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415- Work Smarter Not Harder w/Rob Spellman · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: Hey everybody, welcome to another. You've been heard today we're operating at scale 20 years in and just getting started with Rob Spellman. Rob, introduce yourself and welcome to the show.
• 0:21
  Speaker B: Hey, thank you, Mike. I'm Rob Spellman. I'm the Chief Information Officer with QTC Health Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Leidos.
• 0:31
  Speaker A: All right, so 20 years in, tell me a little bit more about that. How'd you get to where you are and what have you done to have been heard to become the Chief Information Officer?
• 0:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's been a journey. I just celebrated 20 years with Leidos. Before that I did a five year stint with which started off as American Management Systems, then spun off. The piece I was with spun off and was purchased by caci. So I've kind of been in this systems integrator, defense contractor role for my whole career. When I started off I was a database administrator. I started on Oracle and then transitioned over to Microsoft SQL Server and I really loved it. It was one of those things as you go through and you're working your undergraduate degree. Computer science was my major, but it's such a broad field. I really struggled for the first couple years and I can write code, I don't really love writing code, but when I got into a database class, I think it was my junior year, it was like a light went off and I was like, I love databases and I love database architecture and data structures, all this cool stuff that you can do with it. And so. So really started off as a DBA and then made over 25 years, took on different projects, different roles and about almost four years ago now I moved into the CIO role that I'm in now. So it, this is a rarely people ever get to say that they're working their dream job. But even when I was early on in my IT career and I had a lot of great CIOs that ran the organization, a lot of them that I looked up to. But early on I kind of latched onto that and I was like, man, I'd love to be a CIO one day. And I just couldn't ask, yeah, how?
• 2:22
  Speaker A: What was the path? Because I've interviewed probably 15, 20 other people at this level and I have not run across somebody who started off as the DBA and then made it into, not made it into, but aspired to and got there to become one of the CIOs. It seems like typically the DBAs really look kind of like that. That office in the corner and just there you learn from work on.
• 2:49
  Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah. I think what served me best throughout my career, I point back to something that my father instilled in me when I was young. He used to always say that whenever you're in a room and they're looking for somebody to do something that's like really difficult, nobody wants to do it, nobody's raising their hand. Be the one to raise your hand, right? So I think I never shied away from any assignment, any crazy task or anything along those lines and having those opportunities and exposures, I think that's really what has helped me throughout my whole professional career, even in my personal life.
• 3:27
  Speaker A: Right.
• 3:27
  Speaker B: Like you see something and I guess I've never thought anything was unattainable or that I couldn't do something. It's kind of okay.
• 3:35
  Speaker A: So that willingness to participate, that willingness to tackle those projects, that can be a double edged sword. So obviously, I'm assuming came out on the right side of the sword more often than not. Otherwise you probably would not have continued to move forward and into management and become heard. What do you think are the things that helped you to go from being one that's willing to jump in to one that was asked to lead?
• 4:08
  Speaker B: Well, one is you kind of hit on it, right? You've got to execute, you've got to have proven performance, you got to have a proven track record before somebody will even trust you with something along those lines, right? So you can't expect to come in on day one and have somebody entrust you with the hardest task or ask you to lead something to. So where you can you make your mark, you prove yourself and you deliver, right? I mean, our current CEO, Tom Bell, he's got a saying, right? Like, we don't need doers, we need doners, right? We need people that can get things done. And like I always tell my boss, our CEO, and I'm always like, I'm the guy that can get things done, right? Whether it's fighting the battles with cybersecurity, whether it's convincing a customer we need to go in a certain direction or not. Like for more often than not, that's been one of my special powers, Right. Somehow or another, I can find a way. I, I just, I'm like a, a bulldog, right? Like, I don't ever give up. And some way or another, there's a way to get it done.
• 5:08
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 5:08
  Speaker B: You know what?
• 5:09
  Speaker A: For me, that's one of the most enjoyable parts of what we do, is here's a challenge, here's a puzzle, figure it out. And I always, I like, I Just look at things and I try to figure out what's the design here, why they do this, why'd they do that. And so it's, yeah, there's a good chunk of that. Are there any tips? And actually, you know what, you mentioned something that I didn't have in my career, which was you had a lot of other CIOs to look to, to follow in the, the footsteps of people who blazed the path before you. What is. Talk to me some about that. I can ask specific questions, but I'd really rather leave it open ended and hear what your experiences were around that.
• 5:56
  Speaker B: Yeah, it was varied. I'd say you had some CIOs you learned what not to do from and some you learned like what to do and how to emulate. One thing that did scare me always about CIO position, as I was like making my way up the career ladder, you always had this aspiration. And like you said, I've had experience with so many different CIOs. And the reason is because like the industry average, like the last time I looked at it, the average tenure for A CIO is 18 months, right? That may have changed, but I remember looking at that one time and I was like, wow. And sometimes we had CIOs, they'd come in, they wouldn't last 18 months, right? And we'd have some that would come in and would really be successful and last several years. So we had that wide range that I've worked with and over the last 15 years of my career gotten to work closer and closer with different CIOs. But it's definitely a mixed bag. And I, and it was funny, like when I finally got into the CIO role, I remember like thinking to myself and I was like, I was ecstatic, right? And I was so happy. Cause I'd like I'd accomplished this career long goal. But at the same time I thought to myself, I was like, you know what? This is probably the first time in my life that I can almost expect to be fired for a job, right. Just because there's so much turnover within the C suite and especially within the CIO role. So that was kind of an epiphany. Like I had one mentor that was always told me, be careful what you wish for because you might just get it right. But every day I've enjoyed. So like, I'm glad to say I'm past the 18 months period and still a truck.
• 7:30
  Speaker A: Did he fit? Four or five years?
• 7:32
  Speaker B: Yeah, going on four years. So in April. Yeah, it'll be four years. So still waking up every day and love it. It's been interesting and like I said, I've over 25 year career I can think of at least a dozen different CIOs that kind of ring around in my head.
• 7:54
  Speaker C: Most IoT leaders don't need more technology, they need less noise. Over the years, infrastructure quietly gets complicated. Multiple locations, multiple Internet providers, different contracts, separate bills and reactive support. Nobody plans it that way, it just happens. What we do is vendor neutral advisory. That means we don't sell platforms or force change. We start with low friction areas. Internet telecom, Microsoft licensing. Places where complexity builds quietly and can usually be cleaned up without disruption or or capex. Sometimes we find savings, sometimes we find nothing. Either way the outcome is the same. More clarity, less distraction and it that's boring in the best way possible. If you want a second set of eyes from people who sit on the buying side of enterprise infrastructure every day, just go to you've been heard.com and answer the questions to simplify, streamline and save.
• 8:49
  Speaker A: Wow, okay, interesting. Any great law lessons or thoughts or things that you carry with you forward? Like that one of be careful what you wish for.
• 9:01
  Speaker B: Yeah, one thing that is always another thing like one of my guiding principles. And I learned this like when I was a kid as well, right. And I've always lived by this and whether it's work, personal life, golf. I'm an avid golfer, but work smarter, not harder, right? So I've always. And as I got into technology and computer science and discovered programming and automation and things like that, I was just kind of always enamored with that. And I was like, now I have this way to implement and make things smarter, make things easier on myself, make things more efficient. So I think my quirkiness I've always loved like looking at a process, partnering with the business and saying, hey, I know you've done this the last 20 years this way, but what if we did this and, and what. What advantages that could bring to the company and what efficiencies and especially now like as everybody's going through aop, they're getting challenges and then you see the capabilities of AI coming out and everybody try to jump at that, right? So automation is just going to the next level with AI. But it's just that one principle has just, it's helped me throughout my whole career. I can remember being a DBA and even writing code. One of the things I loved was like writing code that wrote code, right? So that was, I always thought that was like the coolest thing ever. And I was in a chat GPT session just a few hours ago, and they were talking about how using the ChatGPT to help you write a better prompt. Right? And I was like, oh, it's like that kind of reminds me of like back when code would write other code. So it's just really cool. But that's always been a thing of mine, like, work smarter, not harder. And just a funny fact. As a kid, I was a huge fan of DuckTales. The original DuckTales, not the remake they'd done recently, but Scrooge McDuck. That was like his character. He was always work smarter, not harder. And it just help.
• 10:59
  Speaker A: It's such a more elegant way of putting it than the way I tend to tell people. I tell people, hey, you know what? I'm kind of lazy. I like to let the computer do the work for me. I say it that way because I think of it being funny. But yeah, your articulation of it, spot on too, because I love making the system do the work for me, especially any of that boring, constant, repetitive type work. I want to automate that stuff. I've always wanted to automate that stuff. Never really got the chance to do much of the code writing code until now.
• 11:38
  Speaker B: No. It's amazing looking at where it's come from 25 years ago to now and it's just like, wow, like you said. I mean, I remember hearing the phrase like, citizen developer. I don't know, maybe five, seven years ago. Like, like, yeah, I was actually 10. Yeah, maybe 10 years ago. Right. But it took a long time to like, I look at where we are now and I'm like, hey, like, you can actually really start to use that. Right?
• 12:00
  Speaker A: So, so, okay, here's. Here's an interesting segue and I, I kind of warned you that we'd head this direction a little bit. You're doing health services, you're contracting with government, or I believe Leidos is contracting with government, not a true government organization. Correct.
• 12:19
  Speaker B: And so, yeah, I can explain, but go ahead.
• 12:23
  Speaker A: So in that imbalance there, and then bringing in the thought of like the citizen developer, that throws like a third aspect of. I just see these as competing roles or where there's lots of role conflict. And so I'm interested in, one, go ahead and fill me in on exactly how the interaction between Leidos and the government works. And then two, that the health versus the government security policies and all of those, and the push and pull there, and then the thought of empowering citizen developers to be able to do stuff in that kind of an environment. I mean, there's a whole conversation. There's a. At least an hour talking right there.
• 13:15
  Speaker B: Yeah. And there's a lot of different Personas. So at qtc, right, We. We're in the business of delivering managed health services. So our biggest Customer is the VA, Veterans Affairs. So we process about 60% of all the disability claims. So in that scenario, we're providing a service, but basically we're helping the veterans file a claim with the va. That claim will come to us, and we take the claimant and we put them in touch. We scheduled our appointment with the best available provider, right? So at the heart of it, that's one of the things we and a claimant, they may have multiple claims, right? There may be one, there may be 20. There could be a lot of contingencies, what we call it, right. So it may be one appointment, maybe four appointments. But to do that and to have our system where we're consuming the medical records, we process over 14 million pages of medical records, right? And we have. We. Over the last five years, we've done a ton of modernization there. We used to have hundreds of people that would take those medical records and do what we call bookmarking them, because you may have a problem with your knee, but you have a long medical history. You know, you may be a veteran that's 89 years old, you've got thousands and thousands of pages of medical records, but you're. You're very concerned about your knee or your hearing. When we just. We just can't give a provider 10,000 pages, say, hey, go read this whole thing and figure it out. We could, but that provider would charge you a gazillion dollars to do that, right? So what we do is we. We do the bookmarks, right? So if anything that's related to the knee or to the hearing, we would bookmark that. Make it easier for the provider to go and find the historical data, read it, do their exam, and basically document the results, and then it goes into a rating system. But it's very interesting how all that happens. But in order to operate like that, we have to get an ato, which stands for Authority to Operate. So whatever technology we're using, the way the data is being transmitted, how VA is transmitting it to us, how we're taking that data, what we're doing with that data, how we're transmitting it to the provider, how the provider is transmitting back to us, and then how we, at the end, take what the provider has given us, take what the VA has given us, take what the examinee has filled out and their questionnaires, put that all together and deliver the case back to the VA so they can make a decision. We have to have an authority to operate. That explains that entire architecture. All the systems, applications, technologies, how the data moves around, all that has to be documented to the emissary and certified by the va, by the doj. So, yeah, that's why it's a big barrier to entry. Right. Like, you don't see just everybody doing these exams. There's four people in the world that do them. Right. So it. It's a huge barrier because it is so complicated. Right.
• 16:21
  Speaker A: And I'm just thinking of the compliance that's involved. You know, you've got the HIPAA compliance, you've got the DoD compliance, the CMMC, you've got, like, you want to talk about somebody who's under scrutiny and has to worry about any of those audits, any of that compliance you got, you guys are getting it from multiple sides.
• 16:41
  Speaker B: Yeah. And it's funny because, like, forever, until I moved over to the QTC subsidiary of Leidos, I was at Leidos and I was at caci and I was working for the army or for the Navy, and it was D O D, which is now, you know, D O W. Right. But when I came to QTC and then you threw the Phi and all the health stuff at it, you know, adding that extra layer on top is definitely a challenge, something we've gotten really good at, but it's just another layer of what you have to do. And then you look at the evolution over the last decade, how everybody's moving out of their data centers into the cloud, the complexity with that. What inheritance are you getting from the cloud provider? You. None of this can live in the commercial space. It's got to all be Fedramp, it's got to be in GovCloud, et cetera. So a lot of it is you try to look to the vendors and partner with the AWS's of the world and make sure that they're compliant and that you can inherit some of that compliance into your system and into your ato. But it's kind of fascinating when you get, like, you could spend hours and hours kind of diving into this and talking about it. It's complicated. But when it comes together and you get that beautiful picture at the end and people are able to look at it and understand and explain it on something else.
• 17:57
  Speaker A: So. All right, let's now throw that third piece in there so you've got all of that up and running and working and now you've got an individual who is utilizing your, the systems that you're responsible for taking care of and they want to leverage some of these new modern tools, those AI tools to do anything. How are you working with that? How are you setting that up for, for approval and use and. Or are you controlling it? How are you keeping me from opening up my Gemini, my personal Gemini account and interacting with that and potentially destroying all of that compliance?
• 18:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, so that's a very heavy question. And it's a different question because we got to worry about not only our employees, but the customer is very concerned about the provider. What's stopping the doctor from just going to chatgpt and say, hey, like, what's wrong with this guy's knee?
• 19:01
  Speaker A: Right.
• 19:01
  Speaker B: So we are being asked to put a lot of safeguards in place to ensure that, like one of the things we track. How much time is the doctor taking to fill out a form? Right. How much time is a doctor taking on this section? How much time are they taking on that section? Right. So that way gives us a good idea of, hey, this, they spent this amount of time here. That's equivalent to what we would expect where if something was coming in like copy paste, copy paste, that would be a red flag. We would dive deeper into it. So we have safeguards on that end from a employee perspective as we're working and supporting the mission. Right. We started off initially, I think, kind of like everybody else, right. When Chachi PT came out and kind of exploded, Open eye exploded on the, the scene. Everybody's like, oh, this is cool. But like, it's scary. And the first thing we did was block, right. We blocked access to it, which is you can argue if it was good or bad. I think there's, you know, you could argue either side, Right. I think initially when you don't know or you don't have a plan in place, maybe it's not the worst thing to do. But we knew right away that this wasn't going away. And employees, whether it's copilot, whether it's ChatGPT, whether it's Gemini, whether it's Gronk, whatever it is, and whether they're using a lightest endpoint that we control, or they go to their mobile device, which is just as powerful, and go to a personal account, we much rather have them use a corporate controlled account versus their personal device that then they're potentially exposing. So what we did was we've gone enterprise with ChatGPT where we control the data, the data is not being consumed into the large language model as we interact with it. So, and then we're also, we have different classifications of data. Not all data can be processed through it. But really trying to have the privacy in place to protect the data, to classify the data so employees know what they're working with and what platforms they can work with that data on.
• 21:06
  Speaker A: So I'm interested in a portion of that thing that you just mentioned. So classifying the data. And if you've classified this data, are there other restrictions in place that keep me from being able to use that data, or is it that I know what the classification is and thus if I use that data in one of these, or provide it to one of these models and ask questions about it, even if it's not being shared, is it left to the employee or are there constraints in place?
• 21:44
  Speaker B: No, it's a combination of both. Right. Like even though we have Enterprise ChatGPT, we've turned off the connectors. Right. So it can't connect to SharePoint folders, it can't connect to email. We're really pressing to get there. Right. Because there are some use cases where I've created a custom GPT and I'm like, man, it would be so much easier if I could just add it to the email thread and how to consume it that way versus having to go there and upload it.
• 22:10
  Speaker A: Well, that whole bookmarking process is a perfect thing for this to do.
• 22:15
  Speaker B: Well, we've been doing the bookmarking, so we moved from that manual process several years ago and we use nlp. So basically every medical record we get, we OCR it, it goes through nlp. And the NLP process, the natural language processing is where we go ahead. And we've automated a lot of the books. So I'd say we still have a team that will do some manual bookmarking. Some providers will only work with us if it's had a manual review, but everything is running through the automation and then where we have some high certain providers or we have certain cases, we will go ahead and have a manual review on top of that. But in terms of trying to protect the data, which, you know, is probably the number one job of a cio. Yeah, I think having the taxonomy in place, you know, protecting the data is always priority number one. So we do that with extensive training, we have our annual trainings and things we have to do, but we also do that with the systems to try to make them smart enough to know. Even like with Email, Right. Like hey, email will stop you from sending something out if it thinks is protected. Right. Or if it's tagged a certain way. Yeah, the DNP and correct. And then having the logging in place too. So like even using enterprise chat gp, that's the great thing, right. We were able to log all that, track all the data that's going into it, the questions that are being asked. And if we did see somebody that kind of did something they shouldn't, we can go back to that person and kind of do some redirection. That's the right word.
• 23:41
  Speaker A: Okay, yeah, interesting. So all of this said, how do you empower that citizen developer then? Because there's a lot of these constraints and there's no connectors available. So how do you empower the citizen developer with that tool set today? Or are you still just trying to work through that to be able to get to a point where you can empower them?
• 24:04
  Speaker B: No, I think we're at a point where they're empowered and I think it goes beyond that. Right. I remember 10 plus years ago we always relied on SharePoint. We had a lot of stuff, a lot of business processes built on SharePoint and used to have to know how to develop and be able to use SharePoint Designer. So if you've ever dealt with SharePoint and SharePoint Designer, it's was a real PETA and only the elite power users could do it. And then eventually we bought a tool called Mintex, right. And it turned it into a GUI based drag and drop. You can build this highly complex workflow. So we've come a long way over the 10 years, right to from that. But that was a good example where it's like, hey, like there's a lot of different ways over the last several years we've empowered users and AI is just another piece of that. But I look at the tools we have today and one just be on Microsoft 365 and Teams and some of the things that we've done with ServiceNow and Move Works and the bots that we've deployed. So yeah, it's always a challenge. You're always going to be challenged to deliver more. And I think that just table stakes, right? Like every you give somebody something, you give them an inch, they're going to want a mile. Right. But I think you have to progress in a smart fashion to not go all the way over the top. Give too much and then you have the negative consequences of that and then you're pulling back and it's kind of what do they say like once you take the boy out of the farm and take him to the city, it's hard to get the city out of them. Right. So I think you got to be cautious, but you got to, you gotta move and deliver as well. So it's a fine line. But I do think users are more empowered today than they ever have.
• 25:48
  Speaker A: Right. I tend to agree that they're more empowered. I was just wondering what it was like trying to empower them within all of that compliance and all of the restrictions and things that you have to deal with. Here's what I've got to deal with.
• 26:02
  Speaker B: Yeah. So one thing we're trying to do now, we're actually in the midst of kind of implementing a couple of tools that are going to help us with that. That because one of the biggest challenges we have is empowering people and allowing them to use real data. Right. Especially when you're dealing like medical records, you can't be sharing phi around. Right. So what we're working on is in the test data we've had historically is just, it's never great, it's never been good enough to do what we need to do. So. But if we can take that data and redact it and like I said, when you're getting a 10,000 page medical record, you don't have time or resources to go and manually redact it. Right. So we're looking at some technologies now that we're trying to implement that are going to allow us to make a pool of test data readily available to users. So that'll take some of the handcuffs off and say, hey, you've got a sandbox now. You've got all your sand, which is that test data that is very realistic, but has been redacted to remove any phi, any cui, any of that good stuff and allow them to kind of go to town with it and see what they do.
• 27:07
  Speaker A: Quite honestly, I'm wondering about that or thinking about all of that because that touches on a couple of different topics that are towards the top of all of this. So the data sets that you have available, if you could completely anonymize those data sets and then allow people in, out at those data sets, that's kind of like exactly what you're talking about, remeling the phi. And then now if I can look at 10,000 people, the 10,000 documents for each individual of 10,000 people and then start to look at what's going on within there, then I might be able to discover or find more patterns or the exceptions and isolate those cases. And discover that.
• 27:54
  Speaker B: Or train your sign language models, all kinds of stuff. Right. So that's, to me, like, that's been holding us back. Right. Because there's so much protection around the real data. You have this gold mine of data, but you can't use it. Right. And you can't make it readily available because you have to protect it because it's so sensitive, because it's phi, because it's. So making this investment that we are to easily take that and clean it and make it available to a normal end user to play around with is going to be a real game changer, I think, or.
• 28:28
  Speaker A: Or those researchers and those people trying to figure things, the different things out, but just train.
• 28:34
  Speaker B: Right. Training new employees. Right.
• 28:35
  Speaker A: So here's the flip side of it in a way that really just kind of hit me during this conversation, and that is. All right, so we're worried about biases. We're worried about the machines finding and furthering biases. But so that anonymized data, you're going to want to pull some of those attributes out of it so that it doesn't lean into the bias. But at the same time, you almost need some of those attributes in there so that it can help identify if there is a genealogical or. Or there's a bias based off of genealogy.
• 29:15
  Speaker B: Yeah. And imagine we always take that same data set, run it with one set of attributes, get the results, mix up the attributes just to test if there is bias, and get the results, and then you can kind of prove whether you have bias or you don't.
• 29:28
  Speaker A: Okay. Interesting way of thinking about it and dealing with it there. So some of the fun, some of the things that we get to look forward to playing with and try to figure out, how do we provide these. You made that statement earlier of, you know, it's the CIO's job to keep that data contained. But my mind instantly jumped to, well, keep that data contained from the outside world while empowering and letting that data flow freely for the inside world. So it's that dichotomy of don't allow but allow and oh, don't allow but allow specifically and correct.
• 30:05
  Speaker B: That's why the taxonomy is so important. Right. And being able to tag the data. And there's various. You go to any conference, you'll get inundated by vendors saying they can do that. But, yeah, you gotta, you gotta be able to classify that data. Right?
• 30:20
  Speaker A: Yeah, Alan. All right. We've both been in it for this long. You know, 20 years ago, as we started to talk about Classifying data that was a purely manual play back then and it started to speed up and it started to be automated today. You got something to say? I can see it on your.
• 30:39
  Speaker B: No, it's just, it's grown too, from. It used to just be you get this high level classification, but now you get all the metadata that goes with it. Right. So for us, like I'm always interested in the metadata, yes. Like, hey, this has phi, but is this for the va, Is it for the FBI, Is it for the Navy? Is it for the Army? Like, who does this belong to? Right. So the tools that we have now and the capabilities, you don't have to do it manually, you're able to automate a lot of that, but you're also able to pull the metadata out so much easier now and have that many more applications to it. So.
• 31:14
  Speaker A: Nice. Yeah, it's amazing how our world has really radically changed in the last, really, in the last seven years. I mean, we had a lot of technology starting to change or continuing to change, I really should say. And then of course, Covid hits and everything changes radically for that now we continue to keep some of those things like the telework. So another shift in the conversation somewhere. I saw and read the mention of bringing services to a gymnasium for the service members and I'm thinking about how radically different that is because of all of the other compliance that we've been talking about. Now to have a pop up site and make sure that everything's still compliant and secure for that. What about those kinds of scenarios and how, how much have you had to deal with that?
• 32:06
  Speaker B: It's a great question. One of the things we do, one of our customers with a DoD, we manage the Reserve Health Readiness Program. So basically anybody who's a reservist, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, any National Guard, Marine Corps, as a reservist, you have to maintain your readiness status, right? That means basically think of it as like an annual phys. We do audio, we do dental, we do a full physical workout, blood work, all of those things, flu shots, we, you name it, we do all that stuff to ensure the readiness of the soldiers. And we have to come to them sometimes, right? So sometimes they may come to one of our clinics, but a lot of times the way we service those reservists, when they're doing their weekend duty, we will go to an armory or in a gymnasium and turn it into a clinic. Right. And it's almost. I remember when I played high school football and spring and the early days, it was always like, my coach called at a county fair and there was like, you did this drill here, you did this drill here, you did this drill there. And we do that with the gymnasium. We'll set the dentist up in this corner. We'll put the audiology booth over here, we'll put the eye exam over here. It will do the blood work over here. So you, you look at this gymnasium with the basketball hoops, and then all of a sudden you've got all these event classifications there. And. And we're acting. We've got a dentist over there filling cavities, right? So it's crazy. There's a lot of logistics in that from a IT security standpoint, standing up the network to make all that work, the connectivity, but also making sure that you've got enough providers, you've got the right type of providers, you've got the right number of dentists, you got the right number of audiologists, you got people that can draw the blood. So there's so much that goes into it. It's really fun. But like we, on any given weekend, we may do 50 of those, we may do 60 of those on a weekend. We'll see over sometimes over a hundred thousand service members, right? So there's so much volume with it too. And before we took over this program, they used to. This shows you, like how crazy it is that used to all be paper based. So you'd go to a group event, something along those lines. You see the provider, they'd write it all on paper. That paper would get sent to a warehouse full of people that did data entry into the backend government system. So as we've taken over that program, we've automated that. We've built integrations in with those DoD systems. And why you're seeing the provider now, they're actually in the web app putting in the results, and everything's being calculated and sent. So it's great for the reservist because historically it would take weeks and weeks, if not months, to get their readiness stamped. Now it's like real time, right? So at the end of the event, we're sending all that stuff and it's turning them green, as we call it, which is key because if you're not green, you're not eligible for promotion, you're not eligible for training. A bunch of other things has a big ramification on your status, your career.
• 35:13
  Speaker A: So so do they. Are there lots of times where they call you guys in for one of those popups like that? And then they've also called A bunch of the reservists in at the exact same time so that they can feed them through that and get everybody green and then move on with their maneuver
• 35:27
  Speaker B: hours, whatever they come from everywhere, right? If you're in a remote area, they may have traveled a couple hundred miles to get there. We have what they call walk ins. We get a roster ahead of time, so we kind of know what to expect. And that's why we're able to do the planning and know how many doctors you need, how many dentists you need. But we also are able to accommodate a certain amount of walk ons. Okay. Walk ins. So, and the cool thing is like, when you're a walk in and in order to service you, we need your medical history, right? So for everybody who's on the roster, we'll pull that ahead of time and have that loaded in the system. And the challenge, you know, we had to solve for this. Like, wow, like for walk ins, how do we do that? And like, how do we make sure we can get it in real time? So the integrations we put in place and how we're able to pull the data from the DoD network and pull it in and make it available and service people real time without notice as a walk in has been a huge feat for us. Wow.
• 36:22
  Speaker A: Sounds like quite the challenge and a heck of a weekend. And luckily, I'm betting that you don't have to be overseeing in many of these. I'm sure you probably go to a few of them a year just to make sure and watch and see what's going on, see if there's ways that you can help optimize that process.
• 36:40
  Speaker B: Yes, they're extraordinary. And it's seeing people make their way through in the different stations. It's amazing. And we've recently. One of the big things we do is disaster recovery, right? So we, we did a full doctor failover. We did a had a doctor scenario and we actually enacted it. It did a failover while we were hosting events for the first time ever, right? So it's like, it's like every year we try to make it harder and harder on ourselves, right. As we do our exercise. And the customer was like, hey, why don't we do it while we have group events running? Because I think there were three active events that weekend that happened to be scheduled, so they were comfortable with like, hey, if we have an impact, or all this stuff. But it was really cool because in 48 minutes we had the system entirely failed over and shifted from running out of a data center. In California to running out of a data center in Carrollton, Texas. And basically it went really well. We were able to do that and accommodate things. Wow.
• 37:42
  Speaker A: Okay. That must be taking some planning. Yeah.
• 37:45
  Speaker B: We've been executing on that program now for almost three years, so. And continuing to evolve.
• 37:53
  Speaker A: All right, so I promised you a question, and that question was, I need you to make a prediction. What will everybody be talking about as far as it goes in 18 months? What do you think our discussions will be about?
• 38:08
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, I just think that people are going to continue to evolve and look at, like, what the IT organization looks like. We talked a little bit about it, like with the citizen developers and that becoming more and more. I think we're going to see the focus move away from these big monolithic legacy IT departments and move kind of have the line blur. Right. Where business is doing more of the development businesses doing more of the design and execution of things and not needing the traditional IT folks as much. So I think 18 months from now, you're going to see a major shift and fewer people in it, but more people in the business doing those tasks that IT people used to do. Small. Yeah, that. That'd be my prediction.
• 38:59
  Speaker A: That's a good one. I've been hearing that from different places. I was going through a doctor planning session myself, and the facilitator was talking about exactly that, saying that his estimate was going to be that very soon the traditional development and that portion of the IT group is going to. They're. We're going to disappear or we're going to infiltrate and we're going to be on the ground with the rest of the business. We will just be part of the business.
• 39:29
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 39:30
  Speaker A: And we'll just. The normal employee will have that level of IT just baked into their job.
• 39:40
  Speaker B: Correct. Just like IT copilot's built into outlook now. Right. So I think the same thing. And to be honest, that's where IT and those skills are most effective, close to the business. Who knows how to make something smarter than the person doing it. Right. So I think it's going to be a big change, a big shift, but it's something that I'm excited about and looking forward to.
• 40:03
  Speaker A: Me too. Right on. Thank you everybody. And let us know what you think of the you've been heard podcast and make sure to drop a like or a comment and let us know so that we can make sure that we're bringing you the content that you want. So everybody, have a wonderful day.