 from Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit, Spring 2017, brought to you by IBM. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with Peter Burris for wrapping up a very full day here at the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit, Spring 2017, Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco, an all day affair, really an intimate affair, 170 people, but Chief Data Officers, with their peers, sharing information, getting good information from IBM, and it's an interesting event, they're doing a lot of them around the country and eventually around the world and we're excited to have kind of the power behind the whole thing. Caitlin Lepic, she's the one who's driving the train, don't believe the guy's in the front, she's the one behind the curtain that's pulling all the levers. We wanted to wrap the day, it's been a really good day, some fantastic conversations, great practitioners, want to get your impression of the day. It's been great, the thing I love about this event the most is this is all client led discussion, client led conversation, and we're quite fortunate in that we get a lot of leading CDOs to come join us. I've seen quite a number this time. We tried something new, we expanded to this 170 attendees by far the largest group that we've ever had, so we ran these four breakout session tracks and I'm hearing some good feedback about some of the discussions, so I think it's been a good and full day. Yes, it has been. Any surprises, anything that kind of jumped out to you that you didn't expect? Yeah, you know, a couple of things, so we structured these breakout sessions, pointed feedback from last session was hey, we want the opportunity to network with peers, share use cases, learn from each other, so I've got my notes here in that we did a function builder, so these are all our CDOs that are starting to build the CDO office, they're new in the journey, right? We've got our data integrators, so they're really our data management data wranglers, the business optimizers thinking about how do I make sure I've got the impacts throughout the business, and then market innovators, and one of the surprises is how many people are doing really innovative things and they don't realize it, they tell me, ah, I'm just in the early stages of setting up the office, I don't have the good use cases to share, and they absolutely do, they absolutely do, so that's always a surprise, it's how many are actually quite more innovative than I think they give themselves credit. Well that was a pretty consistent theme that came out today, is that you can't do all the foundational work and then wait to get that finished before you start actually innovating delivering value, right, and keep your job, you're one of the 41%. So you have to be parallel tracking that first process will never finish, but you've got to find some short term wins that you can execute on right away. And that was one of our major objectives in sort of convening this event and continuing to invest in the CDO community is how do I improve the failure rate? I mean, you know, we all agree, growth in the role, okay, but over half we're gonna fail, and we start to see some of these folks now that they're four, six years in having some challenges, and so what we're trying to do is reduce that failure rate. But still, four to six years in is still not a bad start. So most functions that fail quickly, tend to fail pretty quickly. So one of the things that I was struck by, and I want to get your feedback on this, is that 170 people sounds like a lot, but it's not so much if there is a unity of purpose. Correct, correct. If there's pretty clear understanding of what it is they do and how they do it, and I think the CDO's role is still evolving very rapidly. So everybody's coming at this from a different perspective, and you mentioned the four tracks, but they seem to be honing in on the same end state. Absolutely. So talk about what you think that end state is. Where is the CDO in five years? Absolutely, so I did some live polling as we kicked off the morning and asked a couple of questions along those lines. Where do folks report? I think we mentioned this when we kicked off. Third to the CEO, a third to CIO, and a third to a CXO type role, functional role. And reflected in the room was about that split. I saw about a third, third, third. And yet, regardless of where in the organization, it's how do we get data governance, right? How do we get data management, right? And then there's this, I think, reflection around, okay, machine learning, deep learning, some of these new opportunities, new technologies, what sort of skills do we need to deliver? I had an interesting conversation with a CDO that said, we make a call across the board. We're not investing to build these technical skills in-house because we know in two years, the guys I had doing Python and all the stuff, it's on to the next thing. And now I got to get machine learning, deep learning. Two years and I need to move to the next. So it's a more identifying technologies in partnership, bringing those and bringing us through and driving the business as well. And we heard also very frequently, the role the politics plays. Absolutely. And in fact, Fawad Bhut from... Kaiser, from Kaiser Permanente, yeah. Specifically talked about this, he's looking in the stewards that he's hiring and his function, he's looking for people that have learned the fine art of influencing others. And I think it's a stretch for a lot of these folks. Another poll we did is who comes from an engineering technical background? A lot of hands in the room. And we're seeing more and more come from line of business and more and more emphasize the relationship component of it, relationship skills, which is I think it's very interesting. We also see a high number of women in CDO roles as compared to other C-suite roles. I like to think Fawad has to do with the relationship component of it as well, because it is... Well, I'm not going to touch it, but it's interesting. Well, no, I mean, we heard women in data science event which is a phenomenal event. We've covered it for a couple of years and Janet George from Western Digital, phenomenal, super smart lady. So, you know, it is an opportunity and I don't think it's got so much of the legacy stuff that maybe some of the other things had that people can jump in. You know, Diane Greene kicked it off. So, you know, I think there's a lot of examples of women doing things in data science. Yeah, I agree. And I'll give you another context. And another cube, another event, I actually raised that issue well, relationships, because, you know, men walk into a room, they get very competitive very quickly. Who's the smartest guy in the room? And on what basis, blah, blah, blah. And we're talking about the need to forge relationships that facilitate influence and sharing of insight and sharing of knowledge. And it was a woman guess, and she actually, and I said, do you see that women are better at this than others? And she looked at me, she said, well, that's sexist. And it was, I guess it kind of was. But do you, you're saying that it's a place where perhaps women can actually take a step into senior roles in a technology-oriented space and have enormous success because of some of the things that they bring to the table. Yeah, one quote stuck with me is, you know, when someone comes in, you know, great experience, really smart, are they here to hurt me or help me? And the trust component of it and building the trust. And I think there is one event we do here, you know, second day of all of our studio summits, the women in breakfast, the data depots breakfast, then we explore some opportunities for women leaders and well attended by men and women. And I think there really is, when you're establishing a data strategy for your entire organization and you need lines of business to contribute money and funding and resources and sign off, there is, I feel sometimes like we're on the hill. You know, I'm back in DC working on Capitol Hill and we're shopping around to deliver. So absolutely, another time back to what you mentioned about something that was surprising today, we've started building out this trust as a service idea. And a couple of people on panels mentioned, you know, thinking about the value of trust and how you instill trust. I'm hearing more and more about that. So that was interesting. We actually bought that up. Oh, did you? Yeah, we actually brought it up here in a cube. And specifically, I made an observation that when you start thinking about Watson and you start thinking about potentially competitive offerings, at some point in time they're going to offer alternative opinions and find ways to learn to offer their opinions better than they're just for competitive purposes. Absolutely. And so this notion of trust becomes essential to the brand. Absolutely. My system is working in your best interest, not my best interest. And that's not something that people have spent a lot of time thinking about. Exactly. And what it means when we say, you know, when we work with clients and say it's your data, it's your insight. So we certainly tap that information and that data to train Watson. But it's not, we don't want to keep that, right? It's back to you. But how do you design that engagement model to fulfill the privacy concerns, the ethical use of data, you know, establish that trust? I think it's something we're just starting to really dig into. But also, if you think about something like, I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but this notion of principal Asian theory where the principal being the owner in typical economic terms, the agent being the manager, is working on behalf of the owner and how do their agendas align or misalign. Same thing is just here. We're now talking about systems that are able to undertake very, very complex problems. Sometimes we'll do so and people will sit back and say, I'm not sure how it actually worked. So they have to be a good agent for the business. Absolutely, absolutely. And this notion of trust is essential to it. Absolutely. And it's both originated internally, right? You're trying to trust the answers you're getting on a client. Where's our largest client opportunity? You get multiple answers. So it's kind of trusting the breadth of the data. But now it's also a competitive differentiator. As a brand, you can offer that to your clients. The other big thing that came up is you guys doing it internally, and you know, trying to drive your own internal transformation at IBM, which is interesting in and of itself, but more interesting is the fact that you actually want to publish what you're doing and how you did it as a roadmap. I think you guys are calling it the blueprint for your customers and talk about publishing that actually in October. So I wonder if you can share a little bit more color around what exactly is this blueprint? How is it going to be exposed? What should people look forward to? Sure, I'm very fortunate in that Inderpal Bhandari, when he came on board as IBM's first Chief Data Officer, said I want to be completely transparent with clients on what we're doing. And it started with the data strategy. Here's how we arrived at the data strategy. Here's how we're setting up our organization internally. Here's how we're prioritizing selecting use cases. So client 360 is important to us. Here's why. You know, down at every level, we've been very transparent about what we're doing internally. Here's the skill sets I'm bringing on board and why. One thing we've talked a lot about is the business unit data officer. So having someone that sits in the business unit responsible for requirements from the unit, but also ensuring that there's some level of consistency at the enterprise level. So we've had some business unit data officers that we've plucked from other organizations that have come and joined IBM last year, which is great. And so what we wanted to do is follow that up with an actual blueprint. So I own the blueprint for Interpol and what we want to do is deliver it along three components. So one, the technology component. What technology can you leverage? Two, the business processes, both the CDO processes and the enterprise, like HR, finance, supply chain, curament, et cetera. And then finally, the organizational considerations. So what sort of strategy, culture, what talent do you need to recruit? How do you retain your existing workforce to meet some of these new technology needs? And then all the sort of relationship piece we were talking about earlier, the culture changes required. How do you go out and solicit that buy-in? And so our intent is to come back around in October and deliver that blueprint in a way that can be implemented within organization. One thing we were saying is the homework assignment from this event, we're gonna send out the template and our version of it and be very transparent. Here's how we're doing it internally. And inviting clients to come back to say, you need to dig in deeper here. This part's relevant to me along the information governance, the master data management, et cetera. And then hopefully come back in October and deliver something that's really of value and usable for our clients across the industry. So for folks that didn't make it today, too bad for them. Exactly, we missed them, but. So what's the next summit? Where's it gonna be? How do people get involved? Give us kind of a plug for the other people. That wish they were here, but weren't able to make it today. Sure, so we will come back around in the fall, September, October timeframe in Boston and do our East Coast version of the summit. So hope to see you guys there. It should be a lot of fun and at that point we'll deliver the blueprints and I think that will be a fantastic event. We committed to 170 data executives here, which fortunately we're able to get to that point and are targeting a little over 200 for the fall. So looking to again expand, continue to expand and invite folks to join us. Be careful, you're gonna be interconnected before you know. No, no, no, I want it small. Okay. And then also as I mentioned earlier, we're starting to see more industry specific, financial services, government. We have a government CDO summit coming up, June 6th, 7th in Washington DC. So I think that'll be another great event. And then we're starting to see outside of the US, outside of North America, more of the GEO summit as well. Very exciting times. Well, thanks for inviting us along. Sure, it's been a great day. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much. Thank you, Caitlin. I'm Jeff Frick with Peter Burris. You're watching theCUBE. We've been here all day at the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit. That's right, the spring version 2017 in Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.