 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2016. Brought to you by Informatica. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for Informatica World 2016's exclusive coverage from SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Peter Burris, our next guest is Gerald Jimerson, Chief Data Officer, Texas Health and Human Services. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you for having me. Love having Chief Data Officer on because Peter and I were talking all the first time having a CDO on Chief Data Officer because it's a tough job because you got to love data but you also have requirements, compliance, yet innovation is out there. So the first question is, who do you report to? So I actually report to a group called the Strategic Decision Support Group. We are challenged with providing all strategic analysis to support our five agency HHS system. And that's a strategic role in terms of what? Using data, so is there an innovation strategy behind the data? Can you share some internal kind of feel for how you guys look at data? Sure, right now our consolidated view of the data from our Strategic Decision Support perspective is to pull the data together to make sure that it's vetted as we report to the legislature in our cases as state agency or outside entities like federal government and that sort of thing. It's really to ensure that we're delivering quality output to the entities that we're beholden to. One of the things we've been tracking, obviously it's been not a secret, but Gov 2.0 has been a big part of data and delivering services becomes both a cost management concern but also an enablement for innovation. New types of services and getting people care that they need. How are you guys using the data? What has changed in your world that's modern? What's the modern guiding principle for what's going on in your world? I would probably say it has a lot to do with just recognizing the data is a strategic asset and that we can make better decisions and improve the outcomes of our clients that we serve both from a transparency and a cost perspective. So they have a big message of data democratization which means self-service, grade message. So there's a lot of innovation, passion and people want to say, hey, you know what I think I want to look at different demographic data, look at certain kind of other data sources and they're all over the place I'm going to imagine in your world. What makes data discoverable? How do you guys figure that out? Is it a systems approach? Is it a policy? Is it technology? What's the secret behind making data discoverable? So in our case it had some legislation behind it. We had a sunset commission review of our agencies and one of the recommendations was to improve the visibility of our data and our discoverability of the data. So one of the things we've done as a result of that is to inventory all of our data assets across the five agency system. And as a result now we have on the map in business terms where all the data lives, the associated IT system, some of the critical business processes with the idea that over time we'll use that to improve our efficiency, figure out what we have redundancy, improve our interoperability and so on. So you're in the midst of a transformation right now. You're trying to consolidate a number of agencies down to a smaller footprint. Tell us a little bit about the relationship between the transformation effort. Was that the catalyst for doing this or was it a chicken and egg? Was the transformation driving the need for the data or the data making it possible to do the transformation? They kind of work hand in hand, truthfully. So the mandate we're working under is to move from five agencies to three agencies and the inventory will assist that effort by identifying the programs, where the data lives, what is redundant amongst those agencies right now. Some of our things like our behavioral health are spread across a number of different agencies. As we consolidate those into a single agency we can understand where the data assets need to be merged, what IT changes need to be made, that sort of thing. One of the health care or health provision and health payment is one of those places where the lines between government and the private sector get really, really flexible. So how does greater control over your data make it easier for you to engage and interface with non-government agencies who are nonetheless crucial to your mission? Yes. What's the role the data plays there and how are you finding yourself getting involved? Yeah, so I use a case for me. For example, a case in point is our managed care organizations for our Medicaid clients. Those, a lot of, the majority of our clients are now in the managed care model, so the services are no longer being paid for or adjudicated claims by the state of Texas. They're now being done by your private insurers. So the data is critical for us to oversee and have insight as to how those MCOs are performing in relation to each other, both from a peer-reviewing perspective as well as how are the clients being best served and are some plans performing better than others? Now you're in Austin? In Austin, yes. So Austin is one of the half dozen or so serious tech centers in the United States. One of the biggest challenges of, and we've heard this on theCUBE or here in Informatica World over the past couple days, is the technologies can do a lot, but people have to adopt new practices and behaviors to ensure that you actually get the desired outcome. Yes. Are you discovering that having a tech-savvy population is making it easier for you to affect the sorts of innovation and changes that you seek? Or are they, on the other hand, telling you that they know better? What do you, how's that playing out for you? Yeah, so leading our enterprise data governance organization I found that really it is more about the people, right? The technology is there, you really need people to understand how to make use of it and to improve the processes. So in our case, we do have folks that are tech-savvy, we have some folks that really know the data well, but the culturally a lot of folks are still kind of worked in their silos and getting people to look across different programs and see things from a broader perspective is kind of where I come into play and to try to say, look, if we merge this data with this other data we can actually improve outcomes and we can look at patterns that we've never looked at before. How'd you break down those silos? Because having to spare its silos, that's a big, I mean, pretty much have, people have silos, but getting the data out of it for the master data is a really big challenge. How did you guys overcome that? So we did have a bit of a driver so we're planning to implement an enterprise data warehouse. And to do that, I think we really needed to establish a firm MDM layer and we were working with Informatica's MDM to establish two domains around our clients and our providers. And the idea is to connect some of our largest Medicaid systems so that we can deliver good solid analytics to improve the outcomes of the patients. Talk about some of the IT systems. How many systems are you guys dealing with in your agency? It's funny that you think that'd be an easy question to answer, kind of like how much data do you have, right? That's kind of a loaded question, but we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 systems across our five agencies. And as I'm talking about, we're moving from five agencies to three. Historically, they were 13 and then 26. So it's been a consistent over time set of mergers that have been occurring. So you end up with more silos because effectively you had many silos to start with, so over time you start to merge those. So we, example in Texas now have a common eligibility system that determines eligibility for 65 different programs. That in the past was so fragmented, it was unbelievable. So those movements have helped us center on some critical enterprise systems that can serve the greater good versus a single program. And presumably data is making that easier because it used to be that the administrative process was the dominant feature of where the silo existed and it had its own data. Data was not regarded as something that you necessarily shared outside. It wasn't because you were trying to perform the task. And the data helped you perform the task. Are you finding that by making that data more discoverable that even the people that are performing the work are discovering new ways of simplifying how they do and providing ideas about how you can innovate? Yeah, I think that's a promise. We're still early on in our data asset repository that I mentioned, but the thinking is yes, it'll open eyes on, hey I didn't know this data lived over in this place and it lives in this place. What if we saw that the clients that are coming in for our WIC program, the women children program, the federal program, we looked at that data as it correlates to our Medicaid population and understanding, well if we're getting good nutrition that maybe we can actually improve outcomes and then track them over time and see that longitudinal view of a client. Are you, a couple of years ago, the Obama administration described the digital government blueprint, largely in response to the ACA's disastrous rollout of the website and they wanted to make sure that it didn't happen again. And part of the promise of that was it was coherent and it made some sense, putting in operations not necessarily easy. Part of the promise of that is that state governments and state agencies might also themselves be able to borrow some of those concepts. Data is a central piece of that whole notion of digital government blueprints. Are you borrowing from that? Are you finding your colleagues and yourself starting to adopt some of those concepts? Are you creating a single language for how you're thinking about it? Yeah that is definitely one of the things we're working on. So CMS prescribed the seven conditions and standards of how you and MITA, the Medicaid Information Technology Architecture which are guidelines for states to improve the maturity from an information technology and business process and architecture standpoint. So from the data movement and information architecture standpoint that is what we're focusing on and making sure that we can demonstrate how we're improving the practices as we improve our processes and our standardization of data. So terminology you mentioned that that's a really challenge for us because we have this cultural, historical culture of all these different systems with all these different ways to describe what I would call a client. We have at least six to eight different terms for a client believe it or not. So one of our challenges is to change our terminology so that we can all speak and behave as one. So we're working on a business glossary using Informatica's Metadata Manager where we can actually have common terminology especially as we build out our BI layer so that we can know, hey, we're going to call it as an enterprise member or client but we can recognize that other people may call it a consumer or recipient and so on. Which is okay. It is okay, it is okay. As long as it doesn't undermine the fundamental mission of delivering better health and wellness to Texans. Yes, while it's okay to start with, the plan is as new systems come online that we adopt these standards so that we don't create yet a ninth version of the client terminology, right? So that we start to use that. So as systems get replaced, we have natural points at which we can start to implement these standards and all of a sudden over time you have a commonality that you didn't have before. Chair, talk about the impact because now you've got the system set up, you guys done a great job. What are some examples you can share anecdotally? Innovation you've seen come from the results of this new system and the consolidation but yet the benefits of the data. So as it relates to MDM, that's still early. We're actually in our testing phases to go live in the next month or so but from a data asset perspective, one of the things that has come up recently and that is officially rolling out on 6.1 but we've already done some previews and already have seen some benefits where the legislature asked about interoperability between systems and the fact that we have now legislation that says we have to improve our interoperability and align to national standards like ANSI standards over time. So one of the things we've done is being able to now analyze how data is being exchanged across these assets and determine where do we need to improve our interoperability, have some standardization, try to cut down on the number of connections that say outside providers need to connect into our agency because that right now is a bit of a, you can call it administrative tech burden if you will to some degree. So there's some tech debt kind of out there with you guys, more plumbing, fix kind of the plumbing, get it going. Right, right, and just reduce the redundancy of data. That's a key, right, because we talk about in our case it's not to improve our ROI but it's to effectively spend our money. We have limited resources. You mentioned before we went on that you're a data geek and you're proud of it which is, you know, we all are. What are some of the things you hope to envision seeing from this? I mean, can you, you know, shoot the arrow forward to the future and think, okay, what do you see from your personal perspective, knowing kind of what's going on, you know, behind the curtain and what you're enabling, what kinds of innovations do you hope to see? Sure, I think, you know, the future state I'd love to see is when a client comes into an eligibility office or spread around the state of Texas, we have some 53,000 employees in our system and when they enter the office that they actually can pull up a system, they can identify that client, whether they've received services, what services they've already received in the past and not necessarily created a duplicative record. And then on the flip side of that, from an executive commissioner standpoint, if he's called down to speak to the legislature about different health programs that, you know, he'll have a tablet in front of him that he can pull real-time information out about what, how programs are performing, what the latest stats are and that information's at his fingertips. We're not there yet, but we're working on it. And previously that was, in terms of the roll up, what was the life before that today in terms of, or yesterday, in terms of what was that meeting like? You had to go get some reports. Yeah, I think, yeah, it's a traditional, you know, someone goes and pulls the data and you come down with your, you know, go down there with your, you know. The TPS reports. Yeah, exactly. Your three ring binder, right? It's heavy, it's good. Right. They want to know about efficiency. Is stuff working? Do they fund it? So really the impact is funding effectiveness of programs. Right, it really is. And for us, like I said, it's not about maximizing revenues as much as it is effectively spending because we steward over $40 billion a year in services, both from a federal and state perspective. What's it like now in your environment with the data? It's being the center of the action. Obviously strategic, it's a great thing that you have that mandate helps over the top. That's great. But internally, as you guys are working through the problem, what's the mindset within the group and just share some color of what's the environment like? I mean, are people like really pumped up? How they engage? I mean, do they see it? Do people feeling it? Yeah, I think there's a recognition of why we're doing what we're doing. And I think there's the challenge of how do you get from where you are to where you need to be. And I think we're trying to recognize where some of those barriers are. And some of those aren't, frankly, technology problems. And then sometimes they're not even people problems. Sometimes there's legislation that says you can't mix this data with that data because legislation's kind of written in its own silos, if you will. So we're trying to recognize where some of our data challenges are in realizing that vision and then what can we do to knock those barriers down? What's your take on the show here, final question? You know, what's going on here? What jumps out at you here at Informatical World? What do you glob onto? What's popping out for you here? I would say the thing that struck me the most is that the fact that there's a recognition that the pace of change is increasing and that the integration of the data is more critical now than ever. And I think that's true for us. That's true probably for all the customers. So I see that Informatical is really focusing on that integration and how to improve integration as the velocity and veracity and all of these occur. Final, final question, since I just popped in my head. The role of the CDO, the Chief Data Officer is really kind of a new role. We were talking with Jim Davis, who's the CMO. Depending on where you go in the organization, some more compliance, more security, kind of fearful, but some are really taking a more aggressive approach. How do you see that role enabling businesses and changing the role of the CDO? Well, I really do think the role is varied. I mean, if you go look at all the different CDOs out there, their job descriptions are very different. Mine, in my case, I don't deal with the security. We have a CISO group that works on the security. We have a privacy office that works on the privacy issue. So to me, I can focus on the business value that the data brings and working with IT and partnership to kind of figure out how do we improve the use of the data across the system. So it's less about compliance, although compliance is very important in our world, obviously. Yeah, but you have someone on that. That's really a team already on that. But they're providing the constraints and you're providing the how. Right, right. So it was establishing two years ago when I took this position. It was really trying to figure out how does my position fit with these other data-related roles, right? And how are we going to work together? So we're still working through that, but it's actually working quite well. Yeah, decouple, make them highly cohesive in their efforts. Exactly. They should be complementary, right, as a way I look at them. Yeah, I agree. Obviously data will be... Well, thanks so much for coming on the queue. Sure, thank you for having me. Chief data officer on theCUBE here, sharing the data on his world. Obviously strategic. Thanks for sharing the insights. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burst. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back with more live from Informatical World after this short break. Hi, this is Chris Devaney from...