 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. And welcome back to Washington D.C. We're in the Washington Convention Center here for Inforum 2018, continuing the coverage here on theCUBE. I'm John Walls with Dave Vellante, and we're joined now by Ann Benedict, who is the SVP of Human Resources at Infor. Ann, good afternoon to you. Thank you, thanks for having me. You bet, thanks for being here. Now, 17,000 employees. So, obviously you've got a lot of responsibility there. You're not only an Infor executive, but you wear the hat of being an Infor client as well. Tell us about that, but how that works out, and I guess how you can test drive a lot of different services on your own before it goes out to the market. Yeah, I like to joke that I feel like I have the best HR leadership role in the business or in the world perhaps, because I get to not only lead a great company full of great people, 17,000 employees around the world. I'm so proud of them. But then I also get to be a customer of one of the greatest products in the HCM worlds that there is, and I have a direct line to the product managers, to the developers, to the consultants who can really help us to use our product to its fullest advantage internally for ourselves. So, it's like a toy box that every HR executive dreams of, and it's right there at my doorstep for tests to use to innovate with them. They're always open to our ideas, our feedback internally. We're often a beta customer for the features and functionality that are coming out to our customers, so it's a great position to be in. So, what about the relationship? Yeah, because it's a great give and take, obviously. I mean, because you're a tremendous resource on the development side. So, what is that exchange like, how does that work in terms of what's working, what's not, what you think others would want instead, or what they'd like to tweak a little bit? How does that work? Yeah, so we're trying to straddle a balance between using the product as it's intended to be designed for the breadth of our customers, no matter what industry they're in. We're obviously in a technology industry, but we have a lot of healthcare customers, government customers, services customers who have their own particular needs. So, we like to experiment with the technology, the way it's designed for other industries, but then also, I can make adjustments for use for our own company as a services company, as a technology company. And a good example of that, for example, is I'm working very closely with product management right now to help them design the next iteration of what our talent management suite will look like. So, we have a design concept for how we want to give performance feedback, for example, internally at Infor. And we're sharing that design with the product management team to help them create the next version of the product that will meet the design requirements that we've set out for ourselves, and that I think a lot of other companies are moving towards. It's a modern approach to talent management, and the product, we're working very closely hand-in-hand with product management to make sure that they're designing something that we, we're co-designing it with them really. So, what I'm expecting is, for us to have a really great next iteration of that product that is very modern and up-to-date on what science is telling us about performance feedback. So, you're a pioneer in a way, but you probably don't want to mess with core HR. That's table stakes. Talent management is something that, frankly, not a lot of companies do well, so you may be more receptive to experimentation there. Is that a fair assertion? Yeah, I would say that's true, and also my background is, I grew up in HR with quite a breadth of experiences, but my depth of expertise has always been on the talent management and leadership development side, so that's been sort of where I've been wanting to play with the product and give my points of view on where I think it should evolve. It's just my particular strength that I bring, I think, to this role and to the product as well. How do you see the role of the senior HR executive evolving? How has it changed in the last several years? Maybe digital transformation, this whole big data, the data movement. How does that factor into that role and your vision of where that goes? Yeah, I think companies are looking for a different type of HR executive than they have in the past, and I was fortunate that this wasn't by design. It was very serendipitous, but my career path led me, I think, in the exact right direction, so I started my first 10 years of my career as a consultant at Mercer doing HR consulting, so I was consulting the companies about how to create the best HR department possible, how to create HR strategy, how to operationalize that, and it was that consulting mindset that I've taken with me throughout my career. After consulting, I moved internally to various companies and that skill set of just being able to identify a problem, come up with a solution and measure an implementation I've taken with me in my role, and so I think companies are looking for HR executives who bring that sort of mindset to the role, and I think that's what I've been able to do at Infor. And then I think also, when I was a consultant, I was also advising customers and clients on technology and how to use technology for HR, so that's why I'm so thrilled to have this role because it's the best of both worlds where I get to play with the technology and also be a cutting-edge HR leader, hopefully. So how do you assess the Infor, HCM capabilities? Come on, give us the good, the bad, what's on the to-do list, give us the rundown. Yeah, no, I think it's a phenomenal product, so and I'm not just saying that. Okay, what makes it phenomenal? When I walked in the door a year and nine months ago, we were just about to go live with the Multitenant Cloud product. We were one of the first to do that and we did it in over 65 countries with 17,000 employees and since then, we've subsequently rolled out more functionality, benefits enrollment, absence management, compensation planning, LMS, and each time we learn a little bit more, I can't underestimate the importance of getting the process right before you get the technology in and the change management that goes around it. If we've, you know, if I would say I would give us a B, it might have been around those areas, but the product itself is really, it has the perfect balance of coming out of the box with some functionality that you can use right away that's best practice process. So you get value right after that. Yeah, and not a lot of configuration required, easy to get in. We implemented it with that broad scope in a very, very short amount of time, which is almost impossible with our competitors, so I think for that it's fantastic and then for the specific needs that we've had, it's been very easy to build that in as well, so it has best of both worlds, I would say. So we saw some pretty cool demos yesterday around talent science and it struck me, as an audience member, there were all kinds of different attributes of, you know, ambition and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but the one that wasn't on there was like performer, but it struck me that, well, these attributes lead to performance and I guess that's the basic philosophy, but I wanted to test it with you. Just give me the bottom line, you know? But it really is more complicated than that, isn't it? It is, yeah, and that's one of the most exciting things about HR right now too, I think, and this comes back to the HR executive of the future, is I come from an IO psychology background where data, we used to have to do experiments on subjects with and collecting data was always the hardest part to studying work and studying personality, studying behavior, and now we have all this data available to us that we've never had before and talent science is a perfect example of how data is really empowering our decisions and to answer your question about how it is predicting performance, a particular attribute doesn't necessarily lead to performance in any role. So in one role, ambition, really high ambition is actually not a factor for success. In another role, it is. So it really is, there is no right personality profile that can predict success in any role. It's very role specific. And what talent science is able to do is really find the science behind what is the specific role that will lead to success and what are the attributes that will lead to non-success also in a role. And that's such a powerful thing, what we've found with talent sciences that depending on the role, we can reduce turnover by 20 up to 70% by choosing people who fit a role profile versus those who don't. It's interesting, it's like those books, there's seven attributes of highly successful people. But essentially you're codifying that by role. It's true, it doesn't just work for any role. Salesperson may be different than an engineer, may be different than an operations person, et cetera. Well, this is really fascinating because you have the human science, right? We're all imperfect. We make crazy decisions. Sometimes you're rational and we act wildly. Or predictably, whatever it is. And now you're taking data science and overlaying with that and so you're trying to come up with some kind of predictable markers or whatever for imperfect beings in a way, right? So, I mean, how's technology being the glue in that process? Yeah, well, I think there's no such thing as right and wrong or perfect and imperfect. I could get into a leadership spiel, but any strength that either of you might have, if you use that to an extreme, becomes a weakness actually. So, and like I used in the example of ambition, high ambition in certain roles may not be a factor towards success, whereas other roles it might be. So, whatever particular behavioral DNA that you bring to a role as an individual, it's incumbent upon us as a company to figure out what is the right role for the personality that you bring and the behavior and strengths that you have. And that's what we're really able to do with talent science, which is, so if you apply for a role where you don't match the profile, I may be able to propose to you, hey, you have really high ambition. That's not right for this role, but it may be right for this other role, have you ever considered that? And that way we can really, we talk about human potential here at Inforum. That's the real tool, real tangible way that we can really find the human potential every single person, no matter what their profile looks like or strengths or weaknesses or faults, as you say. But whatever they come with, we can find the right fit. Does technology and generally, and say artificial intelligence or machine intelligence specifically, can it moderate or adjudicate human bias? Or does it actually reinforce it? Yeah, that's like a very good question and obviously very pertinent to today. I think a couple of things. So the assessment that I'm speaking of, we would never rely on the machine to make a decision. So it's telling you as a manager, here are some of the gaps that a particular individual has towards the role that you're planning to hire them for, but we suggest that you ask these interview questions and make a decision for yourself. So you really can't replace that human intervention in the process, that human judgment, their sense from an interview, but it really helps them hone the interview in on the things that they really should focus on, figuring out are we comfortable with those gaps? Does a person realize they have those gaps? And really for both the candidate and the manager to make the right decision. So in the assessment, it's always, we never rely on the machine to make a decision. But it is incumbent on us to make sure that as we're designing these tools, as we're designing the technology behind them, that we have as much diversity in the people who are designing them as possible to make sure that they're being designed in a way that doesn't have bias built into them. And that's why it's so important for us to have diversity in technology, why we're doing USB code, why we believe in bringing up people from all backgrounds to participate in technology, because it's so important to have that diversity as we're building this stuff. Can't take the humans out of the equation yet. There's still some gut check, right? There's still some intuition that has to come into play here. Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the attributes of humans that we machines can't replace yet. So that ability to empathize, the ability to show all the emotional skills, we know machines can't do that today. Maybe someday they will, but today they can't. So humans will bring that. But I really think that the power comes in the combination of AI and machines and humans. And that's what we're talking about here around human potential. It's the power of the combination of the two. And I think we will see that that combination will be required for a very long time before machines take over the world. I always tell the story of John and I interviewed Gary Kasparov, the great chess champion, who when he lost to the IBM supercomputer, instead of giving up, he said, I want to beat the supercomputer. So he took machines plus humans to beat the supercomputer. So to this day, the greatest chess player in the world is a machine and a supercomputer. So that's a great example of augmentation. Now, probably doesn't work so well for autonomous vehicles, but. Yeah. Well, thanks for being with us. Thanks for sharing this story. We appreciate that, the time. And if you see our application come down the pike. Okay. Flag is where we're deficient, if you would please. You'll be welcome, you're welcome. Excellent. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Anne Benedict. Thanks for being with us. We'll be back with more here on theCUBE. We're live in the nation's capital, Washington DC. That was awesome. Thank you. Whoa.