 On the Ground. Presented by theCUBE, here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE special On the Ground presentation. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, co-host of theCUBE, and we are here in San Francisco with Ford Motor Company, CIO of Marcy Clevorn. Here at Ford, she's part of the Ford Motor Company, really part of Silicon Valley's initiative to bring innovation into the car. They've been doing it for years. She runs all the infrastructure, all the operations she's CIO. Welcome to On the Ground. Thanks for having me. Great to have you. CIO is one of the most exciting jobs these days, but it's also pressure packed with a lot of action. Digital transformation, increase more top line revenue, cut costs, but not cutting costs for cutting costs sake. It's really about this digital transformation. And automotive is front and center these days. CES, certainly we saw a lot of conversations. It's a real provocative intoxicating environment where you have self-driving cars, you got big data, innovative things. So give us an update from your perspective. Mark's vision for the CEO's vision is pretty clear. It is. Smart car. So Mark's vision is really new, continue our core business, which is designing, manufacturing, financing, servicing, selling vehicles, and delivering products with passion and excellence. And also taking advantage of the emerging business opportunities that you've described. And looking really to disrupt ourselves in our own business. So balancing the core business with these emerging opportunities. And our response has been to do the same. So we have set up a bimodal IT organization. And the emerging organization is new and we're learning a lot. And partnering Pivotal along the way to learn more from a cultural perspective as well as technically. But really that's kind of been our response. And besides just this year organization impact of that, you have to really think about the culture change. And IT, if you've been around as long as I have, I've been at work for 32 years before that AT&T. IT used to be the backroom data processing, cranking out payroll. And then moving a little more upfront about mechanizing business processes. And now really thinking about value creation, top line, and really getting into the very products we sell to our customers. It's interesting you mentioned data processing. That's an old mainframe word, mini computer word. And it's kind of gone that IT has been infrastructure technology, information processing. But if you think about data processing, we are looking at a whole nother new generation of quote data processing with real time telemetry, telling self-driving cars. I mean, you have to be real time in a self-driving car because guess what? You can't be off by a nanosecond because you're in the middle of traffic. So these are new dynamics. So what is that impact to you and your job and has that effect ultimately for its customers? It's a great question. I think what customers are really looking for is an experience. And our vision really is to take that and make people's lives better. So really thinking about how we can make a difference in people's lives. So they will view Ford as a brand that can rely on and trust. And that might be in or out of a vehicle. Now I'll give you an example. My son lives in New York City. Both his parents work for Ford. He got a vehicle to move and he turned around and gave it back to us and really said, you know, no thank you, we really don't need this car here in New York City. But we want him to be a Ford customer. And he moves all around the city. He uses all kinds of transportation. He engages in services and he buys things. And so how do we take that and provide a better end-to-end experience for people? Whether they are a Ford customer with a one-to-one relationship with their vehicle today, how do we make them a Ford customer in the future in a way that improves their lives? And that really gets where you're going. It's all about the data and getting to know the customer so you can improve the way they move. Dr. Ken Washington was talking to me before he interviewed with Jeff Frick on theCUBE here. Ultimate mobility is the key to the thing, to the car. Digital is part of the car. It's part of the digital system for the users. It's a personal device. It's a note on the internet. It's personal. So I have to ask you the question. Is the car a computer or a peripheral? I'd say it's really an and. It's an and thing. I think it really depends on the lens of the customer that uses it. So for some, it will be a peripheral where they really just care about, maybe bringing their own technology in and using it almost in a commodity-like way to help them move, but bringing their own technology in. For others, it's going to be all about interacting with the technology in the vehicle and maybe bringing some things, experiences in and outside of the vehicle. And for others, it's going to be about performance. I want to drive fast on the Autobahn. I want to feel the driving dynamics of the vehicle hug those curves. So you have to really think about all those customers and a way to serve them all. 2007 was a similar moment. That was the year that Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. You had a phone, you make phone calls, do some text messages. That was the extent of the digital engagement at that time. And the phone turned into a smartphone. Now we're at the same junction with cars. You have a car and now you have essentially a smart car or a personal car. So it brings the question back to, okay, as a CIO, you're back running manufacturing, making sure that the manufacturing systems were all the data processing systems were all this. But now you have a new mandate that Mark has put on you to make the car like an iPhone or make it all enabling services, enabling all kinds of new things to create a new user experience. Summarize what that new user experience is for the users watching. Because they're looking at a relationship with their car that's much different than it was even a few years ago. That's exactly right. And I think at the North American International Auto Show we announced the Ford Pass. And that's really about enabling customers. And they don't have to be a current customer of Ford to engage with us in a different way, inside and outside of the vehicle, through services, through affinity partners, and really getting into every aspect of a customer's lives, again, to improve their lives. And to do that, you have to get to know the customer. And that gets back to something you mentioned before, data. And that's how you get to know the customer is by understanding their data. And we will be doing that. And we are doing that only with the customer's permission through an opt-in program. But then it gets to, what do you do with that data? And how do you use that data to learn more about the customers in a way that improves their lives in and out of the vehicle? And so we are launching, and we actually have launched, starting with our battery electric vehicles, a connected vehicle data platform. And that would be the platform that we use to collect data off the vehicles. And so we can keep it secure in one place and use it to analyze. That's super exciting. And also the big buzzwords in the industry that have things, or IOT, hashtag IOT, and big data. So now you have those lots of data platform. Go into more detail on that. Give us an example of some of the things that you guys have done with the big data, and where this leads and what it means for the customer. So an example that we've been doing for some time now is around our battery electric fleet. So we've been collecting data, those modems in those vehicles, collecting data off those modems into the connected vehicle data platform. And using it to analyze how the customers are interacting with the vehicle, how often do they stop to charge? Where do they go? We've also done some experiments. One experiment we've done is with Hewlett Packard. They were one of our big fleet customers and we used plug-in devices to help them understand how their fleet is used and how they could better utilize the fleet. All that is possible with either a modem or a plug-in device, shifting the data to a connected vehicle data platform and using it to analyze the data and understand more so you can proactively provide services to customers they might not even know they need. I had an HP car when I worked for HP so thank you for it. I was at a Ford Taurus. Oh, thanks for your business. That was years ago when I was in my youth, as they say. Let's talk about big data. So you weren't with HortonWorst. Again, you guys are building your own. This is key strategic thing. You're doing some maps, technologies, 3DS proprietary. There's an element of proprietary core competency that you guys want to build and stuff that you will outsource. Classic core competency strategy. Can you explain what Ford's core competency is, what you won't outsource and what you will outsource and enable with other suppliers? Let me use IT as an example. What we've done in IT is we have what we call differentiated and non-differentiated things. So we triage our application portfolio and this extends into all the technologies you're talking about and we decide if something is differentiated or not. If it's non-differentiated, it's something that we could, we might view it as a commodity or something that we don't think sets us apart from the rest. And so we may choose to give that away, still owning the process itself, but choose to partner and give that away. Something that's differentiated, we will choose to own ourselves. We might partner with somebody on it to help us get a jumpstart and learn, but that will be something we want to own ourselves, something that we think differentiates in the marketplace. And also if we think that it helps with the trust of our customers and the stewardship of their data. Cloud versus data center. Obviously that's a CIO question. It's usually the one that's always kind of, oh, a facility's meeting again. You want to move those costs out, but don't you just talk about cat-backs kind of tax breaks, whatever. But neither here nor there. It's an IT decision to have on-premise technology and cloud. You announced working with Pivotal on the app side and also Cloud Foundry. What's your take on that? Mix, balance, hybrid, mostly on-prem, moving to the cloud. Is there a progress bar and where you're at? I'd say it's mostly hybrid. And it's funny when I got this role, one of the common questions I got was, well, hey, what's your cloud strategy? And I guess my gut answer to that, always has been I don't necessarily have a cloud strategy. I have a strategy to support the business afford. And these kinds of things you're talking about are tools in the toolbox that you take out and use as appropriate. So we have a hybrid strategy. We do use public cloud for some things. We've got private clouds that we use for some things. And for things like our customer's data, when we keep that on-prem or we can protect it and secure it with their permission. You solve your problems. That's what you're in the business for doing. That's right. Okay, so I got to ask you the cool question. What is the coolest thing that you're working on right now, or you've seen inside Ford that you could share with folks? And it's not about picking your favorite child within your project base, but share some color into some of the cool things that you're excited about right now. Boy, I'm excited about a lot of things right now, actually, so it's a really cool time to be a CIO in the automotive industry. Go ahead, share. Because the technology is really becoming the business. So it's pretty exciting. Some of the things I'll share are around, I talked about Ford Pass, we announced that about a week or so ago. I'm really, really excited about that. It was a kind of a secret project for a while, so the team was very excited about working on it. We've engaged with a few partners, we announced McDonald's and 7-Eleven, and really thinking about technology out to the customer in a way we haven't before, partnering with people I mentioned to more to come and how we then bring that back to Ford to provide value for Ford and our customers. So that's been really exciting for the teams. It's one of the things we're working on very recently, and very excited about the Connective Vehicle Data Platform. And how we- Is it the one with Horton-Wars is involved in? It is, yeah, we're partnering with Horton-Works on that, and very excited about that, bringing all that data together, and what we'll learn from that. We've already got started, as I mentioned, but it's almost disguised the limit on that. So that's very exciting. We are looking at the data center of the future, so that's something that's coming. So that's also really exciting to the teams. And I think just having technology lead instead of kind of being the processing payroll in the background kind of thing. And it means a lot to our organization and how we're organizing, and really thinking also internally about how we provide the right tools to the employees so they can collaborate and also feel they're part of an innovation. Marcy, great to see you again. Thank you for spending the time with me today and on the ground here with theCUBE. Final question for you is, share some best practices that other CIOs could learn from because you're in an interesting convergence. You're in the center of all this disruption and opportunity with technology, and I'll see a lot of fast-paced stuff. It's a consumer product, but also a lot of tech involved, classic enterprise tech, but also a consumer customer, and I'll see fleets with businesses. But other CIOs are out there in a similar spot as you with digital transformation. Really going, scratching their heads, how do I go to the next level? What's your advice to them? What have you learned? Can you share something? Sure, we started at the beginning of last year with a kind of an update to our IT strategy in response to where Mark is taking the organization. And we used a car analogy, of course, but we called it, it's kind of U-Drive. So really talking to our employees and saying U-Drive. And we have a great visualization that has the picture of an employee holding a set of car keys, jumping into the car. Technology is leading forward. You are technologists, U-Drive, really empowering our teams to think about how they drive technology into every part of the business and innovation. So sponsoring hackathons, getting out there and letting people feel empowered to share. To create some organic activity. Exactly, and we've had patents that have come out of that, actually. So I think that's part of it, the first part, foundational is culture. Secondly, I would say, I mentioned this bimodal IT that we launched. And you said something that was really spot on that I want to build on. You said, okay, Marcy, you have to do all these really cool disruptive things, but I also run manufacturing plants. And as we think about bimodal, most people assume that my triage filter is speed, how I decide what goes into what mode. And it's actually not its risk. So running a manufacturing plant, it can take very little risk. Safety issues, you know, lots of money as the operations are down. Very small amount of risk. Think about these new and emerging opportunities. You want to take risk. You want to learn. You want to fail and move on and build on those successes or failures. And so I would say that's something else we've learned. The other thing I learned is you have to keep it pure. We separated the modes. We had a little mixing of the modes going on and it just doesn't work. Because of this risk filter, the processes that you use and the types of people that feel comfortable working in either mode are different. And that's okay. We need both. So I would say you have to be very pure about separating those things out. And really having your eye on managing it holistically with the agile and then the stable foundational stuff. Exactly. Because today's emerging and cool disruptive is tomorrow's core. Because the next thing will come. So the things we're talking about today, a year or two now, we'll be probably operating a core and we'll be talking about something else. And then the next time I see you, we're going to ask you a question. How did you integrate it all? Exactly. Marci, thank you for spending the time here on the ground. This is theCUBE on the ground. I'm Marci Cleaver with the CIO of Ford. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.