CIO Panel with Diana McKenzie and Manjit Singh | Greyscale

In this episode, Greylock COO Tom Franjone moderates a panel featuring workday CIO Diana McKenzie and Clorox CIO Manjeet Singh. During this panel, they discuss how each company thinks about partnering with early stage startups. This fireside chat was recorded at Grayscale, an event hosted by Greylock Partners. For more podcasts, please visit news.greylock.com we're.

Going to start the third portion of the day of Grayscaling. We start out the day just kicking off the framework on Grayscaling from founding the product market fit through hyper growth maturity. In the afternoon we spent the time talking about go to market unit value as well as a fireside chat with Mike Clayville about how he thinks about scaling sales teams and going to market and what we want to do this afternoon. We're very lucky to have several CIO guests or customer guests that will be here to kind of talk to a bunch of young founders, young technologists, be two way learning. Before we go to the rounding of discussions, we're going to start with a panel with Diana McKenzie from Workday where she's the CIO and Manjit Singh from Clorox where he's the CIO. So two East Bay companies coming to SF and my partner Tom Franjone will moderate the panel for the next 45 minutes. Tom and his team run our customer briefing center. And so he hosts leading CIOs CTOs, VP of technologies from companies large and small across the country and the world, quite frankly, at Greylock and helps connect a bunch of our CEOs or founders with CIOs and kind of helps us understand as investors what's top of mind for all the large companies out there. What are they buying? What's their priorities? Do they care about security? Do you care about cloud? Do you care about big data and vice versa? The CIOs in the audience, especially on stage, give great feedback to our entrepreneurs about directionally, is this right, is this wrong? And if you listen to Mike Clayville so they can iterate as quickly as possible on their products and try to find this go to market fit with that. I'll bring up Tom and his guests. Thank you.

Come on.

After you. Thank you Jerry. Thanks all of you for joining us today. And maybe want to do a quick introduction of Manjeet and Diana and then obviously let them, you know, correct my mix ups. But so Manjeet is the CIO at Clorox, previously spent some time at Box, but then, you know, just previous to that also spent some Time as the CIO at Las Vegas Sands and CIO at Chiquita. So very consumer focused, someone who's been in that industry for a long time. So obviously welcome, Manji.

Thank you.

And then Diana McKenzie, who is a grizzled veteran of the SaaS business. Three months as the CIO of Workday, but previous to that spent 12 years at Amgen as the CIO and also before that with Eli Lilly. On that note, with Diana, I know two things that I'm sure she wants to talk about. One are motorcycles, and then second, make sure we get into things like triathlons or marathons so we can jump into a couple things like that too. So before we get going, first off, I want to make sure this is interactive. I'm not that interesting. These two are. But please ask lots of questions. The notion here, as Jerry mentioned, is both Manjeet and Diana have spent time both with very large folks selling enterprise technologies, but also getting to know young companies, understanding where they should take risks, where they shouldn't. You know, how do they think about companies to partner with? What do they want to do in terms of early interactions? And so that's really sort of the crux of what I'm hoping to have a conversation about. But maybe before we jump into that, Diana, you want to maybe give a little background on Workday kind of size of company, just some basics about Workday.

Sure. So Workday this year is hoping to achieve over a billion dollars in sales. We'll be about 7,000 employees by the end of the year. We're growing like gangbusters. We made our business on human capital management. Platform software. Platform, true SaaS platform, single line of code. We have now 1300 customers running on our platform, and we're moving into the finance space. And what I'll say as the new CIO at Workday, especially for some of the CIOs that are out there, is the company made its way by working around people like me. And a lot of the reason for that was when Workday got started, SAS was. And a lot of big companies, especially highly regulated companies, were scared of SaaS models. Probably less the IT people than the legal and compliance people. The problem is the IT people were the ones that had to talk the legal and compliance people into allowing it to happen. I think what Workday realizes at this point is the environment's change. And I think that's why a lot of you are here. SaaS is the way businesses want to go, and the challenge is how quickly can they get there. And how quickly can companies like ours help them get there? And knowing that. Knowing that IT organizations have changed and CIOs are being asked to be much more transformational around digital strategies within companies. Workday knows they need to be able to embrace the cio, so that's why I'm there. Not only to help them understand how to better work with CIOs and meet with them out there, but also to help Workday build an IT organization within the company. So that's a little bit about the company.

Cool. Thanks, Manjit. May the same about Clorox.

Yeah, So, I mean, most of you know Clorox. Who here does not know Clorox? Okay.

Pretty good.

What you might not know is that we actually own a number of different brands that you are familiar with, but don't realize. We own Burt's Bees. One of the fastest growing natural personal care products is ours. Brita. Water filters is us. Glad. Trash bags is us. Fresh step cat litter. I can go on. We have a whole bunch of different brands that are very recognizable in the marketplace. We sell around the world, predominantly US focused, although we have a large operation in Latin America. And as I said, a lot of the different product lines are sold all around the world. We have an interesting model from a CPG perspective. We primarily look to have a limited amount of our own manufacturing capabilities, so we leverage a lot of third parties, and that helps us really get up to scale much, much faster. Plus, it also allows us to leverage some of the different categories that share platforms like bleach, laundry additives, and other things like that. We can put that in one facility.

Very cool. All right, so let's maybe jump in and talk a little bit about some of the priorities you guys are thinking about, maybe as you think forward, but both kind of the next 612 months, but maybe even 18, 24 months from now. So, Diana, how do you start thinking about, you know, what are the priorities for you as a let's think first kind of internal cio.

Sure. So what I think I neglected to say in the introduction about workday is the growth engine for workday is really in financial. So workday is taking on Oracle and SAP. And as we think about what that means to the scale of the company, we have a company right now that's been wildly successful operating the way a startup operates, that won't scale. So the opportunity for us is to think about how we change the company without losing the culture. And that right now, for me, as I work with my team and my partners across the company, would Suggest we have a couple of priorities and these are really very early and they're likely to change. But I'll tell you what, they are 92 days into the job. So as we think about the aspiration we have for the IT organization, there is an important element of making sure that we are the first and best customer on the workday platform. Workday rolls out a new release every six months and the release has lots of stuff in it. And as a company that's growing, scaling.

What version is Workday on?

I'm just curious.

Workday is on release number 26 and number 27 goes live in September. All of those, every single one of those tenants is upgraded, all 1300 customers in two hours on a Friday when we put a new release out is killer. Good, right?

That's a relaxing Friday for everyone.

A relaxing Friday for everyone. So as we think about scaling, we've got to be first and best on workday, which means the IT function actually has to be part of pushing the company to use the platform. And then we get to work very closely with product management and help to shape what IT is we need from the platform because we know if we need it, our customers are likely to need it as well. So very important part of what we do. What we're trying to do, however, is make sure everyone in IT understands the platform. It can't just be the people who are focused on the platform. So that's the team that supports salesforce.com and ServiceNow and a number of the other SaaS apps that are out there. The second piece of this is analytics. Always been a bit of a data bigot, and it's great to be with Workday. A company that spends a lot of time, puts a lot of energy into thinking about the data. We need to help Workday think about analytics and insights beyond the use of the workday platform. And one of the questions I got quite a bit before I joined the company and when I joined the company from my peer CIOs is what exactly is Workday's vision around analytics? And do you guys honestly think you're going to be the big data company? And I don't think that is what we think, but we do think in the space where we house the data, there's a great opportunity for us to use this technology that we have in the innovation that exists there to help companies make decisions faster, run and grow their businesses faster. But we also have to be realistic and say we know there's other forms of data that don't sit in that space, and how do we demonstrate through the way we run our business that we know where that line is and what's the best way for us to put a strategy like that together. So that would be the second key area of focus and the third. I'm going to contrast this to my past life.

Yeah, I was going to say, so.

I came from the second most highly regulated industry known to man, second to nuclear. So it's the life sciences, pharmaceutical and biotech. So the challenge there is that everything is legacy. And in order to move out of legacy, We've got some McKesson folks here, right? So you kind of get that health care model to move out of legacy. You got to qualify with all these FDA expectations, which are really costly and they slow you way down. That creates a challenge to engage employees in the environment because they're using these platforms that are just awful from a user experience perspective. So in my past life, the challenge there was how do we modernize the environment and take some of this old stuff that there simply isn't an alternative to and make it not so hard for employees to use and engage them. In my new environment, my golly, we have one of everything. And so my new challenge, and the challenge with one of everything is that every time something gets rolled out, a team thought about how people were going to use that one thing. The user experience for that one thing is really good. But the fact that you got to do five different things before you get there and five when you move on just creates a very challenging environment for our employee base. And our people are our most important asset. So the third element of this is we've got to create an environment that makes it easy for people to do their jobs and bring teams together, collaborate, and that's going to be a source of competitive advantage for us. So those are the three for now.

For now. We'll check in in three months. So, Manjit, how about you?

Yeah, so for us, our industry is changing quite a bit. We traditionally have gone to market, selling to the big retailers that you know, the Walmarts of the world, Safeways of the world, et cetera. Yet today we find that all of you who are really our consumers, consumers are also wanting us to have a relationship with you. So we are entering a realm that we are not very much used to. So while we've done broad based advertising and marketing and you've seen those TV commercials, you want to have more of that one to one relationship with us. And we're trying to figure out what that means because we have all the technology and we know how to connect. And a lot of your companies are helping us do that. The challenge is, well, we can't alienate our customers because if our customers don't buy our product, no matter how much you love our product, you can't go and purchase it anywhere unless we start nurturing more of the E Comm channels, which we're already doing. So we're one of Amazon's largest customers. We sell a lot of product through Amazon. There's a great new product we just launched, which I won't talk about, but it's an Iot product that we launched in partnership with Amazon. So we're pushing into the E Comm channels, but we still have to figure out how to help the Walmarts, the safeways, the targets of the world, make sure that they're staying connected to you while we're also engaging in a conversation. And that's really, really tough to do. So one of the examples is we're partnering with folks like Google to start doing some of this targeted advertising on the mobile platform. Well, the number one question we get is why? Wow, isn't that creepy? Well, most of you are probably used to that. We surf the web. If you've looked at Amazon and looked at something on Amazon, up pops the advertisement that says, hey, you looked at cat litter and here's the cat litter again, and guess what? It's on sale. Click the button for us. We don't know what to do with that because again, that's not the relationship we used to have with you. And so how do we react to consumers who are going well, but you're tracking me. Well, it's not us who are tracking you. You're already being tracked. So you just kind of have to get used to that. My challenge is how do I take advantage of that in a way that's meaningful to you? So the example we talk about a lot is in our Hidden Valley Ranch product, which, by the way, another brand we own. We're trying to make sure that you understand that there are uses for Hidden Valley Ranch outside of just salad dressing, because that's how we've tried traditionally used it. So we want to show you recipes. Well, if I know that you're a meat lover, a chicken lover, seafood lover, or a vegetarian, and I show you an advertisement saying click here to get a recipe relevant to your interest, the chances that you will click on that ad are significantly higher than if you're a vegetarian. And I'm showing you a meat based advertisement. So we're learning those kinds of things. We're experimenting in that. And we are spending close to 40% of our marketing budget today on digital, which is one of the highest percentage rates in cpg. And we're seeing a tremendous result of that. So at a high level, that's one of our challenges. The next challenge that starts happening is how do we redefine the consumer experience, which is a fascinating conversation. Have you ever thought about how you interact with your trash bag or your cat litter? Probably not. It's not something that we really think much about yet we're starting to think about that and saying, well, how can we redesign our product, our packaging, tie it into a mobile based experience so that it is more seamless. And that was one of the Genesis behind our IoT product that again, I said I was not going to mention. So this experience is what we're trying really, really hard to unravel and understand. What is it that we can do with our product categories? What is it you would want to experience through that mechanism and then how do we deliver it to market?

So fascinating. So you guys have both spent a lot more time talking about customers, about data and analytics and not talking about erp, not talking about security, not talking about infrastructure. So in a little bit we're going to talk a little bit about the changing role of a cio. I'd love to make sure we get back to that because, you know, frankly, it surprised me how much you guys just focused on what I would think of as traditionally more business problems than they are, quote, unquote, it problems. Right. So we'd love to get back to that. Before we do that, I wanted to play a little buzzword bingo, if you will. So I'm sure you guys either get pitched or have to think about or have someone in marketing say, hey, what are we doing in AI or something right now. But just, you know, I wanted to get, you know, I'm going to say a word, give me less than two sentences on big issue or not and something you actually care about. Right. And if you want to go deeper, maybe if you have a really interesting thing to say. All right, so let's just go to like big data. I'm sure we've just heard big data. Interesting, right?

Interesting.

Fair enough. Machine learning.

Yes, sort of.

What's that mean?

As we're getting into the IoT space, for us, that's all about machine learning and what do we do with that?

Got it.

Certainly we've got machine learning on the manufacturing floor, but we've had that for years. That's pseudo interesting.

Got it. All right, cool. VR or ar?

No, no, Very interesting. Changing the consumer experience. If I can have you walk through a virtual shopping experience and have you show me how you interact with products on shelf. Fascinating. So it's definitely something of interest.

Cool.

Scale out architectures for data centers. Yes, I could assume. So you guys run all your own data centers?

We run all of our own COLO facilities. We also leverage a lot of aws.

Got it.

Cool.

What's a data center? Well said.

You have aws, so hybrid cloud on that.

Yes, yes, yes.

Internal or customer facing?

Internal.

Both. So workday, both. Prior life. Internal for FDA related stuff. Hybrid outside for stuff that.

Natural language processing or bots.

I don't know the answer to that question. Bots? Internally for sure. Externally. I don't know the answer to that question.

No.

Got it. And then the last one. Drones. Come on.

Besides personal interest.

All right, cool. This notion of a cio, you've been in that role from both regional and then globally in four different times. I think you now second or third time.

Right.

So the good news here is we have folks who've seen sort of old school and probably newer school and obviously folks you're sitting with who've seen different pieces of that. If you had to pick out one or two things that is most different today about the role versus, you know, let's say five, seven years ago, what do you think that is?

I think the role is much more externally facing. So if I, if I take the current role that I'm in or the role that I just left at Amgen, there's this element that Manjit talked about where you've got to figure out how to make your product. Yeah. Figure out how to digitize the product. Product. And historically CIOs were much more internally focused. When we start thinking about how you digitize the product, in my case the new company, the product is software. It completely changes the focus that we have to be much more about growth for a company than about productivity and cost savings and keeping things running in a streamlined sort of way. It's not that latter part isn't important, quite frankly. Back to your earlier question about the enterprise aspect of things. It's table stakes. So that stuff you have to do and you have to do well or you don't earn the right to be in the conversations about growing and scaling the company. So I do think there's a Forbes research study that was done where 17% of CIOs are this transformative where they're leading the digital. Another, you know, 30, however, do the arithmetic right, are in this advocate role. And then there's still a large portion of CIOs that are out there that are in this service provider and plumber area. So you're going to run into, you're going to run into a 50, 50 model where you're going to have a much more open community on the transformative advocate side of digital than you are on the servicer and plumber. But quite frankly, you can make them all heroes if you get in there and get talking to the right people.

So definitely echo. The external focus now is huge. It's tremendous. For everything that Diana said, there are two other changes. One is nobody inside the company necessarily cares about it metrics anymore. We spent so many years talking about server uptime and availability and people fall asleep at those conversations. It's about as exciting as the listening to the finance group talk about balancing the books. It's not a conversation you have. You just kind of assume it's happening. Which leads to the third piece, which is the business folks now want to engage with you. The challenge is though, are you ready for that level of engagement? So it used to be that we would push ourselves onto the business folks, hey, you should come talk to us because we really know how to do this. We, we can help you with reporting, we can help you with analytics. Today it's a pull. We've got this challenge because we decided to whip out our credit card and we signed up with a Salesforce with somebody else and it worked great for about a year and now we don't know what the heck we're doing. Can you come and help us? The proper answer is not why did you whip out your credit card and go to Salesforce? You should have come talk to me. We are now in a position where we are being embedded even further across all of the business lines and we're being challenged with integration in not the traditional IT way of integrations, but in this new world of where we are not in control of everything and we're not in control of the technology, we're not in control of the timing, we're not in control of the business processes yet people still come to us to stitch things up together. How do you manage that?

That's great. So I'm going to start the cold calling because you guys aren't asking questions, but I'm actually going to ask like Michael and Naveen, who, you know, have also seen kind of similar things. Like anything that you see from that changing role of a CIO that is either, you know, additive or, you know, want to echo some of the things that have been up here.

Just, you know, as you get out of the infrastructure, the plumbing side of.

Things, Darwin.

You really move up the stack. Exactly what you guys were just saying as far as much more business centric. And so therefore I think it's really incumbent upon CIOs to really focus on actually how you make the money, what really happens in the business and let the technology be secondary. And that's really the direction I see the CIO role going.

Say Devine, any thoughts?

I distill it down to simple solving problems. At the end of the day, as a CIO you're looking to make an impact and your organization needs to make an impact in different ways than traditional. So one of the things as an example, at Palo Alto Networks we are looking at how do we integrate our solutions with other technologies like ServiceNow or Splunk and how do we build those service models into pair from a customer facing perspective. So that if I'm a consumer of products like Splunk, ServiceNow and Palo Alto Networks, how can I automate that process very seamlessly as a service bundle to you? So that would be one solution that CIO is in a unique position to solve because they have those technologies in house. So that's a little more complementary to just being a first and best customer because that to me is stable stakes as well. You have to be really good at that.

That's great. So one of the things I wanted to talk you guys both talk about talking to customers a lot. Certainly in your role now you're talking to customers all the time and I think at box that was one of the primary things you did. So tell me a little bit about you as a cio. Go talk to for example, manage it is a potential workday customer and or I don't even know it's public or not, but so what do you say to him? How do you talk to a managet and say what can I do? Are you there to help? Are you trying to pitch him? How do you think about it?

And you can't say, look, you were one of the first customers.

Well, I think there's two pieces to that. And you just mentioned one of those. There always is. And I think we all have this. You find as an organization you move onto a platform to solve a problem, you solve the problem, but the platform continues to evolve and it becomes feature rich and there are all kinds of additional problems that the platform is designed to solve that. Once your organization's on it, you sort of move on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. So I think there's an aspect of what I can do as a CIO in sitting down with Manjit and with his leadership team to make sure that they're getting the most from the platform. When we first push new releases out, there's a lot of input that comes from companies that are using it. And ideally the goal would be to make it possible for more of your resources, whether that's in the business functions or within your IT organization, to spend their time on the things that are going to help you solve your digital consumer challenges, not in the space that's trying to run a company that's growing. I think the second piece of it is where I'm finding right now the greatest opportunity. CIOs will ask me, well, how do you do X? And X has absolutely nothing to do with the workday platform. And because I'm new and the first cio, I have to be very honest and say, well, we're still figuring out how we do X. But part of that first aspiration is we want to be able to say, this is how we do X and we feel pretty good about it. Let's talk about that and see if maybe that would work for you.

Do you find you almost end up in a kind of quasi advisory sort of role? Like, it's sort of like, you know, how do you, how can I help you? Sort of thing?

Yes. Yes. I'm actually going to a AON Intersect conference in Florida in a couple weeks and am co hosting a roundtable with CFOs CHROs. And there are only a couple CIOs in the room. And it's, it's an opportunity that, you know, where I came from, the only CFO I talked to was mine.

And they weren't the pleasant conversations, were they?

Yeah. So it's exciting to be out there to help these leaders understand what the power of the platform is. Whether they're on it, whether they're not on it. If they're not on it, what are you missing? Cool.

Yeah. So my short time at Box, when we were interacting with customer base or prospective customers, the old adage of solution based selling, don't go in and just sell your products. And I find way too many customers, companies, way too many companies have the problem. That's exactly how the sales team goes in and you're there kind of, that's the closer, you know, the senior executive to help shake the hand and say, hey, I've lived in your shoes. And so please sign here versus really what people are looking for, which is that advisory role that we just talked about. A lot of folks, you know, they don't want to be the first movers. The first movers are your easy sell now. People who are looking to be innovators, they'll sign up tomorrow, they'll take the risk and be an advocate for you on your platform. It's the next level and the third level who are going to move much slower. And they're looking for you to help guide them to the extent that you can provide them with guidance around other people within the network, your network, workday's network, that have gone through that and they can talk about the experience, they can talk about what worked and what didn't. I find that that's very valuable. And then the third piece, which I really found astounding sometimes, was they hadn't really thought through how they could utilize and leverage the platform. They had a single use case and that was it. So asking open ended questions like, well, so tell me what your top three priorities are. In one case, a gentleman indicated that he had had a challenge for the last two years. His infrastructure team couldn't solve it. And one of the sales folks just looked and said, oh, well, you know, we have a customer that did exactly this using our platform. I'd never thought of that. A week later, that prospective customer became a customer. But it was not because, you know, they were so enamored with the platform. We solved a problem that was top of mind for them in a way that they had not figured out how to do before. So I know that sounds. No, no, no, but it's right, it's right. But unfortunately we don't have enough of those interactions.

No, it's funny, I was just speaking with CIO of a large company Monday or Tuesday and my natural instinct, as these two unfortunately know, is to say, well, have you seen our portfolio company X and Y? And look at the cool things they're doing. But he had just sort of been in one of those situations where he sort of had the problem of he got what he asked for, he was reporting to the CEO. All of a sudden data and analytics flowed into him. All of the IT that was in all the other organizations now reported to him and, and the CEO gave him a job of, hey, there's all this innovation happening in Silicon Valley, what do I do? And so he didn't give. Sorry for all of Our portfolio companies didn't care about any of our portfolio companies at the time. He wanted to know, like, who else has had to face this problem? Who else can I talk to? And that's all we wanted to talk about. Right. And so it's that exact same notion. Right. So he didn't know I was selling him.

You were subtly selling him.

Exactly. Nice. So, all right, so look who's got some questions. We're going to jump a little bit into why you guys would ever take a risk on young companies in a sec. But are there other things or other background, other questions you guys have for Diana and Manjit?

How's the whole lob purchasing versus you guys deciding to purchase software thing going? Is it truly shifting away from you and you're more in a support, integrated stitch role or is it still centralized to a degree in larger companies?

I think I would answer that question. I have to answer that question with both hats on.

Yeah, great.

So the environment that I came from, and I already mentioned the regulated nature of it, there was in general this belief that the organization sort of had a fear that they would go out and acquire a software product of any sort because people didn't really understand how to make a platform FDA validated and they knew it did. And so for the most part, it just made my job a little bit easier because people just knew, go out and do that. It wasn't that it didn't happen from time to time. We had people go out and use the different storage platforms and things like that. Until we were able to provide a service that worked for everyone in the new job. It's not as much like that. So everybody at workday is an IT person that's similar to Greylock. Yeah. They don't need to go to IT to get help. So the challenge for us again, and this is for me very new in the role, is what's the value proposition when you've got this killer product development organization of really smart people? What's the value proposition of going to IT to get help? And the value proposition that we think exists there comes back to this point about the data, at the end of the day, having the ability to give the organization a means to be able to get at all the data, content, assets that they have in a well orchestrated, architected way, the value proposition. And if we can convince everybody that that's what the IT organization is capable of doing to move the company where we need to be, I think that'll be less of a challenge for us. I would say right now Though it's pretty mixed.

So I'll say I look at it as an opportunity because I can't do everything. My team is limited in the resources, limited in our budgets, and if the business is so motivated that they want to go off and do something themselves, as long as they fit within a certain set of parameters and principles that we put out, I'm more than happy to have them go off, because half the time they're experimenting, and if I'm too early in the experimental stage with them, I'm wasting time and resources and they're deflecting from other more strategic work that the company is interested in me doing. So I'm happy to let that experimentation happen. In fact, I encourage it.

So.

So the governance principles become things like, if you're able to go off and do this without needing any of my data, integrating with any of my systems, knock yourselves out. If you need to have a small set of data, maybe one integration, okay, we'll help you knock yourselves out. When it starts becoming complex is when I say, okay, now let's sit down and talk. Because if there's a degree of complexity, that means you are at a maturity point where I probably do need to get involved. And what you find is your business partners actually start appreciating that, because rather than telling them no. And for those of you who have kids, how often does it actually work when you tell your kids no? And once you say no, you can almost be guaranteed that that's what they're going to go off and do. So rather than saying no, you actually are partnering with them and you're giving them a little bit of room, room for them to do their own work and experimentation and then come back to you. And now they know that they're at a point where they know exactly what they want, they've done the experimentation, so they can be more succinct in their requirements, which actually means there's a higher degree of likelihood that you're going to have a successful project implementation. And they know that because they'll tell you about all the failed project implementations that it has done. So I look at it as an opportunity.

So let's jump into maybe either think of an example or a young company that you either found, got introduced to and kind of took a risk on.

Right.

So I'm guessing more from your Amgen days, or pick one. But tell me a little bit about either what the company was or what the space was in, why you thought that was a good space to take a risk, or what was it about that company that made you say, hey, I'm going to not go with pick large vendor like Oracle or whatever it is.

So why don't we let him go first?

Sure, go ahead, man.

I'm not going to use my classic one, right? My classic one would have been workday, so I'm not going to use that one. I'll actually talk about cybersecurity before it was known cybersecurity, a small little company called Check Point. I'll take you into the way back machine. Way back machine probably when a lot of you were not dreaming about starting up your own companies. And that's an the early days of the Internet, things like firewalls were not even in the lexicon. They were basically proxy servers. And you did some filtering at the router level. We determined I was working for Procter and Gamble at the time and we had cobbled together an open source firewall. Let's just say I must have downloaded the code off of some Miltel site or Simtel site. We decided we needed to get a little bit more sophisticated. If only over 180,000 people were going to be using this thing, it could not run on the Spark station underneath my desk. So we went out and we started looking at various companies and ironically during that time, most of the defense contractors were the ones putting out firewalls. Natural extension, as you can imagine, for military use. But the price tag associated with that was a little bit higher than we would have liked.

The General Dynamics price tag wasn't quite $10,000.

Well, you know, when the, when you heard that the Pentagon was spending $10,000 on toilet seats, the per seat license for the firewall was probably like a million bucks. So we found a very small company just starting out in Israel that a lot of people hadn't heard about. Great founder, great technologist, and it was called Checkpoint. Check Point Technologies had just started coming out of an offshoot of the Israeli military. And here was the question that I got from he didn't have the CIO title but our senior most IT leader and he said, would you bet this company on a vendor that has at the time like 25 employees? And my reaction to that was, well, as you start looking at the risks, why do you think it's so risky? Because right now you're dependent on one person right here with a box underneath their desk. I think this is a step forward. And oh, by the way, they're going to put money and dollars into ongoing research so that they can grow their product line and eventually it's something that's scalable over the next couple of years.

So it turned out to be a good bet.

It turned out to be a good pick. There are other examples. Servicenow. Rightnow. A bunch of others that I was very early on and I was trying to think of one that didn't work out very well.

Can you make sure it's not a greylock portfolio company? That'd be great.

Well, so I won't mention names. Okay. But when I was at Las Vegas Sands, we decided that one of the great opportunities of productivity and efficiencies. And those of you who have ever been to a large hotel or casino can relate to this. It's the valet area. Valets basically take your car, go to a garage, park it, run back, and then either park another car or go pick up a tag. And we just said, boy, big, huge property, lots of cars. Pretty inefficient. Isn't there a way to automate it? And there was a vendor that came up with an auto valet system. And it was basically an iPad based system that as they took one car back to the garage, they could look on their iPhone or their iPad and they could see which car to pull from the garage to bring back. So an efficiency. Look at that.

Right?

Look at that. Right. After spending several months doing that, we discovered a couple of things. One, parking garages are really notorious for dropped cell zones.

Turns out GPS hard.

GPS hard. Normally you don't have WI fi there either. So connectivity, small little problem. Secondly, your average valet doesn't follow directions very well. And then third, the entire platform didn't work on the back end. So we had spent a year plus we had put kiosks in, we got everybody excited and the whole thing crashed and burned. And now if you go to Las Vegas Sands property is Venetian Palazzo in Las Vegas. There is no auto valet system. Valet runs back and forth.

There we go.

Awesome. You know, I don't know that we would, in my past life, I have to use that example, be considered a bleeding edge adopter. What I would say is there was a criteria around where we would get in early. And for us it was in the area where we were needing to innovate within the company. So if we had a team that was trying to push the envelope, and I would say in our translational sciences area, there's a fine line when the data that you're generating around patients and how a drug is going to metabolize in their system, whether a drug is going to work where you're generating that data. To learn more about the drug. And then there's a point in time where you're generating that data because it's going to contribute to your file, to the fda and the difference in how you have to treat that data. What you can do over here in terms of applying new technologies to learn about modeling and going faster and what you can do over here, and the level of rigor that you have to show and document it, et cetera, that you're doing the right thing with the data for patients in this space right here, we found that taking advantage of capabilities like Amazon workspaces, applying Docker to some of what we were doing to new modeling software that was relatively new off the press, we had a problem solving. We were very early in, and I think pretty early in even for some of those companies using those as test cases. And that team was working with my infrastructure team. My infrastructure team had some, I think, pretty wicked smart people over there as well, who knew as we were building out our private cloud, we wanted to go hybrid at some point, but we had some gaps to fill. One of them was a pure storage gap, for example, so, so, boy, it's great that we can do all this virtualization with VMware, but you know what, you run into storage and all of a sudden you got a problem. And it was a storage data intensive problem that we had around genetics. So as we started to see new entrants come in that we could try out in these more innovative space, we were all over it. And once we proved it out in that space, we were able to scale it up.

So a couple things, couple themes. One is, you know, understand the business the company's in and not come to you when you were at Amgen and say, you know, yeah, that's a federally regulated, you know, part of your business. No problem, we'll go right in and rip the guts out.

Right?

Never do that, but find more innovative spaces. Second, you know, probably also, how do you find, you know, folks in large companies that you think might be more forward leaning to technology? Someone in this audience, how did they find someone who's willing to take a risk?

Like, what do you, what do you do?

I think today it's a lot easier. It's been an interesting phenomenon over the last 10 years. Almost every large company, CxO, is spending time out here because they've said, hey, this is where innovation happens. This is where people are thinking about cool thoughts. And it's in two ways. One is, yes, I want to know what you're all working on. So, so that I can bring it into my company so we can benefit it. That's one. Secondly, I also want to know what you're working on because you might be working on something that's competitive and I'd like to get ahead of that. So if you've got something really cool, great, great exit opportunity, by the way. Right. Or something that I need to make sure that we're thinking about as well as an offset if we're not in an acquisition mode. So that is facilitating a lot more conversations and discussions at senior levels. Now most of the senior teams bring the folks who are in the details, who actually understand more of the technology on the day to day perspective and they'll be your interaction points. So I don't think it's any more that difficult to identify who it is. The challenge inside any large enterprise. And Diana will, I'm sure, will comment on it as well. Large enterprises are geared towards one thing which is we keep the machine going. You keep the machine going by making sure you don't take too much risk. Which means the innovators suddenly find themselves boxed in. And the challenge for us is how do we free them up, how do we allow them to do what they are good at and so that we can get that benefit versus shutting it down. And there are a lot of times where I've met former colleagues of mine who were some of the most entrepreneurial innovators in large corporations and suddenly you find them kind of, you know, your average run of the mill manager. Not because their passion is gone, it's just their immediate reaction most of the time is the company has just beat it out of me. It's just gotten too difficult.

Yep, fair enough. He's got some questions.

Ask a hard one.

Exactly.

Just on the spot.

All right, who's an entrepreneur who wants to pitch these guys? 30 seconds. This is unbelievable. There we go, Michael, go. 30 seconds, Michael. You're getting a.

You get a picture, a question.

Ah, darn it.

How often are you in.

How often are you in board meetings? And then this is related to my business. How often does the board ask about information security?

Oh, gosh. Okay. Should I take that one first or would you like to.

By all means, yeah.

I am in front of the board every quarter talking about information security. It is absolutely one of the hot topics these days and out there. So boards are very interested. Does that mean that the boards necessarily understand some of what's going on in the space? No. And so it's part of our role is to educate and make sure that they understand risk factors. The media doesn't help. There was a phishing alert that went out recently from the IRS that got everybody spun up. But yeah, there's a lot of emphasis, lot of interaction with the board. The good news is just in keeping with the question around how the CIO's role has changed. While, yes, the primary topic is cybersecurity, we're also able to take that and talk about other things that we've usually never gotten in front of the board with. So outside of cybersecurity, we can start talking about other things in the IT landscape, other things that we're doing to drive business value, which normally we have not had the opportunity to do. Do that.

I would ask, especially those of you that are in here, that are in the cybersecurity space, how many of you are familiar with an organization called nacd, National Associated Corporate Directors, and you know they have a cybersecurity handbook. Yeah. So that right now is the vehicle that's being used to teach board members. Right. What questions they need to ask. So it becomes a. An absolute must have for any organization to say, how are you going to help somebody answer those questions? And it's even dated, I think it's 2014. But at this point, I went to an event just two weeks ago where they were teaching board members how to ask questions about cybersecurity and they were still referring to that handbook. So for now, it's.

It's the Gartner Magic Quadrant for boards.

And that's again, why you have to take a look at and use it as an opportunity to educate a little further.

So good, that's great. Oh, good. So there seems to be a wave of workplace chat and messaging, displacing email or merging with email. So for Slack, Facebook at work, hipchat, things like that, that are also opening up app platforms, one of the challenges for developers out there, or startups is then, okay, do we still have to go through a heavy approval process? So how are you thinking about that approval process for apps on all these new platforms in the workplace?

So that's a hard question, so I'm glad you answered that one. This is my third of the three current areas of focus right now. Teams work the way teams want to work. And back to what's changed in the CIO role. Gone are the days where the CIO is going to pick the platform and everybody's going to be forced to use it. So I honestly think it's a terribly fragmented market right now. And the challenge is, you know, we got close to 4,000 people, I think, on Slack right now. We got people on chatter, you know, we got people using jabber and I quite frankly don't care what they're using. But what I do care about is when a new person comes in and we're hiring 15 of them this year, what do you tell them, right? What group are you working with? And if you're working with this group over here and they're all on Slack, great. But you need to work with that person over there and they're not. So for me, it's who's solving the meta platform problem for me so that I can figure out a way to allow these people to work the way they want to work, but still figure out how to connect them. And security has to be a piece of that. So quite frankly, I don't say security's a priority for me anymore because it's no longer sort of a bolt on thing that I have to think about. In addition to everything else, it has to be part of every decision we make as we think about how we engineer the environment. So I don't have the answer to that, but I tell you we've got some work to do there.

Because let me ask you this, are you open to apps on top of those platforms or not really?

I don't know how you solve for it. The same thing. There's the collaboration space, but there's also the content management space. Space that's been a problem ever since knowledge management was first the new new thing back in 1997. You get people who are comfortable and they know how to manage content in a certain place, but they can't find anything. Now, I know there's a lot of people out there working to help find things, but ultimately, if there was a platform that made it possible for those things to exist, but we can help people work together, that would be beautiful. Big problem to solve.

We talked about integrations before. This is part of the integration problem. People use what they're comfortable with. And I think one of the fantastic things about the consumerization of it, not that we used that word before, not that I necessarily like the word, but that is what is happening, is that you're beginning to see that what I think is useful for me does not necessarily mean it's useful for you. And if I'm really after productivity and efficiency gains, I should let you use what you're comfortable with, whether it's you as an individual, whether it's you as teams. My problem is what Diana said, which is how do I stitch these pieces together? How do I live within a jabber world and a Facebook at work world and a yammer world so that all of those seamlessly interact and again, take you in a little bit of the way back machine. The public IM systems had this problem a long time ago. There was aim, there was Yahoo Messenger. I forget everything else. And over time, people began to realize I can't grow my network anymore because I've kind of reached the natural saturation. The opportunity is for me to interlink the networks. And today we don't even think about that. I think that's what will happen with these platforms inside. Now to your question around. What do I think about building apps off of it if there's information that's useful for people locked into those platforms? Absolutely. Build as many apps as you possibly can. Because I care about the information, I don't care about the app, I don't care about the platform. But I do have to think again. I don't want 10 different platforms because now I've got information in silos. That's a problem I did away with 15 years ago. If I see it coming, I want to make sure I'm out ahead of that.

So it's Lotus Notes.

It's Lotus Notes, yeah. Which, by the way, I still have Lotus Notes. I've been trying to kill it off.

But it's still there.

Are you joking?

Are you serious? Not serious. It was one of the first questions I asked when I took the job 18 months ago. I go, I was talking about something about tech debt and how do you move out of it? And I go, you know, my last job, I still had Lotus Notes here. And somebody goes, yeah, we still have Lotus Notes.

That's awesome.

And for 18 months we have a project to eliminate Lotus Notes. And there's one sticking point. I still have Lotus Notes. Nice. Lotus Notes.

Sorry, welcome to enterprise cio.

Exactly.

That's the part of, of the game, right? You know, interesting in hearing you answer some of those conversations, taking things in.

A little bit different direction. What are your challenges or what are your opportunities that you see with regards to open source projects versus proprietary software.

And, you know, how you evaluate.

Obviously, there's a lot of companies that are coming up with new technologies that are approaching it from an open source perspective that are coming in with, you know, a freemium model that maybe then.

Equates to an enterprise license.

What are you excited about in that space? But then also what are you kind of wary of and what does that lead to from a Support perspective and things like that.

Yeah. So I'll give it a go. So I think at the highest level, the more open source we can go, the better. So that's a high level and that's a utopian statement for me to get comfortable that signing up for an open source platform or way of doing what we do is taking on the appropriate amount of risk. Ultimately, for me personally, it comes down to who are the people who are telling me that that's the right place for us to be doing the work and informing me on what the risk is. Because when it comes to a lot of what's happening in that space out there, I'm not a technical expert. So what I have to do is surround myself with a team of people that have proven they are and when they come and tell me, hey, this is a place for us to be doing our work and you know what, we don't need to do X, Y or Z anymore because we can do it all over here. It really comes down to placing my trust in them and if there's an opportunity to not only use it, but contribute to it. I've got millennials in my organization and this is what jazzism, right? All of a sudden they're making a difference, they're having an impact, they're building their skill set and they're getting over time, they're feeling really good about the work that they're doing, contributing to something that's a greater good. So that's a very generic answer, but that's sort of the way I think about it.

Did I mention I downloaded firewall software? So I'm a big open source proponent and definitely think there are the right times and the right, right places to use it. The challenge in a non tech enterprise is I don't have the staff and the staffing levels to do everything. I would need to make sure that I have the risks properly balanced and open source and the example I give people and I'll tie it to like Amazon web Services. If I ran my entire transactional environment on AWS and AWS goes down, who do I call? Because I guarantee you, the CEO is calling me, the CFO is calling me, the head of sales is telling me exactly how many millions of dollars of sales we are losing every hour. And for me to go, I emailed them and logged the ticket is not the right answer. So when you start looking at open source code, if I don't know that I can pick up the phone and get premier level support who understands my business as being heavily disrupted That's a risky place for me to be unless I have the team behind me from an engineering standpoint, which we will never build that kind of an organization out. So that's one of the concerns. But does that mean that Open Source will never make it? No. Look at Red Hat. Red Hat is open source. Great contributions, probably from several of you, even in this room, but it gives me somebody to call when I have an issue. So matching those two up is really kind of the best of both worlds for me as I start looking at the opportunities in Open source. Again, that's from an enterprise perspective in small, discrete testing environments. Obviously. Yes, Open Source definitely has a role to play. Unfortunately, I don't again have the engineers to contribute back to it. So we're more leeches in that way.

What is an open source project you've either implemented sort of at the enterprise level at Clorox, or at least thinking about, is there one?

Well, there isn't one. There honestly isn't one.

So like Docker? Not even in the game?

No. Well, and that really is one of the other challenges I have again, 100 plus year old company, you know, we're on so called legacy platforms. I don't have a large team who understands all this. So sometimes in a meeting I'll be going like, okay, hey, what are we doing with Hadoop? What are we doing with Cassandra? And people look at me, I've got like two heads. What the hell is a Cassandra? I think I've heard of Hadoop. And when I talk about Docker, they're like, that's a pant, right? Levi's makes Docker. So it's part of the challenge of education now, I would imagine inside Workday, it's probably a little bit different.

Yeah. And I actually hired one of Microsoft's cloud engineers in my world back at Amgen, and bringing him in, he. He brought in the right people. It wasn't a huge team, but it was a highly skilled team and I just learned to trust him.

Cool.

Michael.

Wow. I had a question a few times ago. Now I got comments and questions. I don't know how to roll this all up, but just recently on Open Source, I don't know how you could even think about running an IT shop without Open Source for no other reason than just attracting the best talent. And I find it hard to believe you're not at least running Linux on some workload someplace.

If not, then the gauntlet has been thrown.

Check with me in six months and then I can give you an answer. I will feel better about but wrapping.

Up the open source thing and that kind of Slack and messaging and bot conversations, everything else. One of the big changes I've seen is that kind of the rise of developers. And I really say it's the golden age of developers. And clearly, at least my philosophy is if I can do a SaaS, you know, best of breed, I'm going to do SaaS. If not, then or if I really can drive competitive advantage, I'm going to write custom software and I'm going to deploy it in the cloud and that's all open source. I mean that's where the whole innovation and the agility and the speed and everything is happening. So that's just kind of my comment on the open source thing, on the Slack and Hipchat and Facebook at work and all those kinds of things. The world of CIOs have changed so much. Five plus years ago it was all locked down. There was not very little shadow it, you know, I had complete control. I could shut you off or block you or, you know, whatever. Those days are long gone. And so now I think it's really shifted to a get visibility with a CASB or some kind of thing where you actually see what's really happening on your network. And the days of, you know, link or jabber or whatever being your standard instant messaging thing are once again long gone. I mean there's probably a dozen different ones that run on my network, but I find that as there's a rise, especially Slack, it just blew me away how quickly that was being, you know, kind of integrated into our systems. And so I view that as an opportunity to go find out and discover what's going on. And I really found an enlightening thing and the integration with Slack and the fact that it's kind of enterprise centric, so I get enough of the security, enough of the things that make it a good thing. Similar, I think the way, no, I won't say this, it's not a great lot company you're allowed to box is more enterprise than say Dropbox.

Absolutely.

My philosophy is to go try to make that first and best and then evangelize it. But don't say no, don't block, don't stop innovation. And then the other thing is in my company, they're 56% of the employees are millennials and they just like don't do email, they won't use a lot of our corporate systems. They just flat out won't do it. And you can't force them to. So you have to Kind of go where they're going and that's where I think a lot of these Slack type things that are coming in. The enterprise addresses millennials. So last thing I want to say, based on your question about company startups that maybe didn't work out and ones that did for us, Awake Networks has been a great thing where early on we got exposure at Greylock and we've already gotten a lot of value out of this and I think it's been a win win situation. Here's my nightmare scenario. Here's the thing that keeps me up at night with companies like that. They got acquired by some big horrible company and they ruin it. So I'm curious if you guys have any comments. It's probably great as an exit for you guys, but for me as the.

Customer, if I'm depends on the valuation.

So anyways, just if you have any comments on companies that maybe have been acquired and think back to like Computer Associates or those.

Yeah, no, actually where I came from, again, workday, obviously our founders lived that in a prior life. So there's no question that on the minds of everyone, every day is like hell, is that ever going to happen again. Right. And the company that I came from though, especially as we started to enter into the, into the space of being able to try some of the newer startups, we just built that into our assessment up front about what's the likelihood that this company would be acquired and what would we do about it. And we built that into our risk plan and we would make a go forward decision knowing that we had an informed risk that the likelihood this was going to happen might be greater than 50% or not. And we had a backup plan.

So yeah, I mean, I, I can't even count the number of companies that got acquired by one of four that I was not happy with. And of course the acquisition always goes along the line of, well, we love this business, that's why we acquired it. And we're going to take it slow and we're not going to touch them for a period of time. And then, you know, 18 months later you get the new roadmaps that are all integrated, the sales team have left, the engineering teams have left, et cetera. And as Diana said, I mean, it's just the way of the world world. And in fact, I actually take the philosophy of if it's a really hot company that's doing something really, really unique, chances are probably very high it's going to get acquired. Especially if I think some of the bigger players can't Innovate quickly enough, it's the easiest way for them. They buy the innovation. So you bake it into your plan and you just say, I'm going to keep an eye on it and I'm going to put in whatever mitigations I can to, to work around it. So again, I'll beat a dead horse. But integration, integration, integration. If I've got the right integration platform, hopefully I can swap out application A with application B. As long as I've done data migration well enough. And half the time my business doesn't even understand that something happened. In fact, we just did that with an application where we stopped doing business with vendor A. We're going live on Monday with vendor B. Except for the user interface, which is to going, going to be exponentially better for the end users. They don't even know that anything has happened.

That integration point is really interesting and I'll get to you in a second, but I was on the phone today with a university and they're basically IT advisory board, if you will, and they're looking at a essentially untested sort of new alumni social place. How do they think about engaging their alumni with their students in different ways. Ways, right. And they're looking at a soft piece of software that, you know, coincidentally we have a very small investment in. But they basically ask the question like, well, what if the company goes like, they like to say paws up, you know, to me, look, we get that question all the time. And one, I just think all of you guys got to think about that because you are going to face that question at some point, right? You know, and yes, there's the obvious answer like oh, well, escrow the code for some period of time or you know, but I actually do think your point about how do you think about the integration point for the data? And that really is the main thing because all the other things they were like, what about the financial risk? And I was like, look, if you're their first customer and they think there's lots of you like them out there, guess what, that will never get in the way of the first customer. So there's a bunch of stuff that's really solvable and you guys can solve all that, but there are some hard questions in there about the data and the integration and kind of the effort that was put into your, your product that may be lost. I think those are the interesting questions you guys should really think about and have a really good answer for. For when Diana or Manjit or someone says, hey, what happens if.

Right?

So you Both talked about data quite a bit in initial discussion. So I think about it from a data driven, decision making perspective. And, you know, we as an organization spend a lot of time mulling over data and actually making decisions based on that. How are you solving this problem? And I'll take it a little bit broadly, like for a consumer, you're helping the consumer drive faster, more precise decisions. As an example in Clorox for HR person, you're using the data in meaningful ways to actually recruit better or to actually find the right candidate and actually find that candidate can stay with the company longer than expected. Right. Any meaningful difference there, any percentage meaningful difference can make a huge difference to the company. So how are you solving that problem? Both from real time analytics standpoint, but also predictive analytics standpoint.

So I'll take a stab at that. I'm going to have to use my past life because I haven't done anything yet in the new life. So in the past life, I would posit that a life sciences company is as much a data company as it is a medicine company, because the medicine's not worth much if you don't know what works with it. And the big challenge in that industry right now is it's one of the few industries in the world where I can sell you a product, I can charge you $100,000 a year for it, and if it doesn't work right, you don't get your money back. So the challenge in that industry is how do we get at the repository of data that's out there, understand where it comes from, and figure out how to solve that challenge. And when you have big problems like that, and we're working in the genetics space and we're trying to find these human validated genetic targets, and then we're trying to find the right protein that's actually going to interdict that target. And then we're trying to find a patient population and understand the physiological differences and the genetic differences between them. That breaks that population down further. And then we're trying to figure out how you're going to manufacture the product in the right sizes in a way that you're able to target the patient when you have big data problems like that and an organization that's got a lot of quants in it, for lack of a better word, it creates a really fun conversation about what you can be doing in that space. And, and so the notion of predictive, the notion of. And you have scientists that actually don't like to share data. So how do you even start at the foundational of what's the common syntax and ontology for data that's going to allow us to put it together? The opportunity is in a multitude of layers. And so what we did is we found parts of our value chain, for lack of a better word, where we had people who could got it. So we had plenty of statisticians, but we didn't have very many decision or data scientists. So where we had these data scientists, we partnered with them and we said, what's the biggest problem you have to solve? One of those problems was $100 million in raw material loss every year. Because the supply chain in that industry, you're accountable for every single supplier in the supply chain from the raw material all the way through the point that it shows up in a syringe for someone. So how can you better understand what's in that supply chain and find a problem before the problem's going to occur and you have to withdraw the product? When you have people who are passionate around that, you solve that problem. And when we solve that problem, we made sure that the people that were solving that problem were working with the other places in the organization that got it. Completely different spaces. And we said, we solved this problem this way. It was a method. It was also a set of technology and skills. And we slowly but surely just started to create this ripple effect through the organization that had to do with. We used the data lake concept, for example. Data lakes were great because you didn't have to curate the data, right? You just threw it all in there and people just got to go explore. But the exploration allowed them to develop a hypothesis. The hypothesis then said, hey, I think there's a correlation between these things. And then once we had the correlation, we then said, well, to get to that X level, you got to curate the data a little bit. And so we started, you know, we found ways to get people excited, connected with one another, around what the possibilities were. And then that allowed us to start driving the discipline where we needed to. We didn't have a, you know, we're only going to have one of this kind of analytics tool. And one of the. We tried pretty much. No, it's not. It's impossible to do that. It felt like we tried every single new analytics tool that hit the market because there were so many opportunities there. So I can't say it's a right answer. But finding the big problems and starting there and then allowing that to create awareness in the organization, move the whole organization forward, helped.

I think, Danny, you've clearly got some Italian in you.

You've got the hands going.

Good. This is good.

So I will tell you, we've been trying to solve that problem for decades. I don't like the term big data because we've all been dealing with data for many, many years. We used to call it business intelligence. 10, 15 years ago. Nothing has really changed other than our ability to collect ever more data and put it in data lakes. So the technology has changed, but the data collection process has just only been enhanced. What I found is much like what Diana was saying. You find those key areas where making decisions based upon analytics, whether predictive or not, is going to be meaningful to the business. There's way too much data that we're collecting that actually has absolutely zero value to anybody. And we kind of know that. And we have experts inside the company who know what we can be doing. So if I'm talking to a finance person, they have a different viewpoint of what they need to see in order to be predictive about the business. Sales is going to have a different viewpoint, Marketing, a third, et cetera. So we look to say in each one of the discipline areas, where can we make the most difference in building out systems and capabilities. So we do have a little bit of everything, because what works for marketing, again, is going to be different than works for finance and et cetera. So it's almost a period of mini experimentation. The one thing that we have across the board is data scientists, because these are the super smart people who can figure out the right algorithms, who can figure out what else is going on outside of the company in terms of analytics and algorithms, machine learning, all that stuff, and pull that in and then start applying it across the way. But, you know, an example I've used, we use analytics for one of our mobile applications called the flu tracker. So it's a nifty little thing that'll tell you where the flu is going to show up next. Why is it good for our business? It's good for our business because we can make sure that that region, that area is fully stocked with Clorox disinfecting wipes and everything else. So, you know, we won't experience any out of stocks. Good for you. Because if you happen to be traveling to one of those areas, you might be on a heightened alert that you're going to collect the flu, and so you'll be buying some Clorox disinfectant wipes before you go. Interestingly, we were collecting weather data from the entire continental United States and we were throwing it in a huge Data lake. And we were trying to do predictive analytics and I was sitting in a meeting and I go, well, so how often do you see the flu in Southern California and Southern Texas? Who cares what the answer is? It's statistically irrelevant. So why am I collecting this data? Why am I taking processing time to go through that? And that starts freeing up some of the folks to start thinking differently about the data that we're collecting. And again, that impact that it's having.

Cool. All right, so I think I've got any. One last question. I think we have one more. Yeah, it's a follow up question to.

The data lake discussion. So one of the challenges that I've.

Seen is when you throw a whole.

Bunch of unstructured data from a bunch.

Of different business units is it's hard.

To understand what data is actually there and how to find the data that you need unless you have the context behind it.

Right. So it'd be great if you could.

Speak to some of your experiences of how you manage those challenges in your organization.

Yeah, so I would say we actually didn't put data from across the whole business. And one data lake, we had these. Affinity is the only term that I use. I think that's an outdated architecture term.

But we'll go showing my age.

Right. So where we knew that there was a body of data that when we brought it together that would solve a business need, that's what ended up going into the data lake. So I'll give you for instance, in this area called center for Outcomes Research, we had about 150 electronic health records that we were able to pull in fully anonymized for those of you that would be concerned about that. Then we also brought in some of the early drug metabolism data and we said, ok, that could be very interesting to tie with the health record data because we had a population health problem, we had a targeted genetics problem that we solved through decode. But when you got to a point where you could target the genetic anomaly with protein, you still had a patient population that didn't respond the same way. So we said, here's a problem, here's a body of data that allows us to go in and mine what we're looking for. We didn't pull the manufacturing data and the marketing data in there because then to your point, it just becomes this problem, technology problem that's looking for a solution. So I hope that helps.

So you almost need like a product person level view of hey, what data could help solve this or could potentially be looking at all right, cool. Well, look, I've gotten the cut it sign. But first off, obviously, Manjid, Diana, thank you so much. Been great to kind of ask questions and get your knowledge and more importantly, hopefully spur some conversation that will continue for the rest of the afternoon and evening. So thank you very much. Give them a little round of applause.