 stream it into their lives at will. Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Hi buddy, we're back, Carla Wolfe is here, and she is the Assistant Vice President of Performance Excellence at Elevation Credit Union. Carla, welcome to theCUBE, it was great to see you. Thank you. So you just came off a keynote. We were doing live TV, so unfortunately I didn't get to see you, but how was it? How did it feel? It was great, it was fantastic. We get to tell our story. We've won the National Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award in a six-year journey, and it's the nation's highest level award given for performance excellence, so I got to talk about it. So tell us a little bit about the credit union. What's the focus? We're a community-based banking organization basically. Credit unions have members rather than customers, and it's affinity banking, so typically the origins of the organization are related to the community. In our case it's the University of Colorado. Oh nice, okay, and you're from Baldrige, we were talking off camera, an awesome place in the United States. So what's your role? I mean you're a process expert, so what does that mean, and where do you spend your time? Well, a little bit of everything, but actually as we started our journey for performance excellence, we devoted a group of people in our organization to basically improving everything, but we made a really strategic decision in the beginning when we started this pursuit to sort of reinvent ourselves using business process. So I'm overseeing the disciplines of knowledge management, business process management, as well as business analysis, so full plate. So how does the, what's the, I mean there's always, anytime you mess with technology you better think about the business process. Exactly. And frequently companies don't. So how do you interact with the IT organization? So the way our business process is structured at elevations is we actually reinvented ourselves through the processes, so we built, which is not traditional, our entire organization, all the neural pathways using business process first. So the way we now work with IT is when we need to modify the applications or we need to build the member experience in mobile banking, we use those business processes to dialogue with our IT department, which is a little bit backwards from how it's typically done. Right, absolutely. Usually it's here's the technology and then they try to make it fit. Well, and actually our organization, when we started, a lot of people thought their business processes were the technology. So they really couldn't differentiate those two and by teasing out those business processes and helping them understand their requirements and their metrics and what they were actually doing through the member's eyes, they were able to reconfigure the software to better serve the members. So we often talk in the cube about these idea of microservices and decomposing services into reusable chunks and sort of sounds like SOA, but it's sort of modern SOA. Can you do something similar with business process? Oh, absolutely. And how do you, take us through an example of maybe how you've successfully done that. Well, it's interesting because again, like I said, we reinvented ourselves. So we gave our business users the path of choosing either their as is state, how they thought they did it, or how they wanted it to be when they first started mapping. And we didn't make it right or wrong. We let people, so if you're an underwriter and you have a process for underwriting alone, we let them just document what they're doing and then we were able to parse all those pieces out until we had either sub-processes or connecting processes across the entire value stream of the organization. So we were able to, for the first time, understand from beginning to end, what do we mean when we say consumer lending? You apply for a car loan. What's the entire process all the way through to the end? If you apply for a mortgage, where does it start? Where does it end? So each of those little micro pieces as you're describing them are either activities within a process, a sub-process, a process or part of an end-to-end value stream. Wow, so how do you visualize that? Or do you have to visualize that in order to be successful? Yes, we actually started with a traditional model provided by APQC of how a financial organization should look. So we actually created, I call it the mall map. So we gave everybody zip codes and you are here and we help people orient themselves inside the organization visually and then we help them build, you know, field of dreams, build their processes to the model. And of course we had to modify that model multiple times. I think we went through 14 iterations of that map, but our organization now literally sees themselves through their business processes. It's really amazing. And a big part of your success is like you said, you started with the business process and brought the technology in. But I mean, I've worked with organizations before a company like yours could have hundreds, if not more applications in the portfolio and connecting to business processes and their dependencies. So how do you tackle that without boiling the ocean? Do you have to break it down into manageable chunks? That's a really great question. Actually, a lot of people, a lot of people are, that's a question I get a lot. Yeah, bottom up or top down. Yeah, exactly. We actually started from the middle, oddly enough. But we, during the process of building all our business processes, we also went through a core conversion, a core operating conversion. So we had the opportunity, if you can imagine, to sort of model ourselves the way we thought it should be for members. I love how you called that an opportunity. You are an optimist. You're a workaholic. Yeah, yeah, same difference. Anyway, we were able to then, as we were migrating to our new core operating system, rather than just accepting the out-of-the-box solution, our business owners, process owners, were able to actually work with the analysts from the applications to get those applications working the way they wanted them to. Now we're not perfect, and of course we have all the same hiccups and itches that most organizations do. But this truly was fundamental in our win of the Baldrige Award. Kyle, how about data quality? When you talk about the Baldrige Award, talk about quality of information, people talk about the single version of the truth, how do you deal with all that? Yeah, that's a great question too. We are actually embarking on sort of reinventing ourselves through data, because we're doing a lot of it through dashboards right now, but we do not have a data solution. So we are aggregating data through from our multiple sources, applications, and we've built enterprise dashboards that for our senior leadership team, Blink, red, yellow, or green, which allows us to go back into those processes and do some root cause analysis to figure out what we're doing. However, data is our next big thing. We do not have it aggregated and with one single source, which is what we want to do. Do you have a chief data officer? We do not yet have a chief data officer. We are actually considering that. Yes, we are. Folks in certainly healthcare, government, financial services are leading in that direction. And this is a big debate. Isn't the CIO the chief data officer? This is amazing that you're asking this question. Have enough to do already. Yeah. He or she's got to keep the lights on. How can they also deal with data quality? Where's security fit into this whole thing? No, those are tough questions. They're spot on. I mean, they're so, your question is so raw with what's happening right now, right now at my organization. It's ironic. We actually have what we call the business intelligence team. They're short for byte is their short name. And it's an aggregation of analysts within the organization representing different, you know, the voice of the member or the voice of the process. And we're finding that in order to start aggregating data and actually thinking about a strategy with data, we probably are going to need a data czar. We're probably going to need a single voice, a single source with the byte team we'll work with. So if we're tackling it right now. And presumably that data czar does not report into the CIO because that would cause maybe some other dependencies or conflicts. No, that's really interesting with it. Oddly enough, it may end up in performance excellence because our group is truly the only agnostic provider of governance over all of our methodologies. And so our thinking is probably that the methodology itself needs to be agnostic from the business users and from IT. It's a new emerging role and we think it has legs actually. Data's not going away. And the IT organization is not going to attack this issue of governance and data quality. It's really, they've got too much to do. Right, they don't want to. What about Edge? We're here, IBM, what are you doing with IBM? What am I doing with IBM? Well, what's IBM doing for you? Well, IBM has been an amazing partner for us from the beginning and it's all interesting because our core operating systems are actually related to the credit union itself. But we use IBM's BlueWorks Live to do all of this modeling that we just talked about and described. And they've actually been tracking our story from the beginning, which has made us very powerful in learning, having cycles of learning about ourselves and retelling our story. So they've invited us to multiple conferences, white papers, interviews. It's really been a great partnership. So you rely on BlueWorks Live to develop these maps that we were talking about. It's a noun and a verb in our organization. It is how we do, BlueWorks, it is how we do business. Okay, you BlueWorks it. Yep, we put it in BlueWorks. We're going to have a talk over BlueWorks. Let's go, let's log on to BlueWorks. Okay, so that's the technology underpinning and then of course there's people in process around that. How do those all come together? Well, actually, BlueWorks is a modeling tool. So what it allows us to do is see all of our processes visually and model them, make modifications to them. We're very agile in that if a process isn't performing, the blinky lights aren't going the way they should, we can go right back into that process and remodel it. All, we have over 350 processes captured now and they all are interconnected. All the processes have inputs and outputs to another process within the organization. So BlueWorks, because it's cloud-based, it's super agile for stakeholders to get together. My outputs are your inputs. We can get together and talk about the impact of a process that I might be making on your process. So you understand the interdependencies between business processes and that connects to the application portfolio as well? It does. And you achieve- Not technically. No, but conceptually. Yes, exactly. So you can identify, if you make a change, if you retire an application, you can understand the business processes that are going to get affected by that. Absolutely, and we actually use a system swimling when we're modeling so that when we're making modifications to the application, we can go down to that system swimling. We understand what the requirements are, what it is that that system's currently doing and serving that process. So we have those requirements available when we need to make changes to the application. And the governance of that change goes through your organization? Yes, it does. Okay, so it's not the line of business saying it, it's not the IT people saying we're going to do it. Well, actually- They're driving it, but- Well, actually it's interesting, the governance is over the methodology itself. So we have trained them how to validate and stabilize their own processes using their stakeholders' input. And so what we're governing is what we ultimately have as a source of truth for all of this information where if it's going to get published, it had to have followed the methodology, which means you were engaged in the change. So it's a protocol. Yeah, exactly. To the extent that's followed is going to fit into your model. How do you ensure and verify that it's in compliance? Well, it's interesting. We thought we were going to be more like the cops running around trying to write tickets for people, but it became self-governing because you're my stakeholder and our processes are already tied and we're linked to each other. People started governing each other, so if they saw things get changed or a desk level procedure or a form or a letter, something changing related to that process, they would bring it to the attention of the process owner. And we really don't have any issues around that. Believe it or not. No, I do believe it. I mean, from what you've described, you're having great success with minimal friction but at scales organically. That's the beauty of what you've done. Yes, we actually employed what we called the special forces which were a group of super users, early adopters in the beginning who got it and we essentially licensed them to help us build process. You know, you say believe it or not, but actually very few organizations are in this position. You really, congratulations on being able to achieve that. Thank you. So what's next? I mean, it sounds like you're done but I'm guessing you're never done. No, we're not actually done. It's crazy. We've only been, we just got this award a month ago and so our senior leaders and our board of directors are currently really strategizing right now at our spring board planning conference about what will be next. I know data is on our horizon and our focus now even if we were to pursue the Malcolm Baldrige award again which very few organizations have done or won. Our focus will be on our members this time. We truly want to be as member-centric as we can and in our business, in our organization, members are our customers. We're member-owned. So we really want to put our lens on our members. Yeah, and of course you were talking earlier about the flexibility and the cloud-based services and your business, things change so frequently, compliance, it's so strict. You have to have that ability to change. It's been, we are under siege. It is amazing with mobile banking and Apple Pay and all the players who are entering into banking and yet we're still held to the same standards, regulatory standards that we've always been held to. All right, all right, now there's a coming. Hey, come on in. Yeah. Big Playland. Wow, that's great. Carla, wonderful story. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing it with us. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. And hopefully we'll see you down the road at another IBM conference. Sounds great. All right, keep right there. We'll be back with our next guest. Right after this, this is Dave Vellante. We're live from IBM Edge. This is theCUBE, right back.