 from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet Engaged 2019. Brought to you by Smartsheet. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Smartsheet Engaged here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Dr. Wanda Jean Jones. She is the Digital Learning Evangelist at GE Healthcare. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. Well, we're excited to have you. So tell our viewers a little bit about what you do as the Digital Learning Evangelist, which is a very cool title. The Digital Learning Evangelist, as Digital Learning Evangelist, the main part of my job is to manage our learning, our digital learning ecosystem. So we have a learning management system. We use Adobe Captivate Prime. And then the other part of my job is to teach people how to use digital tools that will help make their lives a little bit easier. Save time, automate processes, and all the way around create deficiencies. And how are the employees willing to go there or are they naturally skeptical? I mean, what would you say? I mean, introducing a new technology to employees is famously a hard thing to do. How do you find it? Well, I'm a teacher at heart. So what I like to do is take what they already know and build off of that. So typically, if an employee comes to me and says, Wanda G, we really want to learn how to manage all of these Excel spreadsheets, there's lots of data. I tell them, you know, come to the meeting with your Excel spreadsheets, and then I want them to tell me the story about their process. And then I go through and match them, kind of play matchmaker, and match them to that technology that already fits within their current behavior. There's some things that they'll have to change just a little bit, but we don't want to do it so much that they find it overwhelming and say, oh my gosh, I'm never going to get this. So I want to make sure they're comfortable and listening to them talk and seeing the sophistication in their current process. I don't know how far I can go. But are these like kind of next gen productivity tools that you're getting them onto or are these kind of new collaboration tools that the company's taken on? What are some of the things you're transitioning them off of and then putting them onto? I think one of the things is, the best part is, most of the work that's coming to me to transform, if you will, it's very manual. So it's knowing where the tools are and I make sure that I am very tool promiscuous. I like to go and look at all of these tools and I like to understand which tools do what. And then I want to understand the role of the person and what they do for the business and how those two can come together. So it's a matchmaker. The tools are most of the time digital collaborative tools. So we have a full suite of all sorts of tools at GE Healthcare. And so we're definitely no short of tools, but sometimes people just haven't taken that digital leap to figure out how do I get my process a little more digitized and save myself some time. So what kinds of things are the people on your team working through? In terms of the kinds of processes you're helping them automate, the kinds of things you're helping them do manually and how is Smartsheet coming into play here? Okay, so I like to look at things from the triple constraints, cost, quality and speed. So when you think about cost, quality and speed, you want to take cost out of a process. You want to improve the quality by creating some sort of a standardization that everybody's going to do. And then you want to speed up the process that people can bring that whatever it is to market. And when I look at those three levers, this is exactly what my end users want to do anyway. So Smartsheet is able to answer all of those in such a remarkable way. That's usually the top of the list when it comes to how are we going to implement this new digitized process. Smartsheet is up there, it's the all in wonder. I call it the all in wonder tool at work and people say, okay, here she comes, she's going to talk about Smartsheet. That's because I always say Smartsheet does 1,000 things. That's why I really want to listen to what is necessary. I don't want to tell you about 1,000 things. I don't want to tell you about the things that you're looking at in this process. When the person starts using the new Smartsheet process, almost always they come back to me and say, look, what else I found? So as they go on that journey, they start finding other things as well. And then we get excited together and I said, but did you see this? And so this whole Santa Claus is coming to town. That's kind of what it feels like. So how has the collaboration culture changed over time? A lot of the conversations here around Smartsheet is that A, you can bring in people from an external organization, not to mention you can bring in external people from your organization within the big company. Have you seen a big change in kind of how the teams form and what's kind of the collaborative work group as these collaboration tools have suddenly become available? I think the biggest part with collaboration is now people know the upstream process and the downstream process. So what information is going into this process? What do I need to do with it? And then what is the way that it needs to be ready for that next handoff from a process perspective? So I like that. The ad mentions are beyond wonderful. When I think about those ad mentions, we have the place, especially in Smartsheet, to create comments and you create the comment, but I'm too busy. I'm not going to go back to row 87 and see what you said. But if you do this ad mention, I've noticed that people when they're using the app, the ad mention comes through, even if they're not directly at their email, they'll go and see, oh, somebody's talking to me here. And so their app is helping them respond in real time. So another part of the collaboration piece is cutting out collaboration. So a lot of meetings, okay, give me the status. What's the status? Well, we can certainly just automate those reports and make it exactly what the executive or the leader wanted to know from a high level perspective. And so we don't have to have as many meetings. I love it though that collaboration means cutting out collaboration. But that is so important. One of the things that you said that was really striking is understanding the upstream and the downstream because we heard on the main stage of me and we're hearing a lot today about how it's providing much more visibility and leaders are able to see the big picture and understand where things are working and where things are not working. But it actually, it's also helpful for the everyday employees for the people who are several notches below to understand and have that full picture. Can you talk about how having the full information has changed the way your company gets work done? Absolutely. So inside of the process that I own, I'm in a learning and development team and there are several trainers. There are several people who own curriculum and we are serving about 4,000 employees. We want to make sure these employees are getting the right learning that they need and preparing them to do their job. So I certainly want to empower those trainers and curriculum owners to do their thing. I'm not going to go to class with you. I probably don't even know your content. But when I look at Smartsheet dashboards, I started, you know, reporting is great, but when you flip it around, it's now a portal. And this is a information portal that everybody can be connected to. So if we have a release in our system, if there's new materials that they can share, these can be happening right there at that portal. So I like it that I can empower people to not need me. And sometimes that can be scary. You think, oh, automation is coming and a robot's going to take over my job. It's not that it's going to do. I have lots to do, but having this portal view allows people to go in and really be empowered. The other thing I have is sort of a ticketing system. So there's one of me and 4,000 of them and everybody might want something from Wanda Gene. So I have an intake form that could easily take that work in and talk to me. And I get to know, you know, they put timeframes around when they need this. So I get to bubble up which ones are the most important ones and, you know, which ones I can put off for a little bit. But at the end of the year, my leader might want to come back to me and say, you know, what have you done for me lately? And so all of this input that has come through in this really standardized way could create a dashboard about what I've been doing. And I get to celebrate and understand, wow, I've had 50% more, you know, learning requests and, you know, this many people wanted to learn about a tool and so I will have those metrics to even celebrate my own work and what I do as an individual. It's really interesting, right? Because then you go from the classic paradigms is information, you know, there's data, right? Which then becomes information, which then hopefully becomes some insight that you can actually take action. So it sounds like you're pulling that just on your straight up inbound form to actually get a whole lot of information about what's going on in that community and where you can prioritize your time, your activities. Yes, when we create job acquisitions and we hire people for roles, you know, you get this job description, you will do this and you will do that. It'll be interesting at the end of the year to look back at this intake and see everything that you've actually done versus what you signed up to do when you took the job. So sometimes it looks really different, like, wait a minute, I think I need some more money because I didn't get hired for this. Right, right, right, I've done so much more. Talk a little bit about the silos within the organization and the ways in which the smart sheet is helping break down those silos. Okay, so I talked to you guys a little earlier and told you, and I believe that silo is an acronym for secrets in the learning organization. And when you have those secrets and you have no idea what this team or this team is doing, it could really cost the company, cost quality speed. It's going to slow us down. We're going to both duplicate processes and the quality of our product, instead of having process excellence, we'll have pockets of excellence. And we want to make everybody into these rock stars for the company. So putting it together and making it more of, you know, a transparent ecosystem is awesome. The one thing that I really like is when you map out a process and you pull in the right people and get those people involved, you'll get to understand, you know, resource management, any constraints. And, you know, why is it, Bob, that you haven't done anything with this? Well, I don't do that. And, you know, it starts a conversation. And we can see, number one, what's wrong. And then we can have a conversation with the person about what's wrong. And it gives another action item for us to make it right. So without these sorts of, you know, without smart sheet really helping us technologically bring those things together, it would be hard for me to even know where Bob is. It's a very big company. GE Healthcare is about 60,000 people. So I don't know. I don't even know where Bob is right now. Bob, where are you? But if Bob gets pulled into that smart sheet, it shrinks the world. And it makes our big, giant company just that much smaller. And people start knowing who you are and what you're supposed to be doing. And you get the right traffic of work. And then anything else that doesn't belong to you, it can get rerouted. I love to get your take on reskilling, which isn't directly part of what you're doing, but you're kind of doing reskilling in terms of tools to execute different your training people to probably be more collaborative that using these tools and have different types of process. So important that reskilling happens in the future as all the jobs change. Just, you know, our people up for this, are they excited to learn a new tool? Do they see that they're different ways to get work done than maybe your tradition? Or you still got the old codgers in the back saying, you know, that's not the way we did it 20 years ago. Exactly. You do have that. You do have that, but you know, this whole fake it until you make it, it's not going to work anymore. There's so many opportunities, especially within our company, we are sharing with our people leaders how to have collaboration across teams. Really don't think that your whole world is just right here inside of your job. Think broadly about what you do. And I like to say that, you know, I act locally, but I think globally. So that just means if I see that there is a process that I'm a part of, this is a mindset that we're sharing with our employees. If you see there's a process that you're a part of and you see that it's broken and you fix it, fix it in such a way that it scales and that it's applicable, you know, if we're all process managers, you probably have this problem too. So create the fix and then celebrate that socially and show someone else you can do it too. You can replicate this. You can replicate this. It's the classic before and after. You know, if we want to lose weight, we don't want to see the skinny person and telling, you know, how we got skinny. We want to see you when you were larger, you know. You want to see the before and the after. Right, right. And make sure that, you know, and when people see that like it's possible, I don't have to be like this superstar coder. When they see how easy it is and they grab that process, I've seen them just do wonderful things. It's amazing what our employees do. As a digital learning evangelist, I mean, I don't know how many are there of you in the world and is it lonely? Do you come to these conferences to sort of have some community and some commiseration and understand? I mean, what is it like and how do you share your best practices with other people who do what you do in other companies? Well, I make, well, in other companies, of course our social networks linked in and those professional communities that I'm a part of. SmartSheet has a user group community. We can share it there. Internally, there are people who are very interested in process. We use Yammer, so Microsoft Yammer and we have a SmartSheet Yammer channel. This is one of the most healthiest channels in our business. We can see the stats on how many people are asking questions. You have people coming there and saying, has anybody ever done this? When I see that sort of curiosity, when I see someone in Europe jumping to help somebody in Mexico, it really is energizing and it lets us know that everybody's trying to help everybody win. But how do I collaborate and get with other people? I do. I collaborate with other companies that I found out that Starbucks actually used SmartSheet during a disaster where there was a hurricane and they sent a SmartSheet form out to their baristas, are you okay? Can you make some coffee? You know, I don't know. How do you make the coffee? Oh, by the way, take a pictures of the damper so we can submit it to our insurance. So that's something that our company can use and I'll take that back to our team and say guess what Starbucks did with this and guess what PayPal did with this. I sent PayPal's SmartSheet movie around to our executive team. They were very impressed. Now, it's not that just that they were impressed, it's that over the next two months, I heard that very same executive say, we're going to create an integrated marketing calendar and we're going to use SmartSheet. That just made me feel so rewarded that somebody is listening. You're not just talking. There are some converts. Great. Well, Wanda Jean, a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Please come back again. Yes, I will. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Stay tuned of more of theCUBE's live coverage of Engage 2019.