I'm Jenny Schultz. I'm the senior director of data governance for KPMG. I am not client facing. I am actually internal to KPMG. So we're now eating our own cooking or drinking our own champagne if you will and doing data for ourselves instead of just for our clients. I've been to EDW and spoken there a few times but again I'm thrilled to be here at DJIQ. I flew in from DC yesterday so long flight and it's a little bit late for me but we're going to get through it. And I know I'm standing between you and tasty beverages so I will make sure to end on time. Alright so if you don't know who KPMG is we do have a global presence. We are colloquially unknown as one of the big four accounting firms. Again we have a large global presence. I'm here to talk to you about what we're doing in the United States. Again I lead the data governance program. I started in April of 2020 right at the height of COVID. It's been fascinating meeting stakeholders through video screens. I have not met one team member, one of the 20 team members that I have on my data governance team in person. It's been interesting but I think we've figured out a way to make it work. So before that before coming to KPMG I stood up the data governance program at Freddie Mac. I was successful there and thought okay let's do this on a larger scale. So here I am. Alright so that's KPMG. Let's talk about my department. We are data strategy and operations. We were born in 2019. My boss is Jody Morton. She's the chief data officer for the U.S. firm and actually just recently named the global chief data officer. She has two jobs which is awesome for her. So we're still relatively new right internal to KPMG. Like I said I started in April of 2020 standing up the data governance firm and I've been at the data literacy game at KPMG about nine months or so. So I want to talk to you about kind of what we've learned so far. You know what we think the robust components of a day literacy program are. Hopefully you'll gain some nuggets if you're thinking about starting a program or if you're in the middle of one. But after so after 2019 you know my boss started she was on a hiring spree right for the first you know make sure year or two. I feel like we're still on a hiring spree because people are still leaving right. There's so much movement in the data space or just in companies in general. And we got the leadership team together. She got the leadership team together and created our vision and our mission. We needed kind of a North Star. What are we working toward right with our in this department. So our vision is empowered people using the right data at the right time to produce insightful outcomes in a data driven culture. And that word culture is really important. Those of you who have been in data programs started data programs know that it is not mostly a data problem right. It is a people culture and change management problem. So that's what my data leadership team is focused on along with our mission right to enable trusted data for KPMG through market leading expertise and continuous innovation. So that's who we are. This is a one pager I call it the at a glance slide of our 100 plus page data strategy. And so starting from the bottom up just to give you some insight into kind of the full data program at KPMG. So we are at the bottom right the chief data officer in function. We are implementing the data strategy building the data supply chain which I'll talk to you about a bit more in a second and all of the governance standards processes operating models tools data assets you name it. We are there building these things or enhancing them so that we leverage data as an asset. At KPMG we've been talking about data protection for a long, long time which is awesome. It's a foot in the door. We haven't talked about value creation from data. So that's what we're working on next is kind of that next iteration. These eight areas are kind of our focus areas as part of our data strategy. So enhancing data literacy which is why I'm here today implementing data governance, clarifying confidentiality rules are a lot out there. Providing data quality accelerators, making sure we have that trusted data, creating a metadata source of truth. That's also in my team, establishing master data, driving third party content. We buy a lot of data at KPMG. So it's not just data from our clients. It's not just the data we produce to run the firm. We also buy a lot of data at KPMG. So we need to manage it. And then our foundational assets. So again, those centralized storage mechanisms that we maintain for the firm. So above that, those are our focus area. Above that is a high level view of our data supply chain, right? I'm sure you all have seen something similar or have something similar at your organization.  We are building that data supply chain. We're standardizing it, making it consistent, efficient, so that we can, again, get the data in the hands of the people who need it to do their jobs. And why do we exist? I mean, you know, it's probably motherhood and apple pie at this point. But we want to increase speed to market. I mentioned we are one of the big four, there's, you could also somewhat argue there's a big six out there too, if you include other companies like Accenture, for example. So we want to increase speed to market, provide the best products and services to our clients, while protecting the firm, and also improving operations, and increasing efficiency, and aligning our risk management to our risk exposure. You know, I heard Scott say this morning, you can't treat all data the same way, right? It's expensive. And we're, we're no different, right? You should treat, there's kind of a sweet spot, you don't want to over control your data or under control it, you should find that sweet spot. All right, so what is data literacy? I don't need to define it. Gartner already has. So we use Gartner's definition of data literacy at KPMG. It's pretty simple, makes sense. This is how we talk about data literacy at KPMG. They do a great job, Gartner's a great job defining all kinds of terms. It's really about, you know, how can we enable faster, better decision making, you know, get the most value out of our data, really understand data literacy helps us understand and analyze what's happening, either internally to KPMG or with our clients in the market, whatever it might be. And hopefully, you know, data literacy will help us predict what's going to happen as well. Return on investment for data literacy. Data is not free, right? Data is not free. And so you've got to invest in data literacy as well. Or else you're not going to get the returns that you expect. So the investments need to need to include attention, time, funding and infrastructure. So attention. Leaders have to pay attention. Employees have to pay attention. Our professionals need to know it's okay to spend time on literacy and learning and upskilling. The time, again, leaders need to say and actually walk the talk and say, yep, we agree, this is something you should be spending your time on. And we're going to fund it. And we're going to help you with the tools and capabilities that you need to do that job. And we're going to help you make data available so that folks can actually, again, play around. You hear me talk about more about that in a minute. Play around with data, you know, meet our clients' needs. And the returns are hopefully engaged employees, right? If employees are learning and growing, they're going to be happy. They're going to provide better services and products to our clients. Our clients are going to be happy. We're going to retain our clients. Hopefully we'll grow our client base. We'll manage our risk better. And hopefully we'll, again, make better decisions faster, which leads to lower costs in our operations. Alright, this is what we consider in the US firm, the components of a robust data literacy program. These are in no way in any sort of order. It's just kind of a blueprint. We used to do many of these things in parallel. And I'll dive into each one of these individually. So let's talk about leadership vision. I've already talked about this. And before I actually get into leadership vision, we can't do this alone. So I mentioned I have a team of 20. That's not my literacy team. That's my total team. My literacy team is three. So we are over here on the enterprise side, right? We're the centralized model here. But we rely on our champions, our practitioners in our other practice lines, we have advisory audit and tax service lines, right, that are going out and selling to customers and meeting clients needs. We rely on those folks to tell us what they need, right, to do their jobs. What do they need to learn? What do they need to be upskilling? So you'll see some things over on the local side that we're doing and some things on the enterprise side. I don't have time to drain every single bullet on every slide. And I think these are all on the on the site. So feel free to have at it on your own. But I think this one's pretty self explanatory, right? The tone is always set from the top. People don't pay attention unless your leaders are saying, Yes, this is important. I support you. You have the time. You have my support. You have the funding. Yes, you can step away from that client engagement for a week to attend something, right? The tone has to be set from the top. And we helped you that through the CDO office. We Iran a data council. I'm sure like many of you do, we leverage the data leaders and all of the areas to help, you know, spread that message. A North Star framework. So what does it mean to be data literate, right? If you're a tax professional, right, you're putting together tax returns for companies in the oil industry, right? You're going to have very different data literacy needs than, say, a partner in the audit practice, right? Very different. So we created a framework. I'll show it to you next. It's a data literacy maturity model. And it helps us articulate what are the levels of data literacy throughout the firm because not everybody needs to be at every level. It depends on your job. And again, just like data is fit for purpose, literacy is kind of the same way, right? We also have detailed competencies. We have some already developed. We are working in concert with those champions that I mentioned to create more competencies at all the levels. So again, we all have a common way of talking about data literacy. So this is a high level view of our data literacy maturity model goes from conversational, literate, competent, fluent to multilingual. The first two, conversational and literate, are components that we see everyone at the firm, every professional should have, right? You should be able to understand main concepts, talk about them, you know, especially at a high level with clients. And then the competent and fluent are, I'm working on an analytics project at a customer site. In each practice area, advisory, tax and audit, they're going to customize this to their needs. Because again, it just depends on what you're working on as to how much day literacy is needed. And the multilingual is, okay, I can take a skill like metadata management and translate it in every cross every industry. And I can explain it to others who don't understand what metadata is. So there are levels and there are competencies under each of these. And you'll see we've also split it out between data at the top and digital at the bottom, because they go hand in hand, right? We're moving to our digital world and data is needed to support that. Learner profiling, how do we know what our professionals need, right? There are a couple different ways we do that. We just piloted a data literacy assessment. There are many of them out there on the market. It sparked a lot of conversation about data literacy. But it helped us understand and help to the learners, the professionals, understand where they were. I thought I was really data literate, but I didn't score as well. And then some people who thought they didn't know anything scored higher than they thought. There's a lot of conversation, a lot of debate, but it helped us understand and it helped them understand what do they need to work on. And it sped up the conversation with their bosses or their supervisors about, hey, I want to focus on X or I need more attention on Y, right? And this year's upcoming training cycle. And at the Enterprise, my department also runs, we have a business intelligence and analytics community of practice. And we also publish templates, accelerators, you know, anything that we can do to help drive that self-service data and analytics. We do that as much as we can. But again, we really need to understand one of the components is understanding what the learner needs, how they take in information, and are they using it. So experiential range, back to so now talking about using your new found data literacy skills. You've got to practice, right? It's one thing to sit in a classroom and blah, blah, blah, like I'm doing to you now. It's another to actually put it into practice.  And so, in a, locally, our advisory practice is actually doing just that. They have a list of non-profit organizations and folks who learn new skills or have, take a new certification with Alteryx, for example, get to collaborate with a non-profit organization and provide them services that they may not otherwise get, right, and do it for free. So it helps the client, it helps the professional, it's a win-win. And so we are franchising good ideas, right? That's our job at the Enterprise is when we hear about these things, we help promote, we help get more people involved so that others can, again, take advantage of that win-win situation. We also provide, I mentioned at the Enterprise, we're building that data supply chain, right? So the tools and capabilities to be able to get the data in the hands of those who need it. Same with experiential learning. We've got sandboxes, again, communities of practice. We have a Python user group so that people can get together and just talk about the tips and tricks writing Python. So it just, if you, if you make it experiential and people can, again, put into practice what they learn and figure out things together, it makes it so much more real. Mender-supported training. There's no way me and my three people could develop all the training that we would need in the data literacy space for 33,000 people in the United States firm. So, outsource. There are a ton of good vendor programs out there through universities, through other organizations who are not even some nonprofits, right? Who put together certifications. They're a ton out there. We leverage them at the Enterprise. We help get the best pricing, right? Figure out what the needs are across the organization so that we have a strategy for our vendors and our vendors aren't picking us off one by one. So we help do that. And then we supplement. There are some things that are particular or, you know, to KPMG. So like, for example, the data strategy one pager. I give an entire class on the data strategy at KPMG. Why is it needed? Why do I exist? Why do I have a job? Why are you here? Because otherwise if people don't understand the foundation, they'll never get to this level, right? Collaboration. No successful data literacy program is successful without working across business lines. So except we're at the center, we have to understand what's happening in our practice areas, audit tax and advisory. Again, what are the needs of the learner? We have a champions group or practitioners group. We meet at least monthly, if not more often to share best practices. You know, what learnings do you need? What worked? What didn't work? Right? What should we not do going forward? Right? It helps us keep the pulse about what's happening in the company. And then we can pivot if we need to or we can figure out what else do we need to implement? Do we need another learning group? Hey, we have some people who want to practice another skill with another tool. Great. Let's get those people together and actually we can learn together. And we don't get it all right the first time. We're definitely experimenting, right? With a firm as large as we are, we try things and we either fail fast and move on or, you know, we'll figure it out. Metrics. So not only do we need to understand, again, what are the learner's learning? So what degrees do they have? What degrees do they need or certifications? Are they using them? Right? So we have a database that catalogs what degrees, what certifications. I know some of the other probably big firms you all work at probably have similar similar databases through your HR department. So we have that. We understand, again, are they using these? Are they actually taking what they're learning to a client site or internally, right? We have a lot of data internally that we use to run the business. Are we leveraging our knowledge and our skill sets? Or are we not? Do we need more upskilling to make a difference? And then also being able to understand, this is kind of a future state, but something we want to aspire to is what are people querying? We have a learning site. It's called Focus. We have a learning site internally. What are people querying? What do they want to learn? If we had, we understood that and like how many people are querying, you know, Power BI. Gosh, it would be great to know that. So we're working on that. Change management, no good program. Again, I said before, it goes without having a good change management program. People, culture, change management. Again, how do we know when we need to pivot? How do we know how we're doing? We're constantly evolving and changing our data literacy program, our needs, what we're focused on. So while these are considered, we think are the core components of what works for us, what we need. Some days we spend a lot of time on this.  It just kind of depends on the day, what the needs are. You know, everything is changing so fast. I mean, a year and a half ago, were we talking about ESG data, for example, right? We are spending a ton of time in that space. So it just kind of depends. Another thing I'll mention is rewards and recognition. You know, not everybody is motivated by money, recognition, you know, the value they create, just kind of depends, right? But some people are. And for those people who like that, hey, you know, let's celebrate that someone achieved this goal or got this certification. We're actually working with HR right now to talk about a bonus when you finish a certain level of alturic certification. So we're, we got to use every avenue possible to get people to want to learn, upskill, be day-literate and all speak the same language when it comes to data. All right, so things that you must do when it comes to day-literacy. You've already heard me say this, leadership, right? Making sure the tone is set from the top. People, the leaders are walking the talk when it comes to day-literacy. They're funding it. Again, at least I have three people. My previous organization, I had zero. So to me, it's a step up. And they want to make, got to make it easy, right? It's got to make it fast and easy for people to get the learning that they need. Local interventions, I mentioned before, we would not be successful without our practitioner, our champions in the other practice lines, you know, really understanding what the learners need, what they're doing, are they putting there what they're learning into practice? Are we all talking about data the same way? And sharing those success stories of, hey, I made a difference because I was able to help, you know, this nonprofit or this client do X with this tool or capability. Organizational system, something else my team works hard at is trying to break down barriers for things that have to get done internally. Again, with a large firm, very large firm, there are processes on processes on top of processes. And so we help get to the bottom of, hey, I need procurement to write a contract for this university to have this training course or this literacy curriculum embedded. So we help make that happen. And again, it's easier for us to do that at the center versus having each practice line call HR or procurement say, hey, help me do this, help me do this. So we are changing the way we work internally as well. And again, pay attention to rewards and recognition, you know, it's a big deal, right? The people are learning and, you know, getting certifications and degrees and actually putting into practice. So you want to recognize that. Communicate. We have many ways of communicating. You heard me mention our champion group. I run three separate types of data governance working groups, a data council, we publish a newsletter monthly about what's happening in our data program. We've got, again, those user groups, Python is one example, communities of practice, we use all of them to market whatever's happening in my department, including data literacy. So use all of them. We also the other, the service lines, the practice lines also have their own newsletters. We get in there too, right? So we're, I don't think we're at the point where we're bombarding yet because people are still hungry for the data information. I actually just got an email today. I was doing one of those data strategy talks a couple of weeks ago and I just got an email today, hey, I know you said at the end of your talk that I could, I could email you about where I can find some more data related training. I work in corporate communications. Could you point me in the right direction? Perfect. So I want to keep, keep evangelizing at the enterprise, but we need, we need our practice lines to help evangelizing as well as communicating. We leverage all channels as much as we can. So what have we learned so far? So this is what we've learned. And your organization may be different. But again, talk about the why. Again, that's why I always start with a data strategy. Why are we here? What are we working toward trust and growth with our clients? You know, working better internally, you know, providing value, whatever it is, communicate the why, leverage your leaders. I use my, my boss, the chief data officer, all the time to help communicate that message. Require training. And on a tight timeline. I don't recommend that. One of our practice lines did that. It did not work out so well. You know, learning should be fun, right? Learning should be something you do together. You know, in, in those groups that I mentioned, it should be, hey, we're going to try this really new cool thing and we're going to be successful together. And if you make it required, especially in a tight timeframe, people just they're like, yeah, no, I'm all set. You now you've ruined it. And now I'm not going to do that. There's a lot of pushback. So if you want to upskill, you got to make it interesting and fun. Learning to be a team sport, right? I mentioned that already. Let's learn together, learning together, you know, talking in groups about Python tips and tricks, how to get the best results. It just helps people put make it real and people like helping others. We have a we have a really helpful culture at KPMG.  I ask a question every day because there's so much I don't know. I'm the new kid on the block, even being there for a little over a year and a half. I ask questions all the time. And so it people feel good when they help others, right? And so it's kind of so win win. Evaluations and assessments, I do recommend data literacy assessments or some sort of evaluation, right? To understand where you are or where your professionals are as a group, as roles, as people. It sparked a lot of debate, right? People were like, hey, this test is too easy. Now this test is too hard. Like we heard it all. So that was our pilot. We're going to go to around two in 2022 and see where we get. But yeah, it's do it. It may it is a little painful to hear all the feedback, but that's what you want. You people were talking about data literacy for the first time. It was great. All right. And then collaborate. I talked about it earlier. Working, you know, work across units. One example, again, the data literacy maturity model where we've developed some companies kind of on the left-hand side of that model, we're working on more the right-hand side now. And we're doing it with our champions, with our practitioners. It is painful to agonize over every single word in those competencies. But if you don't do it together, they don't feel a sense of buy-in, right? And then when you go to kind of say, okay, here it is. Let's, you know, let's roll this out. It's like we didn't agree to that, right? So it's painful. It takes longer. But you get better results in the end. And the same thing goes for data governance. You all who are doing it, right? You've written a data governance standard, do it together. So if you don't do it together and you just say, here's the policy, people are like, no, I'm not doing that. All right, so that's data literacy at KPMG so far. Kind of what we've learned to date, how we're implementing our program, we're still building, we will always be building, right? The world of data and technology is constantly changing. I've heard that about 50 times today. So we will continue to evolve this program. Maybe you'll see me here next year with another set of lessons learned. What we've done. But with that, oh, that's interesting. I will turn it over to you all. Do you have any questions? Yes. About the data literacy assessment. Yeah. You know, optimally with the turning model assessment, I've seen a lot of those, where can I find a data literacy assessment? There, I'll give you an example. There's a vendor called question mark who does data literacy assessments. And they have all kinds of types of tests out there that you can give to professionals. That's who we use to do our pilot and it's probably who we're going to use going forward. So yeah, question mark is one vendor that we've used. We didn't create it ourselves. I'm all about outsourcing, right? I got three people. Anybody and anybody, everyone and anyone who's willing to take it. It could be at a partner level all the way down to I'm just a college hire who just started. Just want to understand where do people, people need to know where they see themselves and we need to know where they are. Yeah, good. Thanks for the questions. Yes. And it's definitions and you know, like for example, in tax, you know, what is the GDP ratio or what are the fee ratios? But what is the value you are? Yeah. My team teaches at a broader level, right? Centralized so what is data governance? All the data governance and management terms, technologies, capabilities, the services we provide, we do a lot of marketing about that. To understand the data that the tax professionals use, that's never going to be my expertise. So I will teach, you know, the terms and tax. That'll be up to the tax professionals to figure out in the tax practice, for example.  I'm the what team, I'm not the how team. I will tell you what you gotta do. I can help you figure it out, right? Cause again, my department does offer a lot of tools and services and capabilities so we can help you with the how, but if you don't want to use our how, you don't have to, right? If you want to keep a spreadsheet with all your business glossary terms, I'm not going to make you yet. Maybe in the future, but I might. Not yet. It's all about building goodwill in the beginning. The tools like Ultrix and PowerV, I have extensive community resources and training documents available, but one of the problems we've had is finding where to start somebody out in and how to, what do they follow to get to where they want to be without wasting a bunch of time looking into things that are possible. We recommend that they work with getting around them. Oh, that's probably best answered by one of my colleagues who actually runs. The Power BI community of practice. I was only able to attend a couple of them so far and there is, there's a lot of information to sit through out there. And I think the people on his team are analytics practitioners. So they already had the knowledge to be able to say, okay, we're going to steer people in this direction. I know that's exactly not a concrete answer to you, but since I am not an analytics professional, but I know that they are, they were the ones to pare down the content and say, here's what's important, what you need to know. So they think it's best done by the people who know their stuff, go out and carry sort of things. Yeah. And you can't just set someone loose on a vendor website. Like that's really going to put you nowhere. I saw your hand. So just to give some information for this question. Thank you. One of the things we gave was a partner between the data governance office, the learning and development team, and then BI analytics team. Yep. And we created a program called Data View. I love that. We went out to a big vendor and then we curated courses and started at beginner and intermediate and advanced level that would give people a place to start based on what their skills are. Love that. You just give me a great idea for what's next. Because our BI and analytics practice didn't spin up until the summer. So we will get there. Love that idea. I saw his hand and I'll come to you. Actually to build upon that, I decided it's extremely important to realize that you have many, many different roles in your company. And so don't think of it as a training program. But think of it as a curriculum. What that means is that you have different folks that are going to take different tracks through the training. If they're a technical asset or a technical steward, they're going to have a different potentially training program that they're going to follow or path through your curriculum. Whereas you have a business user, say a sales person, that has to have it for a QVR. They're going to have a dramatically different path than someone that's a product or a technical steward. So it's important to realize it's not one size fits all. And you can hear it to the point of earlier. Definitely can't just have them sort out what they're supposed to do. Almost swore, sorry, it's late today. Yeah, I know. I saw your hand. How do you get people excited about data governance training? Oh gosh, that's tough. How do I get people excited about data governance training? I told you I started during COVID. I'm on a screen a lot. I smile a lot on my screen. Yeah, that's a tough one.  So I have one that's called talk data to me, right? So it is, I hate to say it, but it works. People are like, what's that? And then they sign up. I know data governance, again, not a sexy term. But people, there is a thirst for knowledge at KPMG. People want to understand what it is, what it's all about. What am I going to make them do, right? So there's a little bit of a push, but a little bit of a pull for information as well. So I think catchy names, marketing, we do, again, we have a newsletter, we do, and it's, I call it's kind of the carrot and the stick approach. So I will eventually beat people with sticks, but I also have a lot of carrots to offer, right? Because we do provide a lot of tools and capabilities and services in my department. So that helps people come to, come to my training, learn about metadata and how my team can help you, right? So it's a little bit of a carrot and stick approach, too, that works. So when the compliance training, they have so much fun. We hear so often, you know, when you have to be compliant with two people, they run, this is, that's a series. And people are on and doing, when's the next episode? I mean, that's, do you build a story that's so popular of people sleeping? I mean, that's so popular, yeah. Storytelling is always best, right? If you can get people to the class, tell stories. It works every time. That's what they did, yeah. Dude, when's the next episode? We never heard that, when's the next compliance training? Yeah, no one says that. We've turned a lot of our, because we have to do quarterly compliance training, too, and we've turned a lot of them into, they're like, TED Talk style. People really, people, it resonates, right? And so we don't mind it, yeah. No, no, no, no, that's good to know. Did I see a hand over here or are we good? Okay. Enjoy your tasty beverages. Thank you for coming. See you tomorrow, or if you have other questions, I'll be circulating the hallway with my tasty beverage.


If you're trying to grow your audience, I really want to recommend that you think more about collaborations with other content creators to grow your audience. So I'll just use the example, imagine an example of two people, let's say Jason and Sarah both have an audience and maybe they're just starting out, let's just say Jason and Sarah both have maybe, you know, ten subscribers on their email list or their YouTube channel or whatever, just ten subscribers. Now Jason and Sarah, let's say that they both talk about something that's related but not competitive. So in other words, Jason talks about topic A, Sarah talks about topic B, and A and B are related, and the audience, both audiences would probably find both topics interesting, but they talk about, they talk about different topics, right? So Jason would introduce Sarah to Jason's audience, right? And Jason's audience was like, wow, this is a really cool gal. She's talking about something that we also enjoy and it makes sense for you to introduce her to us, right? And now Sarah, instead of having ten subscribers, now has twelve subscribers or fifteen subscribers, okay? And let's say that it would also make sense for Sarah to introduce Jason to her audience because the topic is relevant and complementary and the audience would think it made sense for Sarah to introduce Jason. Then Sarah would introduce Jason and Sarah's audience would also say, wow, that was great. Thank you, Sarah, for introducing Jason to us. We really enjoyed his message and now Jason also has twelve or fifteen subscribers instead of ten. And so what's just had, what's happened now is that both people have grown their audience just by collaborating with each other and both audiences have grown in their knowledge or in their enjoyment by having the benefit of both content creators, right? So everybody has one. Now again, this makes sense only when the topic is the right fit for the audience that is being introduced to that topic and that creator. So you got to make sure that it's the right fit. But when it's the right fit, it's truly amazing. Now sometimes it's not necessarily a cross promotion. Sometimes it's, you know, Jason promotes Sarah to Jason's audience but it doesn't make sense for Sarah to promote Jason because the topic is not quite the right fit. But that's okay because again, everybody still has one, right? If Jason promotes Sarah, right? Jason's audience wins because they get the benefit of Sarah's presence and content. Jason's audience likes Jason more because they see that, oh, Jason is not just talking about his own content but he also, he also brings some of the other great content creators to us. So Jason has now become both a creator as well as a curator for his audience. Isn't that great? And Sarah might go ahead and find a third party, let's say Sarah finds the third party named Kim to promote, right? But then Sarah finds that, oh, Kim makes sense to promote Jason to Kim's audience. So it all kind of goes around. There's kind of a nice karmic loop that tends to happen when collaborations are more active. So I really want to encourage you to reach out and to content creators that have a similar size audience and a similar type of audience as you but are not competitive to you in terms of the topics that you talk about. So I hope this is helpful and until the next video I wish you more collaboration and therefore more growth and more a higher level of knowledge for everybody involved.


winter storms snow and ice they can create big problems on highways accidents delays traffic jams every year highway agencies spend over a billion dollars on snow and ice removal and apply large quantities of chemicals and abrasives that lead to environmental pollution bridge corrosion and of course rust on your car we accept this to keep our roads passable and our driving safe but improved methods are clearly needed in 1987 the president signed a transportation bill creating the strategic highway research program a five-year effort to develop new methods and products in highway construction maintenance and safety one of the research areas of the program was snow and ice control an important product of this research was the development of anti-icing technology what is anti-icing generally speaking it is a snow and ice control strategy for important roads that must be kept open its goal is simple to prevent a strong bond between snow and ice and the pavement or between ice and bridge decks though several technologies could accomplish this such as heating the surface the one that is proving to be cost effective is spreading an ice control chemical onto the road as a preventive strategy the essence of anti-icing is to spread chemical a liquid solid or pre-wetted solid on the road before freezing precipitation starts or soon after it begins but always before a bond can form between the pavement and ice or snowpack this timely treatment enables traffic to disperse a small amount of snow or ice accumulation if plowing is necessary crews can clear the road more easily although these practices have been in limited use for many years anti-icing has come to mean a modern strategy that uses an array of new technologies such as the road weather information systems site specific weather and pavement temperature forecasting and sophisticated chemical spreaders as well as conventional technologies by combining new technologies with conventional practices anti-icing can provide two important benefits keeping roads passable and safe for a longer time and using smaller amounts of chemicals and abrasives to do so unlike anti-icing the strategy of de-icing allows a bond to form between the ice or snowpack and the pavement surface after snow has fallen and the ice or snowpack has bonded to the pavement maintenance crews spread the ice control chemical the de-icer must melt through the pack and still have sufficient concentration to break the bond this takes more chemical because its effectiveness is reduced as it gets diluted by the layer it melts de-icing is a much slower process taking hours or days depending on the air and pavement temperatures and the storm conditions also until the de-icing process can work crews must often spread abrasives on the snowpack to increase the road friction many agencies are seeking ways to reduce both chemical and abrasive use because of the application costs and the harmful environmental and health effects using anti-icing is a way to do this to determine the best techniques for a wide range of environmental traffic and climatic conditions the strategic highway research program evaluated anti-icing for two years in nine states California Colorado Maryland Minnesota Missouri Nevada New York Ohio and Washington the results from this study were so promising that it was continued for two more years and six more states Iowa Kansas Massachusetts New Hampshire Oregon and Wisconsin were added to the study here's what some of the study participants have to say for the anti-icing the savings is mostly in the efficiency that you get it where you need it you don't have to keep going back and putting it back where the big savings for us has been has been in the frost control instead of going out night after night and reapplying cinders and or salt we do it once a week or once every five days so we're saving in materials plus we're saving just in personnel hours and that's where our biggest saving has been plus in the accident factor the fact that we can get it out there when we need it and control the ice it really helps in cutting down there a number of our sections are showing 8 to 10 to 1 savings on de-icing over sanding or anti-icing over sanding particularly when we're morning in black ice typically take six passes at a yard per lane mile of sand and the sand cost is anywhere from ten ten dollars fifteen dollars a yard and one pass using anti-icing and we don't have to do anything more and this is a significant savings both in manpower and in sand what we have seen as is where we have put our major effort in training has paid off in many times first first use results the one of the examples is a crew in their first use put down three hundred dollars worth of material and they save over three thousand dollars in labor and materials and this was their first experience with it other than the training yeah I'd recommend almost everybody is because it will keep the snow from bonding it will make your cleanup faster and in a lot of cases like the city of Glenwood Springs asks us to shoot it because just for anti-icing it does two things it will keep the dust down from when we sand so they don't get dust in the storm in the storefronts and on the sidewalks and all over the cars and it'll keep the roads from icing up and freezing up on an average storm for two to three hours the crews that were initially charged with the applications were very skeptical to begin with and the more they used it the more impressed they were and currently they would use it everywhere if I had enough equipment to put it down a side light to this the superintendent in Bellingham is doing a test section that historically has 30 accidents a week due to snow and or ice during the winter months and he received a call from the state patrol the other day wanting to know what was going on because this winter they hadn't had any accidents on that road during the normal times when they would have and they were told that that was our test section and they thought whatever we're doing we're doing it right and they're always very happy with anything that we can do that reduces a number of accidents that they have to respond to the four years of study have shown that anti-icing is a valuable tool for winter highway maintenance especially for heavily traveled roads but it is not the answer to all snow and ice control situations there will be times when de-icing or other techniques may be needed anti-icing though has advantages that other techniques do not why use anti-icing it improves safety because pavements are kept in better condition during storms it generally requires less chemical and abrasive which is better for the environment and the infrastructure and it is cost effective because fewer treatments are required


I'm Salvatore Bobonis, and today's lecture is Illiberal Democracies. Liberal democracy may have triumphed in the West, but many intellectuals and political leaders in non-Western countries have very different ideas about just what democracy should mean. China and Vietnam, for example, share a Leninist conception of democracy in which the Communist Party rules on behalf of the people. In other, less ideological countries, democracy has come to mean winner-take-all elections. In general, representative democracy has not turned out to be as much of a challenge to the entrenched in traditional elites as has the liberal exchange of ideas reflected most of all in a free press. Contrary to popular perceptions, Iran has been for decades perhaps the most consistently democratic country in the Middle East. This U.S. file photo shows the American flag being burned by students on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979 after student protestors had taken over the U.S. Embassy. And ever since 1979, Iran has been viewed as a totalitarian country in the West. Yet, pre-1979, Iran was ruled by an unelected king, the Shah of Iran, who was put in place by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in a coup in the 1950s. So if anything, Iran has gone from being a country ruled by a king under American tutelage to being a country that has, well, at least the forms of democracy. It has had regular contested elections every four years since 1980, both parliamentary elections and presidential elections. It has regular alternation in power with a two-term limit, so an eight-year limit on how long a president can serve. It has broad enfranchisement, unlike its regional competitor Israel, where many, well, where Palestinian citizens of Israel are only partially enfranchised and where non-citizen Palestinian refugees are completely disenfranchised. By contrast, Iran has pretty much complete enfranchisement, including women and religious minorities being able to vote. In that sense, Iran represents a complete contrast to all of the Western-friendly governments of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, all of the other Gulf countries, which are complete non-democracies ruled by kings and other elites. Iran does have a, quote-unquote, supreme leader, a kind of religious king who holds the ultimate reins of power through the power of appointment, the power to dismiss governments, et cetera. But to put it in context, the United Kingdom has a queen who is also nominally the head of the Church of England and who has the power, again, in theory, to dismiss governments. In practice, the Queen of England, who is also the Queen of Australia, dismissed the Australian government as recently as 1975. So you don't have to go back to ancient history to find the kings and queens of England interfering in politics, at least as recently as the late 20th century. This was occurring even in such a developed Western liberal democracy as Australia. So while Iran's supreme leader certainly has undemocratic powers of a kind that we would not today accept in Western Europe, North America, or other developed regions of the world, it's not so far out of place as it might seem, even compared to our own not-so-distant past. Yet, on the other hand, Iran is a deeply illiberal country, with respect for the supreme leader strictly enforced and the expression of alternative views severely curtailed. And in this illiberalness, it is not unlike many countries throughout the developing world, from Turkey on one side of Iran to Azerbaijan on another side of Iran to Pakistan and Afghanistan on a third side of Iran. So the countries throughout the region that are democracies like Iran are also illiberal democracies. That means that major media outlets are controlled by the state, and not just by the state, they are in effect controlled by government. This is a big contrast to England, where the BBC is controlled by the state, but it is not controlled by the current government of the day. It is the British Broadcasting Corporation, not the Tory Broadcasting Corporation or the Labour Broadcasting Corporation. And changes in government only result in very small changes in the kinds of political reporting done by the BBC. The same would be said of national public radio in the United States or the ABC in Australia, Deutsche Welle in Germany. Many Western countries have state-supported broadcasters, but these state-supported broadcasters are not controlled by the government of the day. Also in Iran, newspapers and magazines must be licensed, and they are actively censored by the government. Satellite dishes are prohibited so that people are not allowed to watch television coming from other countries. Many external news websites are blocked. The government maintains an active censorship of the internet. And anti-government bloggers can even be thrown in jail for insulting the government or the usual pretext is that they have insulted the Supreme Leader himself, who is a religious figure of the leading Ayatollah in Iran. But the Iranian example shows that illiberal democracy is possible even in relatively modern countries that are open to the world and hold regular elections. Iran is no Saudi Arabia. I mean, here's a photo of a café in central Iran. We see women wearing headscarfs, but we don't see women in full burqas. We don't see men in traditional Arab dress, Iran's a non-Arab country, but in any case we don't see men in traditional dress.  A lifestyle where people have free discussion in their private lives, who dress in a Western manner, who live Western-style lives, but who simply don't become anti-government bloggers, that kind of lifestyle is possible even in a very illiberal country like Iran. Of course, even in the most illiberal countries, there is still a coffee and broad consumer culture that is completely compatible with their illiberal conceptualizations of democracy. So here's a photo of the fanciest, newest Starbucks in Beijing, and if you wanted to have meetings at a coffee shop where you discussed politics and criticized the government, you could probably do so completely under the radar in a place like this. The tables are not wired with recording devices, nobody would be hovering over you trying to hear what you say. Don't go on the internet and be an anti-government blogger, certainly don't try to write an anti-government report in a newspaper, but in people's private lives they can hold pretty much whatever private views they want. Countries like China and Iran and other authoritarian countries around the world have in a way made peace with Western consumer culture and even with Western ideas of personal freedom as long as that personal freedom does not enter into the public sphere. Now let's face it, how many of us are ever going to be anti-government bloggers, even in our own liberal countries where we have the full freedom to do so? Very few of us are going to do that. And this is what illiberal countries have discovered, that they only have to repress the views and the expression of a very small number of people in order to maintain a highly illiberal form of democracy. In the communist democratic ideologies of countries like China and Vietnam, there is a notion that there is government of the people by the people and for the people, just as there is this notion in Western liberal democracies. But they conceptualize serving the people in a very different way. Perhaps I should have put in this lecture the famous communist slogan from Mao Zedong that it's hanging right in Tiananmen Square, serve the people, the motto of the Communist Party of China. But their idea of serving the people is very different than a liberal idea of conserving the people. So in a liberal democracy, policies are thought to emerge from a free exchange of ideas. All the people who want to express themselves in newspapers and blogs on television and call in shows, and the best policies emerge from this free exchange of ideas. The communist conceptualization of democracy is that policies should be formulated by a technocratic elite, a group of people whose job it is to have the interests of the people at heart. In liberal democracy, leaders have a responsibility to follow the programs that they espouse. One of the greatest insults, one of the most embarrassing things that can be said about a Western political leader is that he or she said one thing and did another, that the person was inconsistent, or in the words of George W. Bush criticizing his rival John Kerry, that he was a flip-flopper, that he changed his mind, and somehow changing one's mind is the cardinal political sin, because by changing one's mind a leader has sought election by espousing one point of view and then acted on a different point of view while in office. In the communist conceptualization of democracy, leaders have a responsibility to govern in the interests of the people whatever those interests might be. So if the interests of the people change, the government's response in theory should change. In the liberal point of view, criticism of democracy keeps governments accountable. Governments have to face the music of constant criticism by their critics in the public sphere. But in the communist point of view, criticism of government undermines the interests of the people. After all, if a group of technocrats are explicitly charged with evaluating carefully all of the policy options and coming up with a policy that's best for the people, criticizing them merely prevents them from doing their job. In theory, it means that you are against the people if you criticize those who are advancing the interests of the people. Finally, in liberal democracy, there's a basic idea that the people can take care of themselves. It is an insult to call a politician paternalistic, or in the British context there have been accusations of the nanny state, the government interfering in the lives of ordinary people when people are much more capable to decide for themselves what to do and what they want in life. The communist approaches completely the opposite, that the people have to be cared for, that people are not capable of making the best decisions for themselves, and even if they did make the best decisions for themselves, those decisions might be bad for other people or bad for society as a whole. So in the communist technocratic approach, the people are cared for by the government instead of taking care of themselves. Which is not to say that communist countries like China are not responsive. In fact, the Chinese government has started to equate democracy with the idea of responsive rather than representative government. Most famous example of this are protests over land seizures. Here you see one of the famous cases of an island house. This is a person who refused to sell his house to developers when the entire block surrounding this house has been sold off. And so the developers simply demolish every single house around, leaving the person's property intact while, as you can see, isolating the person in a sea of wasteland. These kind of hardball tactics by developers in China have come under protest, popular protest, and in fact in many cases the government has put a hold on development or punished politicians, even removed local politicians from office who promoted development and illegal land sales or pressured land sales that resulted in situations like this. So the Chinese communist leadership has become increasingly responsive to people even to the point where local leaders are being judged on the number of protests occurring in their jurisdictions. Leaders are considered successful if they're able to manage their provinces or manage their prefectures or cities with a minimum of public protest. On the other hand, protests demanding liberal values, the right to free expression, are quickly and often brutally suppressed in China. We shouldn't forget the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest movement or the June 6, 1989 repression of that movement with tanks and live battlefield ammunition in which the People's Liberation Army, so-called, the Army of the People's Republic of China, simply ran over protesters with tanks and shot them down with machine guns. The footage of this was caught live on camera by Western and Chinese cameramen. It's widely available on the internet. If you haven't seen documentaries of the June 4th repression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement, I certainly suggest you look at some of those documentaries on YouTube. Perhaps the biggest argument against illiberal democracy is not theoretical. We can have these theoretical discussions between which is better, liberal democracy in which the people fend for themselves, or illiberal democracy in which government takes care of the people. This is maybe a valid philosophical discussion to have. The biggest problem is not theoretical, the biggest problem is practical. Illiberal democracy just doesn't seem to work, or at least it doesn't work as a form of democracy. We can't really find or point to really maybe not more than one country in the world that has a relatively successful illiberal democracy that is still responsive to the people. Perhaps the only one in the world, and it's often held up as an example, is Singapore. Singapore is an odd country or city-state in many ways, and it's often held up as an example of a repressive illiberal democracy where the government maintains tight control of the press, but nonetheless allows a wide degree of freedoms in other ways, and even its repression of the press while widespread is not brutal. People are not being murdered in Singapore for their views in the way they are in China, Russia, Bangladesh, or Central Asia. Leaving Singapore aside, the problems with illiberal democracy are that first, power is unaccountable. It's wonderful to have the ideal of serving the people, but most leaders once they get into power start to serve themselves, their families and their friends, not the people that they're supposedly accountable to. Second, horrific abuses of human rights are common in illiberal democracies. People being abducted, murdered in the night, disappeared, just thrown in jail with no access to the outside world. Illiberal democracies all over the world from China to Cuba to Iran are all guilty of terrible widespread abuses of human rights. Now that said, illiberal non-democracies like Saudi Arabia are also guilty of horrific abuses of human rights, so these abuses are not restricted to illiberal democracies. They're characteristic of illiberal regimes of all kinds. Third, corruption is so widespread that it becomes thoroughly institutionalized. And again, this is a result of power being unaccountable. Once there is, once there are no, there's no freedom of expression and no freedom to expose wrongdoing, people start doing wrong, safe in the knowledge that their wrongdoing will never come to light. And ultimately in illiberal democracies, as in dictatorships, people too easily become a resource to be exploited rather than being respected as the foundation of government and society. There's a sense in which liberalism is the embodiment of respect for the people. When the people are respected, then the rights of the people are respected and government has to be more modest in its claims to represent their interests of the people. If democracy as such was born in America and spread throughout the world, liberalism was born in England and remains primarily a western, not a worldwide phenomena. There are many more democracies in the world than there are liberal regimes. And there are precious few liberal regimes today that are not also democracies. Democracy is widespread, and of those democracies, a few are also liberal democracies. The fundamental liberal ideal is that of freedom. And in its broadest sense, this is a presumption that people can do whatever they want so long as it does not directly harm others. In the British tradition, liberalism has come to be identified with negative freedoms, and thus with the political right. The Liberal Party in Australia, the Tory Party in the UK are both parties that espouse liberalism as an ideal, but liberalism in the sense that powerful people should not face restrictions in the way they use their money. Companies should not face restrictions in the way they operate in the marketplace. People should not be taxed unnecessarily. That is the British conceptualization of liberalism has deep traditions as freedom from government interference, freedom from public oversight. In the American tradition by concept, liberalism has come to be identified with positive freedoms, and thus with the political left. In the American tradition, liberals are people who espouse not just freedom from government interference, but freedom to do things. So for example, if you want to have true freedom of speech in the American liberal tradition, that implies that the government must help people have the freedom to express themselves in a wider public setting. For example, through subsidies for the press or through equal time laws that allow multiple viewpoints to be expressed on television and broadcast media. Positive freedoms also imply that economic prosperity must be widespread. In order for people to have the freedom to flourish in life, they have to have access to good jobs. They have to have social insurance against adverse outcomes in life. Thus, while liberalism in the British meaning has come to be associated with center-right politics, liberalism in the American tradition has come to be associated with center-left politics, with the Democratic Party in the United States as opposed to the Republican Party. The neoliberal movement of the middle of the 20th century and going through to today represents a resurgence of British, or quote-unquote 19th century conceptualizations of liberalism in the United States, and this rebirth of British-style liberalism, of 19th century liberalism in the United States, has now gone global. So now, when we speak of neoliberalism in Australia or the United Kingdom, in a way we're just talking about British liberalism. But British liberalism seen through an American 20th century lens, which now becomes neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is simply the British conceptualization of negative freedoms pulled through an American way of thinking in the late 20th century. Liberalism is connected to democracy mainly through the fundamental freedom of the press, and more broadly freedom of speech and freedom of association. Liberalism is required for the successful operation of democracy because it prevents government from becoming too powerful. It makes government accountable to the people it purports to represent. Two ways of thinking about how freedom of the press, freedom of the speech, and freedom of association promote democracy in the contemporary world are the monetary democracy of auditing organizations. This idea comes from John Keane, a University of Sydney political scientist, who writes about the fact that NGOs and government commissions and investigative journalists constantly monitor the operation of democracy, raising the alarm if government in liberal countries does something that it's not supposed to. A broader concept of how liberal freedoms ensure democracy is the counter-democracy of the French political scientist Pierre Rosanvallon. Rosanvallon talked about counter-democracy as a combination of oversight, prevention, and judgment, oversight being roughly similar to John Keane's idea of monetary democracy, but also prevention, meaning that the people up front have some, by getting politicians to put their ideas into the public domain, people have the ability to prevent outcomes that they don't want through elections, and that people also have the ability to hold government accountable through judgment, that is, through the court system. So Rosanvallon views the liberal restraints on power and democracy more broadly than John Keane. John Keane focuses on the associational freedoms of NGOs and other organizations, operating to keep government honest. Rosanvallon also sees elections and court systems as part of that process of keeping government honest and restraining the leader's power. Liberal traditions are strongest in the English-speaking countries, weaker in continental Europe and East Asia, and nonexistent elsewhere outside India. The influential Reporters Without Borders, the Reporters Sans Frontières, RSF Index, actually makes continental Europe the most free area for the press, but press freedom is not the beginning and end of the liberal tradition. Press may be freest in parts of continental Europe, but liberal traditions run much deeper, I think, in France, Britain, United States, Canada, and Australia. Also on the Reporters Sans Frontières Index, India scores particularly poorly. You see it here in red, classified alongside Russia and Kazakhstan, but I think, in fact, India clearly has much deeper liberal traditions than Russia or Kazakhstan. The RSF Index puts a large amount of weight on the safety of reporters, which is not surprising given that it's produced by an association of reporters, and in fact, reporters in India do face personal security challenges due to terrorism and politically motivated murders. But in India, these challenges are not associated with government repression in the way they are in Russia, China, Kazakhstan, and even Turkey, and other countries in the region. The liberal tradition of freedom of expression is particularly under threat in Muslim majority countries, even those that are not widely considered extremist. So in places like Bangladesh, where this photo is from, there have been many murders of journalists, or in this case the murder of a university professor for expressing views, particularly if the views expressed in any way challenge contemporary conservative Muslim orthodoxy. The murders in countries like Bangladesh, but also they've occurred in Malaysia, Indonesia, and throughout the Middle East have been particularly gruesome. This professor in Bangladesh, who was murdered by an extremist Muslim conservative organization, was hacked to death with machetes. So these have been really horrific murders of people on the basis of their speaking out in the public realm. And this repression has become, well, so severe as to be considered intolerable and to drive many reporters and public intellectuals to become refugees from these countries, leaving Muslim majority countries for the West. The most famous case of this was the Iranian novelist and journalist, Salman Rushdie, who was famously extremist, who was very prescribed in Iran in the 1980s and threatened with a global death sentence. But again, it's worth noting that Salman Rushdie is still with us, whereas many of these intellectuals in more conservative Sunni Muslim countries have been assassinated. Yet these liberal freedoms that we take for granted are not only under threat in ultra-conservative Muslim countries, they're also under threat in the English-speaking countries themselves. Even if the repression of freedom is not as gruesomely visible, it's nonetheless pervasive. First is the extreme concentration of press ownership. One thing that neoliberalism has brought about, the kind of British tradition negative freedom to do as one pleases, this has brought about an extreme concentration of ownership of the press. If you let people do what they want, rich people will buy newspapers and television stations. The most extreme example of this is Rupert Murdoch, who left Australia first for the UK and then for the US to build ever bigger media empires of newspapers and television stations that would pedal his point of view. So neoliberalism implies perhaps that the government will not censor what is said on Fox News. But Rupert Murdoch will, as the owner of Fox News, and as the press becomes increasingly concentrated in a small number of owners. And as public broadcasters, like National Public Radio in the United States, the BBC in the UK, and the ABC in Australia, as public broadcasters come under increasing pressure to be defunded, we are seeing the rise of this negative freedom of expression. Anyone who has the money can have a viewpoint replacing the positive freedom of expression of the government ensuring that everybody has a platform on which to express herself or himself. Second has been the extreme persecution and prosecution of whistleblowers. The two most famous cases are Bradley or Chelsea Manning. Bradley Manning is a coincidentally transsexual US, a transsexual US, a transsexual military analyst who divulged secrets of war crimes in Afghanistan to the press and via WikiLeaks, but ultimately to the press. And for divulging the evidence of these war crimes, now Chelsea Manning has been subjected to extreme forms of psychological torture in US prison, including being held for weeks at a time in 24 hour super bright lighting naked on a cot, unable to have any privacy, naked on a cot being videotaped 24 hours a day in extreme light. No privacy, no sleep, what can only be called psychological torture for having the, well, the temerity and the good conscience to reveal war crimes committed by the US military in Afghanistan. This treatment contrasts with the treatment of whistleblowers in the Vietnam War, who typically were not even prosecuted if it turned out that the behaviors that they publicized actually were crimes. The second example is Edward Snowden, the US CIA private contractor who revealed again enormous evidence of illegal actions, illegal surveillance by the US National Security Administration and has paid for it with permanent exile. He lives in Russia in Moscow, unable to return to the US because of, well, very legitimate fears that he would suffer the same sort of treatment as Chelsea Manning. Western governments, especially in the English speaking countries, the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have conducted extensive spying on private communications to the point where virtually all private communications are being intercepted and monitored by their respective governments. This is an enormous invasion of privacy that would have been unimaginable to people in English speaking countries 100 years ago. 100 years ago, if it were discovered that the governments were recording the address of every letter sent and received by the every household in the UK or US, this would have been a completely shocking revelation, yet today we know that the US and UK governments collect the details of every email and every phone call placed in the United States and United Kingdom. Now, they don't read the contents all the time, but they do in every case collect the to and from information, yet that passes largely without comment in our supposedly liberal societies. Finally, at a very deep level, at a very sociological level, politicians and senior civil servants are increasingly isolated from serious questioning by the press and from the people they represent. One reason for the popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States election in 2016 is that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders actually seem to answer the questions that are asked of them, and this is an enormous contrast with other candidates who for the most part only repeat scripted, vetted statements that have been formulated well in advance. Candidates simply do not react or interact with the people in our contemporary leading democracies. And if candidates don't, civil servants do even less. Most civil servants in the English-speaking countries are under strict orders, not to talk to the press because the government does not want alternative viewpoints being aired. Many of us, especially in the social sciences, believe that this is extremely corrosive to the future of democracy. It may be convenient for government to prohibit civil servants from talking to the press, but it's certainly not a good thing for democracy itself. Key takeaways. First, illiberal democracy is common around the world, and may be even more prevalent than liberal democracy itself. Second, the Chinese government has tried to replace representative democracy with the idea of responsive government. And third, liberalism is concerned with both positive and negative freedoms, but perhaps most importantly of all with the freedom of the press, which has to be construed both in a negative way, freedom from control by government, but also in a positive way, freedom to have many viewpoints heard in the public sphere. Thank you for listening. I'm Salvatore Bobonis. You can find out more about me on my website at SalvatoreBobonis.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on global affairs.


Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. Hello everyone, welcome to Silicon Angles theCUBE with Flagship Program. We go out to the events and extract the signal and noise. I'm John Furrier with Peter Barris, my co-host this week at Oracle Modern Customer Experience in Las Vegas. Lot going on in Las Vegas at the NAB show down the street where theCUBE is. Also we're here for the second year in a row with Oracle Modern Customer Experience. Hashtag modern CX tweeted us at theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Barris. Kicking off two days of wall-to-wall coverage. We have some amazing guests. We have the top executives at Oracle Marketing Cloud as well as some of their customers, as well as some other guests in the industry. Peter, we've been covering this marketing cloud kind of as part of the bigger picture of the systems of engagement that's growing out of cloud infrastructure and big data is really a collision going on between accelerating applications with infrastructure powered by the cloud, powered by hybrid cloud and data is at the center of the value proposition and literally is the key point in all this. So I want to get your thoughts and we talked about this last year. What's different from last year to this year with Oracle Marketing Customer Experience from your perspective? Well, I think there's three things that are different, John. The first thing that's different is that the reality of how difficult it is to integrate technology into the marketing function is setting in a lot of marketers. So we're not hearing any more comments or promises about how marketing expenditure is going to exceed IT expenditure for technology. So there's a reality set in about what it does it really mean to incorporate technology in the work of marketing. I think the second thing that's happening is AI. We're going to hear a lot about AI. We're going to hear a lot about these new ways of taking big data and making them more useful to the business. And that's going to have an enormous impact on marketing for a variety of different reasons. When we talk about next best action, predicting customer experience, prognosticating value propositions, all those other things, AI is going to have a role to play. How fast it gets adopted, we'll see, but we're going to hear a lot about it. It's interesting. We always talk on theCUBE here, you follow theCUBE, you know we always kind of always pontificate on this notion of horizontally scalable. And we talked about it last year, but there's an era of specialization that you need to have vertically oriented into some of these industries. But what's interesting, Peter, and I want to get your thoughts on this because I was commenting last year at the show that marketing was always a silo. And Oracle had a integration strategy that's been kind of horizontal. And the trends in cloud computing and data is horizontal scalability with value propositions differentiated at the application. So this begs the question, what does that mean for marketing in a digital business? If you go digital all the way from the beginning of the journey to the moment of truth to the customer, sales or conversion, it's all digital, marketing's in every piece of the equation along the way. And that's what Mark Hurd was saying yesterday. Well, customer engagements in every piece of the equation along the way. And then the question is, is marketing going to evolve to become primary in customer engagement? It's not going to be just your direct sales force. Customers are going to move amongst different channels. We've heard a lot about on the channel. So to what degree will marketing become primary? And the third point I was going to make, John, is related to this. And that is, one of the big changes between this year and last year is that Oracle has really thrown the tiller over and tacked towards the cloud. And it's going to be interesting to see whether or not the cloud customer experience story or the marketing customer experience story in the cloud is lining up with the rest of Oracle's cloud story. It's just as with Don Klein from our team last night in the hallway conversations here in the Mandalay Bay with the convention as the conference is happening. It's interesting. We were talking about the role of platforms and yet you can't see in the news these days anything from Facebook's relative to fake news and some of the killings on Facebook Live to YouTube and moderating comments. These emergence of platforms has been a very interesting dynamic. But at the end of the day, content needs to have an authentic piece to it. So you're now blending in a marketing and conversion with customers. We're living in a content world. If I'm wearing a wearable, my content is my interface to wherever I am in real time. My experience at the rental car dealership or wherever I'm at is going to be all about the content is not some siloed, hey, hello, buy this. It's everything's content driven. Well, everything's value driven, right? And the question is, is the content going to be valuable? And if there's a big, going back to that first point, what's the big issue about marketing? We thought that if we just through technology we could automate the same ways the marketing has already done or always done stuff. But the reality is marketing does a lot of stuff that is not valuable to customers. It may be valuable to the organization in other ways, but it's not valuable to customers. And often it's really annoying. And so marketing has to decide if in fact they are going to take a primary role in engagement across channel over time as customers move amongst organizations, then they're going to have to start dedicating themselves to creating content that's valuable to the customer in the form the customer needs it, when the customer needs it, where the customer needs it. And that's a challenge. And the engagement piece is critical. I love that angle, but let's take it to the next level. Every example of marketing cloud or any kind of digital experience use case has data in it. It's data driven. I mean Mark heard on his keynote talked about his experience at the rental car place. That's data driven. You got to know that's the CEO of Oracle. So this is again, the data is at the center of this. It's flowing through all the apps and has to be available, has to be real time. This is fundamental. And digital assets are data as well and applications, when you go back to what computer science says, applications themselves are data. So increasingly it's all data. Customers want to be engaged digitally. They want to be able to take their digital experience, whatever channel, the data has to follow them. You have to anticipate what data you're going to generate in the form of content. You have to be able to capture data without annoying them. So in many respects, John, this all comes down. The challenge for marketing is, how do we capture data without being annoying? How do we provision data in a way that's valuable so that we increase the view of the brand? I want to put you in the spot because I know marketing has a lot of different components to it. But one of the things that everyone in the industry is talking about is the role that Salesforce.com has taken in its SaaS cloud platform, VisaV, an app where you just put your contacts in and you manage your relationships and how that's grown and shifted over to being a SaaS platform. And here's the question I want to ask and get your thoughts on and just riff here in real time. Back in the old days, analog sales needed a system to provide automation for those sales guys. Boom, salesforce.com is born, okay? Marketing would provide email marketing and content. Here's a package of content. If you're interested, click on it and we'll get you more information. Marketing department sends those leads to the analog sales team. The leads aren't good enough.  Glen Gary, Glen Ross kind of thing going on there. Because now that's shifted with the digital fabric end to end from initiation to moment of truth, digital. That kind of goes away. And so sales cloud and marketing cloud are blurring. Yes or no? Were your thoughts on the role of a sales kind of thing in the marketing piece? Well, it all comes down to, and again, this is one of the precepts of the whole notion of customer experience. It all comes down to the customers on a journey to solve a problem, to generate some utility out of a purchase that they're making. Whether it's a product or a service. They go through a discovery process. They go through a buying process. They go through a utilization process. All of that requires engagement. And so the data and the way you provision your resources to that customer has to fit naturally in the way the customer does stuff. So one of the reasons why this is blurring is because customers themselves are demanding that they be treated digitally in some coherent manner. Now, institutionally and organizationally, there's still a lot of tension, as you said, between sales and marketing. And it's not enough to just say, we're going to do a marketing cloud because there's marketing budgets. And we're going to do a sales cloud because the sales budget's on a product cloud because the product budget's et cetera. This has to come together.  Great observation. I would just add that this notion of a platform is an indicator of where the market's going. Certainly we're seeing in the mainstream some things that are being tweaked and Facebook admitted in the New York Times that they're working on it. They're going to work on these things. But let's bring that platform, if what you say is true, which I believe it is, everything has to come together because it's not one or the other. It's not mutually exclusive.  So the question is, that shifts the scale because in the old days, marketing was to provide value to the organization, the enterprise itself. The business value of the enterprise and that comes from selling something. Right, right, right, right. So to your value point, I think that this market shifts the value to the marketing team because they have a broader perspective in that journey. Or have more touch points in the engagement of the customer. The question is, can they be the orchestrator of a coherent and holistic engagement strategy with the customer? So I'm a CIO, I'm looking at a complete replatforming. I think that's a better approach than trying to take Salesforce and make it work over here. And if you look at Salesforce, they've done a bunch of different acquisitions, not always kind of tightly coupled and a little bit of awkwardness here, chatter, all these components. Oracle's taking a different approach to saying we're going to integrate all this stuff and you pick and choose. I think if I'm a CIO, I might want to take a more holistic view from initiation to moment of truth with the customer and the life cycle that journey. There's more marketing touch points in there so I'm probably designed that way. Your thoughts. So it's interesting, John. The whole CRM industry went through an extremely challenging birth. One of the biggest challenges is that we, as you said, it used to be analog. Sales people would go on a call, they'd write up a trip report, they'd hand it to an administrator and the administrator would do the data entry and we'd get into the system some way. The minute you start automating that, now the sales guys are doing data entry. And if you talk to sales organizations today, one of the biggest problems is how much time are my folks doing data entry? How much time are my folks generating content for customers? How much time are they doing all these other things and not selling? And that's an issue. So when we think about where this is going to go, at the end of the day, Salesforce has done the best job of presenting CRM to the marketplace for a variety of different reasons. But it still is a let's capture sales activity kind of a platform. The question is, are we actually going to get to a platform that is truly able to provide coherent holistic value at the moment that the customer wants it? And that includes delivery. And I think Oracle has an opportunity in all of this. It's to actually utilize their various clouds to provide a way of engaging customers across the entire journey. Because they can do the discovery piece, they can do the sales piece, and they can also do for digital products and digital capabilities anyway, the delivery piece. Well, Peter Burris from wikibon.com, the head of research over there, check out some of the work they're doing with the digital role of the digital business and assets, digital experiences. They're all assets. Whether it's content engagement or an experience that someone has, it's all a data asset. It's a digital asset. And that needs to be harnessed and looked at holistically in a way. You got some great research over at wikibon.com. Check it out. I'm John Furrier here for two days at Oracle Modern Customer Experience Show. Should be great. Really cutting-edge stuff, and really as the world re-platforms in the cloud. Content and experiences will be fundamental and data's at the center of it. We'll bring you all the coverage here. We'll be right back with more great coverage after this short break.