okay welcome back to thecube's coverage at splunk.com 2021 virtual i'm john furrier with thecube we're here live in the studios of splunk's event here we're all together broadcasting out all over the world here with chris dieglemeyer chief social impact officer for splunk great to see you thanks for coming on great thanks for having me today i love the title chief social impact officer because we're bringing in data unlocks value well you know that and yes it's the theme of the show society has really been impacted by misinformation what context we've seen examples of how data has been good and been bad yes so there's a divide there so you're this is a big part of your talk yes it it's a big part of me and it's going to be even a bigger part of splunk going forward so as many people know they've heard of the digital divide right and that was about access to information communication technologies and it was coined 20 years ago 2001 and we've made progress on that digital divide but now we have all that infrastructure or a lot of it and so on top of that we have the data divide and that's the increasing and expanding use of data and the gap between using that to solve commercial and provide commercial value in contrast to solving our social and environmental challenges and so the the important thing about it is we're early enough that with urgent action we can try to close that gap um and really make a difference in the world so let's get started let's define the data divide and give some specific examples where you see it in action on the pro side and where there's some work needed yeah so all so the definition is again that that gap between using we we have all this data being used for commercial value and a relatively weak use of data being used to solve our social and environmental challenges and we've got four kind of key barriers that we've identified that need to be addressed which will get to you know the questions and how we solve it one is access so think about it think of the data that google has and where that is in access compared to probably the department of education in any country around the world so access is big second is capacity we need both financial resources investing in solving our social and environmental problems and we need data scientists data stewards great data people working to solve our social and environmental problems just as we are in the corporate sector and then the third one is investment choices and this one is a little bit of a be in my bonnet and this happens mostly in the private sector so we all know you know every year it's like what what hits the return on investment criteria and solving social and environmental challenges often does not uh doesn't have that quite time frame return on investment and think about if we'd identified this data divide 20 years ago for climate because companies are doing phenomenal work now about climate what if we had been doing that work 20 years ago around sustainability around efficiency and then the last piece is actionable solutions that we can replicate so those are kind of the four barriers um and again i think we've got a lot of potential and examples there isn't one issue i can think of where more data isn't going to help us you know this is so important i feel very strongly about this because i've seen examples where i've seen really strong people start ngos or non-profits or just building an app and they abandon it because they can't get there fast enough so the idea that cloud and data accessibility can be there you get to see some success and you can double down on that's the cloud way yes so i think this is something that people want to know the playbook so you know where where are people being successful what can people do yeah to take advantage of it yeah so i think that's a really good important point um is transitioning to the cloud so think of the nonprofit sector it's barely there yet so all of us who are investors philanthropists we need to be supporting the nonprofit sector be cloud enabled and cloud forward similarly with government i i you know there's example after example where you know whether it's health whether it's child and human services their data is in file cabinets think about that think of prime so we need to digitize those then we need to data enable that so that we can see those insights that are coming out around those solutions you know it's always the you know it's always a discussion in the industry inside the ropes and now on mainstream but getting data to the right place at the right time yeah is a really important thing it's a technical latency all these things but practically it has societal impact where would you rank the progress bar in terms of where we are on the digital divide because i can see healthcare for instance having access to the right information or it could be something on the government side where it could be related to climate change or hey get this involved where are we on this so i i would say on the digital divide which is the infrastructure piece um for most definitely high-income countries mid-income countries we've actually made progress and so they have that they're all you know network they're cloud but now they have all this data they don't know what to do with right and so what we need to kind of now build on that infrastructure to solve for that data and i'll just you know a splunk example one of our customers the netherlands um in their court system right with using splunk they were able to enable real-time data to inform court decisions so historically the judge would ask you know this happened in covid where are we on bankruptcy cases right and historically somebody would call somebody they'd call somebody they go dig the files and they get the information three months real time this is what's happening with bankruptcy in real time with covid is going to change those decisions that impact people's lives so you add that on top i mean we have environmental examples working with net zero schools we have it and we worked with the healthcare coalition with mitre to enable real-time data with a number of other companies so um where so i would say we're further along on the digital divide we're at step one on the data divide yeah doug merritt was talking earlier today about how you know this data plan that splunk has evolved into this catch basin for all the data and then it becomes useful and really taking us through the journal now security and it's this control plane that's enabling yeah i think to me that's a real key thing here so i have to ask do you see envision a future where we have a data commons where um citizens and could tap into the data and in the gov 2.0 is kind of on that vision yeah what do you where do you see this what do you say well i i think and i i know doug has talked about this before too from a values standpoint of especially with government moving to open data and then what we have to do is we have to protect privacy which actually splunk is really good at doing uh so you've got to take that individual data out of there but then once you get these big data pools into these big data lakes you'll be able to see insights that you couldn't see before you know it's interesting that i remember when the internet came around and how the u.s government's very active it seems now that that tech policy has always been kind of like oh yeah we're kind of involved in dc but now tech is so important and with all the backlash on the facebooks of the world of you know how democracy was broken there's an opportunity yeah and the lawmakers and the people who make the laws are kind of lawyers they're not really techies so so like policy's got to change how do we do that yeah oh gosh if i could solve that one on policy change but but i want to make a comment because i think it's really important because you reference and the situation facebook is in is common knowledge i give a lot of credit to splunk as you know a data platform company saying we see this data divide coming and we're going to step to the table now and do something about it because there's a lot of other companies that knew these challenges if they looked out three five years and they made personal or company choices not to do something about it so transparency is super important getting that out there and and being again in data and just saying it's not all roses right and and so take being a purpose-driven company is about making those decisions as a company to have an impact so then to answer your question on policy um i would say i think it's really complicated and tricky because data moves at the speed of sound and policy moves kind of like a turtle and so i think what we need to have happen is companies going to sometimes have to lead the way and hold themselves accountable and then work in partnership with policy to make you know policy changes that impact everybody so again we're strong advocates of open data you know we we can't make the government do it but we can be a voice for it in service of bridging the state this data divide is a great conversation i wish we had more time for the last minute just give a quick plug for what splunk's doing specifically and how people could get involved and participate yeah so i'll kind of i'd say three things one is at this early stage we're kind of raising the flag to governments out there to philanthropy to nonprofits like we all need to be paying attention to this we're going to be investing in more research on it because it is at such an early stage we've identified these barriers but we've got to go much deeper and build collaborations around the solution so we're going to be mobilizing our partners and our customers we have a 100 million dollar pledge where we donate our product nonprofits we and the equally important thing as i talked about it's our talent right it's getting the talent to help these organizations it's our strategic giving so we're mobilizing you know all of our assets around this pledge we have a 50 million dollar impact fund which is around four purpose data enabled companies so we're trying to do it across a multitude of platforms is that investment fund deploying now or has it been making investments in companies already yeah we've made um three investments refrain ai is one about using machine learning and ai around the jobs of the future and retraining so it's still or it was launched just a couple years ago so we're still early in the 50 million dollar fund so we'll be doing more of that sounds like a great opportunity for people out there watching enable enable the people to change the world yeah that's what splunk's all about right now exactly chris thanks for coming on appreciate great thank you okay the data divide we're bringing you all the data here from the cube live here in the splunk studios i'm john furrier with thecube thanks for watching thank you