 From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit Online, a virtual conference. This is the virtual CUBE doing the remote interviews from our studio in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with our quarantine crew. We're getting all the interviews out there and also covering all the greatest in the cloud. We're in the cloud, we're in the coverage. I've got a great guest here, a practitioner who's really riding the innovation wave at the same time taking advantage of the scale of AWS and putting into practice Chris Foster, who's the CIO of TC Energy. Chris, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE, appreciate it. Our pleasure John, thanks for the opportunity. So you got a great innovation story that's something that we've been reporting a lot on is how companies can really reinvent, reset, reinvent, grow and put things in place from a DevOps cloud scale perspective you doing it with in the energy area. Take a minute to first explain what TC Energy is and your role. Yeah, for sure John. TC Energy, we're one of the biggest energy companies in North America. So the fastest way to explain it, we like to think we provide the energy that enables and powers people's lives and about one in four of every molecules that gets delivered in North America, that's us. And my role there, I'm very fortunate. I lead the IIS team I have done since January 1st of 2019. And our AWS journey started a little bit before that. I've had the pleasure of sort of jumping on the exciting part of it. I like to think where we've got a lot of that enabled and we're moving to a lot of the innovation phases of that implementation. Well, I love the innovation story. We love talking about how the new reality that's upon us certainly we're in this COVID crisis where people are actually seeing the impact of at scale problems. You have a job where your product really cannot have disruption, right? At the same time, there is a large scale to it. And so as you guys think about what's going on and the pressure you're under, at the same time, you can't just cut projects, you can't just cut costs for cutting costs sake. There actually really needs to be an investment or a doubling down in this case. Take us through that process because if you're on the cloud native wave and the AWS wave, which you are on, you've been rolling out thinking about DevOps. You've been thinking about agility. But now as these new pressures emerge and even more new reality, certainly not a new normal, I hate the term, but some people are using it. It's a new reality. And that is the right projects need to be funded because of the consequences of not having everything in place. This is where cloud shines and this is where innovation and good management kind of comes into play. Could you share your perspective on that? Yeah, I'd be happy to, John. You know, safety is our number one concern, always has been always will be. And so, you know, we look at everything we do from that lens of doing things safely and reliability as well, of course, because it's not just the safety and the way people would, you know, think about every day. It's also the reliability of that energy people rely on every day and that has to be almost in our thoughts and in everything that we do. So, I mean, as an example, I would say, you know, some of the, you know, around the periphery of what we did with our AWS implementation, we also took a hard look at our network implementations and how things were working in the background, how we were connected up. And that's one of the reasons that when we transitioned, you know, literally we went from a, hey, we should start thinking about working from home, sort of on a Wednesday, Thursday, and by Monday, the entire company was working from home, right? And that was the story for a lot of folks, I think. And it was seamless. You know, we were not just able to, you know, obviously the primary focus was safety reliability. And of course, you know, that was what preoccupied people in the early days. We went even beyond that, I would say, very quickly, we were actually talking to people about, you know, IS projects that didn't reach the criticality of safety and reliability, but was still important. And we were telling our stakeholders, the delivery dates haven't changed. I mean, we were working in the office on Friday, we're working at home on Monday, no big deal. Talk about the agility piece of that, because I think that puts an exclamation point around what agility is supposed to be. An unforeseen situation, you implement your business as usual in kind of a weird way, it's not usual, but cloud allows you to put the speed and scale and reliability together. What was the partnership with ADO? How did that change things or help things? Can you just unpack that a little bit? Yeah, John, the way I explain it to my business partners that work within TC Energy is, look, it used to take us, you know, several weeks to get you any kind of compute capacity. So when we start talking about innovation and trying new things, the entry cost was high just in terms of time and in terms of money, right? Like you'd have to give us a pile of cash, let us go away, design servers, you know, get all the right equipment, racket and everything else. And that's a huge impediment to trying new things and being truly agile. What AWS has really given us, yes, we're out of the business of looking after our own servers. And so I'm able to move my people to what I would say is more valuable work for the company that really focuses on the outcomes. But what's also very cool for our business partners is I can say to them, if you want more compute power than you've ever had before this afternoon, you know, give me an hour and we'll have it for you. And the great part too is if on Monday you change your mind and you decide that that idea you had wasn't so great after all and oops, that's fine, I'll just turn it off for you, right? And there's no big deal. Whereas in the old days, you phoned me on Monday and said it was a bad idea and say, well, that's great, but I already bought the server and you're living with it for five years, right? That's a great example. You know, I've seen both pieces of the puzzle here, one side, the waterfall provision, there's a lot of risk involved at many levels. The project doesn't scale or if it fails, you've got the costs. And then the agility side, you got those examples that you just pointed out, but got to ask you as a manager, you know, some enterprises that are going into this area get stressed out and things seem to be last minute. How do you manage that? When does it tip over to be part of the culture where it's like, don't worry about it, it's going to work. Because when new things happen, people love process. Process is great, you know? Don't break anything, this is the last minute. So experimentation, as you pointed out, is the key to innovation, getting things out there, but managing it is a hard part. What's your experience and what's your best practice? Yeah, I think if I understand your question rightly, John, I mean, a lot of this goes to me towards culture and you know, you can be, I think, coming from a place where perhaps your view of risk needs to change to get you into this new space. So obviously, like I said at the outset, safety and reliability is number one. We never do anything that would compromise any of those things. The reality in IS, if I look at it, is that 80, 90% of what I do doesn't have those types of implications associated with it. And so it becomes a different conversation about risk and saying, well, what's the worst thing that could happen? And if that's not going to impact any safety and reliability, then let's take a look at it. And so I think the other thing that people are frightened of when it comes to implementing a change like this is obviously the impact on people, right? And I take that part of it very seriously too. What I've been really pleased by in our journey is that we've managed to bring people along and give them new skill sets and we're continuing to do that. We actually introduced what I call Next, or the team, sorry, they came up with this, not me, but it's called Next TC University. And it's this fabulous, you know, ability for people to start signing on and getting new skill sets, you know, retraining themselves. And so we're starting to try and give people that sense of what's in it for them because that's the human element, right? And so for people that love servers, you know, it was a big change to say, I'm not going to get to touch it anymore. I'm not going to get to rack that server. That's what I'm good at. No, but you're still going to get to do these other skills, right? Yeah, and that's a great point. First of all, if you love servers, you love compute. So when you see the compute in action, you know, they got to get excited about that. And I think that's one of the things I think, having that on-demand compute, almost like a dial, start dialing it up. And you guys are probably familiar with that and your business is having that on hand. But the team piece, I want to get back to that because I think that's a thing you mentioned earlier. You can team can be deployed into new things. You have it next TC, which is more of a learning aspirational ladder or kind of way to make people feel good about themselves by getting new skills and reapplying it. It's a nice flywheel for the people side of the business. You know, people process technology as they say, but talk about the impact of the teams working with AWS and cloud in general. What are some of those things they're working on? How do you shift? How do you flex that? What's some of the commentary around team, the work that they do and value? Yeah, it's a great question, John. And it's one I like to talk about because what we've been able to do is to draw much more of a clear line for our people between what they do and how it impacts the business. And I like to talk to people about the fact that we're blurring the lines now between IS and the business, I think like it's never been truly done before, right? You know, I love to tell a story about one of my earlier in career folks who was presenting to a very senior group, a senior group of VPs, one of whom came to me at the end of the meeting and said, you know, which one of our business units is that young man from? And I said, he's an IS guy. No, no, he said the guy that was talking about line pack and all those other things. And I said, no, he's an IS guy, right? And he was in disbelief. And that's what I would tell you is the biggest impact for the teams is it's blurring that line now where they're getting much more engaged on the business side, but also the, you know, the business folks are getting much more, you know, engaged on the IS side. There's this kind of meshing now that, you know, I ask people have always striven for and always said, you know, be a partner, don't be an order taker. In my mind, a lot of this makes that possible because you're getting out of those technical conversations, you're having, you're connecting much more with the outcomes that you can produce for the business. People can see it. And they're closer to the action too with this. Do you get, they're near the business, they can see it, they can feel the victories and also participate in that upside and also taste some of the learnings too. I mean, a lot of steep learning curves that go on through the experimentation that you mentioned. This is the fun part, but also it could be rewarding if you look at it that way. So how do you guys deal with the failures and learnings and, you know, no one likes to talk about failure, but in the sense of if you're going to try things, you've got to have that mindset of a growth mindset where you're like, okay, we're going to fail. We're not going to take it personal as long as you learn from it. How do you handle that? Yeah, it's a great question, John. You mentioned you're sort of sick of the words new normal and I get a little tired of the fail fast for similar reasons, right? To me, it's not fail fast as much as fail small and fail quick, well, fail fast, yeah. But it's making sure you fail on the small thing. So we have had failures. What I say to my business partners is, look, in the past, I would have failed after nine months and a couple of million dollars of your money. And probably more importantly, you've lost nine months of getting to that solution. Now I'm going to aim to fail in six weeks or less. And we're going to very quickly weed out ideas. And what I try and get them very excited about is, you know, stop worrying about whether an idea is a good idea or a bad idea and spending months of analysis and time trying to figure it out. Let's do things and you'll find it's cheaper to do some of these ideas. Figure out quickly, it's going to cost way too much money. So we had one that was targeting some improvements in our field experience. And we underestimated the complexity of the systems it was going to tie back into and all the legacy stuff that was in there. It wasn't a green field, nice clean thing to do. And we did, we found out after a couple of months this isn't going to work, right? Well, better after two months than two years and several million dollars. And that's how we kind of position it internally. You know, the whole fail fast thing, you know, you got me going on that. There's a couple of terms I always, first of all, I talk a lot of jargons. So it's always kind of me to call them the pop black, but fail fast, no one wants to fail, right? So this whole glamorization of failure, any entrepreneur or any leader, no one revels in failure. I mean, failure is avoided. No one, I'd love to say no fails, but it's more engineering. It's more getting the iteration. That's the real issue here. It's not so much, hey, look at me, I fail. You know, that's got to be put to the side, but what you're getting at is really engineering or architecting, really working a problem. And you need to make those iterations, which is essentially failure, but this whole idea of failing is just, you know, that data lake, I mean, don't get me going. It was true, that example I gave you, we've actually just launched a very successful pilot from the learnings of that so-called failure. So did we fail? Not really. I was just talking to another entrepreneur and I'm like, you know, when you're in the business and you're ahead of the curve, the whole world realizes, oh, the pandemic, these are some things. There are some companies that have those steep learnings and they have an advantage because those endeavors give them that courage to try something, but when it's now something obvious to do, those learnings are an advantage, not a disadvantage. So to your point, that's awesome stuff. Talk about the machine learning side of it. I'd love to get your take on it. Are you tapping into some of the Amazon machine learning? Obviously the compute stuff, I can see that being killer for you guys. What about some of the higher level services that come out of having some of these new things available, like SageMaker, there's a machine learning, tons of stuff coming out of the woodwork, if you will, from an Amazon standpoint. How are you looking at that? Yeah, there's some fabulous tools in there that we're definitely, you know, we're fairly early in the journey, I would say, but we're already starting to see some great opportunities, some great possibilities. So, you know, for example, as people probably realize, we're quite rightly heavily regulated and we, you know, quite correctly have to produce a lot of information to our regulators to establish that we're doing all of the right things. You know, sometimes when you've grown by acquiring different companies, you know, putting your hands on the right information at the right time can be challenging. And so we're using things like machine learning to help us find documentation quicker and faster to make sure that we can pull out, you know, certificates or regulation, you know, testing results, things like that, much faster than we could in the past, right? So that's one use that we already see for that, that has the potential to, you know, speed up our interactions with regulators, help us, you know, refocus some costs internally on, you know, safety initiatives and that type of thing. So that's one example. We're also using machine learning to tell us more about how you can, you know, continue to operate the pipe, you know, more safe, you know, always more safely, more reliably all the time. And, you know, I truly believe, you know, all roads lead back to the data and how you get at that data, right? And so machine learning, as most people in this audience will understand, is really another way of getting that data to tell you everything that's hidden within it. Yeah, once you get your team set up with the mindset, the culture, having that compute, working on new things, you take advantage of machine learning, then you got things like Kendra which just announced general availability. These become abstractions as services. So that kind of leads me kind of to my final question for you is we're living at a time where post-pandemic is going to be exposed that there's a lot of gaps. A lot of people are going to realize that, you know, the tide has pulled out and you can see all the rocks that are exposed. The opportunity is out there and there's also challenges. So we expecting a lot of projects are going to be cut, maybe personnel as, but there's going to be a lot of projects being funded. So the funding versus cutting is going to be, I think it's going to all level out, but as people get back in and want to go to the cloud, how should they be thinking about this? How should they be coming into the market because at your level, the CXO levels, it's more visibility than ever on resetting, reinventing and growing, right? Getting back on track or doubling down on a win. So what's your advice to people out there, the practitioners that go to Amazon Summit and other folks that are really need to take the step into the cloud native scale world. What's your advice? Well, yeah, it's definitely a challenging world, John, for a lot of people and we're not immune to that. You know, we are seeing in my local community for sure, lots of people pulling back on projects and expenditures right now. My advice to any of the folks out there is when I talk to my business partners, I try and talk to them about funding outcomes and not funding projects, right? And so, you know, rather than when you, my biggest concern, whenever we talk about budgets, everyone has to go through budget conversations. I don't care what industry you're in or what your position is. I want to make sure that when we decide where we set the budget, if we're going to set it here, do we know what's above the line and below the line in business terms, right? So it's very easy to cut technology and not really see a business impact. And so what I like to talk about with our business partners internally is to talk about everything in terms of the outcomes you're trying to fund, right? And so if, for me, it's a enhancement in field productivity, you know, reducing the windshield time of our people in the field because that's a primary safety issue. That's the outcome I'm going for and there'll be projects behind it. And that's the biggest advice I can give people when it's now, you know, there's so much scrutiny on, you know, is that a dollar that's worth spending? If you talk about technology in most, you know, boardrooms or leadership tables around North America, you're going to lose people very fast. You've got to focus it back to what the business is trying to do with it and create teams that can really zero in together, you know, blur the lines, like I said previously between IS and the business people where everyone's got the outcome that's pasted up on the wall. That's what we're going to deliver. We're going to, you know, come to a conclusion quickly on whether we can do it. Yeah, it's not the shiny new toy. It's how the engine of innovation hits the business subject. That's great stuff. Final, final question. What are you excited about these days? Obviously we're in a tough time. There are new realities. We're going to come out of this. There's going to be a hybrid world. You know, there's virtual interactions we're having, the cube virtual Amazon summit virtual life is in now part of every button. It's an immersion. You got the edge of the network exploding. You got all the, you know, I mean, it's chaotic, but if you squint through that, there's opportunities, startups or big business. What are you excited about? Oh, I agree with you, John. I think you have to be glass half full. And I don't mean to be just the sort of overly optimistic, but I think you have to look at this as an opportunity for a bit of a rebirth and a shift, right? And, you know, I don't want to downplay the fact that change is hard for people. I don't want to downplay the fact that people are going through some very tough things right now. So, you know, not trying to put sort of, put too much of a sweetener on things, but I think if you're looking for a positive angle, you look at the rebirth and the opportunities that will come out of that, right? I think there's incredible, you know, technology opportunities coming out of it. I talk to my people all the time about focus and what you can control. And what you can control is staying relevant, right? We know we're entering a digital world. We know that things are going to look differently when we come back. We may not know what they are yet, but companies are going to continue to need great technology. You know, our partnership with AWS has given us access to great technology. You know, focus on that because it's what you can control. And I think, you know, you'll see that some opportunities will come out of this. We probably didn't expect. Yeah, and also it's an inflection point as well. 2008, when we had the financial crisis there, there were clear companies that were on the up trajectory and stayed up. Here, I think we're going to see something similar. So I think there's going to be a right side of history coming out of this. And it's going to be one of those things where you can tell by who's growing and who's for the trajectory is of their business outcomes. We'll try a lot of that. Yeah, I would agree. There's always someone that's that you don't realize till later was quietly making hay, right? Well, all this was happening and I'd encourage people to think about that. Yeah, you don't want to be that company as the expression goes. Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights on theCUBE Virtual as part of our AWS Summit coverage. This is theCUBE Virtual. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Pleasure. Thanks for having me. I'm John Furrier and the Palo Alto studio is covering AWS Summit Online Virtual. It's theCUBE Virtual doing our part here with our quarantine crew, getting all the data, sharing that with you. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.