Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / DEX, Flow... and 750,000 endpoints (w/ Accenture)

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DEX, Flow... and 750,000 endpoints (w/ Accenture) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGraw.
0:07
Let's get into it. Hello, change Makers, Welcome to another Deck
0:12
show my mind. What what an interesting episode we've got planned for you today.
0:19
But first of all, I am Tom McGrath and I'm joined as ever
0:23
by my may man, Tim Flower. What's going on? Tim? That
0:27
much time? We we're just talking? But it's that time of year,
0:30
right, You're starting to get a little chilly. Get some snow in the
0:32
air. I know you guys over in London missed the snow, but it's
0:35
it's on its way over here. Nice, nice, very snow. Envious
0:40
as you know always. And from from snow to flow, Tim, how's
0:45
that for a rhyming segue. Not a lot else that makes sense of it,
0:52
But the rhyme is a strong one I feel. And look, if
0:57
if people follow next thing, as I guess many people who listen to the
1:03
show do, they're probably aware of the launch a Flow which was which took
1:10
place officially at Experience London, with Tim and I were at and the privileged
1:15
to be a part of. And it caused quite quite the buzz, didn't
1:21
it. Tim? Absolutely people were excited. Now you know, Tim,
1:27
I find after admit, I find flow a difficult thing to describe of all
1:33
our products, and I just feel like I'm saying words when I start to
1:38
describe it, I feel like such a word's cool, go and no.
1:42
But what's in your IT career? There are moments where you see a vendor
1:47
bring something out that make you just sit back and say, holy cow,
1:52
imagine what I could do with that? Right? It opens up. What
1:55
I love about it is the creativity that you can bring to the job and
1:59
when you look at something and start to imagine the possibilities, and that's what
2:02
flows. It's hard to define and describe, but when you know what you
2:07
want to accomplish, it's a pedal to the metal. So it's too new,
2:13
it's too new. That's what my whole issue is. Words are not
2:16
adequate to describe novel something along these lines. Well, let's not hope that
2:23
is too true, because we are going to attempt to really really unpack flow
2:28
today and we're going to be doing it with a fantastic guest who has a
2:32
lot of firsthand experience of it. He's Jason Bentz. He's Design Experience Senior
2:38
manager for Global It Metrics and Global IT Metrics leader at Accentia. Jason,
2:46
welcome to the show. How wonderful to have you. Thank you so much
2:47
for coming on. Thanks Don, glad to be here. And you are
2:53
also at Experience Experience Boston. I believe yes, doing a fan has to
3:00
kind of on stage demonstration of flow or of your experience of using it at
3:07
Accentia. So we kind of faced with a novel challenge of having to describe
3:14
it conversationally to day Jason, don't we And how do you feel about that
3:19
challenge? Do you feel like you do better than me in terms of conveying
3:22
it purely to the is alone? What do you think? Yeah, Yeah,
3:27
definitely. We've been lucky to be part of the pilot and give a
3:30
lot of good feedback to next think on what we were seeing, what we
3:35
liked, what we were like, tweaked. It's a great experience to be
3:38
in. So through that process that's how I got to be to Experience Boston
3:43
and they're like, hey, would you like to do a demo of it?
3:46
I thought it would be kind of fun and a lot of what you
3:49
saw on the screen and the presentations were a lot of just video recordings of
3:53
it, right, and when I got up there in stage, we actually
3:54
built one in front of everybody to show all the ease of it. So
3:59
yeah, definitely cool, speak to it. Very cool. And you know,
4:02
let's let's give a little overview of your role and the scope of your
4:06
user base and responsibilities if you could, if you would, Jason, because
4:11
I think I think Accentia is like our largest customer, seven hundred and fifty
4:15
thousand end points. It almost sounds like a typoson a lot of people you're
4:21
looking after that I have that right, Yeah, yeah, So I run
4:27
our endpoint analytics shop, So there's a we are in charge of telling people
4:31
what is good. That's what we're trying to define. So as our CIO
4:36
comes to us, as other people come to us, so like, hey,
4:39
we need to measure whether this project was good. We need to measure
4:43
whether our endpoints are good, whatever it is. So that's how I got
4:46
pulled into the next Thing project. About two years ago. We were going
4:50
out trying to find vendors that could help us to find good and through that
4:55
we really leverage the dex score and we could talk more about that too,
5:00
but we leveraged the dex score from next thing to give us a definition of
5:04
what is a good experience for an employee, what's a neutral experience, and
5:10
what's a bad experience. And that's how I go back to my CIO and
5:15
now we can say, hey, look, we have historically measured our tickets
5:19
based on how many people call service desk. But for anybody listening to this
5:24
call right now, you would know that there's a lot of people out there
5:27
who are tolerable to their endpoints, so they they you know, at least
5:32
I have a computer to do work, so it's not that bad an experience.
5:34
You know, the same thing with their phones. I don't want to
5:36
buy a new phone, so I'll just use this one until I can get
5:40
there. So measuring it buy tickets to me didn't seem like the best way
5:45
to go. And I'm a data guy, so that's huge. So we
5:48
leveraged it to really show an eye opening experience. I think I last year's
5:54
experience. Everywhere I mentioned everybody saying you can't unsee what you've seen. That
5:59
was my quote for me year. We did it in New York, so
6:02
that was a huge thing for me, and that's why I got pulled in
6:06
to run next thnk at Accenture for yep, seven hundred and fifty thousand devices.
6:12
It sounds like a beast and it is. But next thing, it
6:15
really does make it run a lot easier through the portal system we have set
6:19
up and now we're in process of moving to infinity. So those of you
6:23
who are in Boston got to see my joke I had. We have Project
6:28
light Year is what we're calling it, because we're going to beyond. So
6:31
I like to have fun at work, and that was that was the shirt
6:34
that I wore at the conference to pub Yes seven so seven hundred and fifty
6:41
thousand endpoints or users. And as I understand it, Jason, your own
6:47
background isn't it. So I got to ask, how do you go from
6:55
a background not in it to overseeing nearly a million people's digital experience? That,
7:01
Yeah, it's a great question, and sometimes it becomes the elephant in
7:04
the room because everybody's like they started firing like let's talk about MD, let's
7:09
talk about this and tanium and this and that, and I'm like, okay,
7:13
let's talk about it. Yeah, my background actually comes from from data.
7:17
So, like I was mentioning before when I first started. I actually
7:23
started in customer service way back in the day, just because I like the
7:26
roots experience where you learn from ground up, so learning from taking calls to
7:30
configuring the system, to testing the system, and then ultimately I've been a
7:35
data person for who probably about fifteen years now to age myself a little bit.
7:42
And that's how I got pulled into this project though, is because we
7:44
ran a very large data project at Accenture and they said, hey, you
7:49
did you really? Can you build the foundation, really see the front end.
7:55
Can you help us to find what's good? And that's when I got
7:58
pulled over to in turn it. And I really think it's great for anybody
8:03
who's never wants to push the limits of what they want to do. Right.
8:07
You don't have to be a techie person. You don't have to know
8:09
all the infrastructure to move forward. I think it's actually better I don't because
8:13
then I can challenge them on stuff. I'm like, well, I don't
8:16
get it, what do you mean it? It does intrusion detection or what
8:18
do you mean it? It does blocking or group policies and all that stuff
8:24
like that, because it just adds more to your tool belt. That's what
8:28
I like to call it. So I call it I have a tool belt
8:30
that has quite a bit of stuff in it that I can use. I
8:33
don't know everything about a lot, but I know a lot about everything.
8:39
And it's interesting to consider the fact that a non IT background does open your
8:46
perspective. You're not coming in with some kind of pre defined notion based on
8:52
the technologies that you know of what dex is, right, it's a new,
8:56
fairly new discipline and an IT segment. We're seeing lots of different definitions
9:01
of what DECKS is, depending either as a customer on what your goals are
9:05
or as a vendor on either your you know, you mold the definition around
9:09
your own capabilities or what you think your customers need. Talk about the collaboration
9:16
ATTIC Center with next Think and your general approach to des What are your goals
9:20
and what are you trying to accomplish with the collaboration. Yeah, good questions,
9:24
Tim, so at Accentua. What we've done is we have brought in
9:30
DECKS. We have made some tweaks to it, so it's not the out
9:33
of the box version. But again, seven hundred and fifty thousand points across
9:37
global so we had to make a couple of changes to it, not a
9:39
lot, I would say, but we really wanted to focus on the fact
9:43
that we run a very giant compliance engine behind our system. At the conference,
9:50
I mentioned the only time I want to be mentioned in the news is
9:52
because our stock price is rising. I don't want to be in there because
9:54
we had any kind of compliance issues. And we take compliance very very seriously,
10:00
like once a month, people are taking tests and you're constantly being phishing
10:03
tested and stuff like that at are firms. So through that process, you
10:07
know, a lot of what we're doing is taking the next thing to help
10:11
us with compliance a little bit, but also help us get the DEX score.
10:15
Like I said, we were trying to define good and let everybody know,
10:18
hey, just because they don't call it helped us, doesn't mean we
10:20
have the best fleet in the world. And through that process, we have
10:24
put together a DEX program, and in the DEX program, if you're in
10:28
the higher buckets, we definitely don't look at you as much because you're actually
10:33
having a really good experience. But as we start looking at some of the
10:37
other regions and countries where they have ISP issues and stuff like that, we
10:41
really have to focus on that because if the ISP can't give them Internet service
10:46
provider, so they can't give them the right bandwidth to run things, then
10:52
we have to make sure that we maximize everything in the endpoint to allow for
10:56
that throttling. These are all new fancy terms I've actually earned in this role
11:01
over the past year, So you know, going through that, we really
11:03
have been leveraging the DEX score to kind of bucket our company up and say,
11:07
okay, look, the new term that I gave Sam the other day
11:11
is no computer left behind or no endpoint left behind. So that means if
11:16
you're below a DEX score of a four, that we are aggressively trying to
11:20
get you above afore. So we've got all of our different regions out there
11:24
working through the scores looking to see what's causing it is that our bad A
11:28
lot of it is a lot of it, honestly, is people just not
11:31
rebooting their computers, so we're forcing them to reboot their computers. We do
11:35
pushes once a month for any new pushes for updates to your OS, updates
11:41
to Chrome Edge. We try and keep that on a monthly basis because we
11:45
want to try and control that as much as possible. But if you've been
11:48
to some of the meetings that I've been in, you've heard that we have
11:52
eighty six different versions of teams out there. That's pretty brutal. But we
11:56
also expect to have at least ten different versions of teams because we are a
11:58
micro partner. We have Alpha Beta, and then we have Intro as well.
12:03
Where we are. We've actually been on the versions of teams that are
12:07
being pushed out right now. We've been on them for a year and a
12:09
half. So we had like a lot of our avatar bots and stuff like
12:13
that that are now getting launched to the companies. We've been playing around with
12:16
the avatar bots now for a little over a year and a half and we
12:20
get to test it out and have a really good partnership with my stuff as
12:22
well. But you know, leveraging the dex platform and then talking with the
12:26
next thing. It was great because we could make tweaks and changes to it
12:30
to make it fit our case. With compliance running so hot in our machines,
12:35
I don't want to penalize the overall machine because we are doing all that
12:39
compliance, So we made some tweaks there. We also made some tweaks by
12:43
regions, so we take a look at someone in India versus someone in Philippines
12:46
versus someone in the US. Again, that ISP is very different. It
12:52
seemed to balance out post COVID, So if anything good came out of COVID,
12:56
it looks like internet service providers have really stepped up their game to help
13:00
us all work from home now, but there's definitely been some challenges. So
13:05
talk a little bit more about compliance because it's the same kind of term,
13:07
even though it's been around for decades. We've talked about compliance for a long
13:11
time. In it it's the same as decks. The definition of compliance depends
13:16
on your role. What you're trying to accomplish. Is it an it policy
13:18
like you have to read it every week. Is it company policy where you've
13:22
got certain things set? Is it software license policy and compliance? Is it
13:30
security policy? So when you have a workforce that big managing compliance across seven
13:35
hundred and fifty thousand and probably a pretty unique definition of compliance has got to
13:41
be complicated. Talk a little bit more about what compliance actually means for you.
13:46
What are you trying to tackle as you go after that kind of elusive
13:50
word of compliance. Yeah, great question, and everybody does kind of different
13:54
they differentiate what they want to be compliant. Right. We're very aggressive and
14:00
we move very quickly, so a lot of people are like, oh,
14:01
seven hundred and fifty thousand devices that probably takes months and years to roll out
14:05
compliance. We're in the process of doing upgrades to it right now and our
14:11
timeline is four months. So we have come in. We have a tool
14:16
it's called PMT, so it's called Protect my Tech. And what that application
14:20
does is it monitors roughly anywhere from sixty to eighty different checks in your computer.
14:24
So we're not talking like four or five. We're talking almost one hundred
14:28
checks on your computer every day it runs. We even have some tools like
14:33
Tanium that do intrusion detection. Like the second you open up program, Boom
14:37
is running a check. But with great responsibility. You've got everything going on
14:43
in the machine, like I was mentioning before, because we have all this
14:48
stuff run the machines, the machines run slow. So the compliance checks that
14:52
we do are everything from are you on latest version of Edge Chrome? Are
14:58
you on the right OS version? Are you you and it's N minus two
15:01
usually so within the last two versions We also go out there and make sure
15:05
you're not on a vulnerability version. So if we get notified hey U N
15:09
minus one is actually a bad version, don't use that. Get out of
15:11
that version. We have that run into our script. We have scripts running
15:18
to make sure you're on the latest versions of MD of all the different taniums
15:22
and things like that. And then how often do you reboot? We checked
15:26
that as well, because we want to make sure you're refreshing as fast as
15:30
possible. That's actually, you know, it's the it's the old joke about
15:33
it desk. I called it desk and I said, did you reboot?
15:35
Before you say anything? The more I the more I learn about it,
15:41
you know, getting back to the not it background, the more I laugh
15:43
because I'm like it, actually, ninety eight percent of the problems are gone
15:48
when you reboot because you just don't have a refresh PC. And the joke
15:52
I always say to my team is like, hey, have you guys ever
15:54
rebooted your phone? And they all just stare at me and they're like,
15:56
what are you talking about? Like that's a computer and medge and what happens
16:00
when you reboot your phone? They all do it while we're on the call
16:02
and they're like, oh my god, it's so much faster, you know.
16:06
So it's kind of a fun joke, but it's real. It's real
16:08
out there. So we run all these checks out there every day. You
16:12
need to be compliant. But then so we're also consulting firm at the end
16:15
of the day too, right, So we don't just we don't just make
16:18
products. We don't just come up and help clients do their day to day
16:22
stuff. But we do a lot of consulting on that side of it too.
16:26
And some of our clients aren't a stickler for stuff that we have,
16:30
right, or maybe they're on a different version of something. They don't want
16:33
to use teams, they want to use anything else out there that's that's a
16:37
different platform, Like, for instance, right now, I'm I'm on Chrome
16:41
right now with you guys. I can't tell you last time I've used Chrome
16:44
because I've done the Edge move. Now that we're Microsoft predominant shop, I've
16:48
been really focused on Edge, making sure that Edge is running smoothly since we're
16:52
asking most of our employees to use it. So we do have vendors and
16:56
our clients coming to us saying, hey, we really need to use different
17:00
versions of stuff, and we use it. So we have these things called
17:03
exceptions, which everybody from my company who listens to this call are going to
17:07
laugh because they know that this is like the dirtiest word in the book for
17:11
me, is like swearing on a call. For me is saying, oh,
17:14
we have an exception because this client wants to be able to use our
17:18
USB ports to do storage, or they want us to be able to use
17:22
this version of Chrome or X, Y and Z, and we have to
17:25
change on the fly and create these exception rules to say, okay, well
17:29
this person needs to be eighty three compliant, but the eighty fourth compliance the
17:33
client says they don't want that compliant, that it's compliant for their needs,
17:37
they write it off in their contract. I still kind of argue sometimes,
17:41
saying, you know what, that's great, but it's my PC that you're
17:45
using. So if I get breached, who's I go down with you?
17:48
So we definitely work through that a lot. But that's definitely our compliance model.
17:53
So this tool right now today goes out there and grabs all these compliance
17:57
checks and then displays it for you as a user. But it today it
18:03
says like, oh, go into your dash shell and run run all these
18:06
scripts. Like how many people know dash shell? You know, I used
18:11
it because I was a coder back in the day, But if I was
18:14
an it, I would have no clue what they're trying to tell me to
18:15
run. So we've actually been revamping it now. And this is one of
18:19
the beauties back to the partnership with next Inc. Is now we're leveraging next
18:23
Think to be our cloud source for data. So next inc is now going
18:27
to be running those eighty four checks for us, sending that to our sending
18:33
that to our data lake, and then our app is going to be looking
18:36
at those checks to then say okay based on these checks that Next Think is
18:40
done based on these different people who have exceptions. Now we're going to go
18:44
ahead and send this back to next Think to run remediations. So it's a
18:48
pretty slick system we have set up. And this is something that we're gonna
18:52
where we can talk about flow. Is why we're we're looking at that now
18:55
is because we want to now start looking at how do we get it out
18:59
of going to our data like in processing. Anyone who owns a data like
19:03
if you don't know it's not the data that stored and lake. We always
19:07
use the joke it's pennies on a dime or nickels on a dime whatever to
19:10
store the data there. But it's actually processing the data that is horrendously expensive.
19:15
So data storage for like ten bucks, data process for like a million.
19:19
Yeah. So I almost envision a sign on the wall similar to you
19:25
see at a construction site. Right, X number of days since the last
19:30
safety incident. How do you judge or gauge the impact of compliance on a
19:36
des platform overall? Is it really just is it really just that simple?
19:42
Yeah? I mean, here's the beauty of it so far, is that
19:45
we have I'll say, we over engineered our compliance. So we had lots
19:51
of duct tape. We had all kinds of stuff out there and some stuff
19:56
that was never used anymore. Right, So, the whole days of the
19:57
wormholes and all these back again problems that were coming up, we put duct
20:02
tape over it to make sure that it was strong enough to hold and keep
20:04
us compliant. But it wasn't the best coding, right, But we had
20:07
to do it on the fly, and we can never because we're an internal
20:10
it shop. We have to serve clients as well at the end of the
20:14
day, because we get brought into all the clients discussions because we're clients zero,
20:17
so we we drink our own wine or eat our own dog food,
20:21
all the jokes there. We make sure we test it before we go to
20:25
our clients with it and our compliance model. While very rigorous, the beauty
20:30
of it again merging with next think now, is we can We've got that
20:33
chance to go back and clean everything up and start making it cleaner so that
20:37
if someone gets it, they're not like, wow, what is this coding?
20:41
I have no idea where you're trying to go with this and then try
20:45
and you know understand based on all the comments and the notes too, being
20:49
a former coder, like the amount of comments I put into things I probably
20:53
like made people like go nuts When they look at it, they're like,
20:56
what is okay? I get what you're trying to do. Why were you
20:57
doing this? Still they don't there right, So Jason back to the original
21:04
challenge here, which is to convey flow without visual aids as it were,
21:11
say you're talking to a peer, never heard of it? How do you
21:14
put it in a nutshell? Yeah, So the concept of Flow has been
21:22
around forever, right, it's workflows so that you know you want to create
21:25
a workflow plan, you want to be able to execute things you really want.
21:30
The foundation's been out there for a long time, but I think we're
21:33
flow. The best way to explain it is it's getting something accomplished in a
21:40
system and giving it. I like to look at it a tree, Right,
21:45
you got your branches that kind of spawn off from the tree trunks to
21:48
let you do different things with it. So it's an if and then statement,
21:52
but it really powers on AI. So it lets the computer do all
21:56
the work for you, so I don't have to do it as a human.
22:00
I don't have to be like, oh, let me see if they're
22:00
compliant here, compliant there. But so what flow does is it pulls all
22:06
that together. And I think where the winds of flow come in my mind
22:11
is the ease of it, the way that you can visualize it, the
22:17
way that you can get in there and anybody can kind of work on it.
22:18
You don't have to be a master coder to do it. I think
22:22
the big joke on my team as they say, well, if Ben's can
22:23
do it, anybody can do it, because he doesn't have the IT background,
22:27
and he's still able to code with flow. And then the other thing
22:32
that we're working with really closely that hasn't been launched as part of it yet
22:36
but it's coming is the data points that come out of it. So right
22:38
now, in our PMT modules, we can tell people, hey, here's
22:45
where you are. You're not compliant, you're in the process of being compliant,
22:49
and through some querying we can get about where you are in that process,
22:55
like did we push a package out to you, have you received it,
22:57
has it been run? And get that data. But the beauty of
23:00
flow and next think is that we are going to be able to tell where
23:06
you are at any given point time within like fifteen minutes roughly, you know,
23:10
like near real time. And that's where it really becomes super advantageous to
23:15
someone like me measuring that information. Is when I run the flow, I
23:18
can build the flow. Like I said, it's pretty easy to build.
23:22
The way I look at it and the way I told it to some of
23:23
the other clients when I was sitting at Experience Everywhere is it reminds me of
23:27
the old Seql server. So Seql server, we would go in there and
23:32
code all that Seql and get it all set up, and then about you
23:36
know, mid maybe twenty ten, twenty fifteen or so, one of my
23:41
friends, one of the new hires, came in and he was about him
23:44
in my mind and he was like, hey, I really need help with
23:45
seql server. And I heard that You're like that was one of your things
23:48
back in the day. And I'm like yeah, and I look at him
23:49
like, what are you doing. You're dragging in blocks, You're dragging in
23:52
these big, you know, coding things. I'm like, that's awesome,
23:56
Like that would take me twenty thirty, you know, maybe an hour to
24:00
code all that stuff that you just dragged a box in for and then you
24:03
just enter in different variables and it's all done. So that was that's I
24:08
think where there's a huge win and flow because in the demo I showed if
24:12
you ever want to go back and watch the demo, it's up on the
24:15
page. But you just you drag a box in and then you just add
24:18
the variables and then you're done and then you move on to the next steat.
24:22
So you're you're talking about hours of time saved on the original coding,
24:26
but even more so when you go in there to debugget you can go in
24:30
there and look and you only look at variables. You don't have to look
24:32
at like what the actual box as I like to call it, did or
24:37
does? It does that whole flow for you? And then you can link
24:40
it to everything, so you can link a remote action to a campaign to
24:47
running more remote actions to fix the computer. So in the compliance box,
24:52
you know, I can run the remote action to say did are you compliant?
24:56
Okay? Yes or no? So yes, you're compliant, okay,
24:59
done, And then I can in the future, like I said, we're
25:02
trying to work on right now, is when that box says end, I
25:06
can now measure that end box to say how many people automatically went through the
25:10
flow and we're compliant, And then how many people when they do the non
25:14
compliant flow? What did they touch in that flow? So did we run
25:18
a remote action on them and clean them up right away? Yes or no?
25:22
Did we have to go to a campaign to talk to them? Yes
25:25
or no? Did we have to open up a ticket on them? Yes?
25:27
No? I can track all that and flow going forward, and that's
25:32
the beauty of flow to me. I'm a data guy, right So now
25:34
I've got all my data points. I can go back at any point in
25:37
time and say, hey, cio, here's how we're doing with compliance within
25:42
a fifteen minute window. It's pretty slick. And then the other components are
25:48
One of the things that we actually suggested during the process is naming the ends
25:52
of the flow different because it was originally it was just okay end, so
25:56
that was it. But by changing the way that we name the end state,
26:02
now I've got that measurable component to say, oh, they ended at
26:04
compliant, they ended at campaign, And that's really where you can you have
26:11
that transparency to your firm or your company at that point on a next thing
26:17
dashboard. You don't have to send powerbi reports, you don't have to go
26:18
to the lake anymore. You can do all that inflow. And took us
26:25
for your very first encounter adjacent and how it struck you. Yeah, So
26:32
the very first one I ever ran was my most favorite one. And this
26:34
is the one I did the demo on and it's like, how do I
26:37
get people to reboot every seven days? So it has a seven day check
26:41
in there, and so I ran the very first one. I just said,
26:45
you know, have you rebooted the last seven days, yes to no,
26:48
if it's just completed. If it's no, then send them a campaign
26:52
message saying, hey, you need to reboot your computer, and then I
26:55
run another check after that, another remote action saying okay, did they reboot
26:59
their computer after I told them? And if they did it, then that
27:02
ends a flow. And if they still didn't do it, then I said,
27:06
I'm a nasty gram as I like to call it, saying you need
27:07
to reboot your computer now or else, and then it runs yet another remote
27:12
action to make sure that they did it, and then closes it out.
27:17
But the beauty of flow was that was just like the the black and white
27:22
of it, right, So what we did is we actually added some gray
27:25
area to it or added some color to it and said, all right,
27:29
that was the first crack at it. Pretty pretty easy to do. Now,
27:32
let's say, did you have a Penny Windows update? So if you
27:34
had a Penning Windows update, then now you could do this versus you know,
27:40
make it more urgent because we know you're going to have problems with your
27:42
computer because you have a Penny and update. And we really started working on
27:47
the flow and within you know, fifteen twenty minutes, we were right back
27:51
where we had a whole flow ready to go, as opposed to hours of
27:53
drawing up on the board and creating all the code and everything like that.
27:57
Again, it gets back to the ease of doing it and just how powerful
28:02
and quick and easy and the UI is just so easy to use. I
28:07
can't emphasize that enough. You've touched on a couple of things Jason about that
28:11
I think are worth highlighting. The biggest one for me is that the notion
28:15
of low code, no code for me, freeze up somebody that is a
28:23
logical thinker to focus on the logic and the creativity of the problem you're trying
28:30
to solve, versus do I have syntax right? Do I have the language
28:34
right? Do I know what is it about my code versus the logic and
28:40
the outcome that I'm trying to achieve. So that creativity, I think that
28:44
the fact that you can go in without having to worry about the technicalities and
28:48
just focus on creativity, I think is big and I love talking with folks
28:52
about that creativity. Like I said at the top of the show, in
28:56
solving technology problems and how creativity apps to the solution so talk about a little
29:02
bit about flow in action. How is it? Actually you talked a little
29:07
bit kind of I think on the edges, but how is how are you
29:11
looking to improve compliance at Eccentric and maybe we can bounce a few ideas back
29:17
and forth with you. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So the root is
29:21
that we're moving to investigate what we're calling black box, meaning that we could
29:27
have everything flow through next thing and nothing go into our data lakes and be
29:30
processed, because that's where our money savings. Like I said before, is
29:33
that it costs so much money to run because you're thinking, you're talking,
29:37
we're not talking twenty thousand PC's being dumped data. You know eighty you've got
29:41
eighty four checks that are probably bringing down we'll just say, for ease,
29:47
five hundred data points. So those five hundred data points go into a data
29:49
lake and sit there. That's fine. But when we start running checks on
29:52
that, running you know, splunk or any of the other tools against that.
29:56
Everybody knows consumption models are the worst because they're the ones to spend infinite
30:00
amounts of money. It's not bad for a twenty thousand PC shop, but
30:03
it's horrible for seven and fifty I can't imagine, say, by the bit
30:07
yeah, and we when we start running through. You know a lot of
30:11
people are like, oh, we like consumption models because we only pay when
30:14
we use it. And on the other hand, I'm like, man,
30:15
I'm not a big fan because we go from thousands of dollars to millions of
30:19
dollars real quick when we start running processes. So it it's tough there because
30:26
I have to worry about spend on processing. So that means I have to
30:30
cut processes that I may or may not need. And the beauty of flow
30:33
is I don't really have to cut those processes, right, I can go
30:36
ahead and run all that flow through because it's sitting in the next thing cloud
30:41
today, and I can run the processes against the cloud. The other beauty
30:44
about that is that I'm not running against the person's PC. Right, So
30:48
I've used the term run compliance by dripping. I think that was the thing
30:51
I got yelled at my sam last year. So hopefully he's not listening to
30:53
this, but it's ultimately what it is. Right, So you take the
30:56
data, you drip it in the cloud, and now we run everything the
31:00
cloud. You're not hurting that person's PC. You're not, but you're also
31:03
you're also running your compliance analysis against the most current version of the data and
31:10
not what is stagnant or delayed and sitting in the lake. Correct. Yeah,
31:15
dead on right there, tim, So we're within we call it near
31:18
real time, So within like five, ten, fifteen minutes, we're running
31:22
compliance in that person's computer and we're not waiting to the twenty fourth hour and
31:27
then you know, God forbid that you weren't compliant, and then you have
31:30
to go in there and be compliant. And then you didn't know shell,
31:34
so you have to wait till tomorrow for to run the next check and you're
31:37
like, I didn't do it right, so now I got to do it
31:40
again. Where in flow and with next thing, we're able to do that
31:45
within real time, So you run the script now or you have the remote
31:48
action run and then within fifteen minutes you can go there and be like,
31:52
okay, I got to take care of it to wait till tomorrow and guess.
31:55
So that's a lot of it, you know, setting up all those
31:59
those flows. But you talked about the partnership too, So what we're looking
32:02
to do is actually have the collector itself. We're looking at the collector and
32:07
saying, can we have the collector on the machine say whether or not you're
32:09
compliant, because there still is going to be a problem at the end of
32:14
the day. Right. We can't run seven hundred and fifty thousand flows times
32:17
eighty three daily. There's no way that's going to happen, right, That's
32:22
just that someone at next think is going to stare at their screen and be
32:25
like, oh my gosh, we're so close to capacity. We're so close
32:29
capacity. Right, So if we can get the collectors and the endpoints to
32:32
do minimal checks, just do some checks to say compliance checks on it,
32:38
it's not going to run the computers hot as it runs today. The joke
32:43
I say is our compliance is actually what keeps our homes warm because it runs
32:45
so hot and it takes so much CPU power, burns your fan out your
32:49
house, right, which is fine in Christmas right now in the winter time
32:52
right now, it's not so great in the summer when you're sitting there in
32:53
the ninety degree weather. So as we can get the collector to kind of
32:59
do some of that work that we're doing the partnership now, then that collector
33:01
then sends it to flow. Flow runs all the processing for us. And
33:05
then the first part is the AI have flow right, Like I like to
33:09
say, it's kind of like AI in my mind, because it's the computer
33:13
doing all the work for you. It's doing the checks, it's doing the
33:15
runs, it's running the remote actions, is telling the employee what to do
33:20
through a campaign. So I'm going to call that AI stream and let that
33:23
run. But it also lets me measure that AI stream. That's where my
33:28
power comes from because I'm not using as many employees to do the job.
33:32
That's awesome, so that saves me some money, but it also lets me
33:37
know where we're at. And if we ever see a hiccup anywhere in the
33:39
system, like wow, there's a bunch of people who we tried to run
33:43
EDGE on. We can't run EDGE on them. We can highlight that and
33:45
now we can run another remote action to clean up everybody who wasn't able to
33:49
run through processes right, a different flow per se. So these are the
33:53
things that we're doing. Is not only making it for compliance. So we've
33:57
got your eighty three workflows that can run for compliance, but say if something
34:01
fails for compliance, I can have a developer in the United States or India
34:06
or Philippines who are out there, go into flow and create a flow that
34:10
fixes something that's broke, and then run it on a workforce. Because we
34:15
were able to see all those to your point real time with the problem,
34:19
it sounds like you're using a fairly mature level of engage to engage with those
34:28
seven hundred and fifty thousand people. How aware are they of your compliance programs
34:32
and are you finding their awareness is actually helping with compliance that they're doing more
34:37
of their part to keep things where they should be. Yeah, so it's
34:43
it's pretty painful, I'll be honest. So right now today they if they
34:47
know of PMT, they're like, oh my gosh, it's terrible because it's
34:52
one of those things where it's silent. That's awesome because it means you're doing
34:55
your job, you're in your computer, you're taking your patches, you're log
35:00
into your computer. But it's one of those things like a car, for
35:02
instance, right your car is the greatest current in the entire world until the
35:06
check engine light goes on. You're like, oh man, now what's wrong.
35:08
I got to go get an analyze, I got to go take it
35:10
in. Now it's going to cost me money. You know. It's pretty
35:13
brutal process at that point. So our workforce knows they need to be compliant
35:20
because if you're not, we turn off your ID and that's brutal. Right,
35:23
So and that's end stage. We're we've actually because of the power of
35:28
next thing, we've actually gotten the new levels of saying, hey, maybe
35:31
we give them warnings earlier, and we do some throttling, so we send
35:37
information back and forth to Taneum, or we send information back and forth to
35:40
in Tune to limit some of the stuff that they do. But we don't
35:44
lock them out of their computer. Because what's the worst thing ever is you
35:47
take a consultant who builds a client, turn off their access. Now they
35:52
are no billing all at all that day. That's brutal. So that's the
35:57
other thing that we're trying to do with flow is how do we go from
36:00
we've already been flowing through this today, but how do we make it more
36:04
efficient to say, let's turn off some access and not all access. So
36:07
let's slap them on the wrist, but not let them get away with murder,
36:12
but slap them on the wrist and not take away their their work,
36:15
right because if I have, that's the last thing I want to do is
36:16
have a managing director come to me and say, hey, Bens, I
36:20
have five people sitting on the bench right now because you turn out their computer
36:22
access, and then I have to go back to them say well, it's
36:24
because they didn't reboot their computer. But I don't want to fight about it.
36:28
I just want to take care of it. So, Jason, you
36:31
obviously are very hands on with innovation, yes, rolling up your sleeves here,
36:37
But when you when you look at the implications around AI via the sort
36:45
of fast evolution of data V kind of beyond automation kind of technology that we're
36:53
seeing emerge, how do you see it impacting you? You're new, as
36:59
it were, career, like a of a space you find yourself in over
37:01
the next few years. It yeah, I think if you haven't heard,
37:07
Accentua is pouring billions of dollars into AI right now. And the reason why,
37:12
again, one is for us to save money, but it's for our
37:14
clients to save money too. So when we create code, we push it
37:19
out to our clients to save money as well. So the thing with AI
37:22
is it's always been like a very scary avenue. It's like walking on ice,
37:28
right, You're like, okay, well, let's do it. But
37:30
there's always this nasty word like discrimination testing out there, making sure that AI
37:34
isn't making decisions that you don't want it to make based on data that you
37:38
don't want it to have. So I think people have gotten much much smarter
37:43
with how they leverage AI and how they use it, how it works in
37:47
databases, how it recognizes certain issues and says, oh, I've seen this
37:51
issue before, let's go resolve it. I think it's really going to be
37:55
very powerful. And what I say to people is, look, I'm not
38:00
in the business of replacing workers and getting workers out of the company. Like
38:04
I don't. I'm not. My intention has never been to come in and
38:07
say, hey, if you use next SNC or you use flow, so
38:12
that what you're saying, yeah, yeah, just in general, right like
38:17
yeah, so yeah. I what I want to do is I want to
38:22
make people smarter. I want them to do what we want them to do.
38:25
I don't want them working on little little errors or to your point,
38:29
tim earlier syntax issues, right, like, how many times have you kicked
38:31
yourself when you use a comma or a tick mark on the wrong spot and
38:35
you're like, oh man, that was what screwed up all that code.
38:37
If I can take that away from the worker and make it smarter through AI,
38:44
then I can have that workforce as we say shift left right, I
38:47
can make them say, here's all the things that really bother me that I've
38:52
always wanted to fix but I couldn't fix because I was doing busy work all
38:54
the time. I want to be more creative, I want to be more
38:57
architectural. I want to take us to the next level of our endpoints and
39:01
really work through that. And that's what my team loves to do is think
39:06
tank. I think that's where we actually make more money think tanking than we
39:09
do executing, because it's really about how do we get creative with our clients.
39:15
How do we leverage what they use? How do we leverage things like
39:17
next thing, things like flow, things like into and all these other tools
39:22
and put them all together to create this big, robust tool that is mostly
39:28
run by AI. And all you have to do is just watch it,
39:30
tweak it, and make it bigger, faster, stronger. At the end
39:34
of the day. So I really think the future of AI is going to
39:37
move us to the next level. It's going to make us faster, it's
39:39
going to move things through cleaner, and it's going to free us up to
39:44
do more fun things, as I like to call it, to really challenge
39:47
our human intuition of something that an AI can't do but a human can do.
39:52
Amazing. I did a great job with power of words, Jason and
39:58
conveying your enthusiast regarding Flow, and it's huge, huge potential. If if
40:05
you were listening and you didn't catch Jason in Boston, not to worry.
40:09
We'll have a link to his presentation in the show notes to this very episode,
40:15
and we will also include links to more information about flow and if if
40:20
it interests you sufficiently, if you if you want to only believe your own
40:23
eyes in real time as it were, please do reach out to our colleagues
40:28
at Next Thing. Will be only too happy to set up a demo.
40:31
I think now before we let you go, Jason, with with thanks,
40:37
you have come on at the time of year when we always corner our guests
40:40
and try and pull a prediction out of them for the new year. So
40:45
do you have a crystal ball you could look into Jason, Is that is
40:49
that accessible? Yeah? So how do I think next year plays out?
40:54
Is that where you're going with? Yeah? Yeah, so I think next
40:58
year. Yeah, I think next year. I think we're we're we're like
41:02
a rocket ship. I think right now, right, I think so much
41:05
stuff is going on. I think there's a lot of clutter in our lives,
41:07
you know, just to take it outside of work, there's a lot
41:09
of noise out there, right, and not one of those exploding rocket ships
41:14
at home, No, not at all, but you know there's a lot
41:20
going on out there. And sometimes it's really hard when you come into work
41:23
and and be like, Okay, what do I do today? Where do
41:27
I go with today? Like I said, I think AI is going to
41:30
open up possibilities to let humans really do what they do best, and that's
41:36
be creative, really step outside the box. It's going to give us that
41:38
freedom to do that. I think one of the things that's going to be
41:43
interesting to see is you've heard a lot of company layoffs in the past couple
41:45
of years, right this year especially, and what I'm seeing out there is
41:50
there's a lot of talented people who are not ready to give up. So
41:53
they you know, they've been out there in their companies for twenty thirty years
41:59
and they're now all looking for new work. And I think that's going to
42:02
be interesting to inject those people into different companies, and it's going to be
42:07
another year of mixing things up. So I predict a year of storming coming
42:13
up our way where people have always done the same thing the same way for
42:17
a long time. I think that's one of the challenges with the people who
42:21
worked here for twenty years. Some of the people who just do it.
42:24
I come in and I just, you know, kind of get crazy in
42:27
the room and everybody's like, Okay, you need to sit down and let's
42:30
talk about this realistically for a second. But I really think storming, I
42:36
think is my word for twenty twenty four. I think you're going to see
42:37
a lot of things shake up. I think you're going to see people coming
42:40
into companies and opening eyes and be like, oh I never thought about that,
42:45
and things like next Think, things like Flow is going to really open
42:50
up people's eyes. I think you're going to see a competitive market come around
42:52
that because you know, next Inc. Is really starting to break ahead of
42:55
the pack. But there's competitors out there who are going to have to try
42:58
and stay with you guys, And I think that's great because that's a healthy
43:01
competition that I love to see and Microsoft loves to leverage that as well.
43:07
So again, we're in Microsoft Shop, so we constantly challenge them, and
43:10
things that we're seeing here in the next couple of years is going to be
43:13
huge. So yeah, I think hashtag storming for twenty twenty four is what
43:16
my prediction is. I like it a very positive note, Jason. Yeah,
43:22
we've had such an optimistic, rousing prediction for the new year. Yeah.
43:27
So, and thanks once again for a really passionate and fascinating unpacking a
43:32
flow and what you're doing with it. I hope that goes from strength to
43:36
strength in the new year. And I hope we can have you on the
43:40
show again sometimes, Jason, it's been great to have That would be my
43:43
pleasure. It's a great time hanging out with you guys. To make sure
43:45
that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in Apple Podcasts,
43:50
Spotify your favorite podcast player, and if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, make
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sure to leave a rating of the show. Just have the number of stars
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you think the podcast deserves. If you'd like to learn more about how next
44:01
Think can help me improve your digital employee experience, head over to next think
44:06
dot com. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time,