 From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to MIT and Cambridge, Massachusetts, everybody, you're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We're here at the MIT CDO IQ. It's the MIT's Chief Data Officer event, the 13th annual event The Cube started covering this show in 2013, I'm Dave Vellante with Paul Gill and my co-host and Michael Conlon this year is the Chief Data Officer of the Department of Defense. Michael, welcome, thank you for coming on. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. So, DOD, I think it's the largest organization in the world, what does the Chief Data Officer of the DOD do on a day-to-day basis? A range of things because we have a range of challenges at the Department of Defense. We are the single largest organization on the planet. We have the greatest scope and scale and complexity. We have the most dangerous competitors of anybody on the planet, it's a non-trivial issue for us. So, I have a range of challenges. Challenges around, how do I lift the overall performance of the department using data effectively? How do I help executives make better decisions faster using more recent, more common data, more common enterprise data's expression we use? How do I help them become more sophisticated consumers of data and especially data analytics? And how do we get to the point where I can compare performance over here with performance over there on a common basis and compare it to commercial benchmark, which is now an expectation for us, and ask, are we doing this as well as we should right across the patch, knowing that all that data comes from multiple different places to start with. So, we have to overcome all those differences and provide that department-wide view. That's the essence of the role, and now with the recent passage of the Foundations Revenue and Space Policy Making Act, there are a number of additional expectations that go on top of that, but this is ultimately about improving affordability and performance of the department. So, overall performance of the organization. Overall performance. As well, and maybe that comes from supporting various initiatives and making sure you're driving performance on that basis as well. It does, but our litmus test is, are we enabling the national defense strategy to succeed? Only reason to touch data is to enable the national defense strategy to be more successful than without it. And so, we're always measuring ourselves against that. But it is, can we objectively say we're performing better? Can we objectively say that we are more affordable in terms of the way we support the national defense strategy? I'm curious about your motivations for taking on this assignment, because your background, as I see, is primarily in the private sector. A year ago you joined the U.S. Department of Defense, a huge set of issues that you're tackling now. Why'd you do it? So, I am a capitalist, like most Americans, and I'm a serial entrepreneur. This was my first opportunity to serve government. And when I looked at it, that knowing that I could directly support national defense, knowing that I could make a direct meaningful contribution, let me exercise that spirit of patriotism that many of us have, but we've just not found ourselves an opportunity. When this opportunity came along, I just couldn't say no to it. There's so much to be done, and so much appetite for improvement, that I just couldn't walk away from this. Now, I have to tell you, when you start, you take an oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution. I don't know, it's maybe a paragraph, or maybe it's two paragraphs. It felt like it took an hour to choke it out, because I was suddenly struck with all of this emotion. The gravity of what you're doing. Yeah, the gravity of what I'm doing. And that was just a reinforcement of the choice I'd already made, obviously, right? But the chance to be the first chief data officer of the entire Department of Defense, just an enormous privilege. The chance to bring commercial sector best practices in and really lift the game of the department, again, enormous privilege. There's so many people who could do this, probably better than me. The fact that I got the opportunity, I just couldn't say no. And just too important, too many places I could see that we could make things better. I think anybody with a patriotic bone in their body would have jumped at the opportunity. That's awesome. I mean, I just, I love that. Congratulations on getting that role and seemingly thriving it. A big part of preserving that capitalist belief, defending the Constitution in the American way, it sounds corny, but I'm a patriot as well, is security and security and data are intertwined. And just the whole future of warfare is dramatically changing. Can you talk about, in a format like this, security, your thinking on that, the department's thinking on that from a CDO's perspective? So as you know, we have a number of swim lanes within the department and security is a very clear swim lane. It's aligned under our chief information officer, but security's everybody's responsibility, of course. Now, the longstanding criticism of security people is that they think the best way to secure anything is to permit nobody to touch it. The clear expectation for me as chief data officer is to make sure that information is shared to the right people as rapidly as possible. And that's a different philosophy. Now, I'm really lucky. Lieutenant General Dennis Kroll, our principal cyber advisor, Dana DZR-CIO, these people understand how important it is to get information in the right place at the right time, make it rapidly available and secure it every step along the way. We embrace the zero trust mantra and because we embrace the zero trust mantra, we're directly concerned with defending the data itself. And as long as we defend the data and the same mechanisms or the mechanisms we use to let people share it, suddenly the tension goes away. Suddenly we all have the same goal because the goal is not to prevent use of data, it's to enable use of data in a secure way. So the traditional tension that might be in that place doesn't exist in the department. Very productive, very professional level of collaboration with those folks in the CISO space. Very sophisticated people. When we were talking before we went live, you mentioned that the DOD has 10,000 plus operational systems. That's correct. A portfolio of that magnitude is just overwhelming. I mean, how did you know what to do first when you moved into this job? Or did you have a clear mandate when you were hired? So I did have a clear mandate when I was hired and luckily that was spelled out. We knew what to do first because we sat down with actual leaders of the department and asked them what their goals were for improving the performance of the department. And everything starts from that conversation. You find those executives that want to improve performance, you understand what those goals are and what data they need to manage that improvement. And you capture all the critical business questions they need answers to. From that point on, they're bought in to everything that happens, right? Because they want those answers to those critical business questions. They have performance targets of their own this is now aligned with. And so you have the support you need to go down the rest of the path of finding the data, standardizing it, et cetera, in order to deliver the answers to those questions. But it all starts with either the business mission leaders or the war fighting mission leaders who define the steps they're taking to implement the national defense strategy. Everything gets lined up against that. You get instant support and you know you're going after the right things. This is not, and if you build it, they will come. This is not a drift and that the organization try to gather up all the data. This is spear phishing for specific answers to materially important questions. And everything we do is done on that basis. We heard Mark Ramsey this morning talk about, he showed a picture of stovepipes and then he complicated that picture by showing multiple copies within each of those stovepipes. He says, this is the organization that we've all lived in. That's my organization too. So talk about some of those data challenges at the DoD and how you're addressing those and specifically how you're enabling soldiers in the field to get the right data to the field when they need it. So we'll be delicate when we talk about what we do for soldiers in the field. That tends to be sensitive. Understand why, sure. All of those dynamics that Mark described in that presentation are present in every large corporation I've ever served and that includes the Department of Defense. That heterogeneity and sprawl of IT that what I would refer to, he showed us a hairball of IT. Every large organization has a hairball of IT and data scattered all over the place. We took many of the same steps that he described in terms of organizing and presenting meaningful answers to questions in almost exactly the same sequence. The challenge, as you've already used the statistic, our CIO has published a digital modernization strategy which calls out that we have roughly 10,000 operational systems. Well, every one of them is different. Everyone's put in place by a different group of people at a different time with a different set of requirements and a different budget and a different focus. Organizational scope. We're just like Hesha. We're trying to blend all that into a common view. So we have to find, what's the real authoritative piece of data? Because it's not all of those systems. It's only a subset of those systems. And you have to do all of the mapping and translations to make the result add up. Otherwise, you double count or you miss something. This is work in progress. This will always be a work in progress in any large organization. So I don't want to give you the impression it's all sorted. Definitely not all sorted. But the reality is we're trying to get to the point where people can see the data that's available. And that's a requirement, by the way, under the Foundations Act, that we have a data catalog, an authoritative data catalog. So people can see it and they have the ability to then request access to that through automation. This is what's critical. You need to be able to request access and have it arbitraged on the basis of whether you should directly have access based on your role, your workflow, et cetera, but it should happen in real time. You don't want to wait weeks or months or hour or long for some paperwork to move around. So this all has to become highly automated. So what's the data? Who can access it? Under what policy? For what purpose? The roles and responsibilities, identity management, all this is a combined set of solutions that we have to put in place. I'm mostly worried about a subset of that. My colleagues in these other swim lanes working to do the rest. Most people in the department have access to the data they need in their space. That hasn't been a problem. The problem is you go from space to space, you have to learn a new set of systems and a new set of techniques for a new set of data formats, which means you have to be retrained. That really limits our freedom of maneuver of human beings. In the ideal world, you'd be able to move from any job in any part of the department to the same job in another part of the department with no retraining whatsoever. You'd be instantly able to make a contribution. That's what we're trying to get to. So that's a different kind of a challenge, right? How do we get that level of consistency in the user experience, a modern user experience, so that if I'm a real estate manager or I'm a medical business manager or I'm a clinical professional or whatever, I can go from this location in this part of the department to that location in that part and my experience is the same. It's completely modern and it's completely consistent. No retraining. How much of that challenge pie is people, process and technology? How would you split that opportunity? Well, everything starts from a process perspective because if you automate a bad process, you just make more mistakes in less time at greater cost. That's obviously not the ideal. But the biggest single challenge is people. It's talent, it's culture, both on the demand side and on the supply side. In fact, a lot of what I talked about in my remarks was the additional changes we need to put in place to bring people into a more modern approach to data, more modern consumption. And look, we have pockets of excellence and they can hold their own against any team, any place on the planet but they're pockets of excellence. And what we're trying to do is raise the entire organization's performance. So it's people, people and people and then the other stuff. But the products, don't care about them. We often hear that. They're going to change in 12 to 18 months. I'm a technologist, I'm hands-on. The products are going to change rapidly. I make no emotional commitment to products but the people, that's a different story. Well, we know that in the commercial world we often hear that cultural resistance is what sabotages sort of modernization efforts. The DOD is sort of the ultimate top-down organization. Is it any easier to get buy-in because the culture is sort of command and control oriented? It's actually hard in the DOD. It's not easier in the DOD. Ultimately, people respond to their performance incentives. That's the dirty secret of performance incentives they work every time. So unless you restructure performance that measures that incentives for people, their behavior's never going to change. They need to see their personal future in the future you're prescribing and if they don't see it, you're going to get resistance every time. They're going to do what they believe their incentive to do. Making those changes, cascading those performance measures down, it's been difficult because much of the decision-making processes in the department have been based on slow-moving systems and slow-moving data. Let me think about it. Our budget planning process was created by Robert McNamara as the secretary of defiles. It requires you to plan everything for five years and it takes more than a year to plan a single year's worth of activity. It's slow-moving and we're, you know, we have regulation, we have legislation, we're a law-abiding organization, we do what we have to do. All of those things slow things down and there's a culture of expecting macro-level consensus building and which means everybody feels they can say no. If everybody can say no, then change becomes peanut butter spread across an organization. When you peanut butter spread across something our size and scale, that layer's pretty thin. So we have the same problem that other organizations have. There is clearly a perception of top-down change and if the secretary or the deputy secretary issue an instruction, people will obey it. It just takes some time to work its way down into all the detailed combinations and permutations because you have to make sophisticated decisions now. How am I going to change my performance measures for that group or that group? And that takes time and energy and thought, all right? It's, there's a natural sort of pipeline effect in this. So there's real tension, I think, in between this perception of top-down and people obey the orders they're given but when you're trying to integrate those changes into a broad set of policy and process and people, that takes time and energy. As a result, the leaders have to be circumspect about the orders that they give because they want to see success. They want to make sure that what they say is actually implemented or reflects totally on their organization. I think that our leaders are absolutely concerned about accomplishing the outcomes that they set out and I think that they are rightfully determined to get the change as rapidly as possible. I would not expect them to be circumspect. I would anticipate that they would be firm and clear in the direction that they set and they would set aggressive targets because you need aggressive targets to get aggressively changed outcomes. Now. Well, but they have to choose wisely, right? They can't just fire off orders and expect everything to be done. I would think that they've got to really think about what they want to get done and put all the wood behind the arrow. I think that they constantly balance all of those considerations. I must say, I did not appreciate before I joined the department the extraordinary caliber of leadership that we enjoy. We have people with real insight and experience and high intellectual horsepower making the decisions in the department and we've been blessed with a continuing stream of them at all of the senior racks. These people could go anywhere, do anything that they wanted in the economy and they've chosen to be in the department and they bring enormous intellectual firepower to bear on challenges. Well, and you mentioned the motivation at the top of the segment. It's the largely picturesque. Pretty powerful. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I want to ask you, we have to break but the organizational structure, you talked about the CIO, actually the responsibility for security within the CIO. Sure. To whom do you report? What's the organization look like? So I report to the Chief Management Officer of the Department of Defense. So if you think about the order of precedence, there's the Secretary of Defense, the Deputy Secretary of Defense and third in order is the Chief Management Officer. I report to the Chief Management Officer. As does the CIO, is that right? As does the CIO. Right, as does the CIO. And actually this is quite typical in large organizations that you don't have the CDO and the CIO in the same space because the concerns are very different. They have to collaborate, but very different concerns. We used to see CDOs reporting to CIOs. That's fallen dramatically in terms of the frequency you see that. Because we now recognize that's just a failure mode. And so you don't want to go down that path. It's, you know, the number one most common reporting relationship is actually to a CEO, the Chief Executive Officer of an organization. It's all about what executive is driving performance for the organization. That's the person the CDO should report to. And I'm blessed in that I do find myself reporting to the executive driving organizational improvement. And that's for me, that's a critical thing. That would make a difference between whether I could succeed or whether I'm doomed to fail. So a COO would be common too in a commercial organization, right? Yes, in certain commercial organizations it's a COO. It just depends on the nature of the business and their maturity with data. But if you're in the, if data's the business, a CDO will report to the CEO, right? There are other organizations where it'll be the COO or the CFO. It just depends on the nature of that business. And in our case, I'm quite fortunate. Well, Michael, thank you for not only the coming on theCUBE, but the service that you're providing to the country. We really appreciate your insights. It's my pleasure to serve the country. All right, keep it right there. But we'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from MIT, CBO IQ. Right back.