 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World here in Las Vegas. I am your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by John Lietto. He is the director data management at Walters Clure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. You're welcome. So, Walters Clure is a global provider of professional information, software solutions, tax information. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the company and about your role at the company. Yeah, so Walters Clure, I would say probably 20 years ago was a typical holding company. Has a very long history of publishing in Europe. It's over 185 years old in Europe. But, went on a journey to acquire businesses that were in the services business. We're focused on legal, but there are also big concentrations in health divisions, tax and accounting, really a professional company. Very, very, very big in print. What happened over the last 10, 15 years though, it's completely flipped over to digital. In fact, it's been one of the more successful transformations. So now we're mostly in the digital space and electronic space. So where I come in, and my business unit comes in, CT Corporation is a 126 year old company, number one player in registered agent services, legal information, helping companies like Informatica stay in compliance. United States has 50 states with 50 sets of rules and plus international. So typically companies of any size get a provider. Sometimes they'll law firms will do it, but a lot of times it's going to be CT Corporation or something like that. My role in the company, I've been at 19 years, I've had a mix of roles, mostly in the business, but a little technical. I am a director of data management, which I am basically in charge of managing governance and data quality for the business. It is focused on the customer right now and all things related to customer, but we're expanding into other domains like vendors, product suppliers, and supporting a pretty large digital transformation. So I'm sure in your role you have a lot of practical insights for MDM practitioners, but before we go there, I want to hear from you about the customer mindset. I mean, this is a moment for data governance and security and privacy, a real inflection point, and like Walter's Clure, so many companies undergoing their own digital transformations. How would you describe the customer mindset about all of this? How are customers wrapping their brains around it? Yeah, so for us, you know, we're not in a very regulated business. I mean, we touch customers that are heavily regulated, but we're not. I mean, we're a service company, right? Most of the stuff, the data we deal with is public knowledge, right? A company's data is public knowledge. You can go on any state website and find out exactly when Informatica was formed, who the board of directors are, so it's all public. But customers are extremely sensitive about, you know, where their data is and what we're doing with it. So, you know, we were on top of that, especially for our foreign customers. But internally, the CT and Walter's Clure, we have to be very, very, very customer focused because it's very direct service, right? So it's all about the customer and how we got to this point of using Informatica, MDM, Mass Data Management, is trying to get close to the customer, trying to understand the customer. Our customers go from JP, Morgan, these big, big, big companies that have, you know, investments in companies that you wouldn't even know they're related to that customer. So they rely on us to help them stay compliant to, you know, how do I deal with these diverse businesses that are under my portfolio and how do I keep them compliant in the States? So we have all this data and we help our customers understand it. And know what to do next. I almost anticipate where they're going to fall out of compliance in the State. So what is your advice for the people who are really starting, for the executive starting at square one, trying to think about a master data management solution? Yeah, so great question. And it's really where the heart of my devotion has been the last year. I would say the most important thing is start with a business case. Understand where your business is going. Make it about what outcomes are you looking for, right? Really thoroughly understand that. Also, take the systems or the subjects that are important to you and your company and profile it. Understand that data. You can come to an MDM project, a master data management project with so much knowledge first. Don't just say, oh well, everybody's doing master data management or we should do it too. I mean, it might be true, but you're really not going to get the outcomes and then focus your project to hit those business goals. Because MDM is a process and a tool. It's not an answer. You need to use that tool to get to where you are. So for us, the number one thing was reduced duplication. Okay, MDM tools do that. So we're trying to get to the golden record, okay? Data quality. I don't have good phone numbers. I have bad email addresses. Oh, master data management does that too. So again, it's going for the outcomes you're driving for and MDM happens to be a good tool for that. So it's really about defining the objectives before you even jump in. And then are there, do you recommend experiments? I mean, what's the approach you need? Wonderful question. So in data, we call it profiling, right? So, and you want to go small wins because one of the things that'll happen to anyone in this space is the business is really not sure about this investment. You know, I mean, these days data's becoming so huge that it's becoming a lot easier for guys like me to win a business case. But you know, two years ago, it was pretty hard. But I'm sorry, I just lost my train of thought. No, I think that that's an interesting point is talking about the overcoming the skepticism within these companies to latch on to this idea. And as you were saying, the announcing the small wins and really getting everyone on board. So what we did is we profiled, found a problem. Oh, we have definite cost-prodification. We've got email addresses that are completely bogus. So let's just take to those two. And we did small little pilots, these tools we had. Completely manual ad hoc, you know, let's fix 200 records. Let's take a really important customer that we're trying to onboard or expand and let's fix that data and then show the outcomes. You know, go for the quick wins, communicate, communicate, communicate. And once we did that, and I mean, we did a series of, I want to say 30 or 40 of these, that built our requirements set. We built the requirements set by doing. And it was so easy that way to, one, to show victories, but two, to really get the requirements to a point where we can build a system. We happened to fall on that method for prior learnings of not doing well on projects that had nothing to do with NBM. So for this one, you know, I think the other piece of advice I would give folks is we built a data management team of business analysts that know our business and data. It is really critical that you keep this function out of IT. IT is your supporter and your partner. This does not go to IT. So we know our data. I have a guy on my team that's 45 years in the company, a woman who's 28 years in the company, just for example. So we can do a lot without a tool. And what's happening is now we're like, you know, we're live for I guess going on eight months now. And we're like staying on top, making sure the tool is delivering when it's supposed to deliver based on our deep knowledge. And I think what you're talking about really is introducing this technology and this new way of thinking. And it's really all about change management. It truly is. One of the things that we're talking a lot here on theCUBE about is the skills gap. And this is a problem throughout the technology industry. How big a problem is it for you at Walter's Clure? And what are you doing to make sure that you have the right technical talent on your team? And as we're saying, not just the technical talent, but also the business, the understanding of the business. So one thing to understand is Walter's Clure is a fairly big company. And we are just, as a company, just starting this journey. I have a small data management team in one business unit in Walter's Clure. There's another business unit within our help division that has data management. And that's all that I know of that is a formal data management. That's pretty small. So it's going just beginning. It's what we're doing with trying to communicate, communicate, communicate. And I am having some success because in our next huge journey, which is a digital transformation or a six-year project, data now is center. I've been asked to actually be the business sponsor for the data track, which two years ago that would not have happened. So I take that as a win, but you make a fair point. I mean, skills and understanding both of the business and technical ever is always a challenge. And it's justifying, you know, bringing in that skill set. No, we can just outsource that or we'll just use a consultant. Like I'm right now fighting a battle to bring in a data architect full-time. You know, they don't understand that like, just that role. You have to architect things. We've not done that. So what you have, because I'm doing the data governance piece right now. And what I'm finding is, you know, it's not the Wild West, but you can't always know what the parts of the organization is doing. And a lack of an architect is not keeping all the plumbing all centralized. So as I build this data governance, I'm going to centralize like data definitions and data glossary, data catalog, but I'm going to be looking around going, okay, so how do I actually have the technology piece, architect it correctly? And that's the piece I'm really trying to pump. So hopefully when we build this data layer we're building, my goal is to prove to the business that you need to fill this role. It's not me, it's going to be someone who really is deep, deep, deep in architecture. Hire a contractor, get that small win. That's what we're doing. And then the proof. I learned that from you, John. I'm actually in the process of doing just that. Excellent. One of those vendors was here. Well, we'll look forward to talking to you next year and hearing an update. John Lietto, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Very welcome, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World. Stay tuned.