 Okay, we're back here live at IBM IOD. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events extracted from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by co-host Dave Vellante, the co-founder of wikibond.org. Go to siliconangle.com for the reference point and tech innovation. Go to wikibond.org for free research. Draw the research analysts there, putting out free content. And of course, always come by theCUBE and see where we are in the events. We're going to be at Amazon web services event. We'll go to the events extracted from the noise and share that with you. Our next guest is Tom DeClerc, CIO of Superior Group. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Dave, you and I love to talk about CIOs because maybe we get the real scoop on things. So first, why are you here at IBM IOD? Let's get that out of the way. Let's talk about some of the things you're doing here and what you're seeing here. So I've been 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 SAP Enterprise, ERP system, second being IBM Connections, and the third being IBM Cognos. And so over the course of the three years, you know, we're trying to roll out these projects. So I'm here to learn more about the capabilities of Cognos. And the biggest one for me is that with Cognos and SAP, SAP when they bought, or not SAP, I'm sorry, when IBM bought Cognos, it was at 8.1 they had a report pack specifically for SAP customers. So when they went to 10.1 and 10.2, they didn't offer that product. So they just started developing a year ago, I sat down with some senior executives of the IBM organization and said, you guys are losing an opportunity here of customers that have an implementation of SAP and trying to get information out other than using SAP's product, business analytics. So over the course of the year, we've been developing a report pack that they can offer the customers. So we're part of the beta testing program for IBM. I'm here to actually talk to some other people and understand some other things. Listen to you, so you had an impact on product development, that's good. Well, yeah, there's the continuous improvements. Even on the, when you look at the report pack now, it's still in my mind. And I fed this feedback back to IBM. There's a to-do list. Oh, absolutely. But that's 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. Yeah, so we're a company that's headquartered in Buffalo, New York. And we started back in 1957. It's a privately held company. We have a total of 400 staff employees and roughly anywhere from seven to 9,000 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 recruiting as well as direct placement. And then on the process side, we offer a managed services program. We also also vendor managed services, independent contractor compliance. And then on the outsourcing, we have IT outsourcing, HR outsourcing. So that's pretty much our company's makeup. Tom, we were talking off camera about sort of the role of the CIO and everybody would like to be more strategic if they had time, but a lot of the CIOs, especially in mid-sized organizations, you just don't have as many people to be able to sit back and do some of those more strategic things. But so a lot of CIOs talk about transforming the organization. You've kind of transformed it with three huge projects in the past. What would you say this was? Two years? Yeah, so let's put some perspective. SAP was started in July of 2010 and then we started last year with the IBM Connections and the Cognos reporting. Okay, so but still over the course of, I mean, that's some major disruptions to your business. Talk about how you manage that. So it was extremely challenging, especially given the number of resources that we have. We're a mid-sized company. And when I, so I came from a manufacturing organization. Spent 15 years working for manufacturing. So going from that vertical into professional services vertical, I was used to having a lot of IT resources to be able to support an organization. So highly leveraged the contractors and consultants, both with SAP, they're implementing partners as well as an IBM. It was critical for us to leverage IBM's knowledge and their skillset in order to be successful in rolling out our products. So the SAP rollout was the most complicated item? Oh, absolutely. I mean, by far. Oh, by far. It took literally years to do. Yeah, so we rolled out ECC 6.0, their latest, with a full suite payroll. So we provide payrolling as 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 SAP we rolled out. So it was quite an interesting experience, at least. Was that core human capital management or success factors? Nope, it was core. We've looked at success factors about a year ago. And it just doesn't quite fit. At this point in time, as they start to develop and their product becomes a little more mature, that may be a better fit for our organization. And connections. What was the driver behind bringing that in? Talk about that a little bit. Sure. So for us, connections, we did some analysis. Early this year, I think it's 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 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 offices remotely and people that aren't sitting at our headquarters. And that was another concern or feedback that was brought back to us was that we don't have the ability or that the people at the remote offices felt like they weren't part of the whole process or communicating properly with our corporate headquarters. So we felt that this would be a perfect platform to allow us to enable that. And 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 this product as opposed to the SharePoint is the look and feel of the LinkedIn, the Twitter, and that social media aspect of it. So it really leveraged for us an opportunity 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? I'm sort of curious as to the outcome there. So actually, it was a very positive outcome. And as you roll out, when you take a company and you actually do a transformation into a social media-type organization, it's never, in my opinion, never done. It's a continuous process. So we're still evolving as we go along. I think the key is to be a frontage that has the right adoption strategy. So last year in January, I attended the IBM Connect down in Florida. And I actually participated in an event with some senior execs with Sandy Carter from IBM who heads up that part of the organization, the social media. And so it really was about adoption strategy. And it's key to 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 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 know, your Facebook's in that, it's actually 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 add for our organization is 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 7,000 to 9,000 contractors working for superior. And so they'll be working in our business. There's a high turnover rate. You'll go and we'll place someone at a company. They'll maybe work there for a month, two months a week. And when they leave, that knowledge goes away with them. So we're really targeting our value add to be able to roll this out to even to our contract employees. So when they go work on site, they start to collaborate, share information, invent that they do leave, we still harvest that information. And that's bi-directional too. I mean, they're a representation of your company, even though they're transient. But so you can communicate to them, like you say, executive blogs, what the corporate messaging is, policies, whatever it is, that they can take it as representing you essentially as an extension of your workforce. And as you say, you get knowledge back, right? Oh, absolutely. It's one of the key values that we place is 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 sending it on site facilities that are customers. So it really has improved that collaboration and that communication. It's really brought the organization together. Did you ever think at one point, wow, why don't we just use publicly available social tools, Facebook, or LinkedIn, or just start a blog? Yeah, and our organization has done that. We have the Twitter account, the Facebook account, but this was an opportunity for us to develop it and tailor it more, customize it more for our specific needs. So you've integrated those public networks, those networks, right? Yeah, 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 additional value did that bring to you? Could you pay it for it? Well, sure. So you had to justify it. What value did you get out? So there's several areas that we feel have brought value. One is it's a platform that can be 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. It allows us to connect and stay together. It empowered our users to be able to contribute openly, to be able to collaborate, to be able to innovate and be able to take calculated risks. From an IT standpoint, we see a reduction in email. I don't have the actual numbers to tell you what percentage of reduction in email, but I'm pushing very strongly that we have an opportunity to use and leverage connections instead of sending emails. Traditionally, people will send an email, check this, where with connections, you post the content or you put the files, upload the files in there, and they'll send a notification. So you're not plugging up your email system with additional data, so. Yeah, there's a productivity aspect to that, too. Absolutely. Tom, look at. I was just gonna say, and the other thing is that the time to market for solutions has definitely reduced and even the increase in efficiency. So I know we spent some time looking at, I think it was Ed Brill's book on opting in, and then there's just his situation, identifies in the book, is the traditional product manager that you find 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 gotta ask you about the social software, Dave and I have been tracking, Jive, all these other companies, John and Mark, 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 signed something, 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, we got 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 associated, it's not a lot of personnel. So the issue is that they get implemented, they get sold these software packages and then they got to implement it, kind of like communities, but yet there's other stuff happening, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, events, live streaming, so a lot of other social activations going on. So I want to get your take on as a CIO, do you get involved in levels like that on the app side? Is those apps decisions made with that in mind of like the personnel costs and the actual to run it? And some guys just say hey, I bought that, I don't use it anymore, why? It's just there's too much hassle. So there's a hassle factor, what do you take, what's your take? So my take is first of all, I'm very big on when I get an asset or acquire an asset as best you realize in that asset. You know when I came to this organization, I saw several situations where assets were purchased to your point and just sitting idle because maybe you had to 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 his name's Frank Gullo, 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 manufacturer facility that utilized the SharePoint, so I was big at SharePoint. So I was kind of pushing that direction but when I actually sat down with him and we went through really the true value ads, what we can gain from that, it was really a no-brainer for us. Do you ever have a situation where you put your fist down and say hey, you know what, we just gotta abandon that right now, let's cut our losses, move on. In physical example, there's another use case where same situation, I won't name the vendor, it was an IBM, it was another one where, hey, we wanna do some new things, we don't have the staff, the guy's making us drive this engine until we get an ROI out of it. In other words, they were like, we're gonna ride this pony until either collapses or ROI comes out of it. When in reality, they're just driving down a cul-de-sac. So at some point in an emerging market, like we're in agile is the option to abandon, you gotta know when to cut the cord, right? Oh, absolutely, and I'm not in a position where I'd say absolutely wouldn't abandon if it made sense. It's gotta be a business decision. Ultimately, my position has always been it's gotta work with the business and let the business drive and not IT. IT's 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 in any kind of depth. So tell me what you're doing with Cognos. We talked a little bit about the SAP extension, but how are you using Cognos? So primarily we have, as I mentioned before, part of our businesses and the managed services program is we offer MSPs, which we have a tool called Work Nexus, which is our vendor management solutions as well as our MSP. They, our customers will use this tool for recruiting, for looking at time clocks, looking at approving time sheets, invoicing and so forth. So we have some pretty strict requirements of pulling that information out and providing reports to our customers. We use our platform that we've developed on is based on the domino environment. So 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 enriched type dashboards, active type reports for our customers. We're just about completed with that part of the project. The next is really to pull reports out of SAP. And so the standard reports 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 reports target in that area. So in the next year, I'm trying to work with a partner, a local partner in our area, LPA systems, to help develop more reports tailored towards SAP to provide workers compensation. I need to run a report that pulls out the worker compensation to do it in SAP so much more costly than to do it out of a Cognos. And so that's our goal in the next year is really to pull more reports using Cognos out of SAP. Okay, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about cloud, which sort of stands on some CIOs say no way, others say yes, others got shadow IT going to the cloud. What's the state of cloud from an infrastructure standpoint and even a SaaS at your 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, it was small companies were roughing, 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, on my SAP side for my DR site, I'm doing just that. I have a contract with a company that's providing me a cloud-based solution for my DR. Okay, 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? No, because I would consider, I'm not sure if I would consider this company because our information is very controlled. We follow under the SSE16 because we host data that has the HIPAA regulations, all the different regulations. So we have people's social security number and that. So to offer that in the cloud, not to say that it's not secure, but we have a much better control and we have an infrastructure in our organization that has enough bandwidth, has enough cooling all the normal environmentals that you would have for a data center. So right now for us, it makes more sense for us, but in three to five years from now, maybe even sooner than that, we'll probably look at possibly what's the cost differentiation between doing it in-house, having the resources to do it versus offering. What about test and dev? Are you doing any test and dev stuff? Oh yeah, yes, we have in our SAP environment, we have a traditional three tier landscape, so we've got dev quality in the production, all of which is housed inside. The decision actually to have that done was before I joined the company. So the decision was made, that's in May of 2010 I joined in July. Had I been beforehand, I really would have pushed to have that hosted somewhere else because in my opinion, for an organization especially like ours, we don't have the technical expertise to be able to manage the basis capabilities, the architecture, the hardware, all that type of stuff. So I think that's a better fit for most people in doing SAP implementations of looking at that, maybe the first, second, or third year, especially if you don't have that experience if you're new to an SAP type environment. Are you doing any Hadoop? No, no use case for it, right? No, not this one. Using Bitcoin at all? No. I mean, we have a conversation last night about Bitcoin. I'm gonna still look at it. The next tool of craze, you know. PayPal's looking at it, it's in the news. It's not mainstream enterprise. We love talking to CIOs, obviously at Wikibon community, we have a lot of CIOs, we have a lot of CIOs in our network and this is a challenging opportunity but 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 driving profits. 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 now P&L profit center. 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 an opportunity to generate some additional revenue. I'm assuming you took the facilities equation out of your P&L, right? So before I join the organization. Did you write that down yet or? I'll keep track of that for sure. Okay, go ahead. But before I join the organization, I jokingly say this, we had more bandwidth in some banks. I mean, we really had the infrastructure in place and fully redundant 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 50% of our data center space. So I have all this empty space. I have all this bandwidth sitting here. I've got all the redundancies and the environmentals to be able to support that. Why not go after small companies? 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. We're here live at the IOD conference. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Stay with us.