Latest / You've Been Heard / 411- 850 Vet Hospitals. One CIO. Zero BS w/Andrew Rosenblatt

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411- 850 Vet Hospitals. One CIO. Zero BS w/Andrew Rosenblatt · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: Hey folks, this is Michael Moore and I'm here with Andrew Rosenblatt, CIO for vetcore. Welcome to the program. Andrew, how's it going?
• 0:17
  Speaker B: Hey, great. Thanks for having me, Michael. Happy to be here.
• 0:20
  Speaker A: Nice to have. Absolutely, yeah. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
• 0:26
  Speaker B: Sure. So I've been the chief information officer at three different private equity backed companies. My background is in kind of pretty traditional healthcare, it at big hospital systems and then again for the last 10 years been doing more work between behavioral health, home health and veterinary medicine. So kind of all sorts of stuff now. But it's been an interesting journey, kind of going from mainstream hospitals to a little bit more of niche systems now.
• 0:53
  Speaker A: Oh, let's talk a little bit about the PE backed part of it that comes with its own little challenges.
• 0:59
  Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I think maybe 10 years ago is a little different now. It's pretty ubiquitous, I'd say. There is a huge amount of healthcare that is private equity funded as well as kind of other industries across the board. And so having experience dealing with that kind of structure and those kind of expectations is always positive. And I would say in a lot of ways it gives you a lot of freedom and ability to make change and try to do something cool. But where there's money, there's expectations. You have to make sure that you're delivering.
• 1:32
  Speaker A: Absolutely. And I guess we can get into how you deliver in this podcast a bit. What part of your role makes you tick?
• 1:43
  Speaker B: For me, I really think it is not so different than any other area of anybody's professional life. And a lot of the most important thing is your professional relationships and kind of sticking to the golden rule of we've all been in a situation where you've been the boss and been situation where you have a boss and it's always a good thing wherever you are in your career to remember what it was like when you weren't in charge and remember that you may not be in charge for long. And so how do you continue to operate in the way that you would like to be kind of treated in the reverse situation? I think if you're doing that, no matter what kind of stuff you're working on, it'll always be a good and positive experience.
• 2:25
  Speaker A: You bring up a good segue a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about leadership and what it takes to lead in now. 2026.
• 2:34
  Speaker B: Right.
• 2:35
  Speaker A: Lots of different of pieces here.
• 2:39
  Speaker B: I think in technology in particular, it's really alluring to pretend that you know everything, especially now. There is so much change. There are new acronyms constantly coming out, new ways to doing things that if you try to build an enterprise workflow like it should be. And the really, the critical thing here is don't pretend like you know all the answers. Find. Find experts, ask good questions. Be willing to listen and understand if you're way off course. And I think those are some of the most important things.
• 3:10
  Speaker A: I think that's huge. I'm surprised we haven't run out of letters.
• 3:14
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's. It's kind of crazy, and I think it is very. As a technology leader in particular, the folks who are not in technology assume you know everything, and it's important to be honest. It's important to seek the folks who can give you good information and just be willing to ask good questions and try to learn more, because eventually you'll run out and you'll need. You'll need someone's help.
• 3:40
  Speaker A: Let's talk about one myth about IT leadership you wish the entire industry would do away with.
• 3:48
  Speaker B: I would say, I guess maybe it's not a myth, but maybe it's like a picadillo of mine. But whenever you're talking with somebody, I feel like everyone's got one or two companies or individuals that they're holding kind of like the ace in the sleeve of like, oh, well, do you know this person? Or, oh, do you know this person? And based on your answer to any of these things, you're either like a neophyte or an expert. And I'd say, for my myth is we don't all follow all of the top names across every single industry. It is not like baseball cards when you're a kid or anything like that. So for me, that's kind of my myth or pet peeve is, no, we do not know all. All of everyone else's IT friends in the space. It's still a pretty big industry.
• 4:34
  Speaker A: It's a really big industry with a lot of different segments. Right. I mean, that's a. A really interesting thing. Right? You're in healthcare. Healthcare itself is divided up into multiple different segments.
• 4:47
  Speaker B: Right.
• 4:48
  Speaker A: I used to work for home healthcare. Right.
• 4:50
  Speaker B: Which is different than a hospital healthcare completely.
• 4:53
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 4:54
  Speaker B: Well, and. And even with so much private equity money coming in, sometimes these companies come on, sometimes they get bought, sometimes there's a merge. There's just. There's a lot of action going on all the time. And so, again, it kind of goes back to the, like, don't be afraid to ask the questions. Try not to BS Your way through. And Be like, no, I haven't heard of them, like tell me more about it. And sometimes that's a good way to kind of bring into a better conversation too. Most IoT leaders don't need more technology, they need less noise. Over the years, infrastructure quietly gets complicated. Multiple locations, multiple Internet providers, different contracts, separate bills and reactive support. Nobody plans that that way. It just happens. What we do is vendor neutral advisory. That means we don't sell platforms or force change. We start with low friction areas. Internet telecom, Microsoft licensing. Places where complexity builds quietly and can usually cleaned up without disruption or capex. Sometimes we find savings, sometimes we find nothing. Either way the outcome is the same. More clarity, less distraction and it that's boring in the best way possible. If you want a second set of eyes from people who sit on the buying side of enterprise infrastructure every day, just go to you've been herd.com and answer the questions to simplify, streamline and save.
• 6:19
  Speaker A: If you could fix one thing in IT leadership, one big I guess maybe challenge that you have, what would that be?
• 6:29
  Speaker B: It definitely is not as an accessible like career path, I think as it should be. I think you still get kind of a type of person that's kind of drawn to IT work. And for me the fix would be, hey, it would be nice if it was just more broadly accessible. If you had a more diverse pool of people that were going through, being, going through training or even just considering it as a career choice. I think that's something that's kind of missing across the board and in all of the technology verticals.
• 7:01
  Speaker A: Yeah, More ideas too, if that comes to fruition. Right. You get more ideas. New ideas, absolutely. If you had to teach a new IT leader for actually creating the outcomes that we talked about earlier. Right. That PE firms expect. Right?
• 7:19
  Speaker B: Sure.
• 7:20
  Speaker A: What would be the steps that you would give them for gaining those business outcomes?
• 7:28
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's, it's often worth the time upfront whenever you have a new project or objective or everything else. It's just you got to make sure everybody understands what you're trying to do when and like what does good look like? And I think oftentimes you can get in a crap. If you're very excited about a new project or assignment or team, you're being asked to lead or own or whatever it may be and you get in a hurry and you've kind of started before, maybe you needed to do a little bit more of like discovery and scoping. Now you don't want to get stuck in like a six month scope Exercise. But it's very, very important to understand, like, what are we actually trying to do here? I feel like the movie Office Space, but it is the critical piece. What would you say you do here?
• 8:12
  Speaker A: But I got it immediately.
• 8:14
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. The audience.
• 8:17
  Speaker A: Andrew, you're a people person. I get it.
• 8:20
  Speaker B: Yeah. Well, you have to know what in the world someone's asking you to do and why they're asking you to build it, execute it, whatever it may be. And oftentimes what happens is you get into a silo, all the IT people get together and they're like, this is what it should look like. And like, that concept of should is really dangerous. It's like, you don't need to be worried about what it should look like. You need to be worried about what was the intent of building whatever it is you just built. And it needs to match the intent, and it needs to be delivered in a way that matches the intent and also in a way that can change 50 degrees on its access if it needs to, because it's a new process and nobody really understood what in the world they're asking for you in the first place.
• 9:04
  Speaker A: So I like this idea that you've given us, which is shifting away from perspectives. Right. And moving to the outcome, moving to the actual what IT should do. Everybody has tons of different perspectives.
• 9:19
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 9:20
  Speaker A: And here you're saying, let's not even go that route. Instead, let's focus on the tangible outcomes that we can actually deliver. It's good advice in practice. How do we do that? How do you explain that out to people?
• 9:37
  Speaker B: I think the first thing is, if you're working in a small, medium, large company, whatever it is, whoever, the folks that are going to have a stake, like some kind of skin in the game and what you're building and what you're trying to deploy before any work gets started, everyone has to agree on what in the world you guys are working on and how everybody's role kind of fits in and what the expected timeline is. And not that this is an IT led project. IT typically now it's different when you're in product and you're the other things. But if you're part of an IT team, as part of a larger company, it should not be leading an initiative. You should be partnering with the rest of the business units to deliver an initiative, as opposed to saying, well, we have this best, the best idea possible. And you guys are gonna be so happy when you see it. It's like, that's a trap. You're gonna get in trouble. It may or may. I mean, you're taking on all the risk with half the knowledge of like it actually needs to do. Now obviously when you're in a product perspective, it's a little bit different, but you still have stakeholders. You still need to make sure that the rest of your product teams and everything else are building it collectively and that there is a roadmap that says all these things are gonna work together later on.
• 10:48
  Speaker A: It's a great point because often you see it pick up the role of project manager, pick up the role of business leader. Right. Pick up the role of knowledge experts. And really what you're saying is they need to take that stuff and spread it out throughout the business and let the business pick up where they need to. There should be a main project manager, a stakeholders that are in there that actually understand the business in each different department and drive that. And it should be the resource, the very knowledgeable resource. Because if you're in it, right, you have to know about all the different types of business and what your business does, just like in any other department. But you're right, the. The knowledgeable resource that helps people drive at home and give good advice.
• 11:41
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Your job is product delivery. Not necessarily like the product ideation. In most of those times you are going to be asked to figure it out, but it's not necessarily like what is the goal that, that very rarely comes from the actual IT department. Yeah. And there's.
• 11:57
  Speaker A: IT leaders, I think are built a little bit differently than some other leaders in the company. And they have to be. There's a little more regret involved sometimes. Tell me a moment kind of early in your career when you realized you were built differently, when you knew you didn't think the way that maybe others did and you knew you could apply that to become a business IT leader.
• 12:23
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, for me, I guess there's a couple of different points. One of them was I got chewed out by our chief technology officer at Cedar Sinai because we had done a system update and we had a very, very rigorous change management process and we had deployed something that actually dropped with something that's called order transmittal at a hospital. So it actually prevents people from like printing and actually like sending off lab orders and stuff. So it's a fairly major problem. And it's one of the areas that I was one of the experts at the company and I saw the problem immediately and went in and fix the order transmittal issue within about 10 minutes to the SEV1 issue getting discovered. And it was something where, at least for me personally, I got yelled at for this. And I was probably right to get yelled at because it's like, okay, there is a process. Who's to say that I actually was gonna fix it correctly? But in this instance, it's very much aligning, like, what are we trying to do? And in this situation, it's like, well, this fix actually dropped, like the hospital's order transmittal, which is a big problem. Wow. And it actually, like, impacts, like, real people's lives and stuff. And so the ability to fix it to me outweighed the ability to wait. And I was. Is one of the major reasons I really like private equity, but because you do get to move outside of a lot of kind of hierarchy for hierarchy's sake. But it was a very interesting learning experience because I did the right thing, I fixed it quickly. It ultimately helped patients, but it was also very much the wrong thing because I did skip the process and I did go around like, what was it actually like? Change management process that was there for a reason.
• 14:06
  Speaker A: But, yeah, this is why. This is why emergency change management is so important.
• 14:11
  Speaker B: Correct. So it was interesting on both sides. I there. I always think about that because when I was younger, I'm like, yeah, of course I fixed it. That's what we're supposed to do, do. And as I've gotten older, it's like, yeah, you fixed it, but like, if this happened five more times, maybe the fix you would have deployed would have actually broken things worse. And it's great point. It's just interesting to kind of be thinking about the. Ultimately, you just have to make your best decision you can, and that is what's going to boil down to no matter what. But it was an interesting kind of philosophical moment for me.
• 14:45
  Speaker A: So as you kind of grow in your career, it sounds like what you're saying too, is your perspectives shift on how things need to be done. I experience probably has a lot to do with that, but there's. There's more to it. Right.
• 15:00
  Speaker B: I think how a lot of people react to that situation, and not that one in particular, but any of these situations. Do you fix something quickly because you think you know the answer, or do you wait and follow? The right process kind of informs you where you. Maybe you want to be in your career too, because oftentimes you do just need to act quickly and decisively and it might be wrong, and that's okay. Sometimes. Sometimes, like, you have to act quickly, make a decisive decision, and it's wrong. And your name's on it. And you just have, that's what's going to happen. Your name is going to be on it. And so if you feel comfortable in that situation of taking the risk and soldier shoulder and the responsibility, then it informs a lot of the career choices you might have.
• 15:43
  Speaker A: And you also, as an IT leader, right. Anything you do also kind of branches out to everyone else and the team. So not only are you, you're like, I'll do this one thing, but now I'm showing everybody else in the team something. Something that they can do. And now you may have a bigger problem. Right.
• 16:07
  Speaker B: I kind of started our conversation with this. A lot of this is like the golden rule, though, is do it unto others as you would have them do them to you. And if you set that example out there that, hey, we do emergency fixes without following a process, then so be it. That's what you've done. The example is out there. And you need to figure out how you want your overall team to behave and what kind of strategies and structures you want to put in place.
• 16:31
  Speaker A: What I like about your example is that it shows.
• 16:36
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 16:37
  Speaker A: Did you fix the problem? Did you break process? Yes. Right. But it shows that then the process itself wasn't working and need to be modified a little bit.
• 16:49
  Speaker B: You.
• 16:49
  Speaker A: You end up getting that kind of, okay, I understand. I went out of process. Right. But maybe let's look at the process and see why it's preventing us from fixing things quickly.
• 17:00
  Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I mean, everybody talks about continual improvement and probably the worst offenders are always IT teams. Right. Is. We. We like our process. No one likes redoing videos and redoing documentation. So we tend not to. But yeah, it's. It's really important. It's important to understand, like taking different examples and using it. It. It's a little bit overdone, but using it as an opportunity to say, okay, what. What should we have done?
• 17:24
  Speaker A: Next time let's talk about documentation. Because I don't think documentation gets talked about enough. Right. It seems like documentation always starts as a project and you put somebody on it and they document everything all cleanly and stuff. And then you turn around and you need that documentation. You realize it hasn't been updated in years. And you're like, I thought I just did a project about this.
• 17:46
  Speaker B: Right.
• 17:47
  Speaker A: Tell me a little bit about your experience with documentation and how you handle it.
• 17:50
  Speaker B: I mean, it's great. It's again, it's like when you're early in your career, it's like the bane of your existence when you're later in your career, you're like, where's the documentation? Somebody show me like what the process is. So it's kind of like this natural scope or natural scale for all of us. I mean to a. Yes, like it's, it's very critical. You have to have it. You need to have some form of sticky domain knowledge in anything that you're doing and as human beings that exist is like paper and pencil equivalents. I will say it's one of the nice things about so many new like AI tools. You're kind of out of excuses for documentation and not just like meeting minutes but like actual tech docs can be done effectively automatically now. Yeah, there are very few excuses now not to have good documentation. I think I may be one of the last people like on earth who still like Vizios things. It's like, you know, you don't really have to do this anymore either. And so there's just it, it's, it's just part of the work. You have to be able to, once you build something you have to be able to teach it, otherwise you end up as a developer stuck doing service tickets your entire life and no one wants to do that either.
• 18:59
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean that, that makes sense. Let's jump from documentation to technical versus non technical. There's a point in time when you start your career and you're very, very technical and then you move into a role such as yours where you become a little bit more hands off and a little less technical and then things change and then you turn around and go, I need to know what's happening here. I need to get into the mix of it. How do you stay in lockstep with new technology and keep yourself technical but not too technical?
• 19:37
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's tough. I mean it's going to be different in everybody's organization and everyone's role is a little bit tricky. I think everybody in it's fear is to wake up one day and be like, I don't know how to do anything anymore. And it's tough because kind of the bigger your team gets and the longer you're in any kind of leadership or management role, the less those skills are needed, the less you have to do that every day. And I think the important thing is you don't have to understand how to build like your own AI environment here, but you do need to know how it all like hangs together and what are the risks inherent in it and what are the benefits for it and where it can be deployed in your organization. And so from that perspective, it's like you can't really escape understanding how current and new technology trends are going to impact your field. And maybe once in a while, it is worth doing some, like, technical refresher if you find that you've kind of found yourself a little too far away from the sun on these things and you don't quite understand some of the language you're hearing or some of the vendors you're talking to. But it's tough. It's a balancing act. You get older, if you do have a family, you have more time spending there, you have less time maybe doing some independent learning. So you take the opportunities you can to figure out some of the things that you feel like are the most germane in your field. And staying up to date is pretty important, I guess, no matter where you are in your career.
• 20:56
  Speaker A: No, it makes complete sense. When did you stop being technical, so to speak? Right. And start kind of thinking more like the business leader?
• 21:07
  Speaker B: I feel like it's always kind of waxing and waning. I think there are a lot of times, even when I was working at large, like academic medical centers where I didn't have to like go in and do epic configuration anymore. And that was a decade plus ago. And so I'm like, okay, well, I was doing mostly like documentation, mapping and meetings and all that stuff. And then the first company I was CIO for, we had to build our own application. And so from that perspective, it was definitely like, I'm not coding the application by, I'm designing the thing with it, with everybody. And from that, and it's like, okay, it's a lot more technical. And then understanding how we can build the APIs to connect to all our partner systems. And there's not like a rubric for it either. So you're making it up and you have to figure out the design on your own. And even in my last position as CIO with a very big company, we had our, like, master data lake person leave and we were going to be in a pinch for six weeks. And this was the critical system for the entire organization.
• 22:07
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 22:07
  Speaker B: And I had to go source a vendor to do the documentation that we were missing in order for anyone to troubleshoot what in the world could possibly break in this massive data architecture. And I found myself getting back into the weeds of how things work again. And so you just kind of are always going in and out what, whatever kind of your position dictates at the moment. I feel like I like that it's
• 22:31
  Speaker A: wherever your position dictates that's kind of a bit about leader IT leadership, right, is sometimes, sometimes you're in the weeds and have to actually get in and do some of the work that the grind. And then sometimes you have to pull yourself back out and see the bigger picture and help guide the others that are in there. Right. So it sounds like you're saying it's a mixture of both and that's kind of what it leadership is, right?
• 22:57
  Speaker B: I definitely think so. And for me personally, I have a lot of respect for the folks. Sometimes your, your role and title is, can be lofty. You could be a leader in the whole company's organization. But look, you also have to be willing to dig the ditches too. Like, you don't be afraid to do the work and if you are, your team will not respect you. If you're not willing to like get in and actually do the work like you're asking them to, you'll lose the team really fast.
• 23:23
  Speaker A: Yeah, that, that. Oh, that makes sense. Since this podcast is called you've been heard, right, what is one thing you need C level execs to understand? And here,
• 23:38
  Speaker B: me personally, it's interesting. I think probably the most difficult thing as a technology leader dealing with any like board of directors, the rest of a C suite or anything like that, is at its core, you're asking for money. And you're either asking for money to build something that everybody is asking you to build, or you're asking for money in order to build out a team to have better governance, better support, better anything, better infrastructure, all these things. So you're perpetually selling and you need to be understanding that your job is to package this idea and bring everybody on board with you and convince them that it's actually not your idea, it's their idea. And that's in essence, like the core of like IT leadership is how do you take where you think the organization needs to be and then work with the rest of the group to understand that this is actually what they've been asking for all along. And it's not like you're Houdini or anything, but you do need to be synthesizing everybody's thoughts and thinking about, well, how can you actually do this as a collective? And then when you do it, the biggest thing that you want to be heard from the rest of your leadership group is, hey, we agreed, now you have to stick to it. Like, this is the budget, this is the plan. If you feel like there's going to be pivots, build them into your plan. Be like okay, this is your assessment period. We're going to meet again, talk about the progress, make sure we're all still aligned on the goals, but we're still doing it. And that's probably where you get hurt the most is you have these great plans to build an enormous edifice and whatever company you're working in and you're like, great, now I've got the next two years of my life map. It's like, that's not the way, that's not how things work. Like, you need to have the idea, sell it, get alignment three months later, sell it again. Three months later, sell it again. 3 months later, sell it again. And just keep everybody on the path to okay, we're actually going to accomplish this all together.
• 25:40
  Speaker A: I absolutely like what you said about convince them that it's actually their idea because it is.
• 25:48
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 25:48
  Speaker A: Ultimately the outcome is what they want. But I think that's something that gets missed a lot. And I'm glad you brought it up because it is an important part of selling is providing the outcome. And if you can show them the outcome, you can show them why they want it and why this is actually their idea. Yeah. And then I think it's only helping them get there. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's an absolute great way to do it. Also, the always selling that's so huge in it, that is a big soft skill that many people miss and it can, sometimes it leaders miss it as well. Is the ability to sell the right way. And you can sell to different folks. Right. Because you have your different department leaders you need to sell to the. That's different than selling to the execs who want something different. So you might have to change your approach there. Do you find yourself changing your approach based on who you speak with?
• 26:50
  Speaker B: I think you have to build the relationships first before you kind of cook up any scheme or any product or anything else. But you have to take the time, build the relationships, understand what those folks are doing on a day to day, understand where their pain points are and think about it strategically to say, well, are they experiencing something awkward, uncomfortable, ungainly in their day to day that this other team is experiencing? And where is that friction actually continuing to disrupt the rest of the teams kind of down the line and because invariably it is, I do think it can be a little tricky for folks that are really, really awesome at something in it and then they keep doing an awesome job and an awesome job and awesome job and all of a sudden they get to the point where it's like, whoa, you should run the team. And maybe that's not what they want to do. Like, what we were just talking about. The idea of, like, continuing to convince people or continuing to convince people that you're doing what they want and you understand what they want is like a nightmare to a lot of folks in it. They're just like, I just want to build it, man. Like, you tell me what to do and I'll build it and deliver it. That's great. You can have an awesome career just doing that. And you figuring out where you want to be is pretty important. You, you find yourself maybe a little too far above your skis or too far away from doing the things you actually love to do.
• 28:12
  Speaker A: That's well put. Absolutely well put. On that note, what's an important idea that you wish every executive would understand about modern IT right now?
• 28:25
  Speaker B: It's a really good question, I would say again, from other executives. If you're talking to like, CFOs or COOs or CEOs, man, it's really hard to predict budgets out more than like one or two years right now. I would say that that's something that is really challenging. The cost structure and dynamics of things are changing very quickly. There are opportunities to save a lot of money and opportunities to lose a lot of money. And as a technology leader and if you're sitting around and you get 10 minutes to try to convince everybody, it's like, okay, we're going to be signing one to two year contracts now for the next couple of years and that's it. And like, well, we need to stay very nimble. You need to stay very flexible and have the ability to, like, pivot to different systems. Because it's very clear there are not kind of obvious winners and obvious tech stacks that are going to kind of win out and so figure out a way not to get pigeonholed into one way or the other.
• 29:22
  Speaker A: Wow, that's a, that was a really great point. I, I really think that that's a huge one that every executive should be really looking at is the cost right now. There are so many different things going up, going down. There are, like you mentioned, there are companies going, coming in and going left and right, and the dust hasn't settled.
• 29:40
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's not going to settle for a while. And so just stay nimble. Have the ability to pivot on things, especially pivot on partners, so that you can keep your company, your group, your organization as kind of optimally aligned as, as you can.
• 29:59
  Speaker A: What do you think other CIOs get wrong sometimes that you happen to get right.
• 30:07
  Speaker B: Again, I'll kind of touch on a familiar theme. I think the biggest trap is thinking, you know, all the answers and a little bit of not like checking yourself or having enough humility to think. Like, I'm having a conversation with somebody and I'm really entrenched and have my opinion on this. But so are they, am I right or are they right? Or is the truth somewhere in the middle and having a little bit of the humility to step back and be like, maybe we should talk about this some more. Like, maybe this does warrant like a deeper conversation and just being willing to listen to everyone on your team. Something I really believe in is we all have the exact same responsibility, the exact same kind of level of insight and knowledge and skill. The different things we're doing. We just all are doing different jobs. And so no one job is more important than the other. What's important is how it all like stacks up together. And I've been a CIO for a long time, but that doesn't mean that I'm have the best idea, know what we should be doing, know what, whether it should be left, right or center with these different choices. So again, just you have to hear the rest of your group and you have to understand how to create a meritocracy that everyone really believes in in order to have the best idea really win out.
• 31:30
  Speaker A: No.
• 31:30
  Speaker B: Very nice.
• 31:31
  Speaker A: What's a universally accepted best practice you think is actually damaging?
• 31:38
  Speaker B: It's a good question. I mean, I guess it's a really slippery slope. Where I was going to go with this is almost like a skip level concept. Depending on the size of an organization, you may never talk to somebody who's like your boss's boss or who your direct reports. Direct report. And there's no like kind of perfect structure in an organization. But I would say it is very appealing and considered a best practice to be like, look, you have a weekly meeting with all your direct reports and that's kind of it. And try not to get in the, in the weeds of things and don't micromanage if you happen to be that person's boss or whatever it may be. But it's just important to have the, again the personal relationships with everyone within the team, being willing to let them be heard, being willing to offer like a skip level and have that pathway where maybe an entry level analyst can actually have a conversation with the CIO and for it to be comfortable and not kind of like nails on a chalkboard like hi yeah. How are you doing? Nice to meet you. It's like now you can. You actually like doing your best to foster a real dialogue.
• 32:42
  Speaker A: So kind of the second time that we've brought up hierarchy, right. And this hierarchy that can cause a lot of slowdowns, a lot of troubles and pains. You mentioned that sometimes you've been able to cut through that hierarchy. Tell me a little bit about that.
• 33:01
  Speaker B: I mean, look, it's there for a reason. You can't realistically, like, we have a team of over 60 people. I can't meet with everybody every, every week. Obviously that's kind of crazy. So it's there for a reason. But you need to use something like that as a structural and institutional advantage so that everybody has kind of someone to talk to. And no one feels, no one is not getting supervision or having a pipeline to talk to the rest of the group, but also have the ability to kind of cut through it as needed. And what ends up happening is if you find yourself in a crisis point and you're asking somebody you've said 10 words to in their entire career with the organization to work over the weekend, it's a tough sell unless you've done the work in advance. And if you're asking them to really, like, buckle down and trying to emphasize the importance of something, that's not the time to have the relationship. Like, you have to build that credibility a little bit. And there's not really a way to do that unless you're investing in people on a personal level.
• 34:04
  Speaker A: And we come back to selling.
• 34:06
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, you're.
• 34:07
  Speaker A: You're selling it right to your team a hundred percent.
• 34:11
  Speaker B: I am not a genius. I cannot fix every problem in the organization. I cannot code and develop and do all the work that we need to have done. So I need the group to work collectively. And the only way you do that is by making sure everyone understands what you're doing and feels valued and understands their role and understands why in the world you're asking them to do something,
• 34:31
  Speaker A: make it their idea. And. And this is why we want to fix this.
• 34:35
  Speaker B: This is why we want to spend
• 34:36
  Speaker A: your way at weekend fixing this.
• 34:39
  Speaker B: Yeah, 100%.
• 34:41
  Speaker A: But it makes sense.
• 34:42
  Speaker B: It.
• 34:42
  Speaker A: It absolutely makes sense. Based on this conversation, we really need to get everyone in it. Sales lessons. That's what needs to really happen.
• 34:51
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. This is. What's the famous book like, how to Win friends and influence people, Right? Yep. If you go through your career being kind and helping people and trying to again, think, how can we all do the best work we can. How can you help get your friend a raise? How can they help get you a raise? How can you get the position that you've been gunning for? If everyone is trying to help each other out like that, you end up creating a very positive environment that people will help. And you're not selling, you're just understanding like, hey, this is what we have to do in order to all go home and hang out with our families at the end of the day.
• 35:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, that may make sense to me. What's one lesson you think every emerging IT leader should know?
• 35:37
  Speaker B: Always go to board meetings. If you're in a position as a emerging IT leader. Do not let somebody present your slides for you. Yeah. Oh, that's a good one.
• 35:49
  Speaker A: That's a very good one. It sounds a little bit like you learned a lesson there.
• 35:53
  Speaker B: I've learned this one. Do not let someone. Yeah. If you prepared the slides and it's not like you're jumping three different levels, no organization, then you should ask to present them at whatever the meeting it is.
• 36:06
  Speaker A: I kind of want to hear this story as to. Because you jumped on this really quickly.
• 36:12
  Speaker B: There's a lot of generalities you think I could have provided, but that's like a concrete one. It's like if it's yours, if it's your page, you can let this slide like once. Don't let it keep sliding. If it's your page, it should be you. Yep.
• 36:24
  Speaker A: You. You definitely got burned by it one time.
• 36:26
  Speaker B: Very much. Yeah.
• 36:30
  Speaker A: We've come to the portion for about 18 months. What's it going to look like? What are we going to be seeing? What trends, what. I'm going to leave it to you, right? You can, you can go through the healthcare route.
• 36:43
  Speaker B: Right.
• 36:44
  Speaker A: Or you should be more generic, however you want to do it. But let's talk about what 18 months from now looks like. And I know that's really all you can predict based on what we talked about in here.
• 36:55
  Speaker B: Yeah, right. I mean, the way thing the news is going, it's hard to go 18 weeks, but if you go 18 months. Again, if I go just general technologist, I think the amount of data that's being used to process all this stuff is something that it really has to be tackled and kind of. So how do you take something that's taking like terabytes of space now, do you reduce that. That overall memory size, I think is pretty critical. And as like the industry progresses and there's more and more data, everything is being kind of crunched and Stored and everything else. The world and the country at large can't just constantly be building data centers. So I think you'll see a big boom in the way data is actually being stored to be more efficient.
• 37:36
  Speaker A: That was a good answer. I think we're seeing this right now, right, because storage costs are through the roof, brand costs are through the roof, graphic cards are through the roof. Right. Everyone is clamoring to get all of this stuff so that they can run AI and boost their business. So you are basically saying what we're going to be seeing is new technology around how we end up storing this data, minimizing yet again, taking stuff that used to be massive discs and break them down even, even less.
• 38:07
  Speaker B: I mean, in particular in like the healthcare space, you start looking at when you start thinking about medical imaging. Right. So medical imaging used to be like a 2D X ray. Now it's not just a 3D image, it's a 4D image. It moves, it's a video, it's being stored. It not only is it being stored in this initial place, it needs to be having a data backup. It's just not a sustainable model for how there's more testing more images. There's a legal mandate to keep this stuff. There is just so much opportunity and money to being able to figure out how to condense it and make it a little bit more efficient.
• 38:45
  Speaker A: The demand is so high right now.
• 38:48
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
• 38:49
  Speaker A: You've touched on a new market concept here that people will be going, oh, this is what I need to figure out. But it's going to take some really.
• 38:58
  Speaker B: It's beyond me.
• 38:59
  Speaker A: Yeah, right. This is down to almost quantum level now, right?
• 39:03
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 39:07
  Speaker A: Well, besides some storage and new storage techniques, what other things you think? And maybe even, even in the IT
• 39:14
  Speaker B: leadership realm, I, I think it'll be really interesting to see. We're in obviously like the, the AI boom right now. It'll be really interesting to see what sticks. I think there is a real kind of half full, half empty. They're saying, okay, half these companies are going to fail. That's true. And another half are obviously going to continue to grow and continue to change how things are working. I think it's not necessarily something to avoid, but it is something to be cautious of when you're evaluating other AI products. Is what is it actually solving? What is that workflow actually there? And is that something that's going to still be a problem in the next five years?
• 39:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, we kind of, kind of have a spaghetti on the wall situation. Right, A little bit.
• 39:57
  Speaker B: I mean, if you're developing AI products, great, get them to market quick. Hurry up. If you're buying them, make sure whatever you're buying has a good moat roadmap, has a good technical infrastructure and is kind of proves out the ROI there. Because I think it can get expensive fast and that you need to make sure that it's doing what you need it to be do.
• 40:18
  Speaker A: And no long term contracts. That's you, you mentioned that earlier. I thought that was a dealing.
• 40:24
  Speaker B: Month to month.
• 40:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, month to month contracts. That's all I want.
• 40:28
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 40:29
  Speaker A: Across the board, give me my outcome or go away.
• 40:33
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 40:35
  Speaker A: So it should be on the lookout for this change. How do they prepare for this change? What are some of the things that they can do right now to Prepare for this? 18 months.
• 40:47
  Speaker B: I'll give you kind of an interesting strategy at least that I'm using in terms of like evaluating a lot of AI vendors is I'm willing to talk to everybody. If you're on LinkedIn and you're on everything else, you're going to get peppered by like 10 different vendors like every week. And then that's okay. Everyone's just trying to do their job. It is worth, I think, talking to a lot of new companies and understanding their ideas, understanding kind of the marketplace and seeing if there is a product that actually solves a need or has a different approach that maybe you haven't thought about before. And I think just having the willingness to engage is really critical and having a good conversation. I'm not necessarily telling you to waste anybody's time, but as people engage with you about, hey, this is what we're building, it's always a good opportunity to learn because you'll start figuring out how you can apply it to your own company.
• 41:34
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's good. Hey folks, this is Michael Moore. I've been here with Andrew Rosenblatt, CIO for vetcore. Andrew, thank you so much for joining the program and sharing your thoughts with us.
• 41:45
  Speaker B: Really appreciate it. Great to talk to you, Michael, and thanks again for the time.