 Good evening everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's day two coverage of Snowflake Summit 23 live from Caesars Forum in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, there is a lot happening in public sector for Snowflake, it's a hot topic. Well, when you look at the spending data, you know, there's two sectors, even though there's a macro headwinds and things are compressing, there's two sectors that are growing faster than others. One is small business and the other is government. Yep, we're going to be talking about government next. We've got Jeff Fraser here, VP head of Global Public Sector at Snowflake and Rick Hansen joins us as well, the Chief Data Officer at the Oregon Department of Human Services. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, how are you guys doing? No, of course Rick, a lot of that is because of federal government. They spend more money, that's right. Rick, you just joined last year. Talk to me about the work that you're doing as Chief Data Officer, how you are building a data strategy that's really going to steer the state in the right direction. Yeah, right, great question. So, as I'm sure you've heard from many guests today, the technology's not really the challenge. It's the people in the process, right? We have a really solid technical team inside our agency, but how do you socialize that? How do you bring the business perspective to it? How do you bridge what's possible, technically, whether the business knows to ask for? And that's really why I was brought in, is to set that vision, articulate the strategy and start to get everybody rowing the same direction, right, so it's a little bit of a different model for Chief Data Officer, because the technical side is really handled, styled in. And how do you partner with the technical side? Well, I have technical understanding, so we align just around conversation, where do we want to go, why do we want to go there? It's just a very collaborative relationship. It's almost like a mind meld, really. So, I can relax knowing the technical side is taken care of, I trust the technical team, and I can go out and work the business side. Sounds like a good relationship. Jeff, talk to us about a big push at the federal, state, and the local levels of government to really embrace data modernization in the cloud. What's going on there from your perspective? You guys launched last year, public sector, data cloud. Talk to us about what some of the things are the trends that you're seeing, and kind of the uptake. Oh, so if you buy into the world, it's a major transition, so I had spent time, you're going through all these transitions with the internet in 2000, you had transitioned to mobile, market transition to then to cloud. We are squarely in a transition to data. If you look at the top 20 tech companies by market cap in the world, they are data companies or are being driven by data. If you just take the top five market cap companies in the world, with the exception perhaps of Ramco, they're all data driven companies. And so, we're in that transition now and we see it, and then the largest addressable, so to speak, TAM is our public markets, our public sector. So we're seeing a big tick up in how you can achieve. Remember, our governments are our largest producers and consumers of data. And so they have a ton of information that can be utilized and to modernize, and then you sprinkle all the capital that's out there. Most has been in my lifetime around all the policy issues, not just in the United States, but we're seeing it in the European Union, the structure funds, we're seeing it in Asia PAC, is when you have all the capital, and you sprinkle it with the democratization of data, and if data is the DNA of knowledge, which it is, you're starting to see a big, big move to learn faster and learn more, and it's all the efficiencies that are benefiting our public actors, and that's really critical for us. So Rick, that's really interesting, Jeff, what you were saying, because Rick, the Chief Data Officer role has really evolved. We used to, for whatever reason, we don't do it anymore, the Chief Data Officer Conference with MIT every year. Every summer they have a big conference, and we've just been too busy, but when we first started doing it, it was a back office kind of data quality function, compliance, and there's still a lot of compliance going on, but, and then it's become, as you just described, a change agent, driver of value throughout the organization, a leader of alignment, and that's, I think that's a better place to be, not that data quality's not important, but that role has evolved quite dramatically, hasn't it? Yeah, and it's funny, because I was a CIO and a PNC insurer some years ago, and we didn't know what to do with the data team. You know, we had a data warehouse, we had data analysts, data interests, we just didn't know what to do with them, right? So they reported up to the CIO, and what I see now in my current role is, and it really became apparent to me once I became a CDO, so I was your typical CIO perspective from the systems, systems lens, we got systems and transactions and workflows, and from the data perspective, you're kind of throwing that out, right? That's a legacy mindset, and so you've got the entire organization and all of state government, most governments, still have that legacy workflow mindset, but when you shift to a data-centric perspective, which is the biggest challenge probably that I face is that mindset, I call it the Kodak moment, right? Kodak saw digital coming, but they couldn't change their mindset enough, like intellectually they knew it, but they couldn't change their mind to fix it, to address it, so shifting into that data-centric mindset, you also create the possibility of starting to do things from a person-centric perspective instead of a system-centric perspective. So you're flipping the mindset, you're flipping the possibility, and actually for the first time, able to put customer experience, client experience in the first position, right? Because you're leading with that, so that's what I'm most excited about, and I think that's where the biggest challenges come from. That's a big flip. It doesn't happen overnight, and that's cultural transformation. Yeah, I mean the whole history of IT, going back to the beginning, is about taking workflows and automating them, and this is different. It's not about automating workflow, it's putting the person at the center of that workflow, right, completely different, and people just don't know, that's a challenge. And data is fundamental to that, so many interesting talking points here. We've learned a lot over the years from Amazon, two pizza teams, working backwards from the customer, things like that. When you work back, when you go into many, I don't know what is in Oregon, but when you go into Massachusetts, it's work, they don't work backwards from the customer. Oh no. Like the 1990s web experience, right? But the point is, it's a data experience. When we're moving to a world, Snowflake's helping to drive this, where it's about data apps, it's a data-centric apps, in other words, it used to be just automating processes, where the data is buried inside of the application and the business logic, and we're flipping that, where the business logic is actually in the data. And that changes the whole experience. It's a definite mindset change, and maybe a skill set change as well. Is that, do you believe that, and how are you dealing with that skill set change? You know, the skill set change is not so challenging for us. We have kind of a bifurcation, because the IT team doesn't really want to deal with data, so they're very happy to toss the data over the wall to the data team, right? So we're not part of IT. So we have the skills, and it's, again, it comes back more to the cultural perspective in terms of how you interact with the IT team, and how the business understands what's happening. Okay, so early, so the regime is, you've got a CIO and a data team, and you guys report into... Yeah, so basically, the CIO reports up to a deputy director, I report up to the... Okay, so you guys are peers. Yeah, yeah, we're peers. And then we also have a research function that's also a peer function that really has a team of people who write the algorithms. If we're going to do any research and analytics, we have a separate team of PhDs who do that. Whereas I'm focused exclusively on the data and making sure that we're getting things, you know, and that we're getting things to a quality place, and then thinking about what the big picture is. What kind of apps do you want to build using the native apps that Snowflake's going to provide for it? Okay, so the data scientists are not part of your team. Is that correct? No, I work very closely with them, but no. Okay, and what about the CISO? CISO reports up through the CIO. Interesting. Whether that's the right place for it is, you know... I don't think there's a perfect answer. I mean, it's different in all organizations, but I don't know, Jeff, what you see. It'll evolve. It'll evolve. It'll evolve. I would say when networking took place and the voice people and the voice and networking were different, and the market started, the secular markets changed, it started to, so yeah, they would consolidate. We're going to see a very similar, I think it'll evolve into that. When you start putting, remember, data is a unique characteristic. When you put that at the center and the people at the center with that, you're going to start seeing governance around that change. If you're not a data institution, if your institution is not a data institution, it is, you so know it then. Yeah. So you started talking about data apps and building, I mean, I kind of went on a tangent, but what are you guys doing in terms of building data apps? How do you think about the future of that experience that you want to drive for your constituents? Well, so we're very new in our Snowflake experience. Our primary use case was really, I would say, a technology use case in terms of migrating our reporting and our analytics into Snowflake. The next layer of that is data sharing and data integration. So when you're talking about human services, what's your really big goal? It's improving outcomes. It's making sure that people are getting all the benefits that they qualify for us, because we have a lot of doorways. We're a big conglomerate, like seven major programs, many sub-programs under that, right? So those are your two big goals. And then, so when you can use Snowflake to do the integration and the data sharing, you create the possibility of longitudinal data sets and then bringing in from the marketplace structural determinants of health information so we can start to build a model for how we go upstream in the intervention process and maybe prevent people from falling into a place where they need more and more benefits because we've been able to divert them earlier. So that's a really big use case. And then the fourth one, which I'm really excited about and really became prevalent today, was, well, at this conference is the introduction of the native apps, because then we can actually start to operationalize, right? Because right now, and I'm sure many governments are in this situation. You've got many doorways, people come in and we don't have an enterprise relationship with our client, right? So if you build apps off the marketplace, you know, out of the data warehouse, out of your golden record, you can actually have an interaction with your client as the enterprise. Changes what's possible. You can move some interactions from every single time you walk in the front door to maintaining basically a client record. And again, improving customer experiences. Well, it is interesting. Because we've operationalized the transaction systems. You've done a good job of that, but we have it with the analytic systems and what you just described is actually changing that paradigm. Yeah, yeah. It's exciting. It's a really exciting time. How'd you, what attracted you to public sector? Oh, you know what? I started my career in politics. Oh. Which seems like a strange, you know, of a very strange circuitous path, but I spent many years in the state capital and doing political campaigns. And I can assure you, if you can figure out how to get to a majority in the state legislature, it's a valuable experience to figure out how you changed the mindset inside of a large corporate enterprise, you know? Not just the 11,000 people in my agency, but the, you know, the larger state enterprise. So I've been in public sector for a long time and when the opportunity came to actually shift into human services, you know, there's no greater mission than trying to help people help themselves, so. And of course, everybody has this expectation that they're going to be able to get the services that they need, get the information at their fingertips. People don't like to wait. I think it's one of the things during COVID we saw go away as patients. It hasn't come back. Talk a little bit about why Snowflake and if you're talking to your peers, CDOs and other states, what would you advise them in terms of best practices? Oh, best practices. Well, you know, I don't have a good answer for that in terms of best practices. I would say, you know, one of the things that we're trying to do is just be really smart about how we architect the whole system. So we're focused. So I've got these use cases in mind, but really the number one goal is figure out your skills that you need, figure out how you to make sure you're architecting it correctly for the long term. It's because it's about building a base, right? So we, many times in government, you will say, I've got this use case and I'm going to go put the tools together to fulfill that use case. We flipped it and we said, let's go out and acquire the tools because it's going to take us so long to do that and to learn how to do it that we don't want to tell the business too early about what's possible because I'm going to create a demand problem. So we're focusing on creating that foundation and now starting to socialize. And then once, because I don't want to say no to people from people coming to me and say, oh, can you do X, Y and Z? And I can say, well, yeah, in 12 months. Right, so we're going to get people too excited too early. So that's why Snowflake becomes so important because it does become the center of that ecosystem with all the add-ins and the applications that are available. That is a novel demand management technique, Rick, I have to say. That is true. I don't know that I've heard that, but you're probably now able to say yes, far more or will be far more than you. But you don't want to be the department of no, like you said. Exactly. That's been IT's bad rap. It goes back to the political background. You don't want to give people bad news, right? So you've got to have a good story to tell. It's like being a startup CEO, right? You've got to have a good story to tell, sell people on the possibility, but you don't want them to wait too long to achieve that, to realize that possibility. And you don't want to have them see the sausage getting made. Right, no, no, I'm totally getting the political vibe here. Jeff, talk to us about some of the things that are next from your perspective, given the macro headwinds that we're facing. What's next? And what's been also some of the feedback that you've heard at the show? There's about 12,000 people here. It's actually terrific. Today we announced. So to really help that market, that category succeed. Look, we have 800 million people in the world who wake up every day and go off to serve, protect, or heal, or educate. And it's the largest category. And how do you make that productive? And how do you make them achieve? And so when you think about the role, we have a role to play. It really helps move standards of living. When you think about it, I saw the trends in networking, I saw the trends in cloud, I saw the trends in mobile. And we're in this big data trend. And so what the feedback I'm getting is, for us to address the market, which we're absolutely committed to, it's like you have to meet market rules and permissions. So today we announced our ability to address the data needs for the Department of Defense. And so it's called NIL-4 certification. So we have IL-4 status, which for native cloud offering as fast as we have grown, is tremendous. Hard to get. And so it's hard to get. But we have such an institutional investment into it because that category around the world, it just raises the bar for a private, secure way to compute and operate for all governments. And so I think that's a really, we take very much pride in that. It's a huge category for us to work with. And the feedback is really interesting. You know, from the standpoint of, I have two classes of kind of people. One is like, hey, we have to solve this data problem we're doing this, or hey, we want to change the world. And so you try to put that linearity into kind of a middle. It's okay, how do we do something very practical that's going to actually start to show advancement and achievement to change the mindset? And so now this new wave comes in, how do I change the mindset? And how do I think differently about how I solve things? And then how do I collaborate with people who can help me? And you wouldn't, the feedback, general feedback I'm getting is from people saying, look, I hadn't thought of it this way. I didn't realize I have an ecosystem that I should be talking with or should be collaborating with that could really help me that don't have a competitive interest in public sector, you don't really have a competitive interest as you wouldn't manufacturing or any other community. So there is, and the early innings of this, it's so exciting, follow us. This is a great category. We're just getting started and I couldn't be more thrilled. It's our purpose and our values reflect that as a company. So we're excited about it. Definitely. Guys, thank you so much for coming on the program, talking about Rick, what as Chief Data Officer you're doing with Snowflake for the Oregon Department of Human Services, changing that mindset, how you're helping do that, that is a huge problem. And you just kind of gave us a masterclass and I think you do have some best practices by the way. How you do, I think it's broken up. Rick, Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time. Thank you very much, yeah. Oh, our pleasure. Thank you very much. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Snowflake Summit. Up next, how DataRobot is helping Aflac, you all know Aflac, the duck insurance, safely implement Generative AI technology. Find all of our content from Snowflake on theCUBE.net, all of our editorial analysis on siliconangle.com. We'll see you in a few minutes.