 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. Hello and welcome to theCUBE. Here we are at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier, your host. We are here for a feature one-on-one CUBE interview with Nancy Hensley, the Chief Digital Officer of the Analytics Group. IBM has a new position rolling out across the company called the Chief Digital Officer. There's a Chief Chief Digital Officer and that's Bob Lord. But each business unit is taking digital seriously as a way to engage and provide services and value to customers and anyone who's interested. Nancy, great to see you. CUBE alumni. Thank you, thank you. Glad to be here. Always happy to be back. Thanks for stopping by. I'm really interested in this Chief Digital Officer role that you're in. You know we love digital. You know we're progressive. We love to try new things. IBM, big infrastructure on digital. What's your new role? Take a minute to explain what you're working on. This analytics group, so this analytics division. Yes. I haven't left all of my love for data and analytics. I'm still here, but now what I'm doing is making these products much more consumable and accessible. I mean the challenge we had, and I think a big change that's happening in the industry is that best of breed isn't good enough anymore. You have to make these products much more accessible because the power shifting to that one digital consumer who's going to search for some sort of capability and wherever they find it is where they're going to start to engage, right? And that's where we have to be. Yeah. I mean to me, you know, the member of the old days, CRM, customer relationship management software. I mean, right now software is in a relationship still. Absolutely. So talk about the relationship because digital is different, it's not a catalog for learning, it's not waterfall, it's more agile, it's more personal, but it can't be intrusive because people don't want to be sold to, they're worried about their data, retargeting. How are you guys changing the game? So we used to develop products. Now we develop experiences, right? The product is the experience and the experience is the product. And that starts from how easy is it to find when I search for capability like text analytics or content analytics? Do I find what I'm looking for? How easy is it to get my hands on it and try it? How easy is it to have that aha moment of, oh, I get how this product can help me, right? How easy is it to engage with my peers in a community? How easy is it to get support, right? All of that is part of the experience. And what we're doing now is wrapping that all together around the product. Talk about specifically some of the things you're working on. I'd like to get to you. I know you were talking before we came on camera about some of the programs, but at the end of the day, people want to get the job done, right? They need, they have a job to do, a mission, and they want to feel like they got instant value, maybe kick the tires, do a little deep dive, jump around and not feel like they're getting a headlock on the IBM.com site. Well, let's talk about one of the products that we started with, which was SPSS statistics. So do you know statistics actually turns 50 this year? 50, it's amazing, right? So statistics is primarily students in academia. So the average profile of a statistics buyer is normally under 25. How do you think those buyers want to buy? It's probably not through a face-to-face IBM sales relationship, right? So we started off with that product because it was the most B2C product that we had. And we knew that the buyer gave us some very clear signals about I want to buy digitally, I want to be able to easily try it, download it, and subscription-based pricing, which is including support and a good community go-to. So when we started off the digital transformation a year ago on statistics, it was very difficult to find, it was very difficult to try. We didn't have a very good NPS score for support. And so we transformed the whole experience and you literally can get on, it's easy to find, it comes up top of the search, download it, you swipe your credit card, it's a very sleek experience and you are up and running in like 15 minutes. You know, one of the things interesting, people just want a relationship with that experience and as you guys rethink this, if you think about it, analytics, the younger buyers, they don't actually even use email, they have mobile email accounts, they're on Snapchat, they're on Instagram, and they have mobile channels open. And so you have to be smarter about how to engage in the preferred method that the users want. How does that translate within IBM? Share some inside baseball about some of the conversations inside IBM as you guys try to make that happen because I know certainly that you're talking about it, you guys are doing stuff. What's the conversations like inside IBM? I think we want to be able to do more to engage with the client in product, everything from making it easier for them to find support, to even booking time with an expert. And the more we can push that into the products, they never have to leave that original experience, I think it's better for them, right? I mean in the past, IBM would have one site for developer works, right? One site that had support information, one site that had product information, one site that had like learn and discover assets, another site that you would try and buy. And that was just too much work for the consumer to try and get to that point where they were very comfortable and confident, they could find their peers, right? So consolidating that all, that is the big challenge now because we're not a young company, so we have a lot of information that's digitized out. He has older buyers, but that's the trade-off. I always have this conversation all the time with folks. The new solutions aren't mutually exclusive to the old way. There are a lot of people that still use email as a preferred method. It's been the killer app for 30 years. Okay, but now the new users, you got to have them bolt on new programs. So how's that, how are you guys thinking about that? Is there any technology decisions that you guys made? Yeah, Ginny mentioned you guys are using your own tools and technology. Love her story. AI, blockchain data. Absolutely, absolutely. So one of the cool things we're doing is using chatbots to optimize the time of our digital sales reps. So if you go in SPSS statistics right now, you can have a conversation with a chatbot. And what it's done is it's actually helped us optimize. So when you actually talk to a really good rep that you want to get deeper in conversation on, you've already gotten a lot of your questions answered. We've improved their time, their optimizer time by 76%. Overall, what digital has done for us in our product-like statistics is it's reduced the amount of time it's taken us to acquire new clients. So for every 100 new clients that we acquire, new, brand new to IBM, it's been reduced by 70%. So we can truly accelerate how many more clients we can onboard in digital than we ever could before. So here's a trick question for you. It's kind of a hard question, but it's kind of a trick question, because it's hard to answer. At least I think it's hard. Maybe you think it's easier. Inefficiencies always come in new technologies, but whenever you have new technologies, you can create new efficiencies. Because you mentioned some great stats. You guys are shortening the cycle down to get, acquire new customers, provide value, faster time to value. Have you seen any new blockers come in front of you, or have you seen any new things that you guys have disrupted away in terms of making it more efficient? Because there's always an opportunity to reduce the steps it takes to do something, or make it easier to use and more simpler. It is a huge mindset shift for us because this is not how we've engaged with the client. So first it's important for clients to understand that there are two routes to market with us now. One is through a face-to-face traditional sales method, and some clients will continue to engage on that through many of our products. There's our partners, actually it's more than two. And now there's digital, and that's brand new, right? Truly digital self-service commerce. And with that we're doing more focus around how do we grow adoption around those products faster than we ever can before. So we're using new growth hacking techniques. And that is, again, it is very disruptive to the mindset that we came from. But I always say IBM, we continue to reinvent ourselves so we're reinventing a new experience. Well I've got to just say growth hacking techniques has been a big debate in Silicon Valley. Gamification, growth hacks has kind of passed A in terms of wording, there's nuance but I want to share that with you. There were companies that did growth hacking for at the expense of the users. Right. And that's actually growth hacking that creates a good user experience. Absolutely. That's kind of being replaced with gamification. And this is becoming a very critical part of digital. Gamifying on behalf of user experience, which GD was saying, that's the focus, is really the shortcut. Absolutely. So to me the shortcut is, how do I get to what I want to find? That's gamification, it's an algorithm, it's awful. And how do you amplify on what's working and what's not working? We're literally running weekly experiments. We get the teams together, we have squads that get together, it's everybody from design to development and we just do a big brain dump up. Here's the things we should try. And then we just try and we start to double down where it's working and we learn a lot from the things that aren't working and not everything works in digital. So it's what we're finding. Well the best thing about it is that you can always restart and retry because it's easy to work with. So tell us about the role of community. IBM has always had a strong community mindset. Absolutely. We've come back to open source, today's been a leader in Linux and continue to have an open source presence. We've been following the Hyperledger project in the Linux Foundation, covering some of the IBM work there with blockchain but more and more open source and community. How do you guys take digital to communities? So in the past the digital experience wasn't really all inclusive around the product. So you would have to go to a different place to connect with community. And now what we're doing is bringing that all into, we call it a hub-like experience in the marketplace. So it's all there because part of your decision process is I want to go connect with people like me, right? I want to connect with my peers so we're making it easier to do that. So now that it's all interconnected in the marketplace, making it easier for people to find, because what do you do when you buy something, right? You read reviews, you see how other people have used it. Check the ratings. Community's critical to that, right, exactly. So we've connected all that to you including a support experience as well. All of that revolves around the product digitally. All right, I got to ask the final question. I asked Janine Sneed, who's the CDO for Hybrid Cloud. Same question. What's on your to-do list? New job, congratulations. Thank you. Important run, we think it's super critical. What's your priorities? What are you going to work on? What's a to-do list look like? What are some things you want to accomplish over the next year? You're putting stakes in the ground, new programs. What's the priorities? Share some insight into what you're thinking. I would like to get as much self-service capability across the products that we are determining to be digital is probably my number one, but the number two is to create a great onboarding experience, right? And that's different than selling. When you're selling, you're convincing somebody. When you're onboarding a client, you're kind of showing them the way. And so I want to create that great onboarding experience in every single product so that our products are easy to adopt, they're easy to use, and they, you know, that's how we grow. Get her in their trust on that onboarding process. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, in the digital space, it's everything. It's everything. Digital trust. Nancy Hensley, Chief Data Officer. She's CDO's, multiple things, Chief Data Officer, but you're Chief Digital Officer for the analytics team, CUBE alumni. Sharing her thoughts on her new opportunity within IBM and also an important one. As digital is the fabric, digital transformation is changing experiences and outcomes, of course, creating value. I'm John Furrier, here in the CUBE studios at IBM Think, back with more after this short break.