 Live from Cambridge, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's The Cube, covering the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium. Now your hosts, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillan. Welcome back to MIT everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Paul Gillan. This is The Cube. The Cube is our mobile studio. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Ken Demins here is the Vice President, Office of the CIO of Analytics at SAP. Ken, welcome to The Cube. Good to see you. Thank you. Good to be here. So, let's see. Let's start with this event. This has really evolved. It's like the ninth year start-off. It's kind of data quality, you know, not the big data meme hits. And then the Chief Data Officer, you know, role emerges and this show really starts to, you know, explode. But still narrow, still a small little collection of high quality people. What's your impression? What are you guys doing here? What are your thoughts? So it's a great show. I've been able to sit through a few sessions and find the interactions with the other audience members to be very fruitful and helpful. So our role here at SAP is we're a sponsor of the event, but my specific role is I'm going to be talking about a concept that we call Big Data Morality. So taking your point about the evolution of the event, our approach and our discussion on Big Data Morality comes from a practitioner's perspective in analytics. So we're going to be talking about the way we look at analytics and how we put into practice techniques around data security, data privacy. More importantly, these areas of morality of how we use the data. For what purpose? What are we trying to get out of it? And so on. Because as Big Data continues to explode and explode, it will continue to do, we need to be thinking beyond the parameters we've had in the past around governance. Because you can't corral all of it. So you need to find guidelines and ways of dealing with it. And that's what I'm going to be talking about today. So your work, obviously, is in the privacy areas. The privacy is a component of what you talk about, right, of what you're concerned with. Privacy is a piece of it. But it's also in terms of areas which are more gray, such as how would we use certain data. So let me give you an example. We work at some of our events with people who attend our events. And it's our goal to give them the best experience at the event we can. In doing so, there's certain data we would like them to provide us so that we can then tailor the event more towards them. What content would they like? What sessions would they like to attend? What other customers might they want to speak to? And in doing so, we put into place this give to get, right? We get certain data from them with their permission. And then we use it to help bring them value. So it's much more in that area. Because from an analytics point of view, in this world of big data, and given the processing power we have at SAP to really get through this data from an analytics perspective and draw insight, we want to make sure we're doing it in a way that's beyond just the physical privacy, beyond the physical security, but into the areas of where can we bring value? As we bring this data together. And my example there around the customer is that's to give them a better experience at the event. The reason I ask the question is a constant debate I have with a colleague of mine over how much data people are willing to give up. And whether people give up data willingly knowing that they'll get something for it or whether they simply resigned that they're going to lose that data anyway. Their data isn't private anymore. And there's research that actually indicates that the latter is true. What is your opinion on that? So we've actually seen, as we've done research around out point of view on this as well, we've seen that, well first of all there's a bit of a generational split as well. Those of younger generations, much more willing, much more open, that makes a lot of intuitive sense in terms of the way they share data more openly in social settings and social interactions online and so on. But we're also seeing that consumers are willing to give it up. One of the statistics we bring forward in the presentation, about two-thirds of consumers are willing to give up certain information if they get something of value back. Now something of value back is in the eye of the beholder. What you might want back might be different than what I might want back. And it also depends on the area, right? Is it something such as a coupon, something tangible like that? Or is it something a little more intangible in terms of, again, a certain experience or a certain way that we can tailor something to you? So we're seeing research across all age groups that points to consumers willing to give to get. But there's a proviso with that. They're also assuming that you're taking care of their data. You're not going to misuse it and you're not going to use it for purposes that you're not asking. So there's a lot of ground here that needs to be covered. Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Watch recently said that Google knows more about you than your spouse. And I thought about that and I thought, that's probably true. That's probably true of a lot of people. Now what kind of guidelines do you put in place? Or is it possible to put guidelines in place that keep companies back from the brink of creepiness, from overusing the data that they have about you? Is that even possible to define? Well, that comes with company culture. And that's what a lot of this talk is about, this idea of morality. That you need to be driven by what is in bounds and out of bounds. What Google does with their data as an example. There is a privacy component to it obviously. There's a security component. But they also need to be driven by their corporate values as to what is it they are willing to, first of all, gather and then secondly share and put together with other data. So whereas if we were having this discussion many years ago, we could talk about locking down certain aspects of the data. Only certain people have access to X, Y and Z and so on. That's changing because there's data all over the place. So it needs to be driven by something bigger. It needs to be driven by something more values oriented, which is what this idea of morality is. It's around, you know, is this within the guidelines of the way we as a company want to do business? You know, an SAP, some of our corporate values are around trust and integrity. So every time, even in internal situations where we're bringing data forward, we need to pass those tests to ourself. You know, what our employees trust when we bring this information forward, that this is being used in the right way, right? Should, you know, does this reflect the integrity by which we want to run our business? Just because we can do something or any of these businesses can do something, the question becomes, well, but should we? What's the value? What's in it for the customer? What's in it for us? And how are we living our values that way as opposed to profiteering necessarily? So is that a sort of self-governing model based on the culture of the company and the DNA of the company? Or is there a SAP? You know, I think SAP, I think structure. Is there a structure actually to govern this? Yeah, so the good news at SAP is we actually have structures around a lot of this. We have chief privacy officers. We have data security officers. Just today while I'm sitting here, I got a note about we have another security office that we're adding. So we physically have structures in place. However, there is a self-governance as well, right? If you're someone who's sitting in marketing and while you could be playing within the rules of privacy and security and so on, you need to ask yourself what you're really trying to do, what the value is in it for SAP for you to use data in a certain way, what the value is for our customer, and is that a road that we should be going down? So there is a self-governing aspect here for sure. Data security is no longer the job of the CIO exclusively. It's everyone's job. And the whole idea of bringing the morality to bear gives you a way within what you as a member of that community of a company already embody as your values, we're saying bring that phone into the data and let those be your guiding principles on how you're going to use it. So sometimes if everybody owns it, nobody owns it. It's kind of like the Closer by Committee in baseball. How do you address that challenge? So to your point, there need to be structures in place. It's not an all-or-nothing situation. As a collective group within a company, we do share certain values and a morality, but you don't want to leave everything up to any individual's total subjectivity. So we do again. We have privacy, office, security. We have a lot of the hard and fast physical means for managing it as well. What about the CDO role? How do you see that emerging and evolving? There's been talk at this conference the last couple years about the CIO morphing into a technology role or a business role. The CDO becoming much more of a factor. You're clearly seeing that within certain industries. What do you guys see? So I just saw through an interesting presentation on that where they were talking about the CDO role merging a lot of what the CIO typically has done and the CTO. What we're supposed to do, but didn't have time. Exactly. Or as they got busy trying to lock down the privacy and the security concerns. But yeah, it is expanding. And it is not just about, again, the physical data that we know about today. It's really needing to be more strategic and looking ahead. What are going to be the roadblocks a year from now? What are going to be the roadblocks six months from now? How are our customers, if you're in the business of where customers are actually using the data as well, what are the implications there? The CDO role is also going to have to go beyond the bounds of the physical business. So as an example, if you have a data center that's run by a third party, CDO's got to be involved there, right? Because how is that opening you up to either vulnerability or not following your values as you've planned? Okay, so let's see. We're 24 minutes into a discussion with somebody from SAP and we haven't talked about HANA. How has that initiative, so that changed the whole role of analytics within SAP? So I grew up in my career as someone in the area of marketing and analytics. And if you would have asked me, let's say many years ago, at some point earlier in my career, I could only hope one day there'd be something like HANA. Something that is actually taking the data and allowing the analysis to happen in real time as well as allowing us to focus more on the analysis and the insights than on how an analyst typically works, which is 80% of the time is spent on getting the data together and working on the quality. So it's a game changer. And that's why it fits into discussion as well. Because when we talk about having all the data from Internet of Things and just all the data within a company now, social, use of video, different types of things, and then you talk about the processing power. Having all that data wouldn't matter if you couldn't process it. And that's where HANA is a game changer. It's a game changer for us. So I am speaking today as a practitioner who works at SAP, who works with analysts who try to develop insight from this unstructured data and various tons of data. Without a tool like HANA, that's just not going to happen. How would you describe HANA briefly in two sentences? HANA allows for the processing and analysis of data in real time. But that's not distinctive. There are other real-time databases out there. Why HANA? HANA also integrates with a variety of other tools that we at SAP create as well as many of our partners create. So an analytics ecosystem around it? I would absolutely say that, yeah. But I want to take a step back. You had mentioned you didn't feel that that was a game changer. I actually see it the other way because I know without the platform like HANA and in earlier opportunities I have worked with some bleeding-edge technologies that have tried to get us to the same place. They were probably early on. They weren't as mature. And you would still have a lot of pre-processing. You still have a lot of work for the analyst on the other end. The thing about HANA is the self-contained aspect of it. And you're really able to pump a lot through there very quickly and be able to look at it in real time. And to your point, we then plug it into an ecosystem that uses SAP tools to drive the insight that we build in our business. Is Apache Spark a competitor to HANA or a complementary? So I am not expert on the product side of the world, but let me say this, as someone who's looking at this from the usage of creating insight and bringing that insight to market, any product that can compete with HANA would need to do that in the same window of time and with the same level of efficiency and effectiveness. So in that way, there's a variety of competitors, but we believe HANA is the future. So you're using HANA. Oliver Busman, we were talking about Oliver off camera. We used to come on. We would be down at SAP Sapphire. We would ask him about the dog-fooding segment as the CIO, right? And of course, he's European. He said, I prefer drinking our own champagne. You're drinking your own champagne. Absolutely. So we have a program called SAP Runs SAP. And in situations like today when I talk about what we're doing, we're doing it on all SAP products. In fact, many of our customers sometimes find that interesting on the one hand, comforting on another, saying, oh, so you're in fact using these tools yourself. Tell us your experience, right? And we can share that. And we share it once and all. Not anything is perfect or sugar-coated, and yes, we do. We run on HANA. We run the SAP predictive analytics library. We use all the other tools because we want to be able to ensure that our customers, and that we can provide feedback to the developers and our customers get the best products. So yes, we have definitely SAP Runs SAP Shop. Getting back to the issue of data, of the culture of data, and being, using it in appropriate ways, how are you involving your customers in developing these strategies or these standards? Yeah, so we work very closely with our customers on some of these larger scale projects, particularly the ones that bring in HANA. And we're looking at, and we're working with them on what they see as the standards, what's needed on their end, and likewise, again, we're starting to build those into our solutions. As I mentioned just today, we announced a data security officer, a new role to work with our customers who are in the cloud environment particularly and how the challenges they're seeing around this and what we can do from a security point of view in there focused right on them. So we do have several layers of that. So one is what I just mentioned. Another is we also have chief customer offices, which then work with our customers and bring those requirements in-house so we can meet their needs relative to these data issues. So Ken, as it relates to analytics initiatives, I mean it's a big chewy topic, but they're generally complicated. There's a lot of custom work that has to get done. It's not, you know, you don't buy a software package typically off the shelf and say, okay, I'm done. What advice would you give to your peers that are trying to sort of do some similar things? Sure. So an approach that had been taken in the past would be, okay, let's corral all the data and then once we have all the data, we'll figure out what we want to understand. We'll see what the data says. Given the oceans of data that we're living in today, you need to start with the question. What are you trying to understand? And then from there, we can work back into the data. And that also fits in with this idea of how we want to use data. Because if I'm just out there collecting, I might be collecting a lot of data that might not actually be all that useful to me, to our customers, or all that insightful, but yet I'm bringing it in. I'm giving myself a privacy concern. I'm giving myself a security concern. Focus on what the question is you're trying to answer. And then you can go out and give them the technologies. We've spoken about some of them at SAP, but elsewhere as well. You can go out, you can bring that data in. And you can begin having a dialogue with the business about insights. Not about it's taking us, you know, another six weeks to add more data. You're actually having a discussion on here's the business question, here's the insight we can develop, and then you're taking it from there. So it's much more of a slicing through the data as opposed to amassing a pool of it, which leaves you open to lots of vulnerabilities as well as doesn't answer the business question. Gartner famously forecast a couple of years ago that CMOs, chief marketing officers, would spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017. Are you seeing the makeup of your customer base changing as the business side increasingly wants to use analytics? We specifically see a lot more CMOs being much more involved, much more involved in purchasing decisions, much more involved in being instigators and influencers behind the scene as to where things are pushing. Absolutely. And in fact, back to your point about SAP using SAP, we had gotten on track several years ago without CMO at the time, Jonathan Becker, to ensure that we were doing that for just these reasons. You know, if we could make it work, and if we could understand what a CMO wants, or if we could understand what other line of business people want CFOs, you know, we can deliver a better product, right? So we've in fact seen that internally, and we're also seeing that out in the marketplace as well. Well, we love the data ocean comment. John Furrier is a big fan of data oceans over data lakes, so just tweeting out. Okay. Furrier, did you hear that? He's like, yes, data ocean. So Kent, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. You bet. Sharing your and SAP's perspective was good to meet you. Same here. Everybody will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from MIT IQ in Cambridge, Mass. We'll be right back.