 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Hi, we're back, welcome to Edge 2015. Brad Elmanhurst is here, he's the Director of Engineering Systems at Boeing. Brad, great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So we were just talking off camera. Big change in your life, being in Seattle, now you're in South Carolina. Get a little bit more sun, I would imagine. Yeah, there is more sun in there. So how's that move, how to come about and how's it working out for you? It's been great, I was asked to lead the IT culture. We're building growing IT in South Carolina. So I was asked to lead that culture and it's been great. And I've had my son, his wife and their baby, they moved there and my daughter and granddaughter all moved to South Carolina. So my wife and all were all settled in and it is sunnier and it's just a great place to live and be at. Yeah, I mean, as is Seattle, but what a beautiful part of the country, South Carolina is, so you have dual roles. I know Boeing's a big IBM customer, big P customer, a big power customer, but what's your role? You've got dual roles. One is running IT in South Carolina, but talk about that. Yeah, so I have two roles. I have one responsibility is engineering systems, which is all the engineering systems throughout the company, whether it's commercial, military, space, security. So I have that responsibility and that really goes from product design all the way through PDM, so getting the e-bomb created. And then I also have responsibility for growing IT in South Carolina and what culture we want all the way from designing the buildings that we're staying in to the innovation center we've created to bringing a fairly new workforce and then taking that workforce and granting them into a Boeing-like company but make it feel like a startup company. And so everyone feels they're involved in a two-pizza-type team versus a big company-type team. So we're enterprise IT folks, right? So we've been watching the cadence of Moore's Law drive innovation in our industry for years. What's driving the innovation curve in your world, in Boeing's world? Yeah, I think there's a, and I'll talk more about South Carolina and how that drives innovation. I think by bringing in new employees coming out of college that are in this data world, they can find data faster than all ever find data and they have access to so much more and they think about things differently. I'll give you an example. We asked some interns to come in and to create a picture of what's going on with all of our data distributions, right? Setting data across the world. If somebody would have done that in Boeing, that's been with Boeing for 20 years, they would have created a dashboard. These kids, these young adults came in and what they did was they created a Google map and they put it right on Google map and you can just drill down to anything with a push of a button. Different concept, it's just, it brings that different innovation and that innovates the people in Boeing to say, hey, that's really neat. Now we can start thinking about doing something like that versus the dashboard. You know, Stu, that's a great example of riding on this digital fabric that we talk about all the time, isn't it? It is, so Brad, you know, when we actually did some of the foundational research on the industrial internet and aerospace is one of those industries that's being transformed by sensors, we had yesterday on one of the keynote speakers talking about energy and how, you know, they were a 120-year-old, they're a 135-year-old company. They spent the first 120 years kind of doing the same thing and the last 15 years is to totally transform their industry. I have to imagine, you know, the Boeing's going through some of the same things. Can you talk about how, you know, just the massive amounts of data and sensors is transforming up Boeing? Yeah, that's a great question and, you know, give Boeing a plug here. We're hitting 100 year in 2016, so we're really excited about that. It's been great to be part of the Boeing family and moving into that next generation. But, yeah, the sensor data is, you know, that all the sensor data, all the way from, you know, computers to airplanes to, you know, manufacturing from RFID and how you use that and where your tools are and everything else, that is something that, I think there's two things. You got to be, first off, it's great information. Second, you got to be careful because you can over-innovate on sensitive data and you can give out, you know, false alarms and people reacting and all that stuff. So, I think when you start to look at all this sensor data, you got to make sure that you understand what it's really telling you and it's providing information versus just data. And that's real key and, you know, I think with where we're headed, you know, we're trying to figure out how can we use that data to solve a non-conformance or to solve that we have a tool that's not checked in or we might have FOD on the floor in the airplane. Yeah, so how do you work through some of those challenges there? Do you have, you know, bringing data scientists to help work through some of this discussion? How do you test, iterate, fail, you know, repeat? Yeah, so data scientists is a good way to do it when you do that. Also, it's going back to kind of the second part of your conversation, you know, fail fast. So, you know, have an idea, try it out, fail and pivot and then do it again and again until you get to something that is consumable, right? So, you know, the days of where we're taking a requirement and we're writing on a piece of paper on what that requirement is supposed to be is gone, right? So we've got to do some design thinking, we've got to do some prototyping, we've got to do some prototyping. We've got to be able to say, okay, let's live that scenario live with a customer and then did that work? No, then change, did this work? Yes, and then you go put it in production. But you got to do that, maturation and bring the customer there because once they see it, then they know how they're going to react to it. Yeah, I mean, I think your development life cycle is, you know, you have to do it without work up front but at the end of the day, I mean, it needs to work. You know, you can't have failures. It's like, certain industries, you know, no failures allowed. Exactly, you cannot, and with Boeing safety is number one, right? So, and you're right, we cannot have any failures and we pride ourselves on that and that is just safety, quality, all that stuff is number one for us. So, I wonder, along with safety, the security discussion in IT has changed a lot of the last few years. What's your take on things? Well, security is huge. Everybody's targeted, doesn't matter if you're a small company, a big company, everyone would love to get access to Boeing information, finance information, no matter what it is. So, you know, we have a whole information security team that's keeping the Boeing network secure. You know, they're relentless at it. We have, you know, one of the, if not the strongest security network systems put in place that I'm aware of, and security is it. So, everything you do, you know, you got to take everything into account. Safety, quality, security, all those things are number one. There's not, you know, anything else that's more important than that. So, I want to come back to North, I mean, South Carolina, why South Carolina? Okay, so what we decided to do, we were trying to core up in four areas in IT. One is Washington, the other one is Missouri, the other one is South Carolina, and the fourth one is Southern Cal. And so, we're trying to core up IT centers in those four areas so we can, you know, in a sense, get synergy and figure out, you know, okay, you know, instead of having people kind of spread out and they're working on an application here and an application over there, can we bring more together and do a better job of growing the pipeline, do a better job of, you know, innovating and synergizing over, like, engineering systems? Can we take some technology, like visualization technology, and apply that across all the engineering systems? And the visual technology is a great technology. I mean, it's something where instead of seeing a bill of material in a bomb structure, you know, like you get in paper for your putting together a desk, you can visualize it, you can see it, you can scroll through it, you can drill down into it, and you can see how things are put together. So take that visualization, the modern, the simulation, and put that all through the engineering life cycle so things are a lot easier for people to understand. So, let's talk about EDGE and IBM. Start with IBM. Relationship with IBM, what role do they play in this whole driving innovation inside of Boeing? Yeah, IBM plays a critical role. You know, like I was talking yesterday and the keynote was about, you know, I started the company 30 years ago and started on the IBM mainframes. And over my career, I've been working with IBM from middleware to, you know, business intelligence to, you know, servers to optimization to data growth and, you know, I've been able to call on them and use their expertise in areas that can help us out. It's been a, you know, from my personal experience, been really great. You know, I've had a long standing relationship personally with IBM and helping us through some of our critical block points that we have in the commercial side of the house and getting their middleware put in place, as well as, you know, solving problems today like data growth. You know, the data's gone from a paper to a 2D to a 3D. That's growth. That's a lot of growth. The 3D image is stores on a server and it takes up a lot more space than the 2D. So now, how do you manage that growth? How do you optimize it? How do you make sure that you still have the rendering that you have to have? Because you're taking a drawing of a 41 section of a plane, which is the large part of the plane and you got to turn it. It's got to turn real time. And so how do you do all that? And, you know, with the backbone of IBM and other internal development as well as other products, we're able to do that. And we can do it around the world. I mean, you've got people designing, you know, stuff on the 787 Japan and everywhere else and it works. So it's pretty, it's pretty cool. So Brad, you've been in this industry for quite, you know, quite a few years. Yep. You know, I actually studied mechanical engineering in, you know, Boeing's one of those companies. We always looked at. We're looking for these now. All right, my boss is sitting right here. So, you know, you said you're hiring a lot of, you know, younger people coming in. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what's the jobscape like? I mean, people that have been with Boeing for, you know, decades versus people coming out of college. What's the skills you're looking for? What advice would you give for people as to how they stay up on the latest technology and be relevant in the marketplace? Yeah, you know, so my philosophy, first off, bringing, you know, building the pipeline is critical. I don't care what company you're in and you got to have that good, you know, bell relationship on the pipeline because what the people have been with Boeing for a long time, the knowledge is invaluable and we need to have that and then taking that knowledge and you're never going to transfer that knowledge to a new person, but teaching that person how to solve problems in the Boeing framework is what you got to teach, right? Now, for the people coming in, you know, technology is going to change all the time. So I'm less worried about whether they're going to adapt technology because the generation coming in will adapt technology. I mean, that's a given to me. It's, are they a team player? Are they, you know, risk-free? They're going to go out and take risk and are they going to bring in thoughts and concepts and be willing to speak up and get in that open environment? And that's the environment we're trying to build in South Carolina, so they will have that opportunity to do that. To be able to preserve that tribal knowledge. Exactly. You don't want to lose it. You got to preserve it, and then not just preserve it. What I tell the team is I don't want to just do a mini-me, right? I want to do mini-me on steroids. Yeah, make it better. They have so much more knowledge on how to deal with data that I never had. And so, you know, the way I do my job today, if you had a person that has a different frame of mind and they're going to actually probably excel, well-pass whatever I've ever done. And that's what I'm looking for, you know? I don't want to be a clone. That's not what I'm looking for. So what's your hiring philosophy? I mean, what do you look for? We, well, you know, we're looking for technical people, first off, that's a given. We're looking for Emmys, and, you know. Stop. And we're also looking for people that can work in groups as well as people that maybe they're the introvert, but they can actually share their ideas or willing to share their ideas and all that. And then we're looking for the people that will collaborate with others and be more of a team player versus, you know, I got to build a dynasty for myself. And that's what we're looking for. And are they active? Are they participating? Are they, you know, are they competitive? You know, we, like everybody else, we're in a competitive environment. We want to win. Yeah, we want to win. We're not about, you know, let's figure out how to figure it in a second. You know, Boeing is a fantastic company. It produces tons of products and great products and all that. And, you know, we're in here a hundred years and Mr. Jim McNerney has got a set foundation for another hundred. And so we want to hire those people that are going to get us to the next hundred years. Well, it's an interesting, a huge number. I don't know what it is to, you might know a number of Fortune 1000 companies that were here in 1960s are no longer here bowing IBM to century-old companies. You know, long-standing partnership. Brad, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really interesting story. I appreciate your knowledge. Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Keep it right there, everybody. This is theCUBE. We'll be back from IBM Edge 2015 right after this.