 Live from Houston, Texas, extracting the signal from the noise, it's the Cube, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Now your host, Jeff Brick. Back everybody, this is Jeff Brick. We are live from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2015 in Houston, Texas. Day three of wall-to-wall coverage. We've been here for three days. It's an amazing energy at this event. We're so excited to bring the whole Cube production this year. Thanks to Telly Whitney and the Anita Bore crew for inviting us, and we're excited to jump in with last year's best place to work for a women winner from Bank of America. Denise Minnelli, she is the Shared Service Operations Executive for Global Technology Operations Bank of America. So welcome. Thank you, Jeff. It's great to be here. Absolutely. So you've obviously been coming to the conference for a while. Give people kind of a feel for, you know, what is Grace Hopper Celebration all about? Boy, I tell you, it's been growing dramatically, but what it is, it is certainly for Bank of America, is a great place to share really important ideas about how to get more women into technology. And it's a great recruiting venue. A lot of the brilliant young women that are here from multiple places across the country that have done great things in technology are passionate about it. So it's a great place for us to really find people because we're a very large organization from a technology perspective. So this is one of the best venues, probably the best venue for recruiting young talent in technology, especially female talent. I was going to say, is there any other, forget female male, is there any other kind of recruiting event at this type of scale with such a targeted focus around technology? Nothing that even comes close. And this year, there's like 12,000 people here, 8,000 last year, 4,000 the year before, so you can see the huge growth in it just year after year. So you're Bank of America, right? So we come here, we look around the exhibit hall, we see the yahoo's and the Googles and the LinkedIn's and the Intuit's and all the classic technology companies, but there's a whole lot of what people maybe don't think of as technology companies like Bank of America. So share with the folks how important technology is to your core business and why an event like this is so important to get more talent into Bank of America. Technology is critical. It is a critical part of every single thing we do at Bank of America involves technology. We have a massive technology organization. We've got, you know, 60,000 plus technologists, 30% of them are women and plus, and when we think of ourselves as a company, we're a finance company and we're a tech company. Mobile computing, cyber, you know, anything we do for a living involves very complex technological solutions and so it's critical that we're here. I also think what's important is if we want more women in technology, we all owe it to them to open up the conversation to say every company needs technology. If you're a young girl thinking about being in fashion or any type of industry, every industry these days at its heart still requires technology in order for it to be successful and I think we open up a lot more opportunities for women when we have that conversation. You know, that's a great point I'm just looking up. We had on yesterday, I believe it was Natalia who's one of the students on the board and I've got a couple of daughters, John Furrier was here yesterday, there's a couple of daughters, Dave Vellante, we've got a lot of daughters and we're talking about how do you get them engaged? You know, there's still this perception of, you know, it's nerdy or I don't want to do it and she had a great point, you know, find an intersection of technology with something they're already interested in, whether it's art, whether it's craft, whether it's, you know, whatever, fashion. There's a technology component in those companies that they can use as that path to intersect. Yeah, the perception needs to really change and we're involved as are many companies here in a lot of programs that involve high school girls or younger to help them understand just all of the different things you can do with technology. I mean, computer science at its core has a lot of art associated with it in terms of the creativity that comes with developing programs that do different things. I can't tell you how many young women I've spoken to just at this conference have developed various applications that have reached out into their own communities and have used technology as a way to connect people, as a way to improve, you know, various organizations in their own communities. So, it's, once you make those types of connections for a young girl in terms of what she's interested in and she doesn't have to just sit in a quiet room and code all day that there's more to it than that, then you make those connections and that's what we're doing. So, the other thing that's really exceptional about this conference is the variety of things that are going on. So, clearly it's a huge recruiting conference. I think Erickson said they're looking to hire 150 people at this event in three days. GoDaddy has a huge hiring effort, but then there's actual, you know, heavy duty tech tracks. It was a robotics keynote this morning talking about advances in robotics, but then there's other things going on and we talked before we came on about the tech executive forum. So, a whole other kind of types of tracks going on. I wonder if you can share with us what that was all about. We have this, Anita Borg Institute sponsored this great event at this conference every year and that is they take some of the most senior level people at the companies represented and they put us in a room together for about six or seven hours and we discuss what is it going to take for us to improve and have more women in technology and have more women get promoted within technology and get senior level management. We share best practices among the firms. We have an honest conversation in a room and we talk about what's working and what's not working and share great ideas. So, you know, we kind of promise each other we keep it in the room. Right. Well, how many? Just kind of scale. Probably about 100. Probably about 100. Okay, it's a big room. Maybe 50. Maybe 12,000. Right. It's actually a smaller number of groups, sit at tables and have breakout sessions and share ideas and we have a couple of professors come in from various universities and give us some of the best information that they now have in terms of the research around things like why women leave companies, what is it going to take to get the pipeline bigger and get more girls into technology and so it's a very good education as well as a really good dialogue. So that's a great segue into measurement, right? This is a tech conference. You can't measure it. You can't improve it. You know, need a board, release the results of their first survey last year at the Women of Vision Awards, trying to get people to start to survey. Go Daddy released their numbers earlier in the week and it's really important for people to quantify whether it's what you want to see or not want to see. At least you get a baseline and something you can work off. So talk about the role of measurement in actually making progress because the other measurement that keeps getting thrown out is that the women in CS has gone down from 30 odd percent to less than 20, which is kind of a scary number. I'm fairly obsessed with this topic so I'm glad you brought it up, Jeff. At the end of the day, we're all in business. When you're in business, you're trying to grow your business, you're trying to make money. Business people understand that numbers matter. Numbers give something importance. And if you have measurement, then you can have action and you can have outcome and you can show if something gets better. So at the end of the day, if you don't measure it and if you don't see if you're making improvement and if your actions aren't resulting in outcomes, then you're diminishing the importance of what you're trying to achieve. And if you were trying to achieve more women in technology, more women at senior leadership roles, then you darn well better know where you are now, how you're going to get it to improve and whether your actions you're taking are actually making a difference. So I think more and more companies are learning from each other that you have to do that. You have to assign that level of importance to it. You also need to make sure you understand the value proposition. Diverse inclusive environment, guess what? More patents, more innovation, more success for your company. A reflection of who your clients are. So again, if you're not measuring it and holding people accountable for improving it, it's not going to get better. Right. So I assume BEV, you guys must have participated in the survey last year. And participated in the survey. We also have a very specific set of goals and objectives among every senior leader at Bank of America. It's part of every one of our scorecards. It's how did you do in terms of your goals and objectives? How did you do against your budget? How did you do against your diversity inclusion statistics? What actions did you take? What solutions, you know, what affected those actions have? So it's part of our culture, which I think has contributed to us, again, winning best company for women in computing. But as I say internally, it's still not good enough. Right. Right. Well, that's in business too, right? We're never there. We're just here. Right. And we want to keep moving to where we are, where we're trying to get. So segue kind of into the language of business, and I think that's a really interesting topic that needs to be talked about more. We talked to Renee Zog from Aetna, and she talked about as part of her mentorship program with the women that she gets involved with at Aetna, teaching them to speak the language of business, teaching them to speak the language of results. So I'm just kind of curious from your perspective on the mentorship, because there's kind of like formal mentorship programs, and then there's less formal mentorship programs. What are you guys doing at B of A? Where do you see kind of success that you can share best practices around mentorship? We have a lot of good mentorship programs. We're focusing a little bit more on sponsorship, you know, that flip from giving a lot of coaching to someone to help them improve their career, to making sure that everyone understands they have an obligation to know who the women are in the organization, who these female technologists are, and help sponsor them to get the kind of exposure they need, to the connection to business priorities, and then helping the women understand what those business priorities are. The net net is that the women in our organization are much more passionate about what they do when they truly understand the business proposition. Who are our clients? What kind of, how are we making their financial lives better, right? The most innovative thing you can do in financial services is make things simpler. Make them more easily accessible, more mobile, connect them to people's lives. And so the great thing about having more and more women in the organization is, you know, they can connect to what they do for themselves, their families, to our clients, and then bring together their skills as a technologist and make sure that they're providing true value to the business. That's been a big difference for us. Yeah, it's a whole other step, right? Sponsorship versus mentorship, and actually grabbing them and putting them in places where they can be successful. Right. And our whole talent planning system is around identifying those, you know, women in the organization that can be successors that can get promoted, and then providing them with that additional level of sponsorship and mentorship. Yeah, it's just a funny thing about banks being technology companies, because there really isn't money anywhere, right? It's numbers on a statement, and those numbers are in the database, and if I give you money, it just kind of changes somewhere in a database, right? There's no... Well, you want to make a payment, you want to be able to know what your count balance is, you want to get an alert, you want to see how much you save, you want to see if you're ready for retirement, you know, and then we also serve the needs of large corporations, we serve the needs of consumers, small businesses that are trying to, you know, a small business owner doesn't want to be overly burdened by the complexity of their financial life. Right. We want to make it easy for them, and by providing them the kind of tools online where they can see how they're doing, it's a much easier set of solutions for them. So, last question before we check out, we're going to shift the technology. There's, you know, we cover about 70 events this year. There's so much going on in technology between cloud, and mobile, and social, and big data, data in rest, data in motion, Hadoop, Spark, I mean, the list goes on and on and on. From Bank of America's perspective, as you guys see this vast landscape of very quickly changing technologies, how are you keeping up? How important is it to keep up? How are you trying to integrate the best of all these new things that are out there while still keeping the, keeping the wheels on the bus, if you will? Yeah, it's critically important that we keep up, and we too participate in a lot of conferences. We meet with a lot of the best companies out there in terms of being technical strategic partners to us. We've got some good conferences with tech startups understanding what they're trying to achieve. So I think it's by staying at the pulse of how technology is changing and evolving, making sure that we are at places like this recruiting the best and brightest minds to help keep us very fresh in terms of how our clients, young and older, thinking. So it's connecting to the right companies that are strategic partners with us, not just a vendor, but a true strategic partner. It's making sure that we're staying on the cutting edge in terms of some of the work that a lot of tech startups are, and that at the end of the day we hear all about fintech. We are fintech. We are fundamentally fintech. It's what we do for a living. We want to stay on top of that, and it's recruiting really brilliant young minds at places like here. Awesome. Well, Denise, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to stop by the Cube. It's been a pleasure. Absolutely. Thank you. Very nice meeting you. Denise Benelli from Bank of America. I'm Jeff Frick. Just a reminder, next week we're going to be at Dell World 2015, a lot going on obviously with the Dell EMC merger. You're going to want to keep an eye on it if you're not at the show. We'll have Michael Dell on coming back to the Cube. He loves to come on the Cube to give us an update. So tune in next week. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching The Cube. We'll be right back after the short break.