 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.conf 19, brought to you by Splunk. Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage in Las Vegas for Splunks.conf. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here for three days. This is Splunks.conf 10th anniversary of their end user conference. And we got some great guests here. We're going to talk about diversity and inclusion, breaking the barrier. Women in tech, we got some great guests. Jane Heitzaiad, CIO of National and Government Services. Thanks for joining us, appreciate it. Carol Jones, CIO, Sandy in National Labs from Albuquerque. Thanks for coming on. Two CIOs, I'm excited. Suzanne McGovern, diversity and inclusion talent leader for Splunk. Thanks for guys joining us. Really appreciate it. I want to get into a panel you guys discussed because this is an area of really importance to the workforce. Global workforce is made up of men and women, but most of the software and tech's built by mostly men, but we're going to get to that in a second. I want to get in and find out what you guys are doing in your roles. Because you guys, the journey is breaking through the barrier. Start with you. What's your role? What do you do there? CIO? So I am CIO for National Government Services. We do Medicare claims processing for the federal government. We also have a number of IT contracts with CMS. And I have an organization of 331 people. Very different organization data center, infrastructure, security, the gambit of IT, if you will. Great group of people, diverse. We're in Baltimore. We're in Indianapolis. We're out at the Hingham office. How long have you been in IT? My career. Your entire career. Yes, yes. So you've seen the waves? Yes, I have seen the waves. I have. Harold? Yeah, I'm Harold Jones and I'm the CIO at San Diego National Laboratories. It's a federally funded research and development center. So we do research and development on behalf of the US government. I have 400 contractors. So we provide the IT for San Diego, all gamuts of it, including some classified environments. So a lot of security. Yes, a lot of security. Suzanne, your role, let's bunk. Yeah, so I'm the Chief Diversity Officer at Splunk. So I get the pleasure to do that every day, as well as it's everyone's job, not just my job at Splunk, but I'm very honored to do that. I also look after talent at Splunk as well. I want to compliment you guys on your new branding. Thank you. Not only is it cool and relevant. Like the pink and orange. Pink and orange, but also the positioning is very broad and everything is a great message. But the big posters have diversity. It's not a bunch of men on the posters. So congratulations. Thank you. That's important. It's really important. It was worth mentioning. Okay, so let's talk about the journey. The topic you guys just talked about on the panel here in Las Vegas is female leaders smashing the glass ceiling. So when you smash the glass ceiling, did you get cut? Were you bleeding? I mean, what happened? Take us through your journey. What was the big takeaway? What's the learnings? Share your stories. Well, a lot of it, as I shared today with the panel, is really learning and having that learner mindset and learning from something that you do, which is part of your life. And I use the example of, I married to an Indian Muslim, went to India, spent some time with his family and they told me, let's be ready at 6.30. And I said, okay, I'm ready. I'm ready dressed at 6.30. And nobody else was ready. And everyone in the room said, well, we're gonna have chai first. We're gonna have some tea. And I was like, well, you said 6.30 and I'm ready. And everyone said, well, you know, we need to relax. We need to connect. We need to have some time. So I took that back and said, you know what, we all need to make time for tea and we all need to connect with our people and the individuals that work with us. And I've kind of taken that on through the last 20 years of being married to him. But connecting with individuals and your teams and your partners is what's important. And it has what led me, because I've built those allies and that great group of people that is just for it. So being very people-centric, relationship-driven, not so much chasing promotions or those kinds of things. That's what's worked for me, yes. Okay, Carol, what's been your journey? Tell us your story. I think I'll start a little bit at the beginning. So I've been in tech over 30 years. I got a bachelor's in marketing and then I was looking to get my master's. So I got a MIS degree, but I didn't know even to go into that field. So my professor said, you need to go into MIS and said, oh, no, that's too hard. You know, I probably can't do that. And they said, no, you can do it. So it's always been challenging myself and continuing learning. I worked at IBM. And then I was there in the time when they did the great layoffs. So, you know, I had to, it was 93. Okay, 93, okay. 93, Lou Gerser, look to your right, look to your left. Only one of you is going to be left by the end of the year. You know, for the younger audience out there, MIS stands for Management Information Systems. Before that, there was data processing divisions, which are actually relevant today, if you think about it. Yeah, that's right. Quite a journey, quite a great experience. What's the one thing that you could share for folks out there? Because there's a lot of young women coming into the workforce. And a lot of people are looking at inspirational figures like yourselves that have been there and done that. And there's a lot of mentoring going on and there's a lot of navigation for young women and underrepresented minorities. And you guys, there's no real playbook. You guys have experiences. What's your advice for folks out watching? My number one advice, and I gave this to people who are wanting to go into leadership, trust yourself, trust who you are. You all got to this place because of the successful person you are. And just continue to trust yourself. Take advantage of those opportunities. Take a risk. I took a risk when my total focus was in Medicare. I was asked to do another job and I took another position and it wasn't in Medicare. So you have to take those opportunities and risk and just trust that you're going to get yourself through it. Carol, your advice? Yeah, it's similar. It's to continue to grow and to be resilient. There'll be times in your career like a layoff where you don't know what you're going to do but you can even better job. And take risks. Took a risk. I went into cybersecurity. Spent 10 years there and continuing learning and being resilient. The learning's key, right? I mean, one of the things about security is you mentioned 10 years. So much has changed, hasn't it? Well, it's the bad guys still outnumber the good guys. That hasn't changed. They've got stronger. They're faster. Exactly. Yeah, they've been on it. The technology's changed. Suzanne, talk about the diversity and inclusion efforts you guys have at Splunk. Splunk's culture is very open, transparent. And the technology solution's very enabling. So you're actually enabling a lot of change. Both on the solution side. Now we're seeing the tech for good kind of story because good, tech is tech. Tech for business, but also you're seeing speed and time to value, time to mission value. A new term that we kicked around this morning. Time to mission value. Yeah. So I'm glad you mentioned data, right? We're a data company and we're very proud that we actually post our diversity and inclusion numbers, right? So we moved the needle 1.8% on gender last year, year on year. Proud but not satisfied. We understand that there's much more to diversity and inclusion than just gender. But our strategy is threefold for diversity and inclusion. So it's workforce, workplace, marketplace. The first is around just what I talked about is improving our representation so that these women are no longer the onlys or in the minority that were much more represented. And we're lucky. We have three women on our board. We have four women in our C suite. So we're making good, good progress but there's a lot more to do. And as I say, it's not just about gender. We want to do, we know that innovation is fueled by diversity. So we want to attract folks of different race, different ethnicity, folks who are military veterans, people with disabilities. We need everyone's influence to be successful. Well, you guys are all three leaders in the industry. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate that. I want to ask you guys because culture seems to be a common thread. I mean, I do so many talks and interviews with leaders for all types from digital transformation to DevOps to security. And they always talk speeds and fees but all the change comes from culture, people. And what I'm seeing is a pattern of success. Diversity and inclusion works well if it's in the culture of the company. So one filter for anyone, a woman or anyone is that is the company culturally aligned with it? So that's the question is, what do you do when you have a culture that's aligned with it? And what do you do with the culture that's not aligned so you want to get out but how do you unwind and how do you navigate and how do you synthesize those signals? Because the data's there. Any thoughts? Well, there's one way to certainly really harness and build a culture of inclusion and that's through employee resource groups in particular. So it's more than 50% of our Splunkers are actually members, followers or allies of an employee resource group. So it gives community, it gives that sense of inclusion so that everyone can bring their whole selves to work. So to your point, it really does build a different culture, a different level of connection and it's super different for anyone else. Any thoughts on culture and signals to look for? Good, bad, ugly? I mean, because you see a good wave taken, right? Why not? Take a chance. Right, right. Yeah, no, and I think, you know, like you look at it and you decide like some young women we were talking to, you know, is this the right company for you? And if not, can you find an ally? You know, if you're feeling that the culture isn't there and help to educate them and help to give them the feedback of what does inclusion mean? And as leaders, I think we have to always ask ourselves are we being inclusive for everyone? And mine I would spin it a little bit is that diversity and thought and how when I joined this organization culture is a big factor that needs to change and some of the things that I'm working on but to bring people to the table and hear those different thoughts and listen to them because they all do think differently. No matter color, race, gender, that sort of thing. So diversity and thought is really something that I try to focus in on. You know, Carrie Palin was just on theCUBE in her new CMO of Splunk and talked about the logos and the branding and she said it was a great team effort. You know, love that, you know, because she's just really cool about that. She said, we had a lot of diversity and thought which is like code word for debate. So when you have diversity, I want to get your thoughts on this because this is interesting. We live in a time where speed is a competitive advantage. Speed, creativity, productivity, relevance, scale, these are kind of the key kind of modern efforts. Diversity can slow things down too. So, but the benefit of diversity is more thought, more access to data. So the question is, what do you guys think about how companies or individuals could not lose the speed, keep the game going on the speed and scale and get the benefits of the diversity? Because you don't want things to grind down to the hulks, I mean, Splunk's in the speed game. Get data, more diverse data comes in, that's a technical issue, but with diversity, you want the diversity. I would challenge that, to be honest, because we're a data company and the data's irrefutable, right? So gender diverse teams outperform homogenous teams by about 15%. If you take that to race and ethnicity, goes up to 33%. Companies like ourselves who post their numbers, seeing uptake and share price, it's a business imperative, right? We get that it's the right thing to do, but this notion that it slows things down, you find a way, right? If you're a really high performing team, you find a way. And the best answer doesn't always come fast, right? Sometimes it's about patience and leadership. So I'm on the side of data and the data's irrefutable. Diverse teams just perform better, period. So if it is slowing down, your position would be that it's not working. They find a way to work together, you know? And that's a beautiful thing about places like Splunk. We're in hypercodes, right? It's crazy. Tons of work to do, different things. We were just talking about this at the break, but we have this unwritten rule that we don't hire. I'll say jerks for an interview. Is there gender neutral data? Sorry? Is there gender neutral data? Yeah, absolutely. But not hiring folks that are really going to, you know, have a different cultural impact. They're not cultural acts of the organization. We need everyone and that's a beautiful thing and that's what makes Splunk special. I think, you know, as you start to work and be more inclusive, you start to build trust. So it goes back to what Jane was talking about. It's the relationships. And so you've got to have that foundation and you can move fast and still be diverse. I think that's a very key point. Trust is critical, because if people are taking chances, whether they're male or female, if the team works there, like you say in Splunk, it shouldn't be an issue. Right, right, right. It becomes an issue when it's an issue, right? All right, so big walk away in learnings over the years in your journey. What was some moments of greatness, moments of struggle, where you brought your whole self to bear around resolving it and persevering? What were some challenges and growth moments that really made a difference in your life, breaking through that ceiling? I'm a breast cancer survivor and I used my job and my strength to pull me through that. And I was working during the time and I had a great leader who took it upon herself to make sure that I could work if I wanted to or not. And it really opened that up for me to be able to say I can still bring my whole self, whatever that is today, that I'm doing. And I looked back at that time and that was a strength from inside that gave me that trust myself, you're going to get through it. And that was a challenging personal time, but yet, had so many learnings in it from a career perspective too. Great story, thanks for sharing it, that's awesome. There, Ani, stories and struggles and successes that have made a big impact to you, your life. I think it was my first level one manager job. I got into cybersecurity and I didn't know what I was doing. I came back, my boss said, Carol, I don't know what you did this year. And so I really had to learn to communicate. So prior to that, I would never have been on TV, never would have done public speaking like we did today. So I had to hire a coach and learn how to move forward on communications. Awesome, thanks for sharing. Stories? I think a pivotal moment for me, I was in management consultancy for the first half of my career. And I had a first child and I was on the highway with a local client, seven in the morning, home at eight o'clock at night. Started on a Sunday midday, so I didn't see her awake for the first nine months. I know many women who do it just wasn't my personal choice. So I decided to take a role internal and not client facing and was told that my career would be over, that I would be on a B-track, that I wouldn't get partner anymore. And it really wasn't the case. I find my passion in the people agenda. I did leadership development. I did an HR role. I got into diversity inclusion, which I absolutely love. So I think some of those pivotal moments you talked about resilience earlier in the panel is just to dig down, to know what's important to you personally for the family and to really follow your true North. And you know, it works out in the end. Well, you guys are inspiration. Thank you for sharing that. I guess on a personal question for me as a male, there's a lot of men who want to do good. They want to be inclusive as well. Some don't know what to do or don't even are afraid to ask for directions. So what would you advise men? How can they help in today's culture to move the needle forward, to support and be there for the trust and all these critical things that make a difference? What would you guys say to that? So the research says that women don't suffer from a lack of mentorship. They suffer from a lack of advocacy. So I would say if you want to do something super easy and impactful, go advocate for a woman. Go advocate for a woman you know who is amazing out there and go help her forward a career. And you can do that whatever gender you are. You can advocate for others. But yeah, I would also echo the advocacy. I would agree. Trust, relationships. Yes. Across the board. Yeah, and what we said to some of the women and allies today was bring your whole self. And I would just encourage men to do that too. Bring your whole self to work because that's what speeds up the data exchange. That's what it speeds up results. Take a chance. Bring your whole self. Get the trust going. Right. Be open and communicative. And look at the data. Be vulnerable. Be vulnerable. Look at the data. Yeah, I mean the data will drive it. Thank you guys so much for sharing your stories on theCUBE. Thank you, thank you. This is the stories on theCUBE segment. It's theCUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for the 10th. Dot com, this is theCUBE's seventh year. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.