 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in sunny Las Vegas at the inaugural IBM Think 2018 event. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, this weather has got to be Boston hands down, right? Wow, it was beautiful yesterday about 15 degrees in Boston, snowy. So you thought out since you've gotten here. I took the snowshoes out actually. Life makes lemons. Exactly, and we have another cold weather guest who's probably coming out as well, Rondina Young, the senior vice president of enterprise data services from Northern Trust. Welcome. Thank you, thanks for having me. We're excited to chat with you. You have a role at Northern Trust and your mission is all around data. Five core competencies, including data governance and stewardship, data quality, master data management, enterprise integration with data platforms. Tell us a little bit about your role, how long you've been doing that and really what this focus on data is enabling for Northern Trust. Sure, I want to talk first about our mission as you had mentioned. I think it was critical to establish a broad mission for Northern Trust. We wanted to make sure that we establishing an enterprise data program that enabled our customer needs and overall our customer experience, but also truly helped support our regulatory needs that we had. And it was critical to establish those two as the main goals, not just one or the other. And then the role, I call myself a change agent because establishing capabilities that you've talked about, it is difficult to do with a lot of legacy that we have. The firm has been in existence for 128 years. To establish a data-driven culture was very different. I mean, I think we've been known to do really good, provide good business solutions, but lot with the gut given that we've been good at it. But how do you make sure that you change that culture and have our relationship managers and others really think differently and use data to provide those solutions to our clients? I remember when I met Inderpal Bandari, I'm sure you know him. He said that he has a framework for a data leader and he said there are five things a data leader has to do to get started. And he's three are in parallel, sorry, three are linear, two are in parallel. I don't know if you've heard this rapidly. I'd like to sort of explore them and see how your three years are going. He said we start with understanding how the organization monetizes data, not directly maybe selling data, but how it contributes. And then the next one was sort of data access and then data quality. Those are the sort of sequential activities and then the parallel ones were form relationships with a line of business and then re-skill. So those are his five. How did you approach it? What was different? What were similar? What were some of the challenges that you had? Sure, if I had to think about kind of to correlate some of the components of the strategy, skills is an important thing. When I started establishing the team three years ago, it was critical that you had to bring some of the core skills within the firm because they had the business capabilities, they understood the systems, they understood kind of the skeletons that were there in the closet and we knew the culture and also embraced the challenges and still could find solutions. And then you had to bring external folks that really had the capability to drive that change, had the master data management skills to really support and set up an account domain and a party domain, a reference data domain, especially an asset domain, et cetera. So we had to look at kind of a conglomerate of individuals to do that. And then if you look at kind of where was the starting point in terms of really establishing the program was we were going through a transformation to really re-platform a lot of our legacy, whether it was our valuation system or our cash platform, others. And data was a threat throughout all of those programs. So it was critical to establish and think and take bite-sized chunks. It was important to think about, okay, throughout all the programs what is the important data that we could kind of understand? So we focused quite a bit on initially looking at critical data and looking at critical data from a master data perspective. So asset data, which is very critical to the work that we do on the institutional side. As you know, we have an asset management, asset servicing company. Data is an asset for us. We enrich the data. We provide services around that today and have been. And so embedding data governance through that process was important and also our clients were really looking for the enriched data but also were looking for clean information but also were looking for where did that data come from? How have you actually, what is the definition of this data? So kind of giving them that external catalog of here's the data, but here's the enriched data, here's the metrics for data quality around it and then here's the definitions for it. So to some extent that drove change because of customers were looking for it and a lot of the capabilities that were foundational to the firm, we're starting to externalize especially the metadata catalog. So if I could play that back. So you started with the team. You said, okay, I need to build a team. I think I heard that. And then the data quality and then presumably, okay, who has access to this data? Is that about right or not? I started with the mission to say we have to do this for both arms. The left arm being our customer experience and making sure that we change the way we're doing our work there or enhance the work so that our customer experience was better. And then obviously the regulatory makes sure that we need the regulatory. So for that, we needed five core competencies. We knew that we had to establish a role of a steward, a role of a custodian, a role of a... So the team started to become very critical then. And then we knew that we had some gaps in our master data management capability, a complete gap in having integrated data platforms. So I know Seth talked a little bit about how he established a whole strategy and architecture for ING. I totally relate to how we had to do the same. Each silo did their own particular thing. Those management did their own thing. The institutional side did their own thing. Ask management was a lot more, I would say a lot more mature. So I would say, if you were to think about it, establishing the mission and establishing the team. And then just one last follow up. The services that you're providing, data services, those are delivered through your organization, the IT organization, what's the partnership? We have a partnership and very collaborative partnership that we work together. The technology team does all the build for the work. We work collaboratively to kind of build the strategy of what solutions need to be first, versus later, given the client priorities and our institutional side, our business unit priorities. So that's a collaborative effort working together. So speaking of collaboration, you mentioned earlier that it was really key to have both the veterans with a Northern trust and their expertise that used some kind of skeletons that they know where things are buried, as well as that maybe external, you might say more fresh perspective. You also talked about, we chatted before we went on live, about governance. Seems like what you guys have done is kind of flipped governance from, and it being viewed as potentially an inhibitor, to really empowering, being an empowering capability. Can you tell us how you've leveraged data governance to empower a data-driven culture within a business that is 128, I think, years old, you said? That's right. For us, I think that while we were establishing the program, it was very critical to understand kind of the challenges on the institutional side first, because they had the maximum number of challenges with data. Again, because we're an asset-servicing company, our data is an asset, we enrich that information and provide that information, but what was happening is it was taking us so much longer to provide these solutions, to our clients. So we've embedded now the data governance framework as a part of that solution, and our clients are seeing the value. So if you provide this, if you look at one of the customers that we're working with, we actually have externalized our catalog where they understand now what data that they're receiving and you're speaking the same language and that was not the case before. But again, as I said, if we didn't do the foundational work of cataloging the information, understanding where the data is, how, what the data assets are, we just couldn't have done that. So it's really paying off because of that. How has that affected your ability to be prepared for GDPR? Obviously, it went into effect last year. The fines go into effect in May of this year. What was their relationship there? So we've worked very, very closely with our chief privacy officer and we've really done a phenomenal job of identifying where our highly sensitive data assets are. We've cataloged, we know in the process of cataloging all of them through the unified governance framework that we've established. So we leverage IBM's IGC and IA to do all that work. So, and the lineage all the way to the authentic source which is something that the regulators definitely are looking for. So are we fully, completely done yet? No, so we're in that journey and with unstructured data we're looking at discovery tools to kind of provide that. We have a solution that's a little manual at this point but we hope to kind of make more progress on that side. I got to ask you, so around 17% of the data suggests 17% of the IT technology industry is women. So I was at IBM, it was a data divas breakfast that I crashed, I snuck in, one of the few guys there and there was a stat that around 30% of data leaders are women, I don't know, it was a sort of a small sample, who knows, it sounded a little high. Somebody said it's because it's a thankless job and women have to take it on. So thoughts on women in tech, women in this role. So I'm excited to meet a few here at the conference. That statistic is pretty high, that you're stating, I don't see that in the industry. I do find myself sometimes as a lone warrior, at least in the industry forums, but I think it's growing. I think especially women in technology, women in leadership on the line of business side is growing and so is, and Northern Trust, I'm very proud to say is big around diversity and providing opportunities to women. So from that perspective, I think I'm excited that women are taking interest in data. Yes, it is a very hard job. So I think I feel like we are organized, we get a lot done at the same time. So I think that's really- Well other than it's the right thing to do, are there other sort of business dimensions? Is it Mars versus Venus? Are there other sort of enrichments that a woman leader brings to the equation? Or is it just because it's the right thing to do? I think it's, I've seen tenacity, women have no offense to, I think the higher tenacity to be persistent, to be methodical, to be methodical, and also to have the hard discussions in a very factual way sometimes, but also in, yes, this is the right thing to do, but is there ways we could make this change happen in a systematic, bite-sized, chunk way? Sometimes I think those coercive conversations help a lot more than the others. I think it's, to me, I would say tenacity, tenacity is- I love that word. I have to say that's a word that's oftentimes associated with males. A lot of times, a tenacious woman, it's a different adjective or different, right? I don't know, Lisa, what your experience has been, but so that's good, a good choice of words, it might be. I've heard pushy before, and I think that they really meant it's persistent. Man, it's tenacious, a woman is pushy, so I didn't hear that a lot. Right, I think it's persistent. So last question for you, here we are at the inaugural IBM, I think, 2018. You guys are an IBM Analytics Global Elite partner. Can you talk to us a little bit about that strategic partnership and what it means for Northern Trust? Oh, we have, this partnership has really helped us tremendously in the last three years, why we were putting the strategy to action while operationalizing data governance, while operationalizing a lot of the capabilities we thought we would have, but really kind of, you know, bringing that to life. We're also really excited because a lot of the feedback that we've provided has gone into kind of redoing some of the product products within IBM. So we've definitely partnered and done a lot of testing for some of the non-G, you know, the ones that, you know, the beta versions. And it's also helped us, you know, I think sometimes it's been like a marriage. We've had hard times getting through certain hurdles, but it really has really paid off. And I think the other thing is we've really operationalized governance to the core at Northern Trust. I think IBM is also seeing value and sharing that our story with others because others have started the journey, but it may have taken certain different approaches to making that happen. So all in all, I think that the unified governance framework has really helped us and I think we really love the partnership. As a client, what's on there to-do list? What's on IBM's to-do list for you? So I think one of the things that, you know, we've been talking quite a bit is we have a new CIO and he's really interested in the cloud strategy. I know you've been talking about that. We've, again, we're a bank, so, you know, due to regulation, there's, you know, strategies in terms of private versus public cloud. Like that's one conversation we'll definitely want to take further. We want more integrated tooling within the unified governance platform. That's something that's been on the, you know, a topic that we've discussed quite a bit with them. AI, machine learning, robotics is huge for us. So how do we leverage Watson more, much more? We've done a few POCs. How do we really operationalize and make sure that that's something that we do more of? I think that would say those three. So it sounds like a very symbiotic relationship, slash marriage that you have. Well, Ranjana, we want to thank you for joining us and sharing how really kind of you're exhibiting the term change agent in a tenacious way. I feel like I want to say I'm flanked between two data divas. You don't take offense to that, do you? No, I don't know. It's a compliment, yeah. You crash into them and they're like, I'm seeing a new Twitter handle come up here. Well, we want to thank you so much again for stopping by and sharing. Congrats on your success. And we hope you have a great time here. Enjoy the sunshine. Maybe bring some back to Chicago. We'll do, yeah. Thanks again. And for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. We want to encourage you to check out thecube.net to watch all of the videos that we have done so far and we'll be doing at IBM Think 2018. And of course on all of the shows that we do, also head over to siliconangle.com. That's our media site where you're going to find pretty much a near real-time synopsis and stories on not just what we're doing here, but everything around the globe. Again, for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. Live from IBM Think 2018 in Vegas, we'll be right back after a short break with our next guest.