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339- What fatal mistake haunts successful tech leaders? Jeff Schmidt's IT Leadership Journey · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to another episode of dissecting popular IT Nerd. Today we're talking with Jeff Schmidt. Jeff comes to us from the medical industry, or the healthcare industry, I should say it's probably a better term than medical industry. And Jeff, tell us a little about your journey from the first day that you started working on computers to today.
• 0:23
  Speaker B: Absolutely. So my beginning started around, oh, I suppose 1990 when my dad brought home our first computer of the house, which was still pretty rare in those days. It was an old IBM clone then 8088 processor and 640k of RAM.
• 0:38
  Speaker A: Man, that thing must have been a monster.
• 0:40
  Speaker B: Oh, it was awesome. Ran dos 3.3, you know. No, no windows, there was no mouse, which blows my kid's mind that, you know, you could use computer mouse.
• 0:48
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 0:49
  Speaker B: There. My mouse wasn't even a thing yet.
• 0:51
  Speaker A: Well, you just touch state and tell.
• 0:52
  Speaker B: It what you want. Yeah, not quite. And I broke it. So I, I figured out like you can do change direct CD and go kind of browse through and if you find a dot bat or a dot exe or a dot com, you can run it and just see what it does. And in those days in dos, if you don't know what the format command does and you just run it. And in those early days, you didn't have to give it an argument and tell it what drive it would just assume you want to format the drive you're sitting on. Right. And so I wiped the operating system.
• 1:26
  Speaker A: And he probably didn't have copies of the, the discs.
• 1:29
  Speaker B: Oh, of course not. No.
• 1:32
  Speaker A: Because he got this at a garage sale or something.
• 1:35
  Speaker B: Oh, no, no, no. He went to the local shop and bought it and it was not cheap. So now we had a very expensive paperweight in the house. And eventually my dad brought home a DOS 6.22 disk and a DOS manual and handed it to me and said, you broke it. If you want a computer, you better fix it.
• 1:56
  Speaker A: And while you're at it, program the light or the clock on the yard.
• 2:00
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And honestly that really was my start is like, oh, this is kind of cool. And I read the DOS manual and figured out how to reinstall Dog, which I mean wasn't that complicated of a thing.
• 2:11
  Speaker A: Yeah, it wasn't like Windows 3.1.1.
• 2:14
  Speaker B: Yeah. But I was like, I was like 12 years old and you know, read through the tech manual and try to figure out how to reinso. Yeah, that's kind of where it all started. And then ended up in college and need a part time job and six.
• 2:31
  Speaker A: Years later, what are you using by now? Six years later you said 92, so around 98.
• 2:37
  Speaker B: Yeah, so. So 90 97. Got my first part time job at a, at a local computer shop. Pentiums were just coming out now. It wasn't nearly cool enough for Radio Shack in our small town, but yeah, everybody was on like 386s, 486s, the Pentiums were just coming out. Windows 95 was the latest and greatest, but we were still working with a lot of Windows 3.1, so. And the Internet dial up was becoming a thing. Right. So I spent a lot of time installing like 28, 8, 33 six modems. 56K was just coming out if you could afford a 56K modem. And we're installing those on like Windows 3.1 machines and we.
• 3:22
  Speaker A: The settings on the hardware for the comm channel and all of those other things.
• 3:29
  Speaker B: Oh that's right. You have to choose the comm channel and set the IRQ and the IO settings and, and resolve any resource conflict. I mean that, that was my first job, man.
• 3:38
  Speaker A: Yeah, they tease us about us being able to recognize the sound of a modem and the kids going, huh, that's right.
• 3:44
  Speaker B: So my next job was as a, as a support tech at the local dial up isp. And so yeah, I got really good at diagnosing connectivity issues based on the sound of the modem.
• 3:56
  Speaker A: Oh really? Okay.
• 3:57
  Speaker B: Oh yeah.
• 3:58
  Speaker A: I, you know, I know that it was a handshake and all of those pieces and then it would get to the communication part and it would quiet down a bit. But yeah, I didn't, I didn't. It makes sense, but I never quite recognized the fact that, that if you knew what you were listening for, that you gather information out of that, you.
• 4:15
  Speaker B: Could essentially, it sounded right, but it failed. Usually meant you had your password wrong. There'd be a segment of the handshake that if you heard it like repeat, it sounded like it was stuck in a loop. It was a handshake error. So you've got a setting problem where they're not speaking the same language or you've got some noise on the phone or something like that. Exactly. So yeah, you could, you could kind of diagnose based on the sound.
• 4:38
  Speaker A: Wow. Damn. Okay, so while you're working at the isp, how. What era are we talking about now? Because we've.
• 4:46
  Speaker B: So that's like you're starting to get.
• 4:47
  Speaker A: The CDs from AOL by now.
• 4:50
  Speaker B: Oh yes, that's right. Of Course, we are an isp. So we hated aol. They're the. They're the competitor. And we thought what they were doing was garbage.
• 4:58
  Speaker A: But everybody on the country or in the country online.
• 5:02
  Speaker B: That's right. Well, they had their own browser. Like, they had their own, like, little segmented mini Internet experience that we didn't have a lot of respect at the time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Not to mention the grammar issues with you've Got Mail.
• 5:15
  Speaker A: And that reminds me of. I can't remember whether it was Netscape or if it was one of the other browsers. Net. Something where it was webpage roulette. Like you just click pick a website. Because we were still in the hundreds of websites.
• 5:32
  Speaker B: Exactly. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I was doing this stuff, man. Like pre Google. Yeah. Yahoo was the big winner back then.
• 5:41
  Speaker A: Yes. And Jeeves. Ask.
• 5:43
  Speaker B: Jeeves Ask Jeeves. Oh, yeah. In fact, we still had some clients that would every once in a while call having issues with their Gopher or their Archie client. Like, not everybody was 100% on www even by then.
• 5:58
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And it mattered. You couldn't get away with nothing in the www.
• 6:03
  Speaker B: That's right. Because. Because literally they were different protocols, different ways of accessing. You know, I had a buddy at work who ran his own bbs, you know, bulletin board service.
• 6:12
  Speaker A: Less than Flash.
• 6:16
  Speaker B: Right.
• 6:16
  Speaker A: Close print or close or backslash. Greater than.
• 6:22
  Speaker B: Exactly. I mean, we. I was a big Netscape navigator and then communicator fan. You know, Internet Explorer was garbage. Like it was. It was the Wild west and going the.
• 6:34
  Speaker A: The chat rooms and, and wandering around from room to room and talking to different people and.
• 6:39
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 6:40
  Speaker A: Wow. Okay.
• 6:42
  Speaker B: So, yeah, I came up through that, like, nitty gritty techie stuff.
• 6:46
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 6:46
  Speaker B: Found myself later as a software developer at AT T, probably a decade into my career at this point.
• 6:53
  Speaker A: So some early 2000s.
• 6:56
  Speaker B: Mid 2000s.
• 6:57
  Speaker A: Yeah. Had the dot com bubble burst yet?
• 7:00
  Speaker B: When did the dot com bubble had burst?
• 7:02
  Speaker A: Okay, so things had slowed down a little bit.
• 7:06
  Speaker B: That's right. And I, you know, I found myself from the hardware side over to the software side, and I'm hunched over a keyboard 40 hours a week hacking out code, which was cool. But it was then that I imagined myself 20 years down the road going. I don't think in 20 years I still want to be hunched over a keyboard hacking out code 40 hours a week.
• 7:27
  Speaker A: And this is still pre object oriented programming even. This is still.
• 7:33
  Speaker B: So. So we're talking like 2000, mid 2000, 2004, 2006.
• 7:38
  Speaker A: All right, so it's starting to show up.
• 7:40
  Speaker B: Starting to show up, right. You're starting to see some object oriented stuff. It was, it was the new, the, the cool new technology. We were doing mostly cold fusion, which is like completely died out now.
• 7:52
  Speaker A: Yeah. And even cold fusion, now it's science fiction and we're talking about energy.
• 7:57
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Cold fusion was a scripting language that was kind of like JavaScript only it was all server side inst of client side. And then they tried to go object oriented too. So that's what we were doing then. And I went, you know what, I need to learn something about business because I don't still want to be hacking out code in 20 years. So. So that's where I kind of had a mindset shift, where I went, I need to understand not just how to build the technology, but how to solve business problems.
• 8:23
  Speaker A: So this is a key thing for a lot of us in technology anymore is understanding that business piece. So how did you get that business education? Was this go back to school and get an MBA or was this start asking questions at work?
• 8:38
  Speaker B: So it was some of both of those. I went back to school, enrolled in college and started taking business classes. Didn't finish the degree, but you know, learned some stuff. And in the meantime, the business that I had started my career and worked there for like almost seven years, starting as an Internet tech support and then doing hardware tech and then doing software. And the business came up for sale and I bought it.
• 9:02
  Speaker A: Nice.
• 9:03
  Speaker B: So, so then we had this trial by fire thing of like, oh, I want to learn business and now I'm running. And that was 2006. And if you remember the world in 2008, that was a really bad time to have borrowed a bunch of money to go buy a business.
• 9:16
  Speaker A: Yeah, it was more about real estate, but any loans at that point because all of the loans were tainted because most everything had gone through real estate.
• 9:25
  Speaker B: That's right. The, the banking industry kind of imploded.
• 9:28
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 9:28
  Speaker B: And so we were doing large network implementations. We'd go into a school system or a government agency or a business, rip and replace the entire network infrastructure, switches, video security, servers, all that stuff. And we did it on net terms from our vendor. And when the banking industry imploded, our vendor sold. And we went from $1 million line of credit on 90 day terms to a $10,000 line of credit not being sold by anything. That's like we couldn't buy anything, couldn't do our core business anymore because we didn't have the financial backing to do IT at the same as soon as they said the word recession, it's like everybody locked up their checkbooks and every project in the pipeline went on hold and we ended up shutting down the business like 2011.
• 10:09
  Speaker C: Hey guys, this is Phil Howard, Founder of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I just wanted to take a few minutes to address something it has become fairly apparent, I'm sure all of you will agree over the years that slow vendor response, vendor response times vendors in general, the average is mediocre. Support is mediocre. Mediocrity is the name of the game. Not only is this a risk to your network security because I've seen vendors on numerous occasions share sensitive information, but there's also a direct correlation to your budget and your company's bottom line. Not to mention the sales reps that are trying to sell you and your CEO and your CFO on a daily basis. That causes a whole nother realm of problems that we don't have time to address. Our back office program at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds we've put together specifically for IT leadership and it's on a mission to eliminate this mediocrity. And the best part is that we're doing this in a way that will not cost your IT department a dime. So if you'd like us to help you out, get better pricing, better support, and jump on pressing issues in minutes, not days, then contact us now so we can get on a call with you and conduct a value discovery session where we find out what you have, why you have IT and where you want to go, and how we can improve your life, your IT department and your company's bottom line. What you're going to end up with is, number one, just faster support from partners who care about your organization's uptime and bottom line. And because you're going to be able to access our 1.2 billion in combined buying power, you'll be able to benefit significantly from historical data. And on top of that, you'll also benefit from the skills of hundreds of on demand experts that we have working behind the scenes that are all attached to our back office support program. So if you'd like, again, none of this is ever going to cost you a dime. At the very least, it's going to open your your eyes to what's possible. Let our back office team provide you the high touch solutions and support that your IT team deserves so that you can stop calling 1-800-Gold-POUND SAN for support. Now if you're wondering what does this apply to this applies to your ISPs, your telecom providers, all your application providers, whether you're a Microsoft shop or a Google shop. What you might be paying for aws, even Azure colocation space, any of those vendors that you're paying a monthly bill to, we can help you with.
• 12:52
  Speaker A: Hey, it's Greg the Frenchman, secretly managing the podcast behind the curtain. To request a one on one call, contact us@internetpopularit.net and remember, it will never.
• 13:03
  Speaker B: Cost you a dime.
• 13:05
  Speaker A: Ouch. Damn. But okay, so talk to me a little about that business in that time. I mean that must have taught you a ton about actual business sense and, and what it means and why the business side of the house and understanding that.
• 13:19
  Speaker B: So important people talk about failure as the, as the greatest teacher. Right. So imagine losing your investment, your livelihood, your home and your parents home all in one swoop. And then you've got, well, for me it's been, oh, 13 years to reflect on everything that went wrong. And so the first five years of that, you go to sleep every night laying in bed going, man, what did I screw up? So yeah, you learn a lot. And, and ultimately there are some things I could have done differently and there were some things that were just flat out bad timing and bad luck.
• 13:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Because like you had no control over the banks. You weren't, you weren't the player that brought everything down.
• 13:59
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 13:59
  Speaker A: You were just one of millions at that point. Really. You know, exactly why. Us. Us. And of course the ripples across the world for the US economy going into recession.
• 14:11
  Speaker B: That's right. But what I learned, the biggest mistake that I made was the risk assessment going into it. Right. I went into this optimistically. It's an existing business. Cash flow is good, it's growing. I didn't do the right risk assessment where I went, what's the bad thing that could happen? And can I handle it if it happens?
• 14:27
  Speaker A: Right. And do I have any. Okay, yeah, the contingencies. Can I.
• 14:32
  Speaker B: Exactly. How, how do we mitigate the risk? How do we survive, you know, in the worst case scenario? And you know, being a young man, I was all optimistic and oh, it's going to be great.
• 14:43
  Speaker A: Sorry, I'm guessing.
• 14:45
  Speaker B: Exactly. No, no, you're right.
• 14:47
  Speaker A: Because you know, you're paying all your bills, everything's going well, you've got that line of credit, you're doing.
• 14:52
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 14:53
  Speaker A: Projects. Because you know, I, the job that I'm at currently, we've been doing some of that, the exact kind of stuff that you're Talking about, usually with government funds for the schools, but going in and redoing their network, all their switches, the cameras, their access control, all kinds of stuff.
• 15:10
  Speaker B: Those are exactly what we were doing. The. The state of Ohio was spending a ton of money across all revamping schools across the entire state, and we were bidding on those jobs. And that was the bread and butter of that business.
• 15:20
  Speaker A: Oh, man. And then it just. Gone.
• 15:23
  Speaker B: It's. It's gone.
• 15:24
  Speaker A: Your credit limit, gone. Customers are gone. And then. And then all of the stuff that you'd leveraged on top of it. So now you know about incorporated versus LLC versus all those and the differences.
• 15:39
  Speaker B: Amongst that and exactly how much consideration you should give before you ever sign a personal guarantee.
• 15:45
  Speaker A: Okay, that's. That's actually. Mark that down, guys. Pay attention.
• 15:50
  Speaker B: Right.
• 15:51
  Speaker A: Because, you know, in multiple situations, I gave personal guarantees within business as. Not the business owner, you know, just as the guy. IT guy.
• 16:01
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
• 16:02
  Speaker A: Contract. And they're. They're putting that in front of you with those words on it. Personal guarantee.
• 16:08
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 16:09
  Speaker A: And you might want to know what.
• 16:11
  Speaker B: The implications of that are exactly. The. The worst case scenario can happen. Make sure you can live through it.
• 16:17
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Because it doesn't. Because I put my signature on it, that means I am on there. Not. Not the owner of the company that I work for.
• 16:26
  Speaker B: Yeah. If you do any, ever do any, like firearm training, one of the things they teach you is when you pull the trigger, you own that bullet wherever it goes. So if you miss or it goes through something, that that bullet belongs to you wherever it ends up.
• 16:38
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 16:39
  Speaker B: The personal guarantee is kind of the same thing. However it goes, and you own it now.
• 16:44
  Speaker A: So like I said, mark that down. Learn that lesson from us.
• 16:48
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 16:50
  Speaker A: Don't learn it through personal experience.
• 16:52
  Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. Learn. Learn from other people.
• 16:55
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 16:55
  Speaker B: So.
• 16:56
  Speaker A: So all of that stuff is tanked. You're going to bed going, oh, my gosh, what do I do now? What do I. Or what did I do? And. And how do I take care of mom and dad? And then.
• 17:04
  Speaker B: And I've got a wife and three kids. It. And realistically, it was one of those things where I probably wouldn't have gotten out of bed in the morning if it hadn't been for that man. I've got kids to feed. I don't have a choice.
• 17:16
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 17:16
  Speaker B: And the light at the end of the tunnel for that was I happened onto a job at Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, a nationwide children' working in their data warehouse as the Liaison between the data warehouse and the research institute. And my job there was to go talk to researchers and doctors who wanted to leverage clinical data, figure out how they wanted and what they needed and go back to the data warehouse and work with the technical guys there to figure out how to go source the data, how to store it, how to delete. And it was a fascinating job. It was a meaningful job.
• 17:46
  Speaker A: Yeah. At that point in, in history, all you kids out there, we didn't have. BI was not a term at that point.
• 17:54
  Speaker B: Right? That's right.
• 17:56
  Speaker A: And it was, it was queries. We were lucky to have SQL and be able to put things together and just drop them into spreadsheets. We weren't really taking things and putting them into graphical dashboards, let alone KPIs, let alone, you know, all of these different things that are just everyday products today.
• 18:17
  Speaker B: That's right. This was like 2011 that I started this job and, and it was right at the beginning of that stuff you're talking about. So we're doing ETL from databases into the Oracle data warehouse and we bought QlikView, which was a like tableau competitor, still is a tableau competitor, to start building some dashboarding, but getting creative about how do we first, how do we source this data and then how do we, we deliver it back to the researchers and the QI QA people who.
• 18:43
  Speaker A: How do we answer their question within two hours of them hitting the enter button.
• 18:49
  Speaker B: Exactly. And so we were building these cool like cohort discovery tools where they could just go drill in and immediately go, oh well, we've got this many patients who meet the criteria for the study that we want to do. And it was stuff that would have taken them weeks to get answers before that we could give to instantly.
• 19:07
  Speaker A: Right. And still relatively instantly because I mean the speed and the power of these things and we around that time, I think the really high end stuff and maybe you got to play with a little of it at that point and from where you were coming from in memory and you know those terms because otherwise than that you were diving straight back into the database, into the true database and going through all of that. And not to mention that at that point we still had everything in that normalized database. We didn't non normalized or star schema databases that expedited reporting.
• 19:45
  Speaker B: And that's what we were building. We were taking data from all these disparate data sources and putting them into a denormalized data warehouse so we could do. And yeah, on top of it, the.
• 19:53
  Speaker A: Beginning of that, of that, yeah, because we wanted to be able to report faster and have all of that information and, and you know, look at financial situation compared to the prognosis that they'd gotten last week.
• 20:08
  Speaker B: That's right. And so I had the opportunity there to work with researchers totally outside of like technical. It's not the stuff that I ever thought I was going to get to be involved in, but working like with our cardiology team, we ended up building out what at that point maybe still is the largest pediatric cardiology research database in existence that they were able to share that with other pediatric research institutes to. You want to go study data on kids with cardiology issues? We've got all the data that you want to see.
• 20:38
  Speaker A: So did you guys start incorporating some of that data from those other research institutes or you just made yours available and they would cross reference or.
• 20:47
  Speaker B: The long term goal was to build a coalition where everybody would kind of contribute. But, but I, I left before they got that far.
• 20:54
  Speaker A: Okay, well, and that's such a huge thing because how long or when did HIPAA start kicking in? Because that.
• 21:01
  Speaker B: Oh, we were, we were well into HIPAA. Yeah, HIPAA was, HIPAA came in like 96, I think. So we were well into the HIPAA era.
• 21:09
  Speaker A: All right. Yeah.
• 21:10
  Speaker B: So, and so there are a lot of conversations that we had about informed consent and how do you get consent from patients to use their data? How do we de. Identify the data so we can do research on it without consent?
• 21:22
  Speaker A: And think about the, or, and I'm telling the audience, think about the disparity or the, the mind games behind that right there. You know, you're, you're trying to look at this data anonymized, but yet you need to know all of the things of what race, what, what economic status, what. All kinds of personal information around this, the subject so that you could have meaningful data for the research.
• 21:50
  Speaker B: That's right. And every research institute has an internal review board that you have to send your research plan to and say this is how we plan to collect the data, this is how we plan to use it and they help you navigate. Can you do that? Is it ethical? Is it legal? How do we de. Identify it so that we can actually use it? And all that stuff has to get run through the internal review board before you can do anything interesting.
• 22:13
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 22:14
  Speaker B: And I, I worked one of the projects that I worked on there and I'm actually published. Like you could find me in PubMed somewhere for this, which is, is fun, not really meaningful to my career, but it's Just kind of a fun bragging rights thing to be like. Yeah, no, I published in a medical journal as like one of 10 people who worked on this project.
• 22:32
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 22:32
  Speaker B: But we, we set up a clinic for cerebral palsy kids to. When you have a complex medical issue like that, you tend to go see a neurologist and you go see a physical therapist, you go see an occupation and you see a speech therapist and you see. But all those doctors and therapists aren't really talking to each other and they're not really coordinating your care.
• 22:52
  Speaker A: So we Let alone having common access to all of the records, they have their slice of the pie and that's all they care about.
• 22:59
  Speaker B: Exactly. So we set up a clinic where these kids would come in and they would see all of those specialists in one day, in one appointment, one after the other. At the end of the appointment, all the specialists sat down in a room together and talked about that patient's case and coordinated their care plan, which was. I mean, it just makes sense. Right?
• 23:20
  Speaker A: Right.
• 23:21
  Speaker B: But then our part of it from the research side. Oh yeah. Very hard to do and not cheap.
• 23:27
  Speaker A: Right.
• 23:27
  Speaker B: Which is. Was part of the study that we did is once we had collected data on that for a while and compared it to patients who are being treated for similar conditions outside of that clinic, do they get better, faster? What's their improvement rate? What's their cost? What's their rate of hospitalization? How often do they end up in the er? And what we found and what the paper shows is, yeah, it's cheaper to treat them. I mean, it's more expensive on the front end, but the overall healthcare costs are significantly lower and the patient outcomes are significantly better just by treating them this way.
• 24:01
  Speaker A: Yeah, holistically.
• 24:03
  Speaker B: Exactly. Which again makes sense. But we now we've got the data to prove. Cool.
• 24:09
  Speaker A: Okay, so. So we've switched from breaking dad's computer because you found this cool format command.
• 24:16
  Speaker B: Huh?
• 24:18
  Speaker A: To. To helping kids with cerebral palsy to next.
• 24:26
  Speaker B: I don't know what was after that. I. I did some consulting for a while. So left to work on. On kind of a long shot startup that didn't pan out, but. And did some independent consulting and decided someday I might want to start a software company and I want to understand how commercial software is made.
• 24:43
  Speaker A: Wait a minute. So someday you might want to start a software company where you're going to end up hunched over that keyboard again?
• 24:51
  Speaker B: Yeah, I know. Right? So I took a gig. I drocked out to me. Yeah. Took a job at Xerox as a Business analyst in a healthcare software development division where we were basically gathering data from a bunch of hospital systems, spinning the data into the formatting needed to be able to send it to government agencies for star reporting and all of those performance metrics that the government likes to gather on healthcare organizations.
• 25:17
  Speaker A: So I was like that.
• 25:19
  Speaker B: Yeah. So I was a business analyst and a product owner on the SCRUM team for one of those software packages, Xerox, and then got spun off into Conduit when, when they split that company in half.
• 25:30
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 25:31
  Speaker B: So did that for a couple of.
• 25:32
  Speaker A: Years, getting closer and closer, getting closer and closer.
• 25:36
  Speaker B: And then took a job as a software development manager at a pharmacy. It was like a home delivery, closed door retail pharmacy in North Carolina.
• 25:44
  Speaker A: Okay. Were you living there or were you doing this remotely?
• 25:47
  Speaker B: So at that point I was living in Charleston south, right outside Charleston, South Carolina. Took the gig in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ended up moving up there for a couple of years. Started as a software development manager, the company we have. So six weeks into that job, the building burned down. So talk about disaster recovery. Literal trial by fire. Yeah, so there's, there's a lot to talk about there. But ended up right after that the infrastructure manager left. I took over the infrastructure team, got merged with another, it was a private equity owned company. Got merged with another portfolio company out of Nashville, took over the infrastructure team as the, as the infrastructure director in the Nashville site, split between North Carolina and Nashville. There's a whole lot of stuff to talk about in that era.
• 26:39
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 26:39
  Speaker B: But the fire is probably the most interesting one.
• 26:41
  Speaker A: I was gonna head back to that one for a second because. Because we didn't talk about that in the pre call and.
• 26:48
  Speaker B: No. No.
• 26:49
  Speaker A: So what do you think is the most valuable lesson or the hardest earned lesson from that that you got that you carry forth and make sure that you've got covered going forward?
• 27:05
  Speaker B: Well, it's kind of the same as the buying the business one. It's do your risk assessment, understand what the risk is and make sure you know how you're going to handle it. Because we hadn't and I was six weeks in and was working on a disaster recovery plan for the software side of the business. What would happen in a worst case scenario like we couldn't get into the building, where's our data, how do we make it available? Because we ended up with the whole company working out of a hotel conference room down the road for like six weeks. And we had a backup of our database on the cloud in Chicago somewhere, but we had no servers because they were all in the building, so we had to, we did a whole bunch of just innovate on the fly, building computers and installing SQL and restoring data just to give them something that they can work from.
• 27:53
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 27:54
  Speaker B: So at that point, we're just calling patients saying, hey, you're expecting medication from us, you're not going to get it. You need us to transfer the script out to Walgreens and we've got to track all that data so we can reconcile once we're back together. But yeah, do your risk assessment have a real doctor plan in place so you're not just trying to figure it out standing in the parking lot going, does anybody have a hotspot so we can start downloading a database backup? Which is literally what we did.
• 28:21
  Speaker A: Oh, how much sleep do you get? Those three months sleep? Yeah.
• 28:29
  Speaker B: No, nobody was doing any of that.
• 28:32
  Speaker A: It's ass out.
• 28:35
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 28:36
  Speaker A: You're. You're working out of the hotel, so might as well have a couple of rooms that you guys could just go fresh in.
• 28:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
• 28:43
  Speaker A: Right.
• 28:43
  Speaker B: That's right. The, the biggest thing, I mean, other than you learn some lessons was the, the camaraderie and the teamwork that you have. Six weeks later, when we finally got back into our building, it was a different company, it was a different team because they had been in the trenches together, trying to make this thing work with no resources, trying to work out of a hotel. I mean, we're juggling cell phones, we're going to Walmart, buying track phones just so people had something to make phone calls on. And at the end of that experience, and we were all on the same team.
• 29:15
  Speaker A: Cool. I guess that's one way of doing it, but it's not, not the best.
• 29:19
  Speaker B: That's. I wouldn't plan, I wouldn't plan it that way, but there's something that happens when, when you go through that kind of thing together.
• 29:26
  Speaker A: Right? Yeah. I, I can only imagine because wear some wood. Knock on wood. I have yet to go through that experience. But any other lessons, any, any other advice that you want to throw out there besides that? Do that risk assessment and, and really mean it.
• 29:43
  Speaker B: And, and really mean it. Don't don't assume the bad thing can never happen.
• 29:47
  Speaker A: So. Okay, here's a, a question for you. And I don't know, actually, I do know you've moved on since then, right. You're at a new local, new organization, at the new organization and you're trying to teach them the business, this lesson. And you know, I think of doctor Plans and cyber security and cyber insurance and a lot of these things, unless somebody's burned their fingers on that stove, they're like, well, it hasn't happened to us. Why, why do we need to invent or invest in this? How do you communicate that in a meaningful way so that, so that they really understand it and go, you know, a few thousand dollars now are going to save us tens of thousands tomorrow. We need to do this.
• 30:40
  Speaker B: Fortunately, the leadership where I am now is pretty astute and they're pretty pragmatic about that stuff. So as long as you can adequately verbalize, look, here's the risk. This is what we need to do to mitigate it. Generally, it's not that hard, but I have, because I did it services, right? So I had to do that pitch to a whole bunch of customers who just went, we'll be fine. And yeah, you've really got to sit down and go, what if this happens? Like, tell me. Let's play out the scenario. You get a call tonight that says there's smoke coming out of your roof. By morning, it's clear you're not going to be back in your building for a while. And none of your computers, none of your technology is usable and all your paper records burned up. What do you do next? And, and if they don't have an answer for it, then you go, let's, let's put a plan on paper then, because you don't want to have to be making that plan again. Standing in the parking lot.
• 31:34
  Speaker A: Yeah, in the parking lot. In the parking lot, as you're being told, hey, please step back behind the yellow tape.
• 31:41
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. The firefighters are still there spraying the water on the building. And you're going, all right, so what's next? Maybe, maybe figure out what's next before you get there.
• 31:51
  Speaker A: Who's the boss here? Right as the investigators are asking and the police are looking around going, okay, exactly.
• 32:00
  Speaker B: And that fire was such a fluke too, because we had a camera system and you can see on video where the light fixture in the paper, in the file storage room where we had boxes and boxes of archive paper waiting to go out to the off site paper storage. And the light fixture just drops and falls onto boxes full of paper records.
• 32:23
  Speaker A: So, so that's what caused it was a figure fell out of the, the.
• 32:28
  Speaker B: Light fixture literally fell out of the ceiling and landed on, on the paper, you know, on the boxes stored in.
• 32:35
  Speaker A: Okay, wow. Okay, so, so you, you just have to have that conversation with them, got to talk to them, got to have Them visualize, see it and understand that pain. That's right. And, or, okay, what if. And what's, what's the financial pains? Because the business, it's, you know, I, I hate saying it this way, but it's too true. What's the goal?
• 33:00
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 33:00
  Speaker A: Is money. They're, they're there for a reason, which is to make money or to make profits, and they can't do that if none of their systems are going. And, and where we are today, everything uses technology. Anything.
• 33:17
  Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. And, and you have to be honest, too, on the, on the IT side, what do we really need to plan for and what's really necessary?
• 33:26
  Speaker A: Right.
• 33:26
  Speaker B: Because not every investment, not every disaster recovery option is worth the cost. So there really is that balance of we've got to do what's right for the business. We have to not oversell it. We can't spend, we can't spend more presenting, preventing the disaster than what the disaster would cost.
• 33:45
  Speaker A: Right. Yeah, it's true.
• 33:48
  Speaker B: Like, like, we've got to be pragmatic about it, too.
• 33:50
  Speaker A: Yeah. Because, man. Yeah. Yeah. It's got to make financial sense.
• 33:56
  Speaker B: That's right. And whether it's disaster recovery or whether it's security or whether it's just technology upgrades, those are the same conversations that you're going to have to have with the C suite or with the board. And you've got to be, you've got to be at that level of pragmatic. You can't just say, well, we need to do it because that's what we need to do.
• 34:15
  Speaker A: Right.
• 34:15
  Speaker B: It has to, you've got to be able to communicate business value, which goes back to sitting at AT T going, I need to learn about business.
• 34:23
  Speaker A: Yeah. I don't want to end up like this.
• 34:26
  Speaker B: Right. But if I want to be able to have conversations at that level with the business people, I've got to understand it from a business standpoint and I've got to be able to show them how this technology Investment or the Dr. Plan Investment or the security enhancements really do honestly make sense from a, from a business standpoint.
• 34:45
  Speaker A: Did you do anything to learn the business lingo or was this involvement with running your own business, with surviving a few of these things. Did you learn the language from, you know, living it, or did you do anything to actually try to prep yourself for that?
• 35:06
  Speaker B: I mean, kind of all of the above. Right. Like, I, I went to college and I took marketing and I took economics and I took accounting and I took, you know, the most of the basic business stuff. I read a lot of business books, which has kind of been the thing over my career because you see, I went from hardware to software to data to like all the things. Yeah, software and back to software and now I'm back at infrastructure. Right, right. And I get a lot of like, how do you learn all that? Well, you go get the book and you read the book and you figure it out. And the business thing was the same thing. It's a lot of hands on, it's a lot of having the conversation, get some formal education and it's a whole lot of just read and consume whatever information you get your hands on.
• 35:51
  Speaker A: Right. So let's see, what's your role today?
• 35:58
  Speaker B: So today I am the vice president of information technology and security at a healthcare company. We are primarily a PBM pharmacy benefit management company. And we are a transparent pbm which is different than the traditional PBM model. And we also own a retail kind of central fill pharmacy and a couple overlay programs.
• 36:19
  Speaker A: But so just curious, and with the legalities and with the scheduled kinds of things that go into pharmacies, what levels of security or what kinds of things have you run into? They're outside the norm of regular security. If you could talk about those, because I'm not trying to pinch you in any kind of a way or, or your current organization or. But I'm just curious what's, what's different about your job today in that sense than just being a IT security somewhere.
• 36:56
  Speaker B: So I mean, it's healthcare, which already there, there are. Right. So you've got hipaa, you've got, you know, all those healthcare regulatory things. And not only that, but just the responsibility that comes from you've got people's personal private health care information. And aside from the legal obligation, you just have a moral and ethical obligation to do the right thing to protect that information.
• 37:23
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, and so what I'm thinking of is like, you know, it's one thing to receive a truckload full of fruit, it's a whole nother thing to receive a truckload full of medical, well, pharmacy inventory. And some of that you have to be super careful with. I mean, you guys probably have some of the advanced cameras with built in AI watching. Okay. If somebody's in this area too long, we at least note it. If not set off an alert for a remote review.
• 37:53
  Speaker B: Right. We have a combination of what you would call administrative controls and technical controls. And some of those administrative controls are by law, they are things that the board of pharmacy has put in Place, which is anybody who's doing work has got to be under the direct supervision of a licensed pharmacist. So you don't have, it's a fairly small footprint building that we're into, but you just don't have people wandering around doing whatever because there's literal physical oversight in the building to have eyes on what's going on. And then, yeah, you have camera systems, you have software and you have tracking to know what's happening and who's doing what.
• 38:34
  Speaker A: All right, this gives me a chance to break into the other topics that we said we'd talk about, but we haven't made it yet. And so now I see this is an area where some of that AI stuff could really come into play and have some business value. Because like right now when I start thinking of business and AI and trying to implement AI on, I'm thinking of, okay, how do I take this intelligent workflow system and apply it to some, some process in an organization and how do I optimize that process utilizing this advanced workflow thing, this smart workflow thing. But, but we're starting to see a lot of stuff in the video and the recognition of what's going on or identification of, of what's going on. And, and we just talked about that a little bit. So if you've got control saying that Mike's only allowed to work at this station and this station and suddenly he shows up at that station or he's headed that way, that, you know, thus here are the next steps in the workflow.
• 39:46
  Speaker B: Exactly. So that that technology is there, which is fascinating because it wasn't there not very many years ago.
• 39:52
  Speaker A: Right.
• 39:52
  Speaker B: Where you can, you can start to track, oh, somebody's hanging out in this area longer than they should be hanging out in this area and throw a real time alert to somebody. But AI in general, I see three kind of classes of AI that I'm interested in as the business IT side. One of them is kind of the classic roll your own. Right? And this is stuff that we were starting to do at Children's Hospital 10 years ago where you're going to train your own neural network. We're talking about natural language processing. Then to try to figure out how to take unstructured and semi structured data in doctor's notes and turn them into discrete data elements that then we can analyze. So it's whether you're building your own neural network or you're using some Python libraries to do decision tree algorithm, whatever. Like there's this kind of build your own AI Tool set, which was the only way really to do it ten years ago, five years ago even. And then the next class is you have the tools like Chat GPT, your Gemini, that are more like individual productivity kind of tools. So, you know, I prepare for a podcast like this, right? You can go feed in what are some good questions, throw your resume into that thing and say, you know, give me some ideas of what I should do with my resume. All those personal productivity kind of things that you can do with those tools which, which can be transformational on a personal level. And then you have the enterprise level tools where you're starting to integrate AI into your business's workflows. And that's where you get into security things like that, like, oh, this dude was hanging out in this area too long, or rogue object detection that some camera systems do. A lot of new camera systems do now, where somebody walks into your lobby and they set a backpack down and they walk out without it. That thing stays there for very long and you get an alert that says, hey, somebody dropped something in your lobby. You might want to go see what's up with that.
• 41:41
  Speaker A: Right?
• 41:42
  Speaker B: And the search tools too, with camera systems where you can be like, somebody said that there was a dude with a blue shirt wandering around who looks suspicious. And you can search your camera footage for everybody with a blue shirt that day.
• 41:52
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 41:56
  Speaker B: That'S right here.
• 41:57
  Speaker A: Follow every blue shirt that was in this area for the next two hours exactly.
• 42:03
  Speaker B: And. And then you can look at, at those enterprise level AI tools for things like your call center. One of the things that we're looking at right now is can we use an AI tool to take the transcript of the phone call, essentially listen to the phone call and automatically generate the notes so that the agent doesn't have to spend minutes at the end of the call writing out the notes as to what happened to the call. And we can even let AI do things like rate the tone of the call so I can have analysis. Exactly. Was the client happy? Was the member happy? When they talked to us, were they neutral? Were they really mad? And then there's all kinds of stuff that you can do with that data.
• 42:44
  Speaker A: I live in the southern part of the, the country, and so down here, all of our systems, we need them to be bilingual.
• 42:52
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 42:54
  Speaker A: Or. Or trilingual, because you got, you know, full English, full Spanish, and then you got Spanglish.
• 43:01
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 43:03
  Speaker A: So, yeah, we ran into a couple of issues or, or thoughts or questions about how do we do that, how do we how do we get sediment analysis when, when you have a bilingual person talking in English to somebody who's speaking in Spanish. So you have both conversations or one conversation in two different languages throughout the whole thing and both sides are completely comfortable with that. It's, it's an interesting thing, but, but. So AI in a corporate environment, what are the concerns? Throw the security hat on. Tell me, tell me about AI in a business environment. Corporate environment with security.
• 43:46
  Speaker B: So you remember when Windows released what Cortana as their like built in personal assistant kind of thing, like in the.
• 43:53
  Speaker A: They'Re still trying to get that, everybody hooked on that, right?
• 43:57
  Speaker B: And the first thing I did as a security person was we disable that for everybody because it's like I don't know what it's going to hear, I don't know where it's sending that data. And until I can guarantee that whatever it happens to listen to the information that it picks up is safe and secure and controllable, I just don't want it there. And you have the same concern, no matter what the AI tool is with what is the data that's picking up, where's that data being stored, how is it being stored, where is it being processed? And you've got to really understand the flow end to end, especially when you're using a vendor. Don't just turn it on and feed data into it. And even the individual productivity kind of tools. Like one of my worst nightmares right now is somebody taking a bunch of our patient data, pasting it into ChatGPT and saying find the patient with the most whatever. So again, you've got to have a combination of administrative and technical controls, policies, and essentially we block the site and you've got to come and talk to us if you want to use those tools from a, from the corporate network. And we're going to give you the lecture before, before you can even get there.
• 45:02
  Speaker A: And how are you, how are you staying ahead of that? Because right now if, if you throw in AI tools even to just Google, let alone any of the AI, the publicly free accessible ones that, that you're trying to block. So Gemini Co Pilot Chat, GPT, how do you keep them from using like Fathom or Otter or there's so many different ones out there now, it seems like there's a new one every day.
• 45:29
  Speaker B: I, I think it's the, the classic business IT problem, which is why you have policies, which is why you have administrative controls in addition to technical controls. Like you're never going to be able to keep up with blocking Everything.
• 45:43
  Speaker A: Right.
• 45:43
  Speaker B: And so now you're in into education and you're into policy where people have got to understand and take responsibility. You know, security is everybody's responsibility. You've got to know what you can and can't do. We'll do our best to block those things. And we've got decently advanced security tools to try to keep data exfiltration from happening. And we keep up with that the best we can. But on top of that, we've got to be able to educate our user base and say they don't, don't, don't do that.
• 46:15
  Speaker A: Yeah, don't do that. And, and, or, you know, just trying to put those guardrails because, because we have a lot of those guardrails in place already. It's just, you know, we've got to make sure that we tie all of those boundaries into the AI before we release the AI. It's not bring in the AI tools. And, and here's the, the three racks in our data center that are the AI computer and it's our private model, so only we get to use it. But you still don't want Dave in janitorial asking the questions of who gets the most or yeah, who gets the most?
• 46:57
  Speaker B: Yeah, and that might be the biggest proponent of good customer service in it Because I don't want people trying to go solve their technology issues themselves. I don't want them going, well, which AI tool can I use if I have a good relationship with our business users and they know they can come to us and have a good conversation and we'll help them solve their problem and help them find the right solutions, that's the path we want everybody to prefer is, oh, instead of us poking around on our own, let's go ask it what we should use for this. And so it's that peering and partnership. Exactly. But it means you've got to maintain a good relationship and you've got to be kind and you've got to be helpful and you have to have good customer service so people will actually come to you instead of trying to go around you.
• 47:46
  Speaker A: And I believe on all of those, the, the only other word that I haven't heard you use, but it's implied in a lot of all of that, is trust. They have to be able to trust you. So when you say that you're, you've got this or it's going to do that, that they can learn that it does.
• 48:01
  Speaker B: I mean, that's right.
• 48:02
  Speaker A: Come on, you spend how many years doing data and, and how many times that you produce reports, did they come back and say, this is wrong? And.
• 48:12
  Speaker B: And you're like, absolutely.
• 48:13
  Speaker A: Okay, you know what? It matches all of these things that you told me you wanted. So let's figure out what you didn't ask for that I didn't filter out of because we didn't know to watch out for that parameter.
• 48:29
  Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
• 48:31
  Speaker A: Because, oh, man, so many of those. At least in my career.
• 48:36
  Speaker B: Absolutely.
• 48:37
  Speaker A: You know, along with those customer service vibes that you're talking about, one of the other things I always found was, you know, just, just asking that, that question that a lot of it, people forget why, you know, hey, I want this. Okay, let me go get it. You know, and so there's that aspect of customer service where they. I want to be real helpful. I'm just going to go and, and make this happen.
• 49:00
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 49:01
  Speaker A: But you got to stop for a second, go, well, wait a minute. What's your goal? Where are you trying to go? What are you trying to do? Why?
• 49:09
  Speaker B: I'm not saying.
• 49:10
  Speaker A: I'm not saying it in the sense of, well, why would you do that? No, I'm saying, what's your goal? Because I want to make sure that I am center on that target, not somewhere in the neighborhood.
• 49:21
  Speaker B: That's right. I have a lot of those conversations and I have a few people on my team who are very good at that. Somebody asked for something that, that feels a little. Off you go, you know, let's jump on the phone. I want to understand exactly what you're trying to do so we can help you find the right solution. We spend a lot of time doing that and try not to be the department where we just go, no, no, we don't do that. No, you can't do that. It's not. Let us, Let us help you solve the problem, and we're going to help you solve it in, in an efficient and secure way.
• 49:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, now you're making me think of Mordoch Wardock, the preventer of information.
• 49:55
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 49:56
  Speaker A: Yeah. I was gonna say Douglas Adams, but that's not Douglas Adams. That's that other guy, Gilbert.
• 50:03
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. That was a Dilbert thing, wasn't it?
• 50:06
  Speaker A: Yeah. So if you were going to apply AI in an absolutely ridiculous place, what is the most ridiculous place that you can, you can think of? Because, like, I, I asked for a couple of those questions, I threw that into AI, you know, and, and actually I just said, you know, give me a couple of AI talking points. And it's like, well, imagine that AI adjusts your chair automatically for you, but yet reports it to HR when you slouch.
• 50:38
  Speaker B: I kind of like that. And I hadn't, like, along those. I have. My desk in my home office is one of those power, you know, raise and lower. So I hit a button, it goes up, and I stand to work. And then I can be lazy and sit down if I want to, but an AI that'll. That'll tell me how long I've been sitting, then automatically change the height of my desk so I've got to move. Would be. Would be a really interesting use. Like, I. I would use that.
• 51:09
  Speaker A: You would set that up until you found yourself sitting there going like this. And.
• 51:13
  Speaker B: Well, you got to stand up at some point, right? Exactly. No, for me, because I spent the weekend putting Christmas lights up on my house because my wife is one of those crazy people who thinks that Christmas starts on November 1st. What I'd like is to be able to feed into an AI. This is what my house looks like. These are the strands of lights that I have put a program together for me where I can, like, how can I get the most out of these lights? Make them flash, sync them to music, whatever. Build me a light show based on what I've got to work with.
• 51:47
  Speaker A: Nice. I like that one. And. And see, you know, I'm sorry. I'm lazy. I. I want to, like, put the. The new multicolor LEDs through all over the house and so that I can leave them up year round. And then I can have a Fourth of July. I can have Christmas, I can have Halloween, I can have whatever.
• 52:10
  Speaker B: Exactly. I like it.
• 52:12
  Speaker A: And then, you know, it's just like, go over to the computer, turn on that setting for that time of year and just let it go.
• 52:18
  Speaker B: Let it go.
• 52:19
  Speaker A: And then, yeah, I have to climb up there every year.
• 52:23
  Speaker B: Oh, come on. That's half the fun, isn't it?
• 52:25
  Speaker A: Well, all my kids have moved out of the house, so there's nobody there to help me with this anymore. It's not that much fun. And then putting them away by that time, I'm just like, get this stuff. Just shoving it into the box. So next year when it's time to get it out, it's like, oh, God, why am I such an ass?
• 52:45
  Speaker B: Yeah. Why didn't I take a little extra time last year?
• 52:48
  Speaker A: Yeah. Well, you got any thoughts?
• 52:50
  Speaker B: Any.
• 52:50
  Speaker A: Anything else? Any. Any other IT wisdom that you want to lay down on us?
• 52:54
  Speaker B: So I would say again, do your risk assessments.
• 52:59
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 53:00
  Speaker B: Do your customer service realize that your internal users are Your customers, they're not the enemy. They. They might be your biggest source of breaches, but that's why you need to make them your partners so they don't go hide from you.
• 53:14
  Speaker A: Hey, the CEO just asked me to send out 500 in gift cards. I need your help.
• 53:21
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 53:22
  Speaker A: He didn't.
• 53:24
  Speaker B: That's right. And. And everything starts with what's the business need?
• 53:29
  Speaker C: Right?
• 53:30
  Speaker B: Your. Your technology investments, your security, or all of that stuff starts with how are we supporting the business? And as techies, we tend to want to work with the cool, new, slick, shiny technology. That's why we got into this. Right? So we can work with cool new stuff. Yeah.
• 53:46
  Speaker A: It's fun.
• 53:47
  Speaker B: Sometimes the business need is the simple, basic, boring thing.
• 53:54
  Speaker A: Sometimes the cheapest way to achieve a goal is to have a human just pick it up and walk it from a. To be.
• 54:02
  Speaker B: That's right. Yeah.
• 54:03
  Speaker A: What.
• 54:03
  Speaker B: What's the need that you're trying to fill? What's the problem that you're trying to. You know, everybody. You see these old movies where the inventor, like, keeps making all these really fascinating but useless inventions. You know, the Nutty professor and one of the, like, you always have that. This image of like the. The Nutty professor that's building these things that nobody needs. We don't want to. We don't want to be that in it. You got to start with, what's the need? What's the problem?
• 54:28
  Speaker A: You also don't want to be. You know, I'm listening to a book right now, and they keep referring back to the rube. Goldbrook or Goldbrook Machines.
• 54:37
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 54:38
  Speaker A: You don't need something that complicated to kick the marble down the hill.
• 54:44
  Speaker B: No, you don't. And protect your credibility. Because when you go to the business and you say, no, no, no, we need this, and you don't really need that. Or you're trying to sell something because you want to put it on your resume or because it's the slick new thing, but it's really not the best fit. You're going to burn your credibility. And the next time you go ask for something, you're going to have a much harder time convincing people.
• 55:06
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 55:07
  Speaker B: I like to make sure that everything I ask for and every dollar I spend, I could. I can justify to anybody who wants to come and talk about it. We had to do this because it's the right fit because of these reasons. Not. Well, it was in the budget. We thought it'd be cool. No, everything is based on what business need are we solving.
• 55:26
  Speaker A: Right back to The AI discussion. Because right now that is the big shiny that so many people have. And even the CEOs and the CFOs and the C suite and the boardroom are all going, how can we use bi or bi AI to make everything perfect? And it's okay. Wait a minute. You know, you got to have those discussions. Where's the value? How are we going to do this? Because, because right now all of the vendors are going, look at this big shiny. And those big or those vendors see it as a shiny and they have increased the price on that just because of it being shiny alone.
• 56:07
  Speaker B: That's right. And the parallel of that is look at the activity that you're doing before you think you need to go buy some technology to enable the activity. I have this conversation with the business, with business people all the time, where they go, well, we need this process, so we need to buy this technology. And I go, what's your process today? And they go, we don't have one. Well, the technology is not going to make you have the process. You know, I want to get in shape. I don't need to go buy a home gym, I need to go for a walk. And if I can't go out my front door and go for a walk, I'm not going to use the home gym. I'm not going to use the expensive gym member. What are you doing now? Let's use technology to enhance and enable it. Not think that the technology is going to do our job for us because it never works that way.
• 56:49
  Speaker A: Let's prove that we'll do the simplest version of it before we go for the super complex version.
• 56:56
  Speaker B: Exactly. You don't have a process today for how you're storing your managing your contracts. You don't start with buying the software. You start with, let's make a process and then let's use technology to enable that process, not the other way around.
• 57:10
  Speaker A: You know, I, I was just interviewing at a, at a company and they were talking about, you know, well, we've got this problem and we want alerts when this happens. And I'm like, okay, well yeah, we, I can easily get you those alerts when, when that happens. And then it, it took a couple of days before it sank in. And I'm like, wait a minute, I'm going to alert group B or I'm going to set up, I'm going to have group C set up an alert to alert group B, who will then talk to group C or D, and then group D is going to go talk to the perpetrators that set off the alert. And I'm like, okay, all of this makes sense. And I've seen it happen and I've seen it done, and it's a normal business practice, but why aren't we just holding this, the perpetrators accountable? Let's start there.
• 58:05
  Speaker B: Right? Technology is not a replacement for good business process.
• 58:09
  Speaker A: Yeah. It's, you know, let's, let's look at this whole thing and really take a step back and really look at it for a moment and go, okay, what are we trying to solve and what's, what's the origin? You know, where, where does this whole thing start? Because we don't always have. Technology isn't always the answer.
• 58:27
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 58:27
  Speaker A: And, and it's so hard to get us to recognize. Right.
• 58:34
  Speaker B: When you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
• 58:36
  Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, man. And. And you know what? You can change a tire with a hammer and a screwdriver.
• 58:44
  Speaker B: You can. Absolutely.
• 58:46
  Speaker A: You may not be able to really use those lug nuts again in the right way.
• 58:51
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 58:52
  Speaker A: But you can do it. Oh, wow, Jeff, this has been a fun conversation. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have.
• 59:00
  Speaker B: Oh, absolutely.
• 59:01
  Speaker A: You got anything you want to self promote? You want to talk to us about anything?
• 59:05
  Speaker B: I, I really don't at this point. You can, you can always find me on LinkedIn. I'm, I'm always happy to have conversations like this. Love talking tech, love talking business, security, AI, all that stuff. So something tells me you love Find me Hit me up guitars too. Oh, yeah, yeah. There's a. The, the guitars you see on the wall behind me are probably about half of what I've got here. And that literally is a lifetime of. So I sold one guitar one time when I was like 13 and I regretted it, so I keep buying them and I've never sold one since.
• 59:37
  Speaker A: So I'm looking at eight guitars myself right now, so. Or maybe it's only seven. Eight. And.
• 59:47
  Speaker B: And there's some in cases and there's. They're all over the place.
• 59:50
  Speaker A: Nice.
• 59:51
  Speaker B: Nice. Well, I, for years I would loan them out to people because I didn't want them all in. Well, usually, yeah, but I didn't want them all in one place at one time because then my wife would see how many there were, so I tried to keep them scattered, but I've. I've managed to get them all collected back here and. And it turns out I underestimated her and she's cool with it.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker A: Okay, well, as you said, reach out to Jeff through LinkedIn and catch him there. We're both there to provide advice and help anybody who's looking to advance their careers. I mean, that's. I think that's one of the other things that we didn't talk about. But, you know, that customer service, that helpfulness, is something that I've always tried to bring to every team that I've worked with or every. It's just something that I try to provide, and I catch that in. In you also, and just trying to be of use to my fellows.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker B: That's right. If people hadn't taken the time to invest in me, I wouldn't have gotten very far.
• 1:00:55
  Speaker A: Amen.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker B: I'm happy to pay that forward and help people out.
• 1:00:58
  Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you, Jeff, and. And thank you all, everybody that's been listening to us. You know, this brings to conclusion another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. So wherever you happen to catch this, please drop us a comment with a. Like, let us know what you thought so that we can continue doing this for you. So thank you very much.