 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today with our ongoing coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. It's a virtual event like all the events in 2020, but we've been going there since 2013. We're happy to be back this year and we're excited to have for the first time on theCUBE our next guest. She's Kelly Herod, the US SAP offering leader for Deloitte Consulting. Kelly, great to see you. Great to see you as well, Jeff. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. So first time on theCUBE, you guys have a really interesting concept at Deloitte. You call it the Kinetic Enterprise. What is the Kinetic Enterprise all about? Yes. So if you think about the past, organizations built their technology infrastructures to be what we would call built to last. The future though is all about built to evolve. And that's exactly what the Kinetic Enterprise is. It's really how we're helping our clients create the right technology infrastructures that evolve with their business. And Kinetic Enterprise is focused on four key pillars. The first, that we're building a technology solution that's clean. That means we want to have the amount of custom code or things we may have built that really rack up your technical debt. The second pillar is that it's intelligent. So we're leveraging all of the technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning to really automate and change the way in which an organization runs their business. The third pillar is that it's responsive. And that means it's on the cloud. And this is where AWS comes in. And then the last pillar is that it's inclusive. So it uses all of the technologies and microservices available to really optimize and achieve a company's business value objectives. So that's a great summary. And I've got the list of the four pillars. It's just interesting you lead with clean. There's a lot of conversation about digital transformation and move fast and be dynamic would be kind of an opposite to static. But clean, interesting choice of words. It runs with core clean ERP with minimum technical debt. Why clean? That's such an important thing. I get kind of intelligent and responsive, but clean is an interesting attribute to pick. Absolutely. So if you take a step back and think about when it comes to ERPs, when the ERPs came out, there was a lot of power you're going to run your entire organization on this one solution. What we found is that as companies have put in ERPs they've gone through and created so much customization that it's that, which makes it very difficult to be able to keep up with technology changes or actually migrate to the next versions. So the concept here is if you're going to go in and put in a brand new ERP, such as an SAPS for HANA, this time around, in order to achieve the promise of ERPs, let's make it clean. Let's stick to as much standard functionality as possible within the core, and then we innovate on the edges. And so that will allow us in the future maintain that flexibility or dynamism of a kinetic enterprise. Right. So I have to tease you, Kelly, because SAP R3 and ERP is not necessarily synonymous with digital transformation, speed, agility, and embracing change. So you've been involved in Deloitte's SAP practice for a long time. Why should people start to rethink about SAP in terms of being responsive, in terms of being able to change quickly and to your vocabulary more kinetic? In any way, I've been doing SAP for 20 years. So I actually did start back in the R3 days. And I would just say that things are changing, it's evolving, SAP themselves has been going through a transformation, a revolution. You look at the ERP landscape as a whole, all of the ERP players are moving to the cloud, the technologies, the backbones are changing. Now the reality is going in and actually changing about your ERP no matter what solution you're using, it's a big endeavor undertaking. The goal here and where we're partnering with SAP, partnering with AWS is really focused on how can we make this more efficient for our clients? More importantly, I like to think about it as how can we make this less of a one and done and more of a let's keep transforming the technologies and the business as things are changing in the market along the way. And using technologies to even change how we implement allows us to do that. So Kelly, another thing a lot of people probably don't think of is SAP and AWS together in the same sentence. So I'm sure there's a lot of people that are much more intelligent about this, but for those that aren't as familiar, tell us a little bit about the relationship with SAP and AWS and then how you guys are leveraging that at Deloitte. Absolutely, so there's a couple of things that I would bring up. One is SAP S4HANA solutions in particular, but any SAP environment that you're running on, one of the objectives most of our clients are focused on is how to move to the cloud. And that's where AWS comes in. You can absolutely run any of your SAP solutions on AWS. And what that brings you is our flexibility so that you can actually scale or contract your infrastructure that you're running SAP on based on your business needs. The second thing that we've been partnering with AWS to do is a little bit of what I just mentioned, which was a teaser around, how do you change the way you even go about implementing an SAP solution or start to migrate your business? So one of the things we asked ourselves was, could we radically change how you jumpstart an S4 implementation? And what we decided to do is team up with AWS and leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence, most importantly, standing up in the environment on AWS. We actually created what we call kinetic finance startup. Many of our clients are choosing to start with finance and specifically SAP's central finance to begin their journey to their new S4HANA environment. And what we've been able to do is create a touchless build solution over a weekend. We can actually connect to your existing ERP solution. Majority of those is starting with an ECC environment. We can extract the data. We can use harmonization rules to actually change and modify your data and optimize it for the future. And then we actually, through completely touchless build and automation, stand up a brand new AWS environment with S4HANA on it and actually automate the configuration and testing of the basic finance transactions. So when you come in the next week and we start the conversation with the client, we're actually looking at a real life S4HANA system on AWS with their mask. So the whole concept is to change how we engage. Right. So again, I don't know that I were to think of finance as kind of a lead application to start this journey. I mean, I can see on one hand it is the system of record and it has a lot of very important information that's got to eventually get into finance. On the other hand, it seems like there's less critical maybe lower hanging fruit that's less risky. Is it because you can run it kind of in a parallel path for some period of time but it strikes me that finance might not be the first place you go to look for some early wins. It's actually what you just said about the parallelism. So the reason we've seen that finance actually was one of the starting points is even if you look at the history of SAP S4HANA solution, way back before we got to that, it started with a concept called smart accounting or simple finance. And the theory here is you could actually, if a company has let's say multiple ERPs as most do, you can actually grab the financial information, bring it into a new S4 or central finance environment and actually combine or merge the accounting information to get improved reporting, optimize a shared service organization. So it's actually a lower risk way to start the journey before going and touching the heart of the business or core operations or manufacturing, for example. That's pretty interesting. So you run it parallel for a while and then eventually does is the plan that it takes over from the old. So it is effectively kind of, I guess a slightly delayed lift and shift or maybe it's a reassemble and then a flip. I don't know how you would describe it because it's not really lift and shift. It's not really lift and shift. Actually you have two options. You can either over time pull all of your business processes out of the underlying ERP solutions and bring them into the S4HANA environment or multiple S4HANA environments or some companies may choose to continue to, especially if you're in an industry where you do a lot of acquisitions or divestitures, you may not have an intention of ever combining all of your ERPs, but you may want to change each of them to S4HANA underneath and then have one environment in which you're pulling your data together to really consolidate your financial reporting. That's great. I want to follow up on something that you mentioned, which is the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And we talk a lot about, right? Those are hot buzzwords all over the place. But you know, I'm pretty, pretty vehement in that general purpose AI and ML is kind of interesting. But where the real interesting stuff is, is where the rubber hits the road, is then applied. And it sounds like you've got a pretty interesting application where you're applying this technology to help make this move to cloud go a little bit smoother. Yes, one of the areas, since we've been talking a bit about finance that I'll use as the example is, if you think about it, whenever we go in and we're typically working especially in finance, one of the topics is how to optimize a chart of accounts. So over time, we've done this hundreds of times, if we can look at different sectors, different industries, we can use benchmark chart of accounts. So instead of making this a paper-based exercise that individuals are doing, why not take that and actually use artificial intelligence machine learning to create data harmonization rules so the technologies can actually do that same work. And so that's been one of the things we've been working on and I personally find very interesting just in my finance background. Right, and is this a relatively new thing or have you guys been doing this for a while? Actually, it's something that over the last 12 months we've been focused on building out in partnership with AWS. So it's fairly new. That's great. I'd love to shift gears a little bit and talk about COVID and the impact of COVID on your business. Clearly in March, right, it was the light switch moment and everybody had to work from home and it was a quick rush to make sure that everybody was safe and we could support remote workers. That said, can't help with all the bad stuff that's happening in hospitality and travel and a whole lot of other industries. So that aside, and that's bad stuff. In the tech industry, we were able to make the move. But now we're six, seven, eight months into this thing and it's clear that we're going to have many elements of this going forward for a while. So I'm curious just from your business and your customer point of view, if you can share kind of the contrast of what happened in March and April to what you're seeing now and how this new reality, whatever this new reality is going to be as we continue to evolve is impacting this digital transformation conversations. It is interesting. So if I pivot back to March when this all occurred, it truly did feel like an instant going from in-person and as consultants we travel and typically have a Monday through Thursday or Monday through Friday type of travel schedule to an instant working from home overnight. And I'm really proud of our teams and how they seamlessly made that transition. Many including myself were actually leading clients through final cutovers in parallel to this happening. And we were able to really pivot and make those shifts when I was reflecting with one of the executives I worked with, you know, she and I, you know, six months later, we're looking back at how we did that and how impressed we were with what the team pulled off. And since then they've been able to do several other go lives, which is great. But I think that it was something we had to do quickly. I think many would have said it couldn't have been done that you would see the whole world move to a working from home environment, but we did. What it tells me is it gives me a lot of hope for a lot of the things that businesses can do in the future. In the past, we used to constrain ourselves of, oh, there's no way we could ever get XYZ done or we can't make this type of change in the world, but we can. If I flash forward to now, I think we're very settled in kind of this new way of working, but I'm also hopeful for what the future is gonna look like. I don't believe it will be a pivot all the way back to especially for consultants traveling on a regular basis of Monday through Friday. Instead, I think we're gonna create models that give people and organizations the flexibility they need to really balance some of their personal responsibilities along with their work responsibilities. My hope and expectations, it also opens up options so that all organizations have access to more talent that they may not have had before. And I think that also means global talent. I think we're showing we can work as global teams, which means I could now have members from Japan joining my permanent leadership team in ways that I maybe never have thought of before. Those are just some examples of what I expect and hope for all of us that we'll see coming out of this. Hopefully, and I know, like you said, you've been a consultant for years and years and years and you guys spend lots of time on airplanes and hopefully you don't have to spend quite so much time on airplanes because you don't necessarily have to be there all the time, but you talked about an interesting thing and that's talent and opening up the opportunity to get more talent that maybe you wouldn't have ever considered. And along those same lines is the move in diversity and inclusion. And I just watched a show that you did a few months ago called a Chance for Change, Accelerating Business Recovery through Gender Diversity on a Facebook interview. Very cool panel, really enjoyed it. And I wanted to follow up on some of those things because you made some really simple and poignant points. And one of the things that you said, definitively, go back to the wide diverse talent and perspective equals winning in business, period. I love that. We hear this all the time that, not only is it the right thing to do, but it's also good for business and isn't it nice when those two things can actually line up. And you just talked about, in more of a generic sense, the ability to open up your talent window when there's a worldwide talent shortage, both for geography, but also the work in diversity and inclusion and to continue to hold the momentum that continues to build in this area. I wonder if you could kind of share your thoughts on that and your position and what's going on with Deloitte. Absolutely. I do think this is one of those key pivotal moments for all of us. And I believe we have coming out of this an option to really move the needle on our diversity and inclusion and equality efforts. One example I think about women, women in leadership positions, being in consulting, one of the challenges has always been that we do travel a lot. And it can be difficult to balance all the responsibilities professional and personally. I think with a move to more flexible work arrangements, less travel or travel for purpose is what I would highlight for the future. I think it opens the door to many more women being able to have careers in consulting if that's what they had desired. I also think it allows them to have, to spend their entire careers in consulting and in ways we never saw before. And that means you'll see a significant movement in women in leadership positions. I also think this applies to underrepresented minorities. A hope that from all of this, instead of there may be companies that focus on recruiting from schools that are local to them or within their surrounding areas. I think this gives us an opportunity to really open that aperture up and look at talent from any school or university or geography and being able to get the right skillsets in the door and the right talent. Therefore, you can actually see movement in diversity within teams as well as at the leadership levels for URMs. Right, right. And really managing to the right things too. I think that's the other thing that's coming out of this. And we've had a lot of conversations on work from home or work from anywhere. You guys are a little bit different in the consulting as your team is there usually local at the client site for some period of time. But for a lot of people, it's the first time they are not sitting across from a desk or within close proximity, now you too in your teams. And so the shift changes that now you have to judge output and not activity. And you would think that that would be a great and easy thing to execute, but we're hearing more and more that it's not necessarily. And you really highlighted, I think three leadership traits that are always important, but more important now than ever before in that other interview. I just want to call them out because I thought it was worth calling out. Empathy has ever been more important, resilience, and my favorite one, you said calm in the storm. Just what are again, if you could share, kind of as you've gone through it, both as somebody at Deloitte within the Greater Deloitte Group, but then also in managing your own teams to maintain that calm in the storm and to maintain empathetic leadership because I think you've said it before, right? This is a personal challenge that we're all going through. We all have different things going on at home, whether it's the spouse's work in, the kids are doing homeschool, people are taking care of older parents, this and that, it's a real personal thing. And so these leadership characteristics, these softer leadership characteristics have never been more important. That's so true. And when I think about the empathy part, right now what we're going through is also about how is each of us as leaders also sharing a bit more about how we're experiencing this? I think the sharing of stories is what also helps many on the teams adapt, adjust. The reality is when you're working on camera all day and in the past, imagine that you maybe were having a tough day or you weren't feeling that great. You weren't on camera all day with every one of your coworkers. You're actually sitting in an office, you may have to go to the conference room to do some meetings, but you didn't look like someone was kind of staring at you all day long. Now when we're working from home virtually and we're on Zoom or Skype or WebEx, et cetera all day, it does feel like you're under the lights and you're on camera and there's a lot of pressure and people are trying to figure out how to manage their own emotions while doing that. And my message would say as an empathetic leader, it's okay for you to also share when you might be having a tough go that day, maybe one of your children has been kind of acting out and they didn't really want to do the virtual school. It's okay to share in that because everyone's going through it and it makes us all more human and it makes us all more connected. Right. Well, I will share with you a pro tip. We've done a few of these interviews and it is okay to let people turn off the camera. And I think as a manager, I think it's actually an okay thing to say, okay, everyone, let's just turn off our cameras and get a break from that camera that's got that eye on you all the time because it is just another kind of a factor that we have to deal with. Well, go ahead. And I was going to ask, would you actually, I don't know what one of your techniques is, but I know mine is some of the meetings, it's actually just go back to traditional telephone calls and actually even just being on your cell, put on your earbuds, your headphones and even walk. So I think the other thing we're all missing is actually that movement, the steps to go to the coffee maker and back we don't have them anymore. So you got to work extra hard to actually get in those extra steps and calories and just mental breaks at times. Yeah, well then there's a whole other tranche on walking during meetings and I used to have a boss that would only do one-on-ones while we took a walk always as I get in here because then there's, you know, you're not necessarily looking at each other and if there's some sensitive things or tough conversation, sometimes it's easier if you're not just looking across the table at one another with all the silence. So there's a lot to be said for that as well. Well, Kelly, I really enjoyed this conversation getting to meet you for the first time. Sounds like you're doing a lot of cool and exciting things and, you know, exciting speed and innovation with SAP. That's noble work and I'm sure a lot of people are really happy to have you helping them out there. So thank you very much for your time and to have a great AWS re-invent. Thanks Jeff, it was great to discuss this with you. Absolutely, all right. She's Kelly, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE's ongoing coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.