>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE,
covering Interconnect 2017.
Brought to you by IBM.
>> Okay, welcome back everyone,
we're live in Las Vegas for IBM Interconnect 2017,
this is theCUBE's three-day coverage, we're in day two,
wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE, I'm John Furrier,
with my co-host, Dave Vellante.
Our next guest is Jason Kelley, Vice President,
he's a partner at IBM's Global Business Solutions,
GBS Solutions and Design,
part of the group that brings it all together
in the digital transformation for IBM.
Welcome to theCUBE.
>> Grand to be here, thanks for having me.
>> So, we were just talking about South by Southwest,
before we kicked on the cameras,
and you guys had a huge presence there.
But you're an interesting part of IBM,
and I want you just to make a minute to explain what you do,
because everyone talks about,
"Oh UX design, you're going to develop the future,"
it's a lot more complicated than just saying UX design.
>> That's true, very true. >> There's some work involved,
so take us through what this
design experience concept's about, and how does it work,
and why everyone's so buzzed-up about it,
'cause it's gettin' a lot of traction.
>> Great question to start with,
and I always get to spin that then back to you.
So as you said UX, first thing that came out,
you said design and UX, so tell me,
when you hear design, what do you think of?
Do you think of cool ties, jackets, what do you think?
>> I don't know, a nice cube setup with good user--
>> A couple good lookin' guys. >> Interface on the website.
>> I was thinking devices. >> Dave's tie.
>> I think of cool visuals, right?
I think of movies, actually.
>> Okay, okay.
So, they are things that give you some type of experience.
>> Dave: Yeah, they create a feeling inside,
an emotion, it's a motive. >> All right, okay.
So, now we're headed in that direction.
So take that emotion piece, set that to the side,
and think about what also came out, you said device,
so it's something that you use.
And often when you say design now,
they think of the wonderful things like--
>> John: The iPhone.
>> You got it, iPhone.
They say, "Oh, what wonderful design."
That design evokes emotion.
And so, when we think of emotion,
take that and put that into business,
and think about creating an elegant solution
for the outcomes of the end user in a business.
So, you have a business that has a problem,
they need to solve it,
and you want to create a solution that evokes emotion.
So that as they experience,
like you can't set down that phone,
we don't want them to set down their IBM solutions,
that's the type of design that I'm talking about.
>> Jason, this is interesting,
Dave and I always talk about this in theCUBE
when we get into this kind of like,
get into The Cloud and look down at the world,
the computer industry has always been centered on
how many users do you have?
I mean user, are you a drug user?
What kind of user are you?
It's the consumer, right?
So, now you're really getting at the heart
of design transcending computer, a user on a terminal.
They're all consumers.
So this is kind of the new normal.
>> That's right, the new norm is,
the consumer, meaning the focus.
We'll go back to your phone, you think about
this consumable capabilities and that consumption.
You think back when we thought were cool
and you would say, "This is my home office,
"and I've got my fax machine here and I've got my--
>> John: A pager!
>> "I've got my pager, I've got my telephone,
"I've got all these things."
>> My stereo.
>> You had all those, and now...
Here it is.
And who did this?
This is the consumer.
And so, having consumable solutions
that a consumer would be excited about,
but taking that to the enterprise, at scale.
At scale, did I send someone a great text there?
>> No, I was just plugging in.
(Jason and John laughing)
>> So that you have to--
>> It's got a cognitive energy in it, so it's designed well.
(all laughing)
>> Honey, bring me more milk and bread.
What we do from a consumability perspective is just that:
how do you make sure that you have consumer grade solutions
that the enterprise can enjoy?
Right?
So that is key, and this is what you pivot around.
>> One of the things that we also were watching last week,
we were at the Big Data event that we had in Silicon Valley,
you can judge 'em as Strata Hadoop is,
the collision course between the big data world
which tends to be analytics:
Watson's got cognitive, and then The Cloud,
you've got brute force blocking and tackling,
Cloud under the hood, hard IT problems,
in-production workloads;
and then you have the cool, sexy, sizzley web app,
and mobile apps, creativity, kind of comin' together.
So, on one hand you got creativity, you have energy,
you have emotions, all this kind of outcome-based
consumer thinking, and then you got the hard scaffolding,
the iron under the hood, like workloads, hard stuff.
So, how do you balance that
when you get into the Design Center?
It's not what people might think,
"Oh, they got the crazy ideas, and I'm going to do this,
"change the world," but at the end of the day
you got to go implement it, so take me through that process.
>> So you think about implementation, and we have,
here over the last four years,
established 26-plus IBM Design Studios globally.
And our clients love to come to those studios
because they get to talk about what you're asking me here,
"Look we have all these things, these piece parts,
"some things new, some things legacy.
"How do I take this, and how do I tie it all together?"
They usually come with these business challenges and say,
"Look, I have a front office, and a back office,
"and I'm tyin' to get all this," we go "Wait a second.
"What you've just described is really one office,
"and in that one office,
"at the center of all those challenges are data, typically."
And you're tryin' to figure out,
"How can I make this data work?"
And then, as soon as you solve that problem you say,
"Wait a minute, then there's business process,
"that's working between the front office,
"and the back office, and this middle office."
And then "Oh wait, there's also then some regulation
"that I have to worry about."
So now, you have this crashing
of these different capabilities, you have this challenge
of saying, "How do I make the business architecture,
"work with the technical architecture,
"work with my human architecture?"
And that's where design comes in,
that's where you begin to weave those things together
by understanding how each one of those
diverse pieces of the business work in harmony.
>> So Jason, what are some of your favorite examples
of an outcome that drove business value?
>> I'll use a great example, and it was one with a client
I was just havin' a wonderful dinner with last night,
the Bank of the Philippine Islands.
Banking has each one of these things that I've talked about:
trying be more nimble on the front end,
as well as having a very complicated,
and often regulated back end.
This wonderful, wonderful client of IBM said,
"Listen, could you come in
"and help me solve my data problem?
"Because we have a big data challenge."
I said, "Sure, well let's understand that,
"let's get under the covers of this data problem,"
in a design workshop with them,
walking them through their end users, their end users being
all the way through their enterprise,
our process realized, wait a minute,
it's not our data problem that we have,
it's a start-up problem.
We're always going to have a data problem,
but we can't run like a start-up, we can't move fast,
we're not as agile as we think we are.
We think we do DevOps,
but our DevOps hit separate from agile, and by the way,
this design-thinking thinking is great,
how do you weave all of that together?
What they found then in their start-up was
now that we know what our problem is,
you've wowed us, we're wowed.
But then, how do we execute?
We use this term, if I can wow you,
you will definitely then how me, right?
So how do we do this?
And this is where the design came in where we said,
"Look, now let's understand how you move like a start-up,"
which then did get under the covers with:
well we need a Cloud capability;
we need to have some tooling, like Bluemix,
where we can go ahead
and quickly assemble those things together;
and we need to understand how we can apply some of our
analytics, and maybe even cognitive, towards our clients.
So, that's something that started one way,
here's the problem, and it's data,
that really ended up another way.
And as they will tell you if you were to ask
Bank of Philippine Islands, they'd say,
"Listen, the design doesn't stop."
And what they've learned from us is that design never stops,
everything's a prototype in a sense,
and design only stops when the problem is solved.
And I can ask you, is the problem ever solved?
>> No, it's a moving train every day.
>> Jason: You're never done.
>> The Design Center, really Studio is a great idea,
I think it's phenomenal.
The question I want to kind of probe into is
how much of it is therapy for the customer to kind of,
"Doctor, am I okay?
"I think what's goin' on with me, can you look around me?"
'Cause they're lookin' from kind of that 360 blind spot,
and how to be innovative.
And so, you kind of rub their shoulders,
"You been doin' okay, you're going to survive,"
and then you got to wow them.
So before you wow them, you have to kind of
whip 'em into shape and get their perspective,
so how much of the percentage of time is
herding the cats in a therapeutic way?
Or is it not a factor to then,
when you get that momentum going?
Take us through the psychology of the buyer, your customer,
because I can almost imagine the opportunities
is somewhat intoxicating these days.
So you go, "Hey, I got pressure to go Cloud native,
"but I know it's going to be a disaster if I do."
>> You're on a great point, and I like the thought
of the therapy because look,
it is somewhat of a Dr. Phil moment that they have.
Where you sit back and what we find client after client
is that sure, we could tell them,
"Here are your pain points.
"We're IBM, we deal with thousands of clients every week,"
but that doesn't cause change.
I mean, you really have to change
in the way that you're acting, so you can't really,
we like to use this phrase--
>> Hit the playbook, run the offense.
>> That's right. >> You got to have the culture.
>> And you will have some people say
that you have to have a culture,
so you can't think your way into a new way of acting,
you have to act your way into a new way of thinking.
And so that's the process, is where you bring this discovery
by way of using the basics of empathy,
and this is design thinking,
in the core of its essence. >> Empathy, great word.
Business empathy is really the challenge because,
I hate to use the example of will the parachute open?
You know I always say to my kids,
"Pack your own parachute, learn how to pack a parachute."
Not that I tease that dangerous, but it can be,
I mean, security breaches are one of those things where
the blind trust that's out there, and some opportunities,
to Jenny's point on stage today, trust economy.
>> That's very true.
>> This could be a dangerous world,
so you don't want to just trust the parachute's going to open.
>> No, no, I will tell ya in a prior life I used a parachute,
I jumped Airborne Ranger, jumped out of planes,
and I always joked saying,
"Hey, no one is going to get shot out,
"or have to jump out of an airplane today,"
so it'll be fine.
Well, I can laugh and joke, but you're right because
you sit there and to any of our clients, it's not a joke.
That trust economy that we're in is reality,
and it has to be underlayed with the confidence
that we can bring that to--
>> Well Cloud, I have said The Cloud which underpins all this
is going to move at the speed of trust,
if you don't trust The Cloud, you're not going to use it.
>> Jason: Very true.
>> That example you gave, I want to go back to it,
'cause we talked about the emotion.
So, the emotion comes from what, the consumer experience?
You know the bank, that you gave that example.
So, take us through sort of what that outcome was, I mean,
it was the entire experience that was reimagined?
Is that right?
>> Well that's exactly,
the experience was when the diverse team across the bank
was in one room, and going through some of the
exercises we take them through
to use this empathy for the enterprise.
Not just for the individual, or design for a product,
this is design for an entire business.
As they sit there and they look across that,
what they got out of that was this thought that,
"Wait a second, this is very complicated
"for my part of the business.
"Oh but wait, your part of the business
"is having similar challenges, and oh, yours as well."
And then you have the aha moment you're like,
"Wait, we're all having similar challenges."
And this becomes the emotion, the emotion goes,
"Wait a second, you've just helped me see something
"that was right in front of me, it was right there."
Thank you, this is the Dr. Phil moment,
because then you say, "Oh well,
"then we're doing this together."
And you go, "Yes, now let us walk you through,
"walk you through walking us through
"what we might do together collaboratively,"
and that's where you get this new step change of action.
>> So, you're a business therapist,
but also can implement.
>> Right, because ultimately you have to make,
and we have these steps where we look at
how we walk through our cycle.
If you think of an infinity sign, we go through:
you must understand, reflect and make.
And we have those as stages of this infinity sign,
that you never stop going through those loops,
as we call it, the loop of understanding,
reflecting and making.
>> Jason, I want to talk about the,
you mentioned a Dr. Phil moment, this empathy,
really a legitimate thing that goes on but--
>> Yeah, you're going to think I'm Dr. Phil, right?
>> But also, a lot of customers I can imagine
are grounded in disappointment.
I mean, the way I felt when Duke lost in the March Madness,
I'm like, and then like, "Oh my God, how could they be out?"
I had them goin' all the way,
it kind of screws up the brackets.
So, like that's IT.
IT's a lot like, you know, you make a bet,
and sometimes it doesn't pan out, you got to be agile.
So coming into the disappointment,
clients come into the Design Center, probably with either
an itch they're scratching, I want to innovate,
and then problems that they're trying to solve,
which might be some baggage, some sort of issue.
Is there a pattern that you see
when you have prospects come through,
and clients come through the Design Center
that are consistent?
Like is there a trend, a trending chart,
like top three, stack-ranked,
issues fall into categorically, Cloud transformation,
Watson analytics, is there a trend line?
And by the way, did you have Duke to go all the way?
>> I thought they would.
In the trend that we see, there's some common things
that come to mind where a client will say,
"I want to move faster."
And none of these are going to be surprises:
I need to move faster, okay;
I need to be agile;
I would love to be more innovative;
I would like to take my innovation and put it in action;
how do I do all of there things?
And you'll find if you work with them you go, "So why?"
"Why?"
We play the game of 5-Whys, and eventually you get to
what the true, the true need is, and that true need is
to get to get an outcome very quickly,
they all have something right in front of them,
and it's to be agile, innovative,
and out in front of the market.
All of those things require
what you've already called-out with the technologies,
and they are just technologies,
the challenge is putting them in action.
>> So with the Whys, you get to the outcome,
that's the real pain point, and then you settle in
to a variety of solution architectural choices.
>> Yes, because that architecture battle,
as we hear from Jenny, it's going to be
the architecture battles on cognitive, on AI and data.
And finding those three areas,
that's where it has to be knit together.
>> Enterprise strong, data first, and cognitive to the core.
>> Well said. >> See, I was listening Jenny,
I've listened to all your words in your speech,
and I don't need Watson for that,
but I'll forget tonight after I have a few cocktails.
Jason, thank you so much for comin' on theCUBE,
appreciate the insight.
>> I appreciate the time.
>> Be safe jumping out of the airplanes.
>> All right, take care guys. >> Thanks so much.
More live coverage here from theCUBE after the show,
stay with us, some more interviews still on day two to come.
Great content here, great guests,
more after the short break.