 from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to D.C., everybody. This is the Nutanix .NEXT conference, hashtag nextconf, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Dr. Arthur Langer is here. He's a professor at Columbia University and a CUBE alum, good to see you. Thanks very much for coming on. Great to be back. Appreciate your time. So, interesting conversations going on at .NEXT. People talking about cloud, and you hear a lot about virtualization and infrastructure. We're going to up level it a bit. You're giving a talk, you're hosting a panel today, and you're also giving a talk on strategic IT, using IT as a competitive weapon. You know, it wasn't that long ago where people were saying, does IT matter? We obviously know it matters. What's your research showing? What is your activity demonstrating about IT, and how is it a strategic initiative? Well, if you were to first look at what goes on on board meetings today, I would say, and I think I mentioned this last time, the three prominent discussions at a board is, how can I use technology for strategic advantage? How can I use predictive analytics, and how are you securing and protecting us? And when you look at that, all three of those ultimately fall in the lap of the information technology people. Now you might say digital or other parts of it, but the reality is all of this sits at the heart of information technology. And if you look at many of us in that world, we've learned very efficiently and very good how to support things. But now to move into this other area of driving business, of taking risks, of becoming better marketers. Wow, what an opportunity that is for information technology leadership. So, obviously you believe that IT is a strategic advantage, and is it sustainable, though? You know, I was sort of tongue in cheek joking about the Nick Carr book, but the real premise of his book was it's not a sustainable competitive advantage. Is that true in your view? I don't believe at all. I live and die by that old economics curve called the S-curve, in which you evaluate where your product life is going to be. I think if you go back and you look at the Industrial Revolution, we are very early. I think that the changes, the acceleration of changes brought on by technological innovations will continue to haunt businesses and provide these opportunities well past our life. How's that? So, if anybody thinks that this is a passing fad, my feeling is they're delusional. We're just warming up. So it can be a sustainable competitive advantage, but you have to jump S-curves and be willing to jump S-curves at the right time. Is that a fair? The way I would say it to you, the S-curve is shrinking. So you have less time to enjoy your victories. You know, the prediction is that, how long will people last on the Dow 500 these days? Maybe two, three years, as opposed to 20, 30, 40 years. Can we change fast enough? And is there anything wrong with the S-curve ending and starting a new one? Businesses reinventing themselves constantly. Change a norm. Professor Langer, one of the challenges we hear from customers is keeping up with that change is really tough. How do you know what technologies? Do you have the right skill set? What advice are you giving? How do people try to keep up with the change? Understand what they should be doing internally versus turning to partners to be able to handle it. I think it's energy and culture and excitement. That's the first thing that I think a lot of people are missing. You need to sell this to your organizations. You need to establish why this is such a wonderful time. All right? And then you need to get the people in between the millennials and the baby boomers and the Gen X's. And you got to get them to work together because we know, all right, from research right now that without question, the millennials will need to move into management positions faster than any of their predecessors because of retirements and all of the other things that are going on. But the most important thing, which is where I see IT meeting to move in is you can't just launch one thing. You have to launch lots of things. And this is the old marketing concept, right? You don't bat a thousand and IT needs to come out of its shell in that area and say, I have to launch five, six, eight, 10 initiatives. Some of them will make it. Some of them won't. Can you imagine private equity, prevent your people trying to launch every company and be successful? We all know that in a market of opportunity, there are risks. And to establish that as an exciting thing. So you know what? It comes back to leadership in many ways. You know, really great point because if you're not having those failures, your returns are going to be minuscule. If you're only investing in things that are sure things, then it's pretty much guaranteed to have low single-digit returns, if that. Look what happened at Ford. They did everything pretty well. They never took any of the money, right? But they changed CEOs because they didn't get involved in driverless cars enough. I mean, these are the things that were said, if you're trying to catch up, it's already over. So how do you predict what's coming? And who has that? It's the data. It's the way we handle the data. It's the way we secure the data. Who's going to do that? So that brings me to the dark side of all this enthusiasm, which is security. You see things like IoT, you know, the bad guys have AI as well. Thoughts on security, discussions that are going on in the boardroom. What's, how CIO should be thinking about communicating to the board regarding security? I've done a lot of work in this area and whether that falls into the CISO, the chief information security officer and where they report, but the bottom line is how are they briefing their boards? And once again, anybody that knows anything about security knows that you're not going to keep them out. It's going to be an ongoing process. It's going to be things like, okay, what do we do when we have a response? How do we respond to that? How do we predict things? How do we stay ahead of that? And that is the more of the norm. And what we see, and I can give you sort of analogy, when the president comes to speak in a city, what are they, they close down streets, don't they? They create the unpredictability. And I think one of the marvelous challenges for IT is to create architectures, and I've been writing about this, which change so that those that are trying to attack us and they're looking for the street to take inside of the network, we got to kind of have a more dynamic architecture to create unpredictability. So these are all of the things that come into strategy, language, how to educate our boards, how to prepare the next generation of those board members and where will the technology people sit in those processes? We've had the chance to interview some older companies, companies 75, 150 years old, that are trying to become software companies and they're worried about the Airbnb's of the world, disrupting what they're doing. How do you see the older companies keeping pace and trying to keep up with some of these young software companies? How do you move 280,000 people at a major bank, for example? How do you do that? And I think there's several things that people are trying. One is investing in startups with options to obtain them and purchase them. The other is to create, for lack of a better word, labs, parts of the company that are not as controlled or part of the predominant culture, which as we know historically, will hold back the company because they will just typically try to protect the domain that has worked for them so well. So those are the two main things, creating entities within the companies that have an ability to try new things or investing entrepreneurially or even intrapreneurially with new things with options to bring them in. And then the third one, this last one is very difficult. Sort of what Apple did. One of the things that has always haunted many large companies is their install base. The fact that they're trying to support the older technologies because they don't want to lose their install base. Well, remember what Steve Jobs did. He came in with a new architecture and he says, either you're with me or you're not. And to some extent, which is a very hard decision, you have to start looking at that and challenge your install base to say, this is the new way, we'll help you get there. But at some point we can't support those older systems. One of my favorite lines in theCUBE, Don Tapscott. God created the world in six days, but he didn't have an install base, right? Because that handcuffs companies and innovation in a lot of cases. I mean, you saw that, you've worked at big companies. So I want to ask you, Dr. Langer, we had this, the last 10 years, this consumerization of IT, the Amazon effect, you know, the whole mobile thing. Is technology, is IT specifically getting less complex or more complex? I think it's getting far more complex. I think what has happened is business people sometimes see the ease of use, all right? The fact that we have an interface with them, which makes life a lot easier. We see more software that can be pushed together, but be careful. We have found out with cybersecurity problems how extraordinarily complicated this world is. With that power comes complexities, blockchain, other things that are coming. It's a powerful world, but it's a complicated one. And it's not one where you want amateurs running the back end of your businesses. Okay, so let's talk about the role of those guys running. We've talked a lot about data. You've seen the emergence of the chief data officer, particularly in regulated industries, but increasingly in non-regulated businesses. Who should be running the technology show? Is it a business person? Is it a technologist? Is it some kind of unicorn blend of those? I just don't think from what we've seen by trying marketing people, by trying business people, that they can really ultimately grasp the significance of the technical aspects of this. It's almost like asking someone who's not a doctor to run a hospital. I know theoretically you could possibly do that, but think about that. So you need that technology. I'm not caught up on the titles, but I am concerned, and I've written an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago, that there were just too many C-level people floating around owning this thing. And I think whether you call it the chief technologist or the executive technical person or the chief automation individual, that all those people have to be talking to each other and have to lead up to someone who's not only understanding the strategy, but really understands the back end of keeping the lights on and the security and everything else. The way I've always said it, the IT people have the hardest job in the world. They're fighting a two-front war because both of those don't necessarily mesh nicely together. Tell me another area of an organization that is a driver and a supporter at the same time. You look at HR, they're a supporter. You look at marketing, they're a driver. So the complexities of this are not just who you are, but what you're doing at any moment in time. So you could have a support person that's doing something, but at one moment in that person's function could be doing a driving, risk-taking responsibility. So what are some of the projects you're working on now? What's exciting you? Well, the whole idea of how to drive that strategy, how to take risks, the digital disruption era is a tremendous opportunity. This is our day because most companies are not really clear what to do. Socially, I'm looking very closely at smart cities. This is another secret wave of things that are happening. How are cities going to function? Within five, seven years, they're predicting that 75% of the world's population will live in major cities and you won't have to work in a city and live there. You could live somewhere else, so cities will compete and it's all about the data and automation and how do organizations get closer with their governments because our governments can't afford to implement these things. Very interesting stuff. Not to mention the issues of the socially excluded and underserved populations in those cities. And then finally, how does this mesh with cyber risk? All right, and how does that come together to the promotion of that role in organizations? Just a few things and then way a little bit behind is of course, blockchain. How is that going to affect the world that we live in? Yeah, well, just curious, your thoughts on the future of jobs. Look about what automation's happening, kind of the hollowing out of the middle class, kind of the opportunities and risks there. I think it has to do with a world of what I call supply chain. And it's amazing that we still see companies coming to me saying I can't fill positions, particularly in the five year range and in an ability to invest in younger talent to bring them in there. Our educational institutions obviously will be challenged. We're in a skills-based market. How do they adopt? How do we change that? We see programs like IBM launching new collar where they're actually considering non-degreed people. How do universities start working together to get closer, in my opinion, to corporations where they have to work together? And then there is, let's be careful, there are new horizons, space, new things to challenge that technology will bring us. 20 years ago, I was at a bank, which I won't mention, about the closing of branch banks, because we thought that technology would take over online banking. Well, 20 years later, online banking's done everything we predicted and we're opening more branches than ever before. Be careful, all right? So I'm a believer that with new things come new opportunities. The question is how do governments and corporations and educational institutions get closer together? This is going to be critical as we move forward, or else the have-nots are going to grow and that's a problem. All right, we have to leave it there. Dr. Arthur Langer, sir, thanks very much for coming in the queue. It's always a pleasure to be here. See you soon. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. Be right back.