happening over here so the real challenge for that for the incumbent vendors is how can i participate in the new world and still maintain my relationships in the old world whereas the new guys are just coming and saying i don't i'll leave the old world of you guys i just want to play over here i can get your take on the structure of the IT business is you've observed as have i sort of these disruptions and these changes over time so obviously we went from being framed at pc you saw that the competitive line started to get more disintegrated yes i could use that that term a competition occurred on those I see that Intel's ascendancy in Microsoft and Oracle the best database companies the emc was the storage company and everything was sort of you know siloed and but leadership the leadership matrix has largely stayed intact I mean even IBM and okay HP said its ends up and down but it's largely stayed intact do you see the cloud changing that fundamentally changing the economic yes I think yes I think what happened is so in the client server error we did we built the stack what you're just described and every layer of the stack had a leader now I think since 2000 y2k that stack is being compressed meaning there are fewer and fewer vendors that are still in the in that in that leadership cadre and as we go to like cloud and computing the service you start saying well yeah i still have cisco in there i still have IBM in there but maybe i'm buying them as a service rather than as a set of equipment so you kind of can feel that world just I think compressing this look is the right word and where is the experimentation the opportunity to sort of find new places to go to it's very much in this world outboard of the IT data center where it it is about engaging engaging with your customer engaging with your employee engaging with your supply chain and using mobile things and social and you know analytics and cloud and all these new technologies the freedom to do that is is actually outboard of the of the old style I show you what you described as sort of an oligopoly and you've got these big whales and I've always asking you know guys who follow this it are we going to see somebody to disrupt that Amazon is the obvious you have to go to them a three billion dollar you know company growing at sixty percent a year with marginal economics of services that look like software yep but at the same time it's okay they've got this huge lead but it doesn't just make sense to me that it's sustainable I mean because hardware economics never will go to 0 so you would think that somebody was almost like the IBM early pc days remember IBM heavily yep we're domin to play that's kind of what kind of way amazon is now do you do you see that you see more competition from amazon why is it that they don't have direct competition so the less of the last book i wrote in the last the thing i've been working on most recently is around why is it so hard for the established incumbents to catch the next wave and the problem is so you look at why amazon's why is Amazon so unopposed in many of its initiatives well their business model in the economic model is completely divorced from the incumbent model and so you look at the incumbent in there going it's not that I don't see what the guys are doing I get what they're doing I just don't see how I can get my investors or my my whole infrastructure on to that new place in my example that was code at so you know Antonio Perez came from HP he knew what he was getting into he understood digital everybody at Kodak understood digital but they couldn't get to the other place so in this it would call it escape velocity how do you free yourself from your own paths and you you really do have to take a pretty dramatic approach to it and I think by the way i think i'm looking at microsoft in particular i think it I think Microsoft's going to give a very very big run at doing it and but I think that they're still more the exception than the rule you would wish that every one of those vendors would say look you know because every CIO here if any of those vendors came to him and said hey we're going to really try to play here will you help they'd say yes they don't want to change their relationships but but we get trapped in these business models and then you sort of grind and you grind and grind and after a while it's like well man you've just ground yourself to do I owe the classic label Christensen right individuals dilemma and it also makes a question is d said David's been the same characters kind of changing companies had not Jeff Bezos and Amazon come in with a completely different model to drive cloud with the other people who still has to transfer so they want to give credit to you want to bet it to be so so you want to give credit to Benioff by the way Benioff has been has been the kind of prow of a ship that brings in the illusory at work day brings in netsuite brings in service service now you know so the software-as-a-service thing is coming in at one level and remember if you were an on-premise guy it's very very how many years did did SI p commit an enormous amount of money to say we're going to have a great cloud offering and it just it's so hard so so it is so and then you're looking now at this sort of this next layer of collaborative IT and you're seeing box and octant hang all these cool thing and analytics and splunk consumer logic and all these companies going really I mean I you know I mean if your fear of my age is like okay you have a t-shirt they got love to you think I'm a teacher but but but the point is this free space and they're saying there's these cool problems to solve we're not encumbered by any of the legacy we're going to race ahead and so if you're a CIO well we spent most of our time with the cios today was ok i have established set of relationships here i'm not going to abandon them but at the margin i need them to help me think about the future I thought these really start sparkly new startups some i'm sure not going to exist next year but some are going to be the leaders so how play that game right now and and the pressure it's putting on the IT organization is the people I know that are good at this are not the people that are good at this and so how do I so we had to talk about talent and how do you manage and how do you create career paths and and is it or do you have a infrastructure officer vs an innovation office I'm it was all around that same prob right and then oh by the way there's Hadoop and mobile and big data and some of these other just open source innovations that are being just thrown all these guys played it is so from a technology plate from a technology play if you're technologists it's like bring it on right but I think the interesting thing is and most of my career aighty was about the business so you ran a business and you had IT systems which gave you information about your business what's happened in the last 15 years is that more and more sectors of the economy i T is becoming the business so you saw what happened the newspapers in facilitate with IT isn't about the newspaper business IT is displacing the newspaper business Google is displaced in the media business amazon is displacing retail you know mobile banking is displacing banking Airbnb uber I mean this so there we have the taxi guys are worried them it and so you start saying it isn't IT isn't about the business it's a digital world and and so all of us and that was it i think that was probably at the core of the discussion so which cio am i what do I have permission to be would do my colleagues get this you know am I competent to do it if they do I mean you've talked about this a lot and you've given a number of examples so so was nicked car just dead wrong in 2003 or just to a narrow it is to keep what he was saying I believe is that systems of record okay are dead I think at that time by the way it wasn't obvious there was anything else because it no serious i can remember to you know the whole venture community kind of abandoned itv4 about researcher ivan on 101 yeah it was and even in the end even in the physical infrastructure there's still the idea is the basis of the competitive and about the reporting system yeah and i think this issue about so i think there's still a few businesses we're really IT still is about the business and you know what you can kind of stick with whatever you were doing you'll be okay but if your business is under an existential threat meaning the new IT model eviscerates your business model which arguably you could say all those both those incumbent stack vendors you know I mean cloud does eviscerate the on-premise hardware data center business model which was the fundamental foundation of IT as I knew it for all my business career and now all this it's like holy how do i how do i how do I deal with it so we talk about Amazon as a potential you know new you know big whale Salesforce is obviously he's got it but they've been around since 99 there's going to be exception mm-hmm proves the rule I don't maybe a service now or a workday you know we'll see if this market is big enough it looks like it it might be what often happens is they these guys let's get gobbled up or Larry Ellison writes a check you say these to denigrate people who write write checks not code I think the biggest matter and they got such mass never was afraid to reinvent himself change the game change the dynamics of the industry so do you think we will see a another big player and where will that comfort will it be the SAS guys will it be the sum of the guys out of the hadoop world what I don't think it will so here here's what I don't think will work I don't think you can be an established incumbent vendor under this compression power and write a check and get yourself back I think what happens when you write a check if you just bring a hot property into cold molecules and it loses its exactly exactly so I don't think that will work I think if you want to be one of these incumbents and succeed over here you have to actually pull part of your own DNA and capability and we literally just jump and then I think you can acquire it to it to build a thing there but what Larry did was he consolidate he basically was the first guy to figure out Nick Carr is right I need to buy up all the properties yep and brother George ball and run a maintenance business which by the way came to read and Georgia computer associates had that play up in the eighties it's the same play with this is a different plan well I love what you say in emc is an interesting one to watch the way to chi is setting up this Federation with pivotal and VMware you know who see we'll see what happens with the quarry NC and I think VI 3 of 8 yeah I think that that is I mean VMware's one of the wonderful examples of think we're a company did not cause the hot molecules become the cold molecules the thing you wonder there though is it feels a little bit like a like a holding company if you will and so and by the way vmware is in a curious tweener right like they kind of were the most they made the old stack incredibly productive so in some sense they can feel like they're part of the old world right they're probably the newest kid on the old world but then you think well yeah but I want to look at their plan now they want to be into software-defined networks they wanted me to software-defined data centers they definitely want to play over here and what it's in this case so state partners Wow one could argue that that was it because of what big in the cloud virtualize computing absolutely absolutely so what're you working on these days that's exciting well so that I think this issue of working with management teams to say okay look this is a self-imposed exile that we're putting ourselves under you know we get it i'll call it the Kodak problem because I don't want to talk about anybody in high tech specifically at the moment but the point is every management team in the established vendor group puts itself on a self imposed discipline to make you know certain kinds of eps things certain kinds of growth you know whatever it is the expectations of their investors and you look at the situation you say guys that is a slope glide path to extinction we all know that and by the way off the record they know it's no it's not that that is this is not a failure of it like this is a failure of will so then the question is well so how do you negotiate a different path and part of it is you have to make you have you have to be able to tell a story of your investors part of it is you have to negotiate a different operating model inside the company and what they've done so far is they said well okay we've got our established businesses and we've got our innovative businesses and we know enough to keep them apart so that part is not the problem and they actually come up with cool stuff the the moment of truth is when can you scale any of these innovative businesses to compete to actually be a material part of your historical portfolio meaning in my terminology at least ten percent of your total revenue going to twenty percent in what happens in that journey is it a key point you have to draw on the resources of your established business and all the people that make their living and they're compensated on getting the next quarter in the next quarter go guys I can't make the quarter and do this and you've got it you've got to find a way to say you know if we don't figure out a way to pull some of that resource over here and play our next hand will invent everything in the world but we'll never get it to scale and so there's there's a bunch of stuff around business model planning and then Investor Relations organizational development it's all around saying and the key there's two key ideas idea number one is it's a go-to-market problem not an RD problem you do not have an innovation problem you can't get your thing to market and the second cool idea is you can only do one of the time and everybody says well but give have the risk to so high you got a three or four or five of these things maybe want to work it's like know the sacrifice is so great if you put two or more horses in the race people people won't even run so the other one that's a focus and don't it's ok not to make the quarter that's like on American looking like michael dunn right i mean that's obsessively what he's hoping to be able to do and i think one of the reasons you see people go private is to say i can't play this game bye-bye normal public company protocol i mean i like to but i can't get there from here now i actually don't think every company ought to have to go private to do this but i think they do have to change their playboys all right Jeff we have to leave it there hey great to see you thank you very much me feel smarter just hanging out with you right there buddy we'll be right back after this is the cube you