 Hi everybody, welcome to CUBE Conversations. This is Dave Vellante, we're here at Wikibon headquarters and we're going to talk about the relationship between customers and customers and the supply community. We're going to talk about the total customer experience. Kevin Roach is here, he's the Senior Vice President with EMC and Bill Fandrick is the Senior Vice President and CIO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Gentlemen, thanks for coming into the CUBE today. Thanks Dave, thank you very much. So Bill, let's start with you. Blue Cross Blue Shield, great brand name. Everybody knows about your organization, but things are changing in your business. I wonder if you could talk about some of those external challenges that you're facing and then we can get into what that means for your IT. Sure, I think obviously in the press today in the market there's a lot being talked about about the changes in health care and there's a lot being discussed related to health care reform and the implications of that. Of course in Massachusetts we've been under this model since 2008, so we've been actually implementing capabilities now to compete in a different market. So if you look at our situation in Massachusetts we have a few things. One is how do we compete more and more in a portion of our business that is more regulated? So it's a different business model. How do we start to put in capabilities to support what we consider more of a retail consumer-based business? And of course our customers, the cost and quality of health care is always a high demand and affordability as a result of that. So what we're looking at is innovative products to support that. Now on the other side I think in the history of my career 27 years I don't think I've ever seen as profound amount of change in what I would call the infrastructure side of technology and it's not just improvements that we've typically saw in the past it's actually transformational. So all this tied together really puts really my role and my organization's role is how do we enable our business strategically plus transform us to position ourselves technologically for the future as well. So it's interesting, I mean Massachusetts is a little microcosm of the Affordable Care Act otherwise affectionately known as Obamacare but so what kinds of things have you learned in the early days of sort of the transition in Massachusetts and do you think that will ripple through sort of nationally? Yeah, certainly the demographics and associated with each state or different parts of country have different challenges but there's an awful lot in common. One is common themes is access to care. We've done that in Massachusetts and a big part of our business is supporting really what we've done at the state level to ensure all but less than 2% of the entire population. Equally having products and solutions in the market that an individual can buy and use and understand versus what we typically did in the past with an employer-based healthcare. But also the nature of what you go through is early when you implement these kinds of things you really deal with access but now you have to deal with affordability. And with IT and our infrastructure being such a big part of the cost structures of our business, we have to find innovative ways to leverage it and make value of it versus just managing assets better. Okay, so EMC, local company, US, Kevin obviously have a relationship. Talk about the nature of that relationship and how does this idea of the total customer experience fit in? Yeah, it's interesting. You know, Bill, I agree with you. What's changing is the pressure on your types of roles, right? The infrastructure that has to evolve as you think about where things are going in the industry and healthcare is obviously an important one both locally but nationally and globally, quite frankly, in terms of the pressures are on. And I think what you just echoed is some of the challenges not only in your industry but across the globe. CIOs are getting challenged to say that that cost of infrastructure that has, for lack of a better word, keep the lights on infrastructure has to be getting to the point where it's been challenged to be more efficient and effective in how it's done so that you can begin to bring innovation into what you need to do for your customers' employees. And I think EMC from a strategy standpoint has seen this and certainly has been an important part of that. As a provider of that infrastructure and that transformation that's going on, we have for many years looked at a total customer experience program to reach out to our customers like Blue Cross, Blue Shield and both look at it from a transactional level but more also in the transformation of how we align to the strategy of our customers. And I think that's an important piece of it. So we've been really kind of looking at our listening posts as this transformation has gone from consuming that technology on a less strategic level to fill infrastructure and now towards more solutions and optimization of that infrastructure. We've got to keep looking at ways that we evolve our listening posts to make sure we understand how we're hearing our customers and making sure our strategy, our solutions are aligning to the needs of the marketplace. And I think a big part of that becomes a total customer experience program that we're driving with an EMC. Okay, which is, we're going to get into that a little bit but it's a program that sort of measures all the touch points and the quality of those touch points. I want to go back to sort of the business issue. So you mentioned Kevin, you drive for efficiency and ever since I've been in this business I've been a driver except maybe like in 1999 was maybe the only time it was a crazy period. But in general the way people, Bill used to approach that was many times they would outsource their infrastructure and they would move the needle a little bit but it was clear that you didn't get the type of agility that you were after. And so now people are looking at the cloud, they're looking at Amazon as the poster child for agility but not everybody wants to outsource their data to Amazon especially in a highly regulated business like yours. So how do you accommodate that need for continued efficiency and speed and agility? What are you guys doing strategically to address that? Sure, and I think this is where our relationship with the EMC is very critical. We've been talking about this, I've been at Blue Cross about six years now, we've been talking about this journey and it is a journey. I think historically CIOs, especially in our industry and I think other industries have gone through changes but in our industry you are measured a lot on how effective an issue could manage the assets and it really was a debate of who was better at managing assets, an internal or external entity and there's a financial and other SLA things that you would measure. The world's different. I don't think in infrastructure anymore you're measured on managing assets. It's really about the value, it's about consumption and use and value you're driving it and so the days when you would look at how effective are you managing your servers, how I'm managing you, the towers of mainframe, the towers of desktop services, they're all integrated right now. And to give you an example with the EMC, these are some of the challenges that we've talked about. I can see, we see annually 30 to 40% growth in the consumption and use of our data. Now if you just do the math on basic Moore's law where you can get a 15 to 20% if you optimize your infrastructure, improvement on capacity and cost, we're basically becoming economically infeasible in our business managing that way. So it's how do you transform that and break down the silos of infrastructure that have been built for years and stop measuring and stop looking at buying software, servers, hardware, desktops, where it really does your buying capacity and use. And so a big example of that is, big part of our work with EMC is not only on the data management, which they've had years of expertise, but it's all on the infrastructure management in what we built as a private cloud. Even though a lot of it is with third parties, it is something we do manage internally. But with that capabilities, think of it this way. We used to talk about hot centers and data centers and keeping idle capacity just in case issues going with the new technology. We literally can keep images of our environment in a fraction of the space. And if there is an issue in one environment, it automatically rebuilds itself and another comes up and repoints everything. The power of that basically means that I can run my IT infrastructure in about a 10th of what I used to be able to run some of these things from a fixed asset. And I can support a business continuity as well as disaster recovery without having all the fixed costs and services that I used to. It's a big difference. Plus, I improve my time to market. Plus, when I want to start a new project and I need new servers, I'm doing it in minutes versus months, which is how the old world works. And it sounds like for the business side of things, it's a consumption-based model. That's right. It's not putting a bunch of infrastructure and over-provision, and then wait for the application demand to catch up. Is that right? And I would ask, you know, the image, the vision from a business is instead of focusing on these desktops that we issues and all the security and all the capabilities on it, why can't we run our operations like a Google or an Apple, where you have your personalized desktop, you get it from an Apple or Google's like store, it downloads to any device you want. It's private, it's secure, but all the power and processing's behind my data center, and they can do that anywhere, anytime, on any device that makes sense for them. And I'm getting out of that. I'm not becoming an obstacle. I'm enabling them. You're almost becoming a broker through that process. And that's, I think, one of the roles that we see evolving, and that's one of the things that we have the sensitivity with as a provider of these technologies and solutions. You know, we have to understand your evolving role is almost a broker of looking at different ways to best satisfy that demand and need that you have of saying, how do I bring capacity in a way that it wants to be consumed by a customer and end employee, et cetera. And I think that's the challenge. And I think that's the big part of our relationship change, because in the years ago, we talked about how can you maximize my storage management capabilities. Now we're talking about all touch points with my business, all the technology capabilities, and how do we enable a different model where I'm measuring something totally different that quite frankly in the past we didn't measure, which gets into capacity, usage, value, optimization, and you can't just have a relationship on a one-dimension of technology, and that's all the relationships we've built with EMC in all the different touch points with my business areas. Exactly, and I think you said earlier too, you've constructed your private cloud internally, right? And that is through stuff that you've constructed internally, but also partners that you're leveraging and using through that model. And I think that's the challenge is not only that you've built it, i.e. manage an asset, but how do you optimize that and how do you run the best run private cloud that you can through this broker service that I think you ultimately have to enable? And I think the challenge, you know, to give you, I can give some real good metrics on that, but it's not a one-size-fits-all. We do do, a lot of our applications now, we do purchase through the cloud, through third-party services for what I would consider more the traditional corporate-type things that we don't need to differentiate ourselves. And those are third-party, you know, the salesforce.coms of the world, the workdays in the HR, those kinds of applications on the other side for our internal, what we consider our crown jewels, our data, in some of the internally-built applications we designed with EMC, our own private cloud. Now the power of this, it does change your dynamics of how you manage infrastructure. So in the days of outsourcing, which we've been, we're an outsourcing relationship for over 30 years prior to joining Blue Cross, we had over 200 people managing this mid-range infrastructure from our vendor. I run it now with 42 people. Now they're a different skill. They're not optimized on one component, they actually have to understand end-to-end the technology. And I'm fortunate to have a good team who's done that, but I think that's the challenge. You have to re-engineer your organizational and your skills and your competencies as well. It's not just technology. Now part of that same as you satisfied a big chunk of your infrastructure. Okay, but you're also within the core infrastructure that you're keeping in-house, you're more efficient is what I'm understanding. So Kevin, how do you measure all this stuff? I know a little bit about TCE, but as Bill was describing, sort of the old way of managing infrastructure silos, this measurement system, this TCE total customer experience has been in place for a while. I would presume it would have to transform as well to this new world. Absolutely, and that's one of the things, the thing I was attracted to EMC when I joined a few years back was its passion around customers and we had some pretty good listening devices that were out there, but I would say that they're very traditional. They were, how did you do managing your asset and how did we do supplying something so you could manage an asset? And what we've had to evolve over the last year and a half is, we want to understand the experience our customers go through for each segment of that journey that we want to take. We want to understand how did we do in helping you in your solution part of that? So what do you need to satisfy the demands that you have and then how did we do fulfilling that? Both technology, products and services and then when something isn't working right, how well did we do when responding and helping in that environment? And so we've started to put in place and transform the total customer experience program around that journey map to say, at various touch points, are we serving our customers the way we need to? That then provides information back to us, not only in the relationship that we have with customers like Blue Cross, Blue Shield, but also at an aggregate level across the company because it's now starting to drive actions and function and tasks within the company to start to say it's process improvements, not functional necessarily improvements and that's the transformation we have to go internally to EMC is to start thinking about that transformation across a set of processes not just in isolated islands of functions. Now how much visibility does Bill have on this data? Well, we're getting there, right? So we've taken the first couple of steps actually. We decided in order to have a program that was relevant, we needed to take ourselves out of the data collection part of that process and the construction of who we wanted to talk to and how we spoke to them. We gave guidelines but used brokers to third party brokers to go off and do that. That data now comes back to us and it's manifesting itself in a couple of ways. First, at the account level, so the folks who deal with Bill on a regular basis, they're for the first time getting visibility into what were the responses back so we can begin to build the relationships and respond to the feedback we get from customers like Blue Cross, Blue Shield. The next step in that process is then to make sure we share that back with Bill and team to say, here's what we think we heard, are we hearing that correctly? Because I think the most important thing is we can't be the only ones interpreting the data that we're getting back. We want to be able to share that and say, did we hear correctly? And by the way, thank you for your contribution, others in your industry across the globe, et cetera. Here's what we're hearing from them. Ultimately that's where the program needs to evolve because it has to be looking at the solutions and be relevant to people like Bill so that he gets value out of it, not just in responding, but also seeing the input back that comes from other customers. So there's a benchmark angle here as well. What kind of things do you want to see from that? Well, I think the journey we're on, it's continuation, you know, the interesting thing is always start with a business problem. So when we first met, when I first joined the company and I had my meeting with the emcee and some of our technical team, including our outsourcer, one of the things they were informing me of that our need to upgrade our storage and they needed to shut down for the weekend to do this. And I said, well, how often do we do this? Well, it depends how often we upgrade, but every year, two years, three years at the moment, you know, we'll have to, and I said, I need to understand how we can run this business without shutting down the environment to upgrade. And in the past, that would mean more infrastructure, more assets, more cost structures. And I was, you know, in having been through that multiple times, I was expecting that, but I said, no, there's a new model. There has to be a new model where I don't need more infrastructure. I need a different kind of infrastructure. So the challenge was, how do I start to maintain and upgrade and do all the things you have to do with your business without shutting down the company? The journey we're on safe to say is, we've proven that you can actually do this and be less costly, which is the first time I've seen in my history to put infrastructure and do upgrades on a regular basis without shutting down the entire environment. We're literally changing certain things that's repointing elsewhere. The business continues to run because we have to be successful in our business in the future. You have to have a 24 by seven mentality and you have to be able to process this information literally at a fraction of the time and cost that we did and make decisions off the data. And I can't do that if assets are being shut down. Well, what a change, right? Because it used to be, you'd measure planned downtime and unplanned downtime, unplanned downtime, really bad. Planned downtime, well, we plan for it. But to be your point, Bill, you plan for it, it's really expensive. These days, Kevin, customers are telling you no downtime is acceptable. And the feedback that we get from customers like Bill in this journey that they go through is feedback that gets racked back to our engineering teams. And we have to start thinking about, for lack of a better word, I'll just use some simplistic terms. You almost have to build a veneer in front for the user experience and say, look, this is how you consume that technology. What we do behind the scenes and plugging in and plugging out infrastructure, let us worry about that part of it. And I think that's part of the strategy that you've had almost. You almost have to secure the perimeter and the experience that your customers will have as you replace or enhance or modify or upgrade infrastructure as you go forward. And I think that successful companies are the ones who have done that in their journey of building out this hybrid colliding environment. So I wonder, Bill, if you could talk a little bit about some of the initiatives that you have going on. You talked about that you, if I call it, sassified a big chunk of that, that's sort of outsourced, rented. My understanding is you're bringing some things back on prem. That's correct. And maybe talk about some of the big initiatives you have near-term, mid-term, and then, Kevin, maybe talk about how you guys are helping. Sure, I think what you find, and this is the, I wouldn't say outsource, insource, it's a little bit of both, but we are definitely insourcing what I consider the intellectual capital. We have to control our own destiny. And we work closely with partners like EMC to help this vision in as long as they're committed to that same journey and their innovation, which in this case EMC is, we partner very well. But what I found was the traditional outsourcing model is so optimized now and so specialized into towers, people have lost the integration of technology. So to transform your organization, I'm having a hard time finding how you can turn those keys over to someone else. What we really are looking at is insourcing that intellectual capital, working with partners differently. I wouldn't call it outsourcing, but it's a different kind of model in building out a new infrastructure. And yes, there'll be aspects of it that if we need third parties to help us for level three support or other things, yes, we build those relationships, but ultimately we have to control that direction. It's a different skill set, it takes a strong commitment to that. But I think the challenge I see with the traditional outsourcing models, those companies who've been in that business for years, they almost have to cannibalize their entire business to be successful. And that's an awful hard thing to see someone willing to do. A lot of dislocation going on. Now, how do you deal with the human capital challenge? I mean, it's never easy, right? So how are you re-skilling? Well, you know, a couple of things. One is in having come from the technology side years ago, although I forgot more than I know now, is one thing about technologists, the good ones, they wanna be valued. They want to know that people recognize the importance of what they're doing to the business. And they want to be heard. And it's important that you commit. But they're also, I find in my case, the people where they're not, their expectations aren't that crazy that we should just do it for technology sake. They wear a business-oriented hat. So there's a profile of a skill or competency we're looking for. Now, fortunately, when you're doing something unique that someone hasn't done, you attract people. Now the challenge is how do you make sure you're not just attracting people that'll jump for the next thing? Being in Massachusetts, which of course has a strong background, a good technology people, being in the brand of Blue Cross and everything we represent in the community as well as the healthcare industry adds a lot of value. Plus having a vision in showing, we now have six years of progress that has showed this journey and commitment. And the excitement that goes with that is just amazing. So yes, that is the hardest part of the job, but by far. But it's also the most rewarding part because for the first time, the infrastructure groups are coming out from, they're the necessary evil to you are transforming this company and they're pretty excited about that. They're almost getting a chance to come out from behind the curtain as well. And when they make the connection with the people who are consuming the work that they do, you can see how they feel more valuable and what they're contributing. Because I think one of the important things we got feedback through the Total Customer Experience program was the need of this transformation was not just about technology and solutions and infrastructure, it was how do people move forward with this? And that becomes a key part of that. One of the things that we tried to do at EMC is to build out a curriculum around that transformation of skills that we assume that there is some great technical skills and people out there. But the challenge is how do they convey their value in front of their leadership team or their customers to consume that? And we've created a curriculum around cloud transformation and cloud transformation skills to help those technical people who are ready to take that journey. And we thought that was an important part of that. That's another one of those pieces that came through that Total Customer Experience program because I think what Bill, you shared is exactly what most of the CIOs are looking for across the globe is help me move my talent forward because I need that skill set who have that historical legacy knowledge but are willing to take that challenge as we go forward. Well, you guys have transformed, I can say your educational services because it used to be how to manage a disk array. Exactly. It's not anymore. All right, we're out of time. But Bill, I wanted to ask you the last question is on the role of CIO. I was talking to one of your colleagues on the provider side, John Halamka, who is a pretty well-known individual in Massachusetts, very brilliant guy. And we were talking about the future of the CIO and his premise was, the CIO is sort of really splitting. You got the technologist CIO and you got the business CIO that maybe reports to the CIO. The growth path of the CIO, in his mind, was maybe a potential into the COO role, a business role. Maybe if you're a hardcore technologist, go to the technology role and then this emerging data role, chief data officer. What's your thought on the future of the CIO? You know, it's funny. A journey I started 27 years ago out of college. I don't know why, but I got this strong feeling that even though I was deep technology that the future of the CIO, the future of running companies was you had to be absolutely competent in technology. That the way you think about things, you know, people now talk about, is technology an enabler or is it the strategy or, and it's both, it's both. And I believe that more so than ever that to look at a problem and a set of business circumstances and to shape it, not from a technology for technology's sake, but shape it in the way of things that people can't even see yet, because that's how we're trained and groomed. It is long as it's always grounded in the strategy of the company and you can always put that foot forward in the market side of it. That to me is the missing piece that CIOs have had is how do you leap from that? So when people ask me, are you a business-oriented CIO, are you a technology-oriented CIO, or are you a good relationship manager? I said yes, yes, and yes, because, and you work every day to improve that, and it's a strong commitment to improve. I work harder now, not just hours, because of the demand of the job, but in understanding the business, in understanding the technology changes, understanding that I ever have in my life. And if you're signing up for this job, you better be committed to that because you have to stay ahead of it. So it's a business enabler, it's a technology broker and a matchmaker slash market maker. You have a relationship. All right, gentlemen, thanks very much for the great conversation. Really appreciate your time today. Thank you very much. And thanks for watching, everybody. This is CUBE Conversations. We'll see you next time.