 Live from downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit 2018, brought to you by IBM. We're back in San Francisco, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here covering exclusive coverage of IBM's Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit. This is a summit, as I said, they bookend at each coast San Francisco and Boston, intimate, a lot of senior practitioners, chief data officers, data folks, people who love data. Caitlin Halferty is back. She's the client engagement executive and the chief data officer office at IBM. And Alan Crane, assistant vice president at USAA. Thank you, welcome. Good to see you, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. You're welcome. Well, good day today. As I said, a very intimate crowd. You're here as a sort of de facto CDO, learning, sharing, connecting with peers. Set up your role, Alan, tell us about that. Well, at USAA, we've got a distributed data and analytics organization where we have centralized functions in our hub and then each of the lines of business have their own data offices. And I happen to have responsibility for all the different ways that our members interact with us. So, about 100 million phone calls a year, about a couple billion internet and digital sessions a year. Most of that is on mobile. And always looking at the ways that we can give back time to our membership as well as our customer service reps, who we call our member service reps, so that they can serve our members better. The faster and more predictive we can be with being able to understand our members better and prompt our MSRs with the right information to serve them, then the more they can get on to the actual value of that conversation. A lot of data. So one of the things that Inderpal talked about, very first time I met him in Boston, he said, he talked about the five pillars. And the first one was, you have to understand as a CDO how your organization gets value out of data. He said that could be direct monetization or I guess increase revenue, cut costs, right? That's value. So that's a starting point. And so, how did you start? Well, actually it was the internal monetization. So first off, I want to say USA never sells any of our member data. So we don't think of monetization in that framework. But we do think about it in terms of how do we give something that's even more precious than money back to our company and to our members and the MSRs? And that is really that gift of time by removing friction from the system. We've been able to reduce calls per member through digitization activities and reduce transfers and reduced misdirects by over 10% every year. We're doing work with AI and machine learning to be able to better anticipate what the member is calling about so that we can get them to the right place at the right time to the right set of member service representatives. And so all these things have resulted in not just time savings, but obviously that translates directly to bottom line savings. But at the end of the day, it's about increasing that member service level, increasing your responsiveness, increasing the speed that you're answering the phone and ultimately increasing that member satisfaction. Yeah, customer satisfaction, lower churn rates. That's a form of monetization. It's hard dollars to the CFO, right? Let's talk about the role of the CDO. This is something we touched on earlier. Yes. We're bringing it home here at the last segment. Where are we at with the role of the CDO? It was sort of isolated for years in regulated industries, permeated to mainstream organizations. Correct. Many of those mainstream organizations can move faster because they're not regulated, but so if we sort of reach parity between the regulated and the unregulated, and what do you discern there in terms of patterns and states of innovation? Sure, I think when we kicked off these summits in 2014, many of our CDOs came from CIO type organization, defensive posture, king of the data warehouse that we joke about. And now we've, you know, analyst reports at that time were saying, you know, maybe 20% of large organizations were investing in a CDO or similar individual responsible for enterprise data. And now we see analyst reports coming out to say upwards of, you know, 85, even 90% of organizations are investing in, you know, someone responsible for that role, often, you know, CDO type. At the, in my opening remarks this morning, I pulled the room to say, you know, who's here for the first time? It was interesting, you know, 69, 70% of attendees are joining us for the first time. I went back, okay, who's been here last year, a year before? And I said, who is here from the beginning? 2014 with us. And Alan is one of the individuals who's been with us. And as much as topics have changed and the role has grown and the purview and scope of responsibilities, some topics have remained our attendees tell us they're still important top of mind and data monetization is one of those. So we always have a panel on data monetization and we've had some good discussions recently that the idea of it's just the external resell or something to do with, you know, selling data externally is one view but really driving that internal value and the ways you drive out those efficiencies is another perspective on it. So, fortunate to have Alan here. We've been able to, for that very reason, we've been able to grow our team from about six or seven people five years ago to well over 100 people that's focused on how we take inefficiency out of the system. And those, you know, that mere 10% when you recall call per member reduction, when you were taking 30 million calls in the bank, you know, that's real dollars, right? Three million calls out of the system that you can monetize like that. So it's real value that the company sees in us and I think that in a sense is really how you want to be growing as a data organization because people see value in you, willing to give you more and then you start getting into those interesting conversations. If I gave you more people, you know, could you give me more results? Let's talk about digital transformation and how it relates to all this. So you've got, presumably you've got a top-down initiative. The CEO says, he or she says, okay, this is important. We got to do it. Boom, there's the North Star. Let's go. What's the right regime that you're seeing? Obviously you got to have the executive buy-in. You got the chief data officer, you have the chief digital officer, the chief operating officer, CFO is always going to be there making sure things are on track. But how are you seeing that whole thing shake out at least in your organization? I think one thing that we've been seeing is that digital digitization, you know, really is not about where the digital transformation is not about just going only digital. It's how does all this work together? It can't just be an additive function where you're still taking just as many calls, you know, and so forth. But it's got to be something that that experience online has got to do something that's transformative in your organization. So we really look at the member all the way through that whole ecosystem and not just through the digital lens. And that's really where teams like ours have really been able to stitch together the member experience across all their channels that they're interacting with us, whether that's the marketing channels or the digital channels or the call channel so that we can better understand that experience. But it's certainly a complimentary one and not, it can't just be an additive one. I wonder if we could talk about complacency in terms of digital transformation. I talk to a lot of companies and I just don't, there's discussion about digital you talk to a lot of people who say, well, we're doing fine. Really, you know, maybe not in our industry. Insurance is one that hasn't been highly disrupted. Financial services, things like aerospace. I'll be retired by the time this all happens. I mean, that's true, right? And so, and it's probably accurate. So are you seeing a sense of complacency or you're seeing a sense of urgency or sort of mix or both? What are you seeing, Caitlin? Well, it's interesting and people may not be aware, but I'm constantly pulling our attendees to ask what are top of mind topics? What are you struggling with? Where are you seeing successes? And digital was one that came up for this particular session, which is why tomorrow's keynote, we have our chief digital officer giving the morning keynote to show how our data office and digital office are partnering to drive transformation internally. So at least from our perspective and internal side of it, we have a priority initiative, Cognitive Sales Advisor, and it's essentially intended to bring in disparate parts of customer data obtained through many different channels, all the ways that they engage with us, our mind and other, and then deliver it through Sales Advisor app that empowers our digital sellers to better meet their revenue targets and impact and develop more of a quality client relationship and improve that customer experience. So internally, at least it's been interesting to see one of our strongest partnerships in terms of business unit has been our data and digital office. They say, look, the quality of the data is at the core. You then enable our digital sellers and our clients benefit for a better client experience. Well, about a year ago, we actually changed the organization to align the data office with the digital office. And so that reports to our executive council level. So they're peers that report into the same organization to ensure that those strategies are connected. Yeah, so as Caitlin was saying, the chief data officer kind of emerged from a defensive posture, compliance, governance, data quality, the chief digital office kind of knew. Oftentimes associated with marketing, more of an external, perhaps facing role, not always. But so do you see, and then the CIO, we say, well, wait a minute, data, it's the CIO's job. But of course, the CIO, she's too busy, you know, trying to keep the lights on and make everything work. So where does the technology organization fit? Well, all that's together. So when we brought all those things together at the organizational level, digital data and technology are all together in even design, actually. You guys are all peers reporting into the executive committee, essentially, is that right? Yes, our data, technology and design and digital office are all peers reporting into the same executive level later. And then one of the other pillars that Interpol talks about is the relationship with the line of business. So how is that connective tissue created? Well, being on the side that is responsible for how all of our members interact, my organization touches every product, every line of business, every channel that our members are interacting with. And so our data is actually shared across the organization. So right now, really my focus is to make sure that that data is as accessible as it can be across our enterprise partners. It's as democratized as it can be. It's as high as quality. And then things that we're doing around machine learning and AI can be enabled and plugged in from all those different lines of business. What does success look like in your organization? How do you know you're doing well? I'm obviously dropping money to the bottom line, but how are you guys measuring yourselves and setting objectives and what's your North Star? I think success for me is when you're doing a good job to the point that people say that question, could you do more if I gave you more? That to me is the ultimate validation. It's how we grew as an organization. It's how we don't have to play that justification game when people are already coming to the table saying you're doing great work. How can you do more great work? So what's next for these summits? Are you guys doing Boston again in the fall? Is that right? You're planning on doing that? We are, we are. And you know, fall of last year, we released the blueprint and the intent was to say, hey, here's the reflection of our 18 months internal journey as well as all of our client interactions and their feedback. And we said we're coming back in the spring and we're showing you the detail of how we've really built out these internal platforms. So we released our hybrid on-prem cloud showcase today, which was great. And to the level of specificity that shows the product solutions, what we're using, the flash storage, some of the AI components of that machine learning model, exactly. And then our vision to your question to the fall is coming back with the public cloud showcases. So we're already internally doing work on our public cloud in particular with respect to our backup, some of our client, very sensitive client data as well as some initial deep learning models. So those are the three pieces we're doing on public cloud internally. And just as we made the commitment to come back and unveil and show those detail, we want to come back in the fall and show a variety of public cloud showcases where we're doing this work. And then hopefully as we'll continue to partner and say, hey, here's how we're doing it. We'd love to see how you're doing it. Let's share some best practices, accelerate, you know, build these capabilities. And I'll say to your business benefit question, what we found is once we've built that platform, we call it internally a one IBM architecture out our platform. We can then drive critical initiatives for the enterprise. So for us GDPR, we own delivery of GDPR readiness across the IBM corporation, working with senior executives in all of our lines of business to make sure we get there. But now we've got the responsibility to drive out initiatives like that, cross business unit to your question on partnerships. And the evolution of this event seems to be this kind of a lot of evangelism early on and now it's really practical sort of sharing, like you say, the blueprint and how to apply it. You know, a lot of people asking questions, how do I, you know, there's different levels of maturity. Now you guys back tomorrow, you got a panel, you guys are doing a panel on data monetization. We are doing a panel on data monetization tomorrow. Okay, and then you got Bob Lord and Inderpal talking about that's a perfect juxtaposition and teamwork of those two major roles. And this is the first time we've really showcased the data digital partnership and connection. So I'm excited, you know, want to appeal to the developer viewpoint of this. So I think it'll be a great conversation about, you know, data at the core, driving digital transformation. And then as you said, you know, our data monetization panel, both, you know, external efforts as well as a lot of the internal value that we're all, that we're all driving. So I think that'll be a great session tomorrow. Well, and it's important, it was a lot of confusing and still is a lot of confusion about those roles. And you made your point early today is, look, there's a big organizational issue you have to deal with particularly around data silos. My data, I presume you guys have, are attacking that challenge. Yes, yeah, absolutely. Still, it's still attacking. It's an ongoing thing, but they were getting a lot better at it, I think they, but it's, you know, but you've got to lean in because if it's not internal, it's some of the external challenges around, now we're picking cloud vendors and so forth. So it was, you know, 10 years ago we were, we had our own silos and our own warehouses if we had a warehouse. And then we were kind of moving into our own silos in our own databases. And then as we democratize that, that we solved one problem, but now we're, our data's so big and our compute needs are so large that we have no choice but to get more external into a cloud. So you have to lean in because everything is changing. It's such a rapid rate. And it requires leadership, right? I mean, the whole digital data really requires, excellent leadership, vision, IBM's catalyzing a lot of that conversation. So congratulations on getting this going. Last thoughts. Oh, I would just say, you know, we were joking, the 2014, the first couple of summits, small group, maybe 2030 participants figuring out how to best organize from a structural perspective, you know, set up the office, what sort of outcomes metrics are we going to measure against? And those things I think will continue to be, you know, topics of discussion, but now we see we've got about, you know, 500 data leaders that are tracking our journey and that are involved and engaged with us. We've done a lot in North America. We're starting to do more outside the geographies as well, which is great to see. So I just have to say, I think it's interesting to see the topics that continue to be of interest, the governance, the data monetization, and then the new areas around, you know, AI and machine learning, data science, empowering developers, the DevOps delivery, how are we going to, you know, deliver that type of training? So it's been really exciting to see the community grow and all the best practices leveraged and look forward to continuing to do that and more of that this year as well. Alan, you obviously get a lot of value out of these events. You're here at the first one, you're here today. It was in 2018, you know, your thoughts. I think the first one, we were all trying to figure out, you know, who we are, what's our role, and it varied from, I'm an individual contributor, data evangelist in the organization to, you know, I'm king of the warehouse for this thing. Right, right. And largely from that defensive standpoint. I think today you see a lot more people that are leaning in, leading data science teams, leading the future of where the organizations are going to be going. And people, this is really where the center of a lot of organizations are starting to pivot and look and see, you know, where is the future and how does data become the leading edge of where the organization is going? So it's pretty cool to be a part of a community like this that's evolving that way, but then also being able to have that at a local level within your own organization. Well, another big takeaway for me is the USAA, the USAA example shows that this can pay for itself. I mean, you've grown your organization from a handful of people to 100 plus individuals, driving value. So it makes it easier to justify when you can demonstrate a business case. So guys, thanks very much for helping me wrap here. Absolutely. I really appreciate you having us here. It's been a great event. Always a pleasure. Hopefully we'll see you in the fall. Sounds good. Thank you so much. All right, thanks everybody for watching. We're out. This is theCUBE from IBM CDO Summit. Check out thecube.net for all the videos, siliconangle.com for all the news summaries of this event and wikibon.com for all the research. We'll see you next time.