 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World 2019. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, and we are joined by Sanjivora. He is the Group Technology Officer and Global Data Business Lead at Accenture. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks, thanks for having me here. So, we're hearing so much about AI-led data intelligence and the other buzzword, of course, that we hear so much about is digital transformation. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this data-first approach to digital transformation. What, first of all, what does that mean? So I think we are, what we are seeing is that if you, I think we do see that we are getting into a post-digital era, which means that in the last seven years, most of the bigger companies and businesses have invested in building a better customer engagement. So what they did was they created properties like portals, like mobile applications. You name it, like, to just get better sense and touch their customers better than they were touching earlier. Right, that was a whole investment that went into the last six, seven years. And what they feel is that, so what's next, like, and you do that, but does it really translate into revenue growth? Is it really translating into the experience on a sustained basis, not one time, but on sustained basis every time you touch a customer they feel the same passion towards you. They feel that they're still engaged with you and they want to come again to you for whatever you're offering, their services or goods. And they felt that that's not actually happening. And the reason why it's not happening is because I think the underlying data is not complete or comprehensive enough or not accurate enough for giving that experience. And that realization is seeping up right now. So they are asking for ensuring that instead of looking at a use case-based approach of solving one problem for one business or one geography, is there a way to do it enterprise-wide? And that's as which is coming up. So the point which is coming out is that they looked at technology process, this old tradition model of looking at new businesses, technology people processes, and those three. But now they're looking at the fourth element which is foundation called data. So that's what we are calling a data-first approach. So you have to look at data as well while looking at reforming your business services and offers to the client. And then I want to talk to you on something you said earlier, and that is to make the customer feel passionate about interacting with you. I mean, that's such a loaded and almost romantic word to describe a customer interacting with a company. Why is it that companies are trying to invoke passion and incite passion, inspire passion? I think it's a way to differentiate yourself with your competition. So I think that's what in my view the businesses are doing, right? So let me give an example to you to make it real. Like, and it may address your first question as well to some extent. Like, we are working with a cruise company, one of the largest cruise company, North America based. And they obviously are trying to make sure that the experience of the customer is much better than they had earlier. And which can result into a much higher revenue growth for them, obviously. And acquisition of more customers, right? The friends of friends, friends of customers, if you may. And they had done a great job in creating that digital property and the transmission of the program. But they also realized that when they are now, they realize that they really don't have a sense of who is the customer. Now that's a good question. Like, after all this investment, you still don't know who's the customer. And that's where they came and talked about, can I get a single view of my customer? And the reason why they don't have a single view of customer is because they actually don't own all the interface of the customer. They only own their own interface to customer, but they also work with a lot of partners, as you can say, Expedia and others, who actually own that same customer. So they are not able to have a sense of that customer and their habits and their behavior in one single place, so that they can really provide that recommendation saying, well, guess, if you're going to Italy, we can probably help you somewhere. So yes, exactly. That's what I want to know is what, if you do have a sense of who your customer is, and that is everything from their basic demographic information to what they do on Sunday afternoon with their families, what kinds of things then can the cruise company do to make that customer more passionate toward the cruise? They can do a lot. But I can tell you another example of another cruise company, which is, again, a customer pass, and they did a fantastic job, and I'm assuming that you may have also experienced yourself, but this customer, they had come with the single view of customer, obviously, but what they did was they used a lot of IoT or sensors in their ships. They actually transformed the entire ship, like the entire ship has been transformed to understand the customer movement and give that flawless and seamless touch point to customers, which can help to have them have a very great vacation on their vessels, if you may. And that's what they did. From the day when you order the tickets for them, for their service, from that time onwards, they actually send you a medallion, and that tracks you as a person moving into the ship, and they can offer much more seamless services and also reduces the friction of their operational staff. The staff is not in a hurry and hassle. They're actually able to understand who's actually the customer, what they want, and able to provide that service. That's how they're using that feature of knowing the customer to better serve them, bring a better engagement with them, plus also reducing the operational friction and their own staff. So the customer wins because they feel that the company gets them and knows them and understands them, and the company wins because then they're able to make more money off that customer because they already have predicted what that customer wants and needs in every moment. And they can do more with less. They can do more with less staff, less resources. So one of the things that we also are talking a lot about here on theCUBE, it's the 10th anniversary of theCUBE, so we've had a lot of these conversations, is how data is becoming a C-suite discussion, and there's this growing need to appoint a chief data officer to drive data strategy. What do you see as the evolving role of the CBO at your company and then also at the companies that you work with? We see this is a very significant step in the future. There are a lot of prediction from, let's say, Gartner and all, right, to our analysts saying that there will be more and more roles, like three fourth of the companies would have, three fourth of the large companies would have a CDL, a chief data officer, but I think our point is slightly, you know, to augment that point, I think what we believe is that we do believe, irrespective of who actually owns the agenda, whether it's chief data officer or a CI or a CO, they definitely need a person at the C-suite, not below C-suite, to have that discussion at the table and ensure that their data strategy is attached to their business strategy, and that's not true in many cases right now. So the data is a topic which is two levels down in many of the organizations, and that's why it is not getting that attention as a corporate asset, as a strategic asset from where you can actually extract value that you're looking at, right? And that's what we see. So we see a very important role, we see a whosover is in that role, we think there are a few qualities that person need to have, right? The first one, the person has to have a seat on the table. The second is that person should be able to understand business quite well, should be more innovative business innovation, he or she should have an insight on business innovation, and if the person is having tech savvy, it's good to have, but it's not must to have, right? And we do believe that person should be able to prepare a strategy, and the governance of data across his or her peers, so they know that what value they are able to get from that data, and how they can share data across their functions, and that's where the value comes in. Plus beyond that, the last point would be the making sure that it's, whatever they do, they do responsibly. So they actually make things work, whether they was using AI, or whether they're using any machine learning, or everything else they have, they make sure that it's the responsible data, and make it secure for themselves, for their enterprise, and for their customer. Well that is certainly a theme we're hearing a lot about at Informatica World. Talk about the relationship between Accenture and Informatica. It's quite good. It's been good for years. We have been working together for years, but the last two years, or two and a half years, I think it has really taken a different shift between the two companies, and that's largely because we have really gone to a strategic discussion between the both the companies, and seeing what is the future. And I think one thing which resonated very well with their leadership, you know, Anil himself as the CEO, and Amit, and Tracy, and everybody else, and with our leadership is that, that we do believe that we are at the surface of untapping the value, one. Second thing is, I don't think the use cases will draw the benefit which large organizations are looking at. It has to be something done at enterprise level. So think about, I think Anil talked in the morning about enterprise data catalog, Amit was talking about. You need that. You need that to not do one use case for one particular business, for one particular country, or one particular customer segment. We need to do that for entire businesses across the enterprise. And that can only happen if you have a sense of data, and you know how to do it effectively at scale. And that's what I think that people are looking. Companies are going to be looking at that solution very soon, and I think it's the right timing for having that discussion. And there are going to be learnings that you can derive from financial services and apply to retail and healthcare and all sorts of, is that what you're finding here at Informatica World? Are you having those conversations to learn the best practices? I mean. Oh yeah, I mean I think we have various customers here, Accenture, as we have our customers here who are presenting in different sessions. We had Shlumberj present today morning at 11 a.m. about how master data management can actually help you drive a better strategy on transforming your operational systems, like SAP. That was never talked earlier. Two years back, nobody talked about saying how can MDM help you have a better transformation of your SAP systems. Well, that's where we are going. We are saying that, okay, you have a transactional systems, but you also need a system of right governance. Because a lot of your data, customer data, or other data, maybe sitting in SAP, or maybe sitting in Salesforce, how do you connect the dots? You need something to connect that dot, so they have a single source of growth and make sure that you know your customer or vendor or your location or everything else in the right fashion. Know your customer. So another thing I want to ask you about is the skills gap. And I know that workforce of the future is something that you have worked passionately on at. Passion, it keeps coming up a lot in this conversation at Accenture. Tell us your story first in terms of how you came to terms with this skill gap and then what you did at Accenture to remedy. So this is four years back and we were looking at our tech strategy and our strategy to rotate our business going forward or where do we invest? And we felt, and we are a people-centric company. So we are 470,000 people. It's a lot of people. And in my role, one of the things in my role is to make sure that I look at all the investment that we do on our people. As a CTO of our technology business, I need to make sure that we are investing in the right places. So this came to me saying that, okay, we'll be very relevant as 470,000 people 10 years from now. That's the question, right? Because of AI, because of machine learning, because human plus machine, what happens to our workforce? So that's what I was trying to solve by stating, saying, what do we do next, right? And that was the whole point about workforce of the future where we will work more closely with the machines and how will that happen? So what skills we will have need as humans to work with machines and everything else what's going to happen in terms of automation going forward. And plus new talent, which is required for the future. And so we worked hard on this. We built a strategy around what we need. Then we did a very simple thing. We actually went to sort of a high-speed execution in agile sprints. And we came with a few principles, actually. I can say a couple of them to you so you can resonate. One is, we came to the principle saying, there's already a lot available in the market. So don't spend creating stuff, but spend learning stuff. The second thing is we change the mantra for our vision of our people vision, employee vision. It used to be saying that you need to perform and grow. Something like that. If you perform high in a company, you will grow faster. We change the saying that learn and grow. So we said learning is more fundamental. This performance will come automatic when you learn more. And what we did was we changed the, we worked very hard on the cultural aspect. And one of the things which you used to always say is that in the past and 10 years back, if you used to learn a day in a month, well, that may not be enough today. Just because of breadth of technology and the change of technology is happening much faster. It's 10x speed. So you need to learn at 10x level. That doesn't mean you need to be learning at very deep level for 10 things. It's going to be hard for humans to do that. But you can use some help. But that's why we rolled out two pronged approach. One is what we call as conversion training, which means we make you more aware of everything that's happening in the world. And then we give you a chance to go deeper. So how do you do that? I mean, that's a tall order. So what I did was we went to the market and I looked at a lot of platforms. Okay, you need technology to do everything. You get it, right? We are sitting here, we're talking, we're still talking with use of right technologies, right? And making sure that what we're talking is available to a lot of people to watch us, right? But the same thing there. I mean, we were looking at a lot of platforms. I looked at a lot of things and I felt everything was great, but it was a piece of engineering. It was not something which is experiential. So I had to build a platform of our own. So I spent six months writing a whole platform. It was a very smart team. And the whole logic that I used was that build a platform which treats employee or a human in the center of your development or design. So we made a very personalized platform where it helps the person to get there and it attracts you to come back. So it's very user-friendly or experiential platform. And we call it Accenture Future Talent Platform. We deployed it across our entire businesses. We have 70% of our people who are already been certified through that platform and they feel good that they have got to the next stage of their career. And now we are actually using the same platform for our clients. So we are giving the platforms to our clients who can use that effectively. From what I'm hearing from you, it's about having technology skills, know-how and expertise, but then also having this mindset of learning and a hunger for learning and wanting to know more. How do you make sure that culture is cultivated in the right way? So we did some of the campaigns. So very simple principle where we use is that like you do a marketing campaign to attract a customer, whether you're selling a beverage or you're selling a cruise experience or vacation or whatever, use a similar principles for our own employers. And we said it's learning campaigns. So the marketing campaigns, learning campaigns. So one of the campaigns that we ran was how important is for you to be learning fit. So just like we all measure ourselves on health every day, we said you have to measure yourself on learning. So we made it, our app actually was given to everybody so you can see whether you're learning enough or not. And that bred the culture of seeing how am I doing against my own goals, but how am I going against Rebecca's goal? And that's what created a- Keep a fire. Yeah, give me fire. It's more fun. A little competition. Plus we also did top-down effort as well because we felt that people look at their role models and say, well, this person is very successful. I want to be like that person. That's a normal human, you know, that's what people see. So we made sure that our leaders do what they're saying. And they can percolate down that, they should start learning faster itself, like from top management perspective, so that people see them learning. They will say, this, you know, I want to be like him. So it means I need to have the same behavior as this person is in. No, those are critical people in companies. Well, Sanjeev, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a pleasure having you. Same here. It was nice talking to you. I'm Rebecca Knight. You are watching the CUBE Informatica World 2019.