 Okay, welcome back. We're here live at IBM's Information On Demand Conference, exclusive coverage by SiliconANGLE and Wikibon. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, expect to see them from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm Joe, my co-host, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is John Mancini, author of Occupy IT, Manifesto, also president of AIM community. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, John. Nice to be here. So first of all, I got a hashtag Occupy IT. So if you want to keep the hashtag going, and of course, we're big believes in the hashtag. So check it out, communicate on Twitter when I hear your thoughts. Tell us about what is Occupy IT? Dave's raving about it. Share it with the folks and me. What's going on with Occupy IT? Sure, it was probably a little bit more of a current premise when I wrote it about six months ago. But the idea was that as business people, it had come time to take technology seriously. That technology was not just the hairball in our organizations, that we had to try to make as small as possible. That it was the key enabler for our businesses moving forward. And so it was time for the business to Occupy IT. And so that was the genesis behind the thing. Give us apps, give us the iPhone, give us the iPad. Modular, modular, modular. Yes, it was so. So it basically centered around the disruptors that are going on in the technology business these days. Why would someone want to Occupy IT? Because I just got some backlash on a comment I made called IT's kind of like TSA. Trying to use a metaphor. I got slammed by folks on Twitter, terrible analogy. Meaning, you know, folks who want to move fast and get on the plane and get to their point A to point B, which is business outcomes. What you want is to get on the plane and you got to go through security at the airport. So my metaphor was, you know, you got to do things to get ready to get on the plane. So IT has had that kind of reputation. You want to launch an app, I want to spin up some servers. I got to check on this, wait in line, take my shoes off. You know, get everything checked out. And it slows things down. That was my metaphor. Sorry for the folks out there that offended you, but that's what it's like these days. So there are legitimate components to that metaphor. I'm sorry, anybody who was offended by that, but let's face it, it's not why we have to Occupy IT. No one likes that, but Occupy IT, that's basically saying, look it, it's a game changer in the sense the sea change is happening, the tide is coming in, it's called modern in the modern era. This new wave, social mobile data, big data, agility, speed, all these things, is that the premise? Yeah, I mean, the idea is that we have these, these three huge disruptors in enterprise IT right now. The first one disruptor is consumerization. And that radically changes how we look at applications, how we look at how we interact with enterprise systems, how we deploy them. It increases the level of frustration that the business has with how long it takes to deploy things. So that's disruptor number one. Disruptor number two is cloud and mobile and what that basically does is create an environment in which people can work anywhere, any time, from any place and can transcend the firewall. And so that's kind of the second one. And then the third is within our organizations we have a motion to flatten the organizations, to be less hierarchical, to be more responsive. And so you mix those three things together and basically it changes IT from essentially being a cost center in an organization to a value creator. And if you're a value creator within the organization then the business damn well better pay attention to it. Right, so you had, you had five sort of demands if you will, right, I love this. So commit to the cloud, mobilize everything, make the business social, digitize anything that moves and then prepare for extreme information management. Yep, extreme, I like the extreme. So, and then you ask the question, so what the hell can I do tomorrow? So what can I do tomorrow? Well, I think that's the challenging part because if you're in an organization like mine, I run an association called AIM which is in the content management space and we're 42 people. So if I make a mistake and screw up my information management practices, I might look bad because I'm, you know, the shoemaker's children in many ways when it comes to information management but it's a correctable phenomena with 42 employees. You know, I can deploy this, I can deploy that, I can deploy another thing and if necessary I can go back and redo it at some point. But if you're an organization at scale, then you really gotta think through this question of how the pieces fit together. You've gotta really think through how you challenge IT to be responsive to the business and you've gotta take a different look at it if you're operating at scale than if you're just a small business. So we've been talking all day about social business analytics, social business in general and analytics for social businesses. Where does that fit into, you know, sort of the AIM agenda and some of your constituencies? Yeah, it fits very clearly. We've been around since 1943, believe it or not and we started life as the National Microfilm Association and so, you know, a lot of the first question people say is well geez, what the hell is that story all about? And the story is about the intersection between content and process and so we've gone through this evolution where we've gone from film to image to documents to content to web content to social content and so the kinds of things that we manage have changed and gotten much more expansive and much more voluminous than they ever were but that central premise that this is all about content and this is all about process, that's the core thing I think that organizations have to keep in mind. So, I mean up until very recently people looked at this data problem, data as a problem, right, oh there's so much of it, it's gotta be governed, I gotta have a records management, you know, operation or function that has to like break through brick walls to get the organization to actually adhere to some of the best practice policies and it seems like now all of a sudden everybody say oh big data, it's a great opportunity so it's almost been a flip, we were just talking a rich about that a little bit. What's your take on that mental flip? Yeah, I mean it's like most things unfortunately in life it is a massive challenge and a massive opportunity at the same time and that's what organizations have to sort through. So on the challenge side, you've got these ever cascading piles of content, you know, we've got this hoarder problem within our organizations where nobody can get rid of anything and the cumulative impact of that has serious business risk and cost to the organization. So simultaneously on the other side, you've got this accumulation of information that previously has been mostly at rest within organizations and now what we're finally starting to do is figure out how to put that in motion, how to understand what it is, how to apply metadata where it doesn't exist right now and essentially extract value from these huge digital landfills that are out there. So that's the yin and the yang of this whole thing is that you've got both challenge and massive opportunity. So this is why I think John the TSA analogy is so appropriate because it's the value it's the asset and liability balance the yin and the yang as you just said where the TSA is it's IT's job to protect the organization or it's the record management function the information management function to protect the organization to deal with information risk. The passengers, like the line of business they just want to get stuff done. You just open the doors up and everybody can come on and do whatever they want. We know what kind of risks that brings to bear. So one of the questions we've been bouncing around on theCUBE for the last several months is this whole notion of information asset and liability management. This idea of the chief data officers come up John just mentioned in the last conversation we had. I used to think that that was the job of the CIO to balance that asset and liability information asset and liability management. There's a new line of thinking that says that's a whole separate function. Yeah. Where do you see that going? What does AIM say about that? I think there's clearly a need for organizations to think through the question of who has that ultimate responsibility for the information assets. You have your financial assets, the CFOs in charge. You've got your people, usually your chief human resources person. You've got your physical assets usually have an ERP system of some sort to run that. It's a good balance too. If you make a wrong move you could really foreclose innovation. Yeah and I think the problem in most organizations is that the CIO has been really a CTO. They're managing technology rather than managing information. They're managing the pipes rather than the stuff that flows through the pipes. And so organizations I think really need to change that. One of the things we talk about in Occupy IT is that you still have to have the pipes and you still have to have the platform and you especially have to have that if you operate at scale but it's what flows through those pipes that really is the coin of the realm right now. Or the CIO is managing the delivery of services. Yeah, yeah. Fairness, right? And that's what all these CIOs talk about transforming the organization, getting more agile, providing a service catalog. But you're right, it's not, the water flowing through the pipe or the data that carry the metaphor through is really not the responsibility of the CIO. The CIO sitting around saying okay, how are we going to implement governance? How are we going to monetize that data? Maybe some are. Yeah, I think, Dave, you have a really good point. It's that disconnect right now in the CIO job that essentially makes it the most vulnerable job in corporate America right now. You look at Harvard Business Review did a survey just recently and they looked at what the CEO thought of the CIO. And boy, that is a tough place to be right now because you were expected to do all the things that you previously did and then you're also expected to transform the organization through applying technology in innovative ways. And that data suggests that that is a very, very vulnerable place to be in an organization right now because the challenge is so hard. Yeah, and the consumerization too, there's a lot of other issues, like CIO's got to deal with space and facilities, power and cooling on one hand and data. Yeah, well, consumerization is like a massive thing. The second that that CEO in December of 2010 got an iPad for Christmas and came in to his IT people in the first week of January and said, why don't our systems work like this? The world changed. And in some ways that's what Occupy IT is all about is that there's been an inflection and a flip in terms of this idea of IT as a cost center and a cost center only versus a business enabler. And that's really at the heart of this revolution I think we're in the middle of. So a lot of the things. I mean it's a change over IT's best days are still ahead of it. But what David and I have always talked about is that the consolidation phase of recession has been about a decade of downsizing, cutting to the bone and doing more with less, outsource help desk, everything's outsourced to somebody. At some point you've got to find a core competency. Yeah, and you think about the skill set in our organizations right now. We have a concept that aim that we call an information professional. And the idea there is that pure technical skills are not enough anymore. You have to have pure technical skills but you also have to have them in a context and particularly a business context. And so that dramatically changes what it means to be an IT moving forward. Because a lot of that stuff that was driven purely by technical skills, that can be outsourced, that can be put to the cloud, that can be do a lot of places. Doesn't mean that IT's not important but it's the integrative capacity of IT that becomes most critical in organizations. So is big data and social for business sort of changing the perception of the historical sort of records manager? Is that, are we gonna see a renaissance or resurgence of innovation? I think the nuance that's occurring right now is that the idea of records manager as a pure records manager, I think that is a concept that was built on paper-based assumptions. And as we move into the kinds of challenges associated with volume and velocity and scale and all those things that are associated with big data, you really have to change to a focus on governance and using automated processes to facilitate that governance because if you look at it in the way that we always used looked at records management, which was that we somehow expected individual workers to drag and drop things into folders and apply retention schedules and to care about all the things that we cared about in the records management arena, the business doesn't give a damn about that stuff. They are operating too fast and systems have to do that, not people. Yeah, but your own data suggests we still live in largely a paper-based world. I think your aim data suggests like, I think 14% of the processes that could be automated electronically are. I mean, it's a huge- Yeah, there's a worse data point in a survey that we just did, which was that said that in 42% of organizations, the volume of paper records is still increasing. So I don't doubt it. So I mean, I don't doubt it either, but it's kind of a bummer too. Yeah, so was there light at the end of that tunnel? Yeah, I mean, I think the light is, and it's a tough light. It's not an easy task, is that we're gonna be in a hybrid world for the foreseeable future. We're gonna be in a world that has paper in it. We're gonna be in a world that has on-premise information in it. We're gonna be in a world that has cloud-based information. We're gonna be in a world that has both traditional structured kinds of documents as well as wild and crazy social content, and we've gotta figure out how we apply governance structures across that, which means that, again, if you're an organization at scale, you have to think about this from a platform perspective and not just ad hoc it, because if you don't think about it from a platform perspective, you don't have a ghost of a chance of figuring that out. Do you think emerging economies have a major advantage because they don't have this legacy to deal with? I mean, what you just described is incredibly challenging. Yeah, I mean, a little bit. It's also dichotomy between large and small organizations too. If you're a small organization, as I say, you have a lot more room for operating without worrying about what you did before, or if you did have something that was screwy before, you can suck it out and replace it without too much effort. But if you're a big organization, typically our data suggests that you have eight, nine, 10 different content management systems operating because they were deployed to handle particular mission critical departmental processes. They were deployed, as Rich said earlier, back in the 80s and 90s. And now you've got to figure out not only how do you federate that and manage across that, but you also have to figure out how you manage in terms of all these cloud silos that are emerging all over the place, as well as unconventional forms of content like social. Do you think that the ascendancy of some of these companies that you're seeing, some of these companies that exited successfully the dot-com blow up, and I mean, take Google, Amazon, Facebook, now Twitter about to do an IPO. Do you think that part of their ascendancy is that they were not encumbered by some of these challenges? Yeah, I mean, I think there's the entry of consumer-based solutions into the document and content space is really revolutionary in its nature. And I think organizations have to pay attention to that revolutionary aspect. That's one of the things, one of the concepts in Occupy IT. But at the same time, you can't just drag and drop consumer-based applications into enterprises that operate at scale and think that they will operate effectively. I'll tell you just a very quick story recently. Got a call from a guy, got a call from companies lots of times where they want to brief me on their company. So they, I said, fine, we had the briefing. They gave a PowerPoint. End of the presentation. I said, could I have a copy of the PowerPoint? Because I'm gonna, you know, people might call. They said, great, it's a big file. We'll send you a link. So half hour goes by, check my email. There's a link in there. I click on the link. And lo and behold, I am not at the file level for that individual PowerPoint. They had decided to keep their enterprise information in a consumer application. And I'm at the top-level file directory for that company. And I'm looking at folders that have names like executive compensation, intellectual property, patents, you know, HR, all of that stuff. And the lesson there is that take the lessons from the consumer space as you deploy enterprise systems, but don't necessarily think that you can just drag and drop consumer applications into the enterprise and they'll work at scale. That is a scary story. Yeah, it goes on all over the place. Excellent, all right, well listen, John, thanks very much. We really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. And good luck with those challenges that you've articulated. Glad to be here, aim.org. Hashtag occupy IT, this is theCUBE, hashtag theCUBE. We're live here at Information on Demand. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. 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