 Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live. This is Silicon Angles, the CUBE, live coverage, exclusive coverage of IBM, Pulse IBM's cloud conference. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm joined by Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.org. And our next guest is Mirella Matase. IT director of quality systems at LaFarge. Welcome to the CUBE. Did I get that right? Yes, you got it right. Okay. It's actually maintenance and quality systems. That's a problem for me, you know. By AC Sound. Yeah, thank you. You're welcome. Welcome to the CUBE. So what do you think of the IBM show here? What's your impression? Well, for me, the IBM show is definitely one of the best shows I attend every year. And mind you, I attend quite a bit because of my position on running departments of maintenance and quality, which is covering pretty much industrial in the plans. Because it's not only about software resources, it's about information sharing. And you know firsthand whatever is out there and you know also how people are using whatever is out there to be successful. So for me, that's why it's one of the best opportunities. So service management is a big topic here. Cloud's a big topic. Blue Mix, platforms as a service. They say it's supposed to help people's lives get better in terms of IT. And also new opportunities. How do you see that, this cloud opportunity in terms of current operations and future possibilities? Lafarge itself is interested in having cloud opportunities because we need to be able to scale up rapidly. We are a company that is quite big, is a multinational, is number one in the world in construction materials in cement. Is number two in aggregate, is number four in concrete and the summer four, five in gypsum. So when you have such a huge company with 1,057 sites, when you have 65 countries coverage, different cultures, different instances, and you have a process of standardization, you need to be able to scale up rapidly. You need to be able to deliver in a timely manner and you need to be able to give your footprint or have your footprint in the plants as soon as possible in order not to impact the business process because whether we like it or not as a society, we are overhead. So the company is the one that's doing the other. You're a big, slow corporation. Yes. So you have to move fast, as they say. It's hard to move fast when you're big and you have standards. So the goal is to be agile and flexible. How do you do that? Well, agile and flexible is easy to achieve, supposedly. We say that because we are templatizing at Lafarge since 1998, which means that we have a history of templatization of our processes and systems that go accordingly for 14, 16 years already. So we did orient the templatization or the standardization of the products we deliver around business process, conceptual organization, all embedded into a nice IT product, which includes integrations with backend office, includes ERP, includes Maximo as a tool for maintenance management. And everything else delivered with the methodology of implementation. That contains the change management, contains delivery methods, contains auditing, analytics, and measuring, and contains a template governance for the template evolution. So that's why I'm saying is relatively easy because we went through a process, a lengthy process of growing up as users of our systems and standardization itself, over six, seven versions of template. And we are at the point where we can get creative. We are at the point where we can expand the scope of what we are doing to more than maintenance. That says for all because, for instance, we used to call our template in my group, which is Maximo Competency Center. It was called Maximo Template. You see the maturity at some point in time because it's called maintenance template. And nowadays it called manufacturing improvement version seven. So it means that we are far and above the maintenance process and the preventive model only, but the extension of preventive model and process product and quality and so on and so forth. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about your business and some of the global trends and pressures that it puts on you as a technology practitioner. I mean, you're a huge global company, multi-billion dollar company. You're subject to the ebbs and flows of economies around the world and very obviously diversified around the world. But so what kind of pressures are you seeing in your business? What kind of demands is the business placing on you and how are you responding from an IT infrastructure standpoint? Well, the major pressure we face up is something that you expressed it in a nutshell, but it's one small thing missing. We are a commodity product. So at least the division I'm running IT for is a commodity product. What does commodity means? It means that in order to give profit to the stakeholders when there is a fixed price on the market for your product and there is a fixed cost for raw materials resources and energy consumption, you have to do something to be competitive and the competitiveness comes from excellence in operational activities, excellence in execution, improved and state-of-the-art delivery of the system that is available. It's not that we are up there to be perfect, but we are trying our best to achieve that. And not only that, cement is maybe I'm over simplifying, but it's easy to do. People would say we can do cement on paper. So if you can do cement on paper, better have a good system that delivers without fault and without error, because if not, they will use paper. You'll be in the cement, you know they say. Cement shoes, you don't get that IT system right. Where'd she go? She didn't show up for work today. Well, it's a little bit like that, yeah. No, it doesn't matter. I'm from New Jersey, so it speaks for itself. I don't want to go there. Okay, but I want to get your perspective on this show. What is your reaction to the IBM announcements and these new capabilities? You've been doing templates, you've been doing composite design, you've been doing IT right, setting the table for your organization. Now IBM's got all this stuff. What's your reaction to it? Do you impress with it? What do you like it? Thumbs up, thumbs down. What's your take on it as an IT director? Well, I sometimes definitely, because what you're looking for is for rapid development, installation, configuration, delivery, scalability, name it. In one place. This is something that everyone is targeting, is running after. Why do we run after that? It's not only a matter of technology, it's a matter of resources. So in order to have a portability of resources, you need to have the capability to have a system which is easy to know, easy to learn, and you don't need to cross train all the time the people to be able to deliver and to be there and available. So it's not only about the fact that they have this product, which seems to be amazing, and it's fast to deliver it, but you also have, can use your resources on and on again on different components or products that they are inattaching in this complex delivery. And put them at the right task at the right moment without extensive cross training. From my standpoint as a 90, and this is the same thing for somebody that's supporting the applications. If I'm used to one or two or three of them, for sure I'm going to be at ease to do all that else. So you hear a lot about cloud, obviously. If I had asked you four or five years ago what you think about cloud, most IT practitioners would have rolled their eyes and said, cloud. But it's not a raining. Yeah, yeah, that's right, it's not raining. Okay, but now it's become the sort of accepted term, but I wonder if you could describe your strategy as it relates to so-called cloud computing. Would you say that your primarily, your organization is primarily doing internal sort of private clouds? Are you looking at public cloud? Are you doing mostly, as your strategy more, to go hybrid? I don't think you could talk about that a little bit. Right now, we are doing a private cloud or somewhat we are mimicking a private cloud in the infrastructures we have. And we are targeting to go towards similar goal as what IBM is presenting. What I'm saying is that is because currently we have, at least for manufacturing improvement program, we work on a centralized instance, which is something new for the last two years. You have one centralized instance per region to date. The tendency was to go with one instance globally due to the resources that are already available. The support people and so forth, we decided we go and split in three. It's also another reason because we have a lot of integrations with different financial RPs. So it's normal to have a little bit of segregation, but we are already looking at something centralized. Centralized cannot work unless it's having a very strong platform support. I mean, it's not gonna be performant. The product that is beautiful and doesn't work because the network is not right or the platform is not strong enough is a role choice that's gonna stay in your parking spot. So that's the way it is. How about this idea of shadow IT? You talk about this trend towards centralization at your organization. What percent of your IT spend is centralized versus what we would sometimes call shadow IT? Lines of business spending, rogue spending projects or marketing driven spending projects. Do you have a sense of that? I do not have a global sense of that so if I have it, maybe I'm not gonna necessarily share it in details. Maybe in subjective terms, like high, medium, low. Yes, okay, so I would say somewhere in the medium. The way that spending on IT is an interesting context or complex, we give ownership to the countries. Around the country you have countries that are managing their own resources and budgets and their investment on the IT side. But there are also global projects that bring to the table the benefits of a global solution. So we empower the countries to take the global solution. It's more work on our side, definitely, to sell our products with the same thing that IBM does or any other software company, if you want to put it like that. But it's just that we are not only software and also process because the template has a business component, the IT component. And yet giving independence to the country to take it or not. And eventually they take it because if they see the benefit, if they can measure the benefit, if they can establish their own KPI, they're really investing in it. So the cost is in two places. So when you have an initiative that is outside core IT, assuming it's not successful, then somebody will kill it, right? But something successful, do you typically at some point bring that back into the IT organization? Do you somehow collaborate with them to make sure that they're complying with the security and the compliance edicts of the organization? How does it work? How does a successful shadow IT operation work? And what role does IT play in the evolution of that project? There is one component that our CIO has introduced maybe four years ago, three, four years ago, which I would call it simply transparency. Actually for us it's a wiki, it's a communication, internal communication around Lafarge, where people are encouraged to write in plain text all their initiatives, all their questions for that matter, all their doubts, all their comments. So that is actually in encouraging productivity. The other part that we are saying, when you talk standard, you don't have to imagine that the standard is something that is rigid, is a block, is a black box, that's never gonna, and you will touch it when everything is gonna be stabilized. That's not possible, because we evolve our people, technology evolves next to us, actually is bypassing whatever we are doing, so if you don't evolve your templates, by the time you deploy them, you will never achieve the goal. So people are encouraged to propose changes, they're encouraged to communicate changes they want to do or localization they want to do. And what we are trying to do, and maybe that's gonna sound a little bit weird, we are trying either to implement a standard or to give a standard way of localizing, which means you are allowed to do this, but within these IT standards. So using a certain version of your internet browser, let's take an example example, using a specific platform, which is common, so you can scale it up. So we try to bring them as much as possible towards something that can be reused. We used to be lots of initiatives, many ideas, and when we implemented Maximo, we had 100 reports globally, and in one plan we found 230 developed by the plan. So you can imagine what that means. So much for the single version of the truth. Exactly, so, well, but that tells you something, that people don't like your truth. So it means narrow down what you give them. It's not shadow IT, they're doing it in the open. Exactly, so narrow down what you give them, and give them tools that enable them to develop in a standard way. You don't like it, make your own. Make your own, but don't break it. But follow this recipe. Exactly, but don't break it. Use patterns at all? Exactly, that's the idea. Actually we give them what they call toolkit. A toolkit is a subset of data onto which they can play, whatever they want, and yet is not impacted, whatever is out there. So I have to ask you, as part of your title, is the term quality is in there. Does that apply to data quality? Is that part of your responsibility? Yes, yes, well, it is on the maintenance side, but actually I'm in charge of the quality IT solutions for the plans of CEMEN division, which is specifically LIM solutions laboratory. It's also software, it's also related to analysis, equipment, transfer of information, and measurements that are done in the plans. I don't know, compressive strengths, everything, we will talk about that if you want. We can talk all day, it's great. Exactly, it's very interesting. And as simple as it looks. So we do that. You make it sound so easy. It's cloud, it's so easy. Well, it is easy if you want to do it. Well, it's a learning curve, for sure. But it's an opportunity, and for me, this is a time for opportunities. But quality systems, for instance, the same thing, what I'm trying to do, and we are trying to do at Lafarge, is actually to create synergies. That's a good example why we do not say maximum maintenance time planning, same manufacturing. Laboratories have equipment. Laboratories need to maintain equipment. Why should we use another software to maintain the equipment in the laboratory instead of using the process of inspection, the process of preventing maintenance that actually maximum uses, which is in the same plan. So we used to be oriented on a specific silo before, now we have started to create synergy. But that one is maturity and trial and error. It's normal. My final question for you, you've been a great conversation here, great energy, is advice for other folks in IT. A lot of people are here in the story. We have 70% IBMs reporting, and we're confirmed that there's 70% of the attendees here, our first timers for IBM at this show, Cloud. It's attracting a new breed of IBM customer. What's your advice to them in working with IBM? What would you say, a summary of the technology? What should they do? What's your just general opinion? An advice to a colleague out there who says what's this IBM stuff all about? Well, the only thing I would advise them to do, because they do it right in regards to the delivery of the product, is to sell it well. I'm not saying they don't sell well their products necessarily, I'm saying that you have to understand the people you are talking to, in order to be able to propose whatever you have as your best of breed, because it is a best of breed, whatever IBM is offering as a product. So, this understanding of the people, of their way of thinking, I think what I loved about this conference is the first time I'm hearing from people science of planification, artistry of mechanism, we used to be so technical, and we used to be so narrow to the numbers. Now, with everything technologically that's happening around, we are thinking outside the box. We allow ourselves to make it nice, to make it cool, to make it appealing, and all of that is appearing to the user that's at the end of your microphone, for instance. But it's just viable, I mean, in the U.S. they don't have the data problems, up challenges in Europe. So, it sounds like they're addressing those. Yeah. Okay, we're here live inside theCUBE, hearing from the customers themselves, unbiased commentary. Cloud is easy if you do it right. Thank you for sharing your stories. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break.