 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's The Cube at Tableau Conference 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Tableau. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Okay, welcome back everyone here. Live in Seattle, Washington for The Cube. For Tableau's data 14 conference, I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE. This is The Cube. We'll go out to the events, extract the simple and noise. Our next guest, exciting users here, Kevin Penry, operations leader and the Ambersmart data analyst for lifechurch.tv. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you. So, one of the things I love about Tableau's conferences is that they have such a loyal audience of customers. It's fun, the energy's high, and you guys are in data. Talk about what you guys are doing from your business and why are you guys here? Why are you guys a customer of Tableau? Is it because you have all this data? You have a lot of action in your fan base audience? Tell us. We do. Lifechurch, let me tell you just a little bit about it. It's been around for about 18 years. We're in six different states, 20 locations, a little over 60,000 on weekend attendance. Heavy online presence, there's beyond those 60,000 physical people in seats, there's about 120,000 people connecting on our website every weekend streaming there. We're the developers of the Bible app, which has 151 million downloads now on the app store. And so we really look to media and see it as a very important means of us accomplishing our mission. So, it's like a, you know, in any stadium-like environment, there's a physical space and a virtual space. And we see the leaders kind of look at the virtual space as an opportunity, not as a separate siloed activity. How do you guys look at that? Cause obviously, you know, people go to the events or to charity, the physical location, and there's some face-to-face contact, but with mobile, the virtual face-to-face becomes an opportunity. How do you guys look at those environments? And what do you guys do? Well, we try to be very aware of them. And we try to make them more, if a person is experiencing live church, whether it be online on their mobile or whatever the case may be, we try to make it more than just watching somebody else experience live church, but we try to make it personal and more connected. Our speakers are addressing the cameras and looking more closer, you know, at the people on the other side of the lens. Oftentimes, even the folks at our physical locations see it as a part of their sacrifice to realize that the experience is gonna be geared for the person that may not even be in the room that day. So our senior pastor's gonna be communicating directly with the people that are there and acknowledging them and welcoming them to the experiences. I love the IT angle here. Everyone talks about outcomes. And in this case, outcome value for your customers, if you will, is relationships, knowledge, interactions. Amber Sherer, how do you guys do that? I mean, there's obviously data involving 150 million downloads. You have a great digital footprint. How do you guys harness that data? And how do you, from an IT-like perspective, how do you guys create great outcomes for your fans, audience, customers? Sure. Well, with it being a church, it is very relational, and it should be relational, but we believe that data has a place at the table. And so one way that we use data is we like to see how well are we connecting? How well are we getting people plugged in? Are we growing? Is our attendance growing? Attendance is our number one key performance indicator. Everything is tied to that. So we're constantly monitoring that and using that piece of data. David Pogue, who used to write for the New York Times, came on theCUBE at an event we did with IBM. He now writes for Yahoo! Does the video thing over there. And he says, he's like, it's so obvious you should give the video away because it tries more physical presence. And he uses the TED example where they pay like $6,000 a ticket and they have the free videos. And he talks about rock music and music musicians, they give them, they got to test the albums out before you want to see them live. Do you see the correlation between the data on online and physical to that level of granularity? Can you see spikes in usage online and correlate that directly to attendance? Sure. I know, for example, if there's bad weather in an area of one of our physical locations, our attendance online will spike up. We also have series throughout the year that we call, one of them we call is at the movies. And we're due to licensing, we're not able to record that. And so if people want to view that and they can view it online. Cause we have, I think about 60 online experiences every week, opportunities for people to come watch it. So yeah, we do see that correlation. So Tableau kind of has the magic Juju as Dave Volante, my co-host who's actually not here this week. But the magic that happens in the visualization, we're just talking with Dave, we did the keynote on stage. How are you guys using Tableau as users of Tableau and how does that, has it become addictive? Is it giving you share some of your stories? Sure. Well, one thing that's great about Tableau is that you can start small and then grow. You don't have to go all in with this immense expense. So we started small and usually we try to meet the user where they are. We get the users within the organization. I usually connect with them one-on-one and I'll ask them what problem are you trying to solve currently? Get them excited about it, get them interested in it, get them curious, getting them asking questions. And it typically just spreads. It becomes its own thing if you want to add to that. Yeah, and our culture, our organizational culture is really geared towards high feedback. So we were continually looking for outcomes, looking for evidence, not just, we want to be self-aware. We don't want to convince ourselves that we may be doing something well if in fact we're not. I've always said that we run the risk of becoming like a bad American Idol audition if we go through life without really having our eyes open, self-awareness with high feedback. So we had that even before in the earliest years of the organization. We found ourselves surrounded by that information. It might have been in the early days, it might have been in the form of spreadsheets or in a spiral notebook. And as time has gone on now, we're surrounded with a lot of visuals and tableaus contributing significantly to it. So listening is key, right? So you need to listen and match your vision, what you think is happening to what's really happening. That's the key, right? So everyone has that kind of group think problem that they're trying to avoid, that blind spot where you think you're doing great and you might be misconnecting. And that's a time lag. How does real time affect you guys? It must be a huge impact. Yeah, absolutely. We are constantly like for attendance, for example, that's real time, that's updated every 15 minutes as the weekend is progressing. That gives our leadership team an idea of how things are going. Our executive pastor may tweak his message a little bit depending on how that's going. So we do rely on real time data. Tell like current events, like we've tweaked our message here in our editorial because the Apple event, you got everyone's eye watch and iPhone 6 Plus, which we're all salivating for, but it brings up a connection around user interface. How do you guys look at the user interface side of things? You constantly looking at how people are using the app, you're thinking about new form factors, are there a lot of developers involved? How are you guys structuring your innovation around keeping pace with that consumer desire to have one group want the latest and greatest and some people just want ease of use? Yeah. Well, Ann, why don't you talk about your, you were actually the scrum master overall of developers. We developed all of our apps in-house and lead that. So I'll talk a little bit about that. Chat rooms, how do we connect with the people that are actually using some of the applications? Yeah, absolutely. Well, we believe in leveraging technology, however possible, to further our mission. And so we're not afraid, we're not risk adverse. So we like to try new things, we're constantly trying new things. We're constantly seeing how industry leaders around us are using things. And we're not afraid to just jump out there and try something different, something that's not traditional for even a church. So you name it, we've probably tried it, and very innovative. Yeah, we try to tweak as few variables as possible so we can be sure that we're associated in an outcome with an action. And as far as connecting with the users you spoke there, many of our online events are accompanied with live user chat. So we're actually able to connect. Did you guys write your own chat client? Are you leveraging off-the-shelf tools? No, we wrote everything. We wrote our own tools there. And we're heavy into Google Analytics, so we're always interested in- You're data geeks. We are. We are. Like us. So I got to ask you about the data, because one of the things that we talk about is big data seems to be a category. One of the things that we've been sharing is we believe data's native in everything. Every aspect of the touch points. How do you guys look at your digital strategy around as things start to become consumerized? You got obviously search engines, you got events on the chat or video rooms or hangouts, and you got social media, mobile apps. Are they stovepipes? How do you tie them all together? Wow. That's a part of who we are. The same vision is driving it all. We just, we're more than ready to access any resource that we feel like we can to further our mission, and technology we feel like has been one of the major tools from the earliest days of our organization. We've been- You have a social media command center? We have a global- You can't see a smile. Yes, we do. We have a global operation center. We have eyes in on everything. We have our, on our Bible app, where we have 151 million installs. We've got lots of user data coming in on that and seeing where it's at. We've brought the social context of that where there's actually, people can invite friends and different things to it. You know, all kidding aside, you know, you watch, you know, one of my favorite movies with my family is watching Bruce Almighty, and they have the file cabinets and the emails, and you hit reply all, and it's kind of a, you know, it's good satire and it's comedy, but in reality, I mean, you can document thought on Twitter. You can see someone who's in the need, or someone who wants to share. These are really awesome gestures and they're little data points out there, so harnessing that and bringing that into the community is something that sounds like it's clear on your agenda. How do you guys stay on top of things? And what are you doing to not miss a signal? Oh, wow. Well, I think because we are so data aware, it's just on the forefront of us every day all the time. I mean, we're always thinking about it, and where all of us, about 50% of our organization has logged into Tableau and is using it, and so it's just, it's a core value of ours, and so I think it's just on the forefront of all of our brains and it's just an expectation almost. Do you remember what some of your viewer statistics are on from, our staff is a little over 400, and so. And about 220 of those are logging in to Tableau, so about 50%. How do you guys do that? How do you issue your licenses on Tableau's side? Is it all users, you have power users? How do you guys, for the folks that don't know Tableau, how many Tableau users do you have? Is there a limitation can you share? Well, we did not initially start with a core license, but that's where we are today. So a core license means we can have an unlimited number of users. I'm currently the main, I would say power user of Tableau and our organization, but a few of our other employees are here at this conference to learn so that we can get more, more using it, but everyone has access. So Amber, I got to ask you, what is the coolest thing you've done with Tableau? That you can say, that's, wow, amazing. Cool, it's your definition. Whatever you think is the coolest thing you've done. Yeah, I, you know what I love about it is just how quickly I can pull a ton of data together and just have an aha moment. I know recently we had a question of, how can we get more people plugged in to serve? Because it takes an army of people to make every weekend happen. And the question was, well, how many people have applied but have never been plugged in? And the question was, well, you know, it's probably not that many, but it might be interesting to look at it. And I was, in just a few moments, was able to pull all that data together. And we found out we had 3,300 people who had applied but had never been plugged in and still had plenty of time left because we background check all of our volunteers. So they had plenty of time left to get plugged in and serve. Huge opportunity right there. And it was an aha moment for our campuses. In terms of, wow, we'd be able to get on this pretty quickly. Yeah, we have, there is a opportunity right here, whether it's within our operating process or something that we're doing. There's a huge opportunity we need to jump on right here. You know, you bring up the operational cycle. So on the ops side, has there been anything that you've seen that's been like something that you didn't expect at the aha moments that you could share? Well, one of the big things that we do is how we have multiple services. So we have, everybody usually, is used to coming to church at one time on a weekend. You know, 10 o'clock on Sunday morning, something like that. It's a flash mob. Yes it is. So one of our biggest challenges is how to effectively distribute everybody who would come to church across times that they might not otherwise choose to go to in order to so we can grow. So we will have our typical campus locations, sites we'll have as many as six, seven or eight service times. And so we use it heavily to evaluate the capacity of the rooms, how full they are. And then our local site leadership becomes very effective at helping people, inspiring people to move to those, maybe less opportune times to be able for more people to come and attend. If so, if you could, I'm gonna ask you a question. If you can have a technology miracle, what would it be? That could just, if things could change from a tech perspective, a new feature, a new bell or whistle, a new functionality, Amber, what would it be? Man, that is a hard question. There's no real right answer because I mean, I have a couple of wishes, and I watched them, so that's the question. So what would you have it to be? What would I watch right now? I don't actually, I haven't worn a watch in over 25 years, so I'm not a big watch person, but certainly the Apple I Watch has gotten my attention. I think my biggest wish would be, I would like to see more insight around people I'm working with on a real-time basis. That's not a privacy violation. So I can connect better. Eliminate the lag, the bigger the gap between your information and your cause, the greater opportunity there might be to disassociate the two. Dave Vellante, my co-host, great quote. He says, real-time's great. If you cross the street and the car hits you, it's not great, or real-time's not good after you've lost the customer. So I think real-time, to me, is one of those things that I look at is what's real-time? I want real up-to-the-moment value. I mean, that's my categorical wish. Oh yeah, that would be great. Yeah. All right, well, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. Like you guys, if you could, just share with the folks out there who are looking to embark on cloud and mobile and take the technology and put it in practice to have good outcomes. What would you share, Amber? That's been a good success, either mindset, guiding principle, technology you trust in, the hammer and the nail that you use the most, saw or whatever tool you have, share some insight. Well, we always say around our organization, start where you are, use what you have and do what you can. And I think the culture is very important. And even if your culture isn't where it needs to be, start where you are, do what you can. But I think what's happening at Life Church is very special and unusual. And I think the key to that is that we have leadership who's creating great vision and culture. We've got an IT team who's very supportive of our tech needs. We've got a data evangelist. I think it's important to have somebody who's dedicated to this role that's not trying to do 10 other things. And I think the data evangelist, their ability to connect with the users and meet the user where they are is really, really important. And I think when all those components are working in unison, you get a lot of momentum. But that for us- The cohesiveness of that equation. Yeah, but if one of those pieces is off or not working properly, man, it just- Things fall off. They fall, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd say self-awareness. You know, I think an organization in its leadership valuing feedback, really wanting to know truth, having a desire for truth, not being willing to deceive themselves into something that they want to believe and being willing to surround themselves with data as close to real time as possible to what that is. So that you can effectively change your course, respond and see what works. Incorporate what is working, stop doing what's not working. You know, that's a really good point. I think, you know, Jeff Kelly, who took a break to make room for you guys, he just did a survey with around Hadoop and big data deployments on the IT side. And the survey results were very interesting. They asked, how would you grade yourself? The IT people grade themselves, oh, we're doing great. The business units or the user group say, no, you're not doing good. And that's to the point, Amber, about going and meeting the users rather than pulling the users into the IT world. So this is a mindset, right? I mean, who is the customer, right? And I think the one aha moment I've seen is the shift in the culture of the technology business where you put down some IT and then everyone conforms to that. And now the market is with consumerization and connected devices that have a lot new dynamics and play, crowdsourcing, data, user data, and global data. The applications are dictating the policy for the tooling and infrastructure. Do you guys see that same trend? We do. I think for us, the way we would describe it, we might be saying the same thing whenever we talk about it. It's not about us, it's about the audience. For us, it's about the user. It's about who are we trying to convey information to? And too many times, it becomes about the person who's doing the talking rather than who they're trying to get to listen. And so I'm certainly, whether it's IT, whether it's operations, whatever the case may be, we really want to see information that comes from the people in the seats and understand what is working for life change to occur in them. Amber, what about your take on demographics of personnel, the younger generation versus the old guys like me? Yeah. We have, well, I mean, I consider myself pretty open-minded, but in general, I'm still, I'm in my 40s. I'm not in my 20s. So, you know, we're, there's a younger generation that are natively web. You see a difference, I mean, when you see new people come on board and working with you. Well, you know, really, we talk about, we see two different type of users. We see resistors and influencers. And I mean, you could probably say an older generation might be a little bit more of a resistor, but that's not necessarily the case. I mean, I've got, we've got team members on staff that are well into their 40s and 50s and are huge influencers and proponents of technology and data and, I mean, that's just who we are. And so I think a lot of people that come on staff just naturally adopt that. But, yeah, I mean, I would just kind of like- So the older users tend to be more ingrained in like email. So they want functionality. Would you say that? Yeah. And the younger generation are more kind of, they kick tires and push the limits of things? Sure, sure. Yeah, there can be that. But we move so fast as an organization. Gosh. I mean, I think, I just see that it's a core theme with within our organization. That's a high rate of feedback and a high rate of being a willingness to change results in a very dynamic environment. I love what you guys are doing. I think it's a real innovation. So I guess my final question will be for you guys would be share a story where something happened that was innovative and important to your organization that wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for the mobile environment. This new connected, the crowdsourcing, this new dynamic where it's not just a unidirectional monologue. It's a truly omnidirectional, multi-hand shaking world now with the data. So what have you guys discovered that's been amazing? For me, it would be, I mentioned we have 151 installs on the Bible app. More recent, the largest number of installs have come from Pakistan, parts of the country where it may not be as safe to own a physical Bible that you can in fact download an electronic version in a much more acceptable way. So your community's expanding rapidly. Expanding and it's free, it's for them and it feels like that we've moved into a season that's fit for where the world is today. And so that's very fulfilling. Amber, anything you'd like to share? Things that you've seen that have been amazing around this new crowd, talking back, democratization of content and media? Yeah, I would just say don't resist it. Embrace it and utilize it and it's rich and there's so much there to learn from and use and just don't resist it. Thanks so much, Kevin Penry, Operation Leader, Amber Smart Data Analyst at livechurch.tv. I mean, life church, life church, not live church, although it is live, lifechurch.tv. This is theCUBE, live in Seattle, Washington for Tableau, Data 14. I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.