 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Adobe Summit 2019, brought to you by Adobe. Well, welcome back everyone. CUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Jeff Frick. For the next two days, our next guest is Cynthia Stoddard, CIO of Adobe, formerly CIO of NetApp, where you were on theCUBE last time. We were on AT&T, now called Oracle Field, ironically. Wow. I mean, that is a transformation in itself. Welcome to theCUBE. Yeah, I'm glad to be back. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. So your keynote, you had an amazing conversation around with the CIO from Intuit. Yes. You guys talked about changing the culture of the company. Talk about that conversation. Yeah, so we have similar, I would say, our company's has similar paths and that we both used to be box software. And now we're operating out of cloud SaaS providers. And it's really interesting, and actually Atticus and I were just on another panel talking about this. When you sell a box, you don't really know who your customer is, right? But when you sell through a SaaS or an e-commerce site, you know a lot about your customer, because you know, first of all, who they are. Then as you go through the customer journey, you can understand the different touch points. You can understand what the pain points are, what they're using, what they're not using, and really gear your product and your information to really make that experience a lot better for the customer. Yeah, and even more than that, because when you ship the box, you ship the box and bye-bye box. You have no idea how it's being used, when it's being used, not only the who, but the how and the what. So now that you're connected to all your users and the way they use their products, the amount of data that you have to make continuous adjustments to pick your feature prioritization is completely different ball game. It is exactly right. So you really take an outside view, an outside in view of the customer, versus an inside out. And you know, the customer and their experience becomes front and center. And you focus in on that. And then additionally, you know, that impacts all of your processes inside of the company. Because they were all geared for that, you know, we don't know who the customer was before. Now you have to gear to knowing who the customer is, providing that right level of information through a number of different functions, consistent information, so that everybody can operate to the same level of knowledge and same level of understanding. And when you look at your IT infrastructure as well, it's got to be geared for that experience. So what you used to do on a cycle now becomes real time. So if you think about, you know, downtime or invoicing or, you know, customer lookups or whatever, you need to have that always on experience for the customer. So your operational excellence, your resiliency, again, changes dramatically with that customer view, the outside in. One of the things you mentioned in the keynote I thought was really an important point was about the cloud journey and the role that data plays and the integration of data. And you had a couple of key tenants that you talked about. Can you just quickly explain that? Because I think that's a point that everyone's talking about right now and it's really hard to do. And you guys have an interesting angle on this. Can you share that, your perspective on that? So absolutely. So the tenants are commonality of data, consistent measurement, actionable insights, and I focus in on the actionable, you know, the action part, and then data governance. And when you think about it, you know, you have all this data around the organization. It could be in different data lakes. It could be under somebody's PC, under their desk or whatever. And when you start getting in to look at that customer journey, what initially happens is everybody brings their own data to the table. So my data is different than your data, but of course my data is the one that is best and correct, right? So what you need to be able to do is really get that consistency and definition. So, you know, if we're going to have, you know, even just define what customer is, what is, you know, what is that term? But when you get that, then how do you measure it? And you know, you might have a term, but you know, you have to put the boundaries around how do you measure it? How are we going to look at it? You know, what's good, what's bad, and that sort of thing. That's the consistency of measurement. The actionable insights is, you know, you can do a lot with dashboards, and I think a lot of ITU organizations have a gazillion dashboards that they have, but I would ask how much of that is actually actionable. So what we focused on is, let's get the insights, let's get the information into our data repository, into these dashboards, so that people could act on it proactively, as opposed to just say, oh, this is great. And then the fourth area is data governance. What we did is we made sure, and working with our business people, that the metrics that are selected to measure that are consistent have business owners. And they are responsible for owning that definition. They're responsible for owning the quality, and they're responsible for owning how they're used throughout the entire organization. We had a, for the first time we've been on theCUBE for 10 years, we had a guest on this event, came on for the first time with a new title we've never seen before. Oh wow. Marketing CIO. Marketing CIO. One of the customers met life, talked about how marketing and IT are coming together, and how the CIO has to be aligned with the marketing CMO, if they wanted to serve the business union. And this was a criteria that he said is what organizations should look like if they're ready to be transformed. Can you comment on that? Because you're looking at it from, Spidey, you're at Adobe, so you kind of have the inside view. There's a confluence of the worlds coming together, business and tech. That's right, that is. And it is, and it used to be, I would say in organizations that there was walls between departments, right? IT was behind this huge wall. And that can't be anymore. Technology is pervasive in the organization. And when I look at marketing, I would say that the marketing discipline probably has some of the most mature data and analytic skills of anybody in the company. Because that's what their roles are, right? It's to analyze the customer marketing campaigns, how can they bring this value into the organization? So they've got that skill. What IT has is the big data skills. We know how to process, we know how to govern, we know how to make sure that the data is there. So bringing the two worlds together is actually really a perfect marriage because you bring the big data discipline together with the people who know how to look and analyze that data and come together to really deliver those really great actionable, I'll use actionable, again, actionable insights. And when I look at how my team works with our marketing organization, it's blended. You go into a room, you would not know who's IT, you would not know who is marketing. It just, you mean, you would be able to tell. It's a lot of interdisciplinary. It's interdisciplinary. From the time, I mean, from staff meetings, from the time of working on a new idea, all the way through to sprints of getting it done, they are hooked at the hip together and marketing and IT are working jointly. I mean, we have joint sprint teams and things like that. I got to ask you the kind of historical question. Look back, CIO roles evolving over time. You've seen a couple key points. Obviously, security, cloud, data, big data, these kind of changed a little bit of the direction trajectory of IT organizations. And now you've got Adobe with a platform and integrating data across of it. It's going to yield some new capabilities. It's always hard to operationalize new for your customers, for Adobe's customers who have not just Adobe products, they might have other stuff. So they have multi vendors out there, a lot of different data, a lot of diverse data. So the kind of pull it all together is a really hard task. So how does the CIO have to deal with that now because if you're going to use first party data, now we got privacy, you got GDPR kinds of things. You mentioned governance, so it sounds really hard. How does it get easier? It's not easy. It's not easy, that's for sure. But I would say a few different ways. I would say first and foremost, the CIO has to be out there with their business partners, with the CMO, with the CFO, with everybody in the business, and really understand what their business goals and objectives are, so that they can bring their knowledge to the table. Relationships are really key. I mean, you can do so much for the relationships. So being that collaborative agent I think is really key. In order to solve the hard technology issues, I would say that architecture is absolutely the first and foremost thing CIOs could think about is you should have your architecture in place, know what that data, what that common data model is going to look like, figure that out, know how you're going to operate it, and then as I said this morning, you can't do it alone. So figure out who your key partners are, and then bring them into the fold. With the right architecture and the right partners and the right relationships internally, you're going to overcome those issues. And the operating model dashboards that Jeff was mentioning earlier can be a key point, but also people can see too many dashboards and not see the real issues. That's right. So the dashboard is not the silver bullet per se, but it's an instrumentation panel. That's right, the dashboard is not a solution. The solution is really the insights that you're providing and then getting people on board with the insights and then getting alignment across different disciplines that need to action the insights. Now, they may action them in different ways. So finance may action different than marketing, than different than sales, but it's important to have that common definition and really look at how I'm going to use this in my day-to-day operations. John, I thought you were going down a different path. I'll ask a question. You're going to bring up the new fund toy, which is AI and machine learning. So how are you, you know, it's going to solve all ill, you know, peace in the Middle East and hunger in Africa. As you look at some of these new technologies, how are you trying to get kind of past the hype and really find great places to get great value return on applying AI and machine learning? Yeah, there is high pressure, but there is a lot of value too when you apply it correctly. And you know, when I look at what I do within my organization, we use the techniques, we're actually using it in some of our data-driven operating model to look at abnormalities and how data moves through the cycle and point those out because it'd be, in some respects, like finding a needle in a haystack. So we're using some AI techniques there, but we're also using it in core IT and how we run IT. So in our operations, we've used a lot of automation, but automation supplemented by artificial intelligence and machine learning. So if a problem occurs and it can be fixed by a human, then it goes into a knowledge base the next time around that problem occurs, it could be fixed programmatically. So, and that has saved us a tremendous amount of time in, you know, our return to service statistics have improved considerably. You know, one of the exciting things in covering the tech industry so long and seeing what cloud has done, you know, the whole DevOps movement, infrastructure as code. You know. Infrastructure, really key. Very good point. It makes the infrastructure programmable. Exactly. Versus the old model, I remember back when I was, we're going to HP back in the late 80s, early 90s, you were limited by what you could provision and deploy as tech, network and compute and storage, and you kind of had to operate that. Okay, now it's all the way around. So what I see, when I see the slides up on this keynote today and the architecture slides, I look at them like, it looks like Amazon to me, but it's marketing, you know, marketing provisioning. So it's content developers, it's creative developers, it's the user, not programmers. So when you start to get down that road, you're talking about large scale. So the question I have for you is, as workloads and use cases become the determinant of the architecture, having that dynamic versatility and that ability to provision either other services becomes an interesting part of the architecture. That's where, I think, where data I see fitting in. Can you just kind of react to how you see that world? Because if this continues to happen, the terms being dictated down will be coming from the use cases and the workloads. They will be coming from the use cases and the workloads. And it's interesting that you mentioned your days at HP because I just actually gave a little talk about operational excellence. And the analogy that I used is people used to come to me and say, I want a server, right? Or I need additional space. And I would say, no, you're not efficient. Go back and clean up the stuff. And then maybe I'll give you additional capacity. Well now, that infrastructure is absolutely in the code. It's in the hands of the developer, it's in the hands of the engineer. And they need to understand how the decisions that they make impact performance, impact cost, impact a lot of different things, impact data. So it's a whole different world. And I think that part of it is really education and awareness, working with the engineering teams so that they understand that having your ops embedded in your code is a lot of responsibility. A lot of responsibility. And we need to understand how we're making decisions and how they affect not only what I'm doing here in my piece of code, but actually the whole end to end, right? The whole end to inflow. So- And it certainly changes your role because now you're not saying no, you're saying yes. But you're not even saying yes, you're just saying do it. That's right. Yeah, so we, I think our roles change to, yeah, we're not saying yes or no. We're saying you can go to it. Yeah, with policy. And then also with the right level of information so that they can, you know, the right standards, the right architecture, so that you can use those standards and architecture to make the right decisions in the code. My final question before we break for the day, you interviewed on stage Atticus Desin from Intuit. You were asking some questions, and I could see you wanting to answer them yourself. So I'm going to ask you the questions you asked him since you know the questions coming. Oh wow. Acceleration, transformation, doesn't happen in the silo, I think was your comment. Yeah. The specific questions are, how do you build a team to accelerate? Yeah. How do you increase the velocity of change and how does it impact culture? Yeah, so that, that's, yeah, that was one of my favorite questions actually to talk to Atticus about because he's done a tremendous amount of work within Intuit to kind of revamp. And actually, you know, within Adobe and other places, you know, I've gone through culture change with my team and it's really getting them to take the customer view One of the things we've done within Adobe is we've said we wanted to have cloud-like characteristics in our DNA. And people kind of looked at me and said, you know, what does that really mean? Cloud-like characters, I said a cloud, it was easy to use, it's extensible. And the way that I describe it to them is we really want to take IT out of the equation. So when you build, think about self-service, think about APIs, think about the right architecture. And then also, you know, organize around not a project because projects have start and finishes and then, you know, things never get taken care of, but organize around the concept of products and life cycles. And that's what we're doing. So, and that's a lot of fun. And now with the Adobe platform, you can stand up solutions very quickly. It sounds like cloud, it's easy to use. It is cloud and it is easy to use. Easy to buy, you have to buy it all at once. You can buy as you go. You can. This is the new business model. That's right, that's right. Thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing. Thank you so much, always my pleasure. Great insights, great data on theCUBE. Thanks for sharing the data. Thank you. Bring you all the data and insights here at Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Roy Jeff Frick. Thanks for watching. Day two is tomorrow.