(upbeat music)
- Welcome to "Conversations With Leaders."
I'm Bryan Landerman and I'm an AWS enterprise strategist.
And I'm joined today by Jack Berkowitz.
the chief data officer at ADP.
Jack, thanks for joining me. - Thanks.
I'm really happy to be here.
- So tell me a little bit about your role.
- I kind of have a three-faceted role.
On the one hand,
it's really about protecting the information, right?
So putting a strong data governance
around the data that we have and managing that.
The second side, which I spend a lot of time on
and really get energized about is building products
using that information on behalf of our clients, right?
And so we have people-analytics products,
we have other data products that we build
and I have a big engineering team that does that.
And my third thing is really about
creating a data-literacy culture inside of the company.
We're dealing with a lot of client data,
I mean, data's our middle name,
which is kind of corny, but true,
and so we're all about making sure
that everybody in the organization,
all 58,000 associates, understand information,
and I really enjoy that marketing side of things as well.
- Yeah, so that culture is a challenge
for a lot of customers
where data has typically kind of been siloed and protected
and it's prevented us from really getting value out of it.
So how are you approaching that?
What are you doing differently?
- Well, I'm not sure
that we're doing anything drastically differently.
But what we are doing
is putting the knowledge of governance around things
so everybody understands.
We don't want it to be siloed.
We want people to be able to use the information they need
and at the same time, we need to protect it, right?
'Cause it's data about people or data about clients
and you wanna make sure
that it's well understood, it's respected, you know?
And so, we have processes
and methods that we've put in place,
but at the same time, we also bring it together
and make it accessible.
And so we're really spending an awful lot of time
about getting it into a single global-data platform,
getting all the data lineage there,
getting the data rights on top
so that people that need to use it
either for internal analysis or to build product
or to service clients
'cause we have a large number of our team servicing clients,
that they can get that information really quickly.
- Yeah, that makes sense.
And I know you've been focusing a lot
on diversity, equity and inclusion,
really for your customers, given your data sets.
So what's that journey been like?
- Well, it's been interesting, right?
There's a need in society, there's a need in the US
to continue to push forward
with creating an inclusive environment for everybody.
Right?
And the first way you do that is by measuring it.
If you can't measure it, then you have no idea
if you're actually making improvements
to people's situation or not.
And so a large portion of what we're doing
right now with that is providing client companies
the ability to measure how they're doing.
And not only to measure it internally,
but then to use benchmarks
so that they can compare themselves to other companies.
Right? - I love that. Yeah.
- And are they doing well
in creating environments for people?
And that's not just bringing people in,
but are they also creating opportunities for people
to thrive and grow inside their organization?
- I couldn't agree more.
I think that baseline is really important
and I know you're creating that baseline
in a way that's keeping it
really relevant to that customer
so that you're not just comparing them globally, but to-
- Exactly.
Right to the location where they happen to be,
to the industry, to the size of the company, right?
And again, we wanna make it
so that they can understand it quickly.
You know, not a lot of people
actually know everything about statistics or numbers,
so we wanna be able to make it
so that it tells a story for them and they can take action
because if they do wanna change things,
well, they don't know what to do.
So we have advice, we have expertise
right there in our product
so that they can take some action.
- That's fantastic.
And so obviously focus on helping your customers
in this space.
What's that look like internally for your organization?
- It's a great question.
So, as we build software, we run it on ourselves.
We have 58,000 people around the world, right?
- It's a good test bed. - It's a good test bed.
It's a really good test bed.
And you know, some of the things that we do
come from our ADP Research Institute
which is sort of a nonprofit we have inside the company.
Some of it comes internally,
and then we implement some of those programs.
One of the things that we've been doing lately
in my engineering team is providing people opportunities
that maybe, under some critical way,
well, they don't have all the Xs and Os to make that happen
but you give 'em an opportunity to thrive and to shine.
And this idea that people have to be given
that opportunity to rise
is something that we see in the research,
we can see it in the data,
so we're actually practicing it internally
and it is yielding wonderful results,
you know? - Yeah, I love hearing that.
And you're right, we all have a role to play in this
and so it's great to...
Visibility is step one,
so having those metrics and being able
to keep track of it is important.
- Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
You know, again, I run data programs, right,
but I look across the corporation
and a lot of our data projects,
the leaders are actually women
and that's fantastic.
Right? - It is.
- And so we're really seeing the benefits there.
The company has a strong reputation
for really being a place
to attract diverse talent and cultivate
and it's something we believe in strongly as a company
so it's really great to be able to contribute the data side
of that to the company's story.
- So you're harnessing all of this data.
How are you re-architecting your data in the cloud?
- That's a great question.
So, in mid 2019, we kind of stepped back and we were looking
at how we were processing the data on-prem.
And we had, you know, sort of a lot of problems
just managing the demand of it all, right?
Like, to get time on the systems,
we had engineers staying up to two and three in the morning,
just to timeshare, right, to schedule jobs.
So we stepped back, we worked with AWS and we said,
"Hey, we want to move our data into the cloud."
And we did it for three really important reasons.
The first thing was to be able
to get that elasticity of demand.
The second thing was to take advantage
of all the innovation, right?
So I could take advantage of the new things from SageMaker
or whatever it happened to be, very quickly.
And the third thing
was to really, really focus on the culture
and we started to do that
and we were kind of doing it for a while and then COVID hit.
And, you know, it was interesting.
We had just gone live with our very first capability
in February of 2020. - Oh wow.
- And because we process all that data about the workforce
and about pay, well, by the end of March,
we had to be up and running with reports
and all these other capabilities
to help really get our company operating
but really, loans and small business capabilities
to all thousands and tens of thousands of businesses.
And that really drove an awareness
about how we could use the cloud for innovation.
And now what you see us doing is innovating very quickly.
So the diversity dashboards
that I talked about this morning on stage
and then we just talked about here,
those things came to be in a very short period of time
because people are now thinking about data,
they're able to innovate and they're able to get access
to the capabilities very quickly.
- I love that and I think that that cultural piece
is such a big part.
You have to kind of see what's possible
to then start thinking differently
about how you can approach things
and innovate, yeah. - That's right.
That's right, and so now we have this explosion of ideas.
And really, our challenge,
and I think it's a challenge of the industry,
is how do we put a governance around the data,
the security, the privacy, the ethics
of using that information.
We've stood up an AI and data ethics board at ADP
both for internal participants,
as well as we have some external experts on that
to help us really think through the use of the information
so that we're doing it properly.
And you know, putting the right governance frameworks,
and I keep using that phrase.
It so important as we move forward.
And it's actually...
You know, taking the time to put that in place,
actually increases our pace overall.
- Mm. Yeah, I mean, right.
Having the guardrails and kind of knowing
what those guardrails are does actually create more speed
than you might think. - Yeah, right.
You know, people think, "Well, if I'm gonna do that,
I'm gonna slow down."
It's exactly the opposite.
If you do that, you have it structured,
people can get to it, and then you feel confident
so you can actually execute very quickly.
- Awesome.
Well, Jack, sounds like you guys
are making a real difference for your customers
and your company with your data platform.
Thanks so much for joining me today.
I appreciate it. - Thank you.
It's been great being here.
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