 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2017, brought to you by Informatica. Welcome back to Informatica World 2017, I'm Peter Burris and once again theCUBE is broadcasting morning, tonight, two days in a row, to bring you the signal from the noise at this very, very important conference. There's a lot going on here as we talk about the increasing role of data is playing in the world. Now, to get a user perspective and not just any user perspective, a leading user perspective on some of these issues, we've asked Mel Kirk to come on board. Mel, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you sir, glad to be here. Mel is the Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer for Rider Systems. For those of you who don't know Rider, it's a trucking company, trucking and leasing company. Absolutely. And my background is I used to actually do a lot of research around transportation related things and I always found the ability to use queuing theory in both technology and in transportation to be very fascinating. So again, well, Mel, welcome here, but tell us a little bit about what you're here at Informatica World for and what's your interest in all this? You know, it's interesting, this was one of the conferences that I set out this year that I wanted to come to because I wanted to learn more about where Informatica is going in terms of leveraging data. Transportation company, we generate a lot of data. We have three business units. We have a fleet management company, 3PL, traditional supply chain company and a dedicated transportation company. All three of those businesses generate a lot of data and we're on a journey to try to figure out what's the best way of using that data to improve business outcomes. So that's what I'm here for this week is to learn more about the tools that are here, the applications that are here that we can use to do just that. So one of the things that I'm fascinated often the new branding of Informatica, which we think is good, enterprise, cloud, data management, leader. We know what enterprise is, we know what cloud is, we know what leader is. One of the dynamics is what is the new data management? We've talked to a couple of people about it. From your perspective, all this data coming in, what is the new data management function at Ryder or the new requirements and capabilities? I think the biggest thing for us from a data management standpoint is mastering our data. Like I said, we generate a lot of data. We've got two really important domains in which that data revolves around. It's a customer and it's the vehicle. And so our objective this year is to master both the customer and the vehicle, the information around those so that our marketing team can create better solutions by understanding all of the ways that a particular customer may interact with our business. It's also, our operating team is leveraging that same data to win at the local level on a day-to-day basis when a driver comes to one of our facilities and he wants work done on his truck. Our account people, our service people at that location will be able to pull up specific information about that customer and perform the work that they need based on the contract they have with us. That's a win for the customer and a win for our local team. So key, handle the customers, handle the crucial assets. That seems to be a general trend in the industry as you look across both the conversations that you're having here in Informatical World but also beyond, where do you think the industry is going from a trend standpoint with some of these questions around data? I think we're all on a journey to try to figure out the best ways to leverage the data, treat data as an enterprise asset, right? A real enterprise asset that may have more value to it than some of the physical assets that sit in our business. And as I've talked to people during the week here, it's really about that journey of trying to figure out how do you get better value out of the investment that you make in understanding, cleansing, liberating your data? And for us, again, that's creating products, new products from the data that we have, and it's improving productivity and efficiency in our operations with that data. So you must be excited about some of the new capabilities that Informatica's announcing about being able to discover inventory and then use metadata in new and different ways. What do you think about some of the metadata issues that Informatica's talking about here? Yeah, I think both metadata and cloud for me is very important. The metadata is important because, again, we've got multiple business units, right, that are operating with elements of data that are not associated across the enterprise. And so, you know, getting more deliberate about understanding the data at the metadata level will help us as we try to bridge everything together across our enterprise. The cloud's important because more and more of our customers are moving from a batch world to a near real-time world. And what's happening there is we need the ability to spin up operations in a very quick way, receive data in large swaths, so having burst capacity is where the cloud is going to give us. The immediacy of capacity is important to us, so the cloud-based applications that I've seen here, even the enterprise information catalog is important because as we go through and we cleanse and harness our data, having it in a structured, governed pattern is important to us as well. So you had been in the business, your XGE before he came, the writer, a couple of iterations before, you know, Master Black Belt, Six-Spec Sigma, that kind of stuff. You're an operations guy. I'm an operations guy. So as you think about going from an operations guy and great operations guys are very focused on data, into the CIO, how was that transition? It was more than what I thought. You know, it's interesting. I've said that as an operator, I'm not sure that I would have been effective in this role five, 10 years ago because it was a different type of role. Today I don't know how you'd not do this role, how you can do this type of a role, the CIO role, without having an operational background because the technology is integral to everything we do now. So where before companies differentiated themselves on operational rigor and process, which is what I live in, now it's about data. Now it's about data and the technology tools that can free up capacity, create productivity, and again, generate products. And so this has been a great exercise for me, a great learning experience for me, getting involved in technology at a time when it's moving so fast, right? Every day is a different day from a technology standpoint and bridging that with my operating background, I think it's been a great experiment for both me and Ryder. Well a lot of CIOs that have great job satisfaction at heart are operations people who have figured out how to be operations people as opposed to people who often, CIOs who often don't have that satisfaction are spending their days putting out fires and they never get into that groove. But think about as the role of the CIO changes at Ryder, but just in general, how do you see yourself organizing your groups around data assets, because it used to be that the key assets were the hardware or the network. How is that catalyzing a new way of thinking about getting your talent mobilized to do what Ryder needs your function to do? You know the big shift is away from keeping the lights on and keeping the phones working to delivering outcomes for the business. So that's that operational view, right? It's really whether it's an application development team or a talent on our employee, on our infrastructure team, it's about delivering outcomes for the operating team, for the business team. And so an example of that is in our fleet management business, right? We run 850 shops around the U.S. and Canada repair centers and our core application in that business, our technicians in those shops say, Mel, if you can do one thing for us, make the application faster. That's both an application problem and an infrastructure problem, right? And in terms of trying to find the right solve, what I've been able to do or what I've been focusing on is translating that ask of give me more speed to the infrastructure team and the application team in a way that they understand that that incremental speed means better customer service, better outcomes for the business as well as our customer. That driver that comes to that repair center, he or she is on the clock and they want to get out as fast as they are more of more value to the customer when they're on the road doing their job. And that truck is typically not a cheap thing. It's not a cheap thing. So it trucks on the clock too. Absolutely. So you think about these new disciplines acculturating the application team to, at least in this case, speed, the infrastructure team to speed, are there any new skills or any new disciplines that you are finding need to be filled within your shop? You know, the thing that's been interesting, and I'm going to go back to my Six Sigma background, the thing that's really been interesting and when I take into consideration the pace of change of technology, it's been change management, right? I mean, the application team can come up with the absolute best solution. I'm going to add to, it's change management and the UI, the user interface is important to that journey, right? Absolutely. And so they can come up with the greatest application, it could be the best solution ever. But you've got to get people, like in our organization, it's nothing to see employees that have been with the company for 20 years. And getting them to fundamentally change how they do work, that's a challenge. And so we've been focusing on is educating both the IT organization as well as the business team on how to drive change, especially in an organization with such a long, rich heritage. So as these changes start to manifest themselves, your relationship with the executive staff, how's that evolving? Yes, yes. So when I went over to, when I came over into this role, you know, I left the operating role as a peer and I came over to the IT role and I think they felt sorry for me because of all the challenges. But what's evolved is that as I've learned more about the technology and how to deploy, I've been able to actually balance between communicating with the technology team on the needs of the operating side of the business and then translating the technical challenges to the operating team so that they've got a better sense of if we're going to launch a new product or if we're going to onboard a new account, right? There is some lead time, there's some pre-thinking that needs to happen to get the technology right for you to be successful when you deploy for that customer. So I think bridging the gap between the two sides of the company has been very important for us, especially now given, again, the pace of change with technology. So does Ryder have a COO? Ryder actually doesn't have a COO at the corporate level. We have a COO in our fleet management business, but I'm playing kind of a hybrid role, I'd say. Kind of a CIO slash COO because I can blend it too. Excellent, and how's that going? It's actually good. When I first moved into the CIO role, I was very deliberate about not encroaching on the role of the operating teams, right? Even though my heritage and all of the things that I had done in the company was around operations, I didn't want to make operating decisions from the CIO role. What I'm realizing now is the best benefit for Ryder and the customers is for me to bring all of the skills that I have, right? Plus the talents of the team to bear on a problem for the company. So I've thought less about boundaries and more about delivering outcomes. And if that means I have to put a little bit of an operating perspective on a technical challenge, so be it. Which is really, quite frankly, what any real great chief anything does. How do I take shareholder capital and translate it to an outcome through my purview? So, Mel, let's pretend that we got five CIOs sitting here all about ready to start in the journey that you're quite a ways along. What is it, one thing you want to say to them, say here's how you're going to get started and here's the pothole that you have to look out for. You know, I think one of the most important things that I would advise is to divide, especially if you're like me coming from a different purview and even folks that have been in technology for a while, establish a board of directors, right? Your own personal board of directors. For me that was, I had to identify a couple of folks that had been in this role before that I could call and reach out to and get unfiltered advice, right? It was also identifying, the second one was identifying a short list of vendor partners that I could go to for technical questions in their domain plus beyond their domain where I felt comfortable with the autonomy of the answer. Good ideas, just good ideas. No sale, just good ideas. Then I had to reach inside of my team and figure out who are the one or two people in the organization that I go bounce ideas across for the sake of the change management that I talked about, right? Some for technology, but also from a change management standpoint. And then build a couple of key partners at the leadership level within the organization. Again, to help with selling the concept and the ideas. A lot of what a CIO is going to bring to bear now is going to be disruptive to the way a business, a company does business today. And so they're going to need constituents or partners from the executive leadership team. Yeah, none of it happens if the CIO doesn't recognize the change management that they have to drive about their role within the business. Absolutely, so I use my board of directors, this board of directors as a way of getting smarter about the job, secondly, to help facilitate the change that we need and three, just to bounce ideas for sanity. Fantastic. Mel Kirk is the Senior Vice President Chief Information Officer of Rider Systems Inc. Mel, great conversation. Thank you very much for being here in theCUBE. Okay, thank you for the time. Once again, Peter Burris, Informatica World 2017. We'll be back with more in a moment.