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389- Stop Solving Problems That Don't Exist w/Juliano Giannerini · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: All right, welcome everyone back to. You've been hurt. Today we've got Giuliano Giannarini. I'll let you introduce yourself. Why don't you give me your official title and what you do over at Baker Construction and we'll go from there.
• 0:25
  Speaker B: Absolutely few. First of all, good to be here. I'm Giuliano Gennarini, Director of IT Operations and Security at Baker. So basically I oversee the IT services, the IT operations, our day to day and cybersecurity functions within the IT organization.
• 0:46
  Speaker A: All right, you do have a few specialties as well. I mean, that's kind of the general overview. But first, let's go back in time. Why don't you tell me how you got started in this whole IT gig anyways, Especially back how you got from Brazil over here. And I don't know what was your first computer? What was it? What was IT growing up that how'd you end up here?
• 1:03
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's a long story. And I'll try to make it as short as possible. So my first computer was an AMD 450 that I kind of learned with some friends how to do an overclock and move up to 500 MHz, which is funny, right? These days we are talking about 500 MHz. I started my career in it, let's say accidentally, because I was hired to do like outcad drawings as part of the engineering group of the Rio de Janeiro airport, the city that I come from. And after one or two weeks they actually told me we are going to do the network drawings rather than the engineering drawings. I said, well, I can do any drawings. And then they moved me up to the IT team and with the network guys. So I started designing the drawings and putting things together, things that the people used to do manually and take like weeks. Of course, with AutoCAD we could do it like in a couple of hours, if not minutes. That was back in 2003. And then I found a kind of a passion for what those guys were doing at the time and I decided to go to college to do computer science. And that's how Everything started in 2003, 2004, I was already part of the network team. And since then I've been within IT and also with a variety of roles within it.
• 2:41
  Speaker A: That's, I think it's the most common answer that I get from people, at least that had been in IT for a long time as I got in there by mistake, because it wasn't something that you kind of just went to school for. And I don't even know if it really still is. I mean you can go to school for computer science, but it's like a lot of theory and stuff like that. But there's not like, hey, can you go to school and we're going to teach you how to work the help desk and talk with end users and create a customer experience and all those different type of things. It would be almost better to like get an MBA or something like that.
• 3:11
  Speaker B: I agree.
• 3:12
  Speaker A: But then how do you speak the language? How are you going to translate the language of technology into it? What part of your role fires you up the most?
• 3:21
  Speaker B: Well, certainly you just touched on that when you said translating it to the business. Right. I think that the business folks, they think they have a way better idea of what it, what the technology team does for the organization these days. But sometimes there are still an underestimation of how difficult things are or even easy sometimes. But translating the IT needs as well in terms of keeping everything up and running with good performance, with the reliability that the business expects into business terms for layman, it's not easy. I think that's the most challenging situation that I come across quite often finding analogies that will ring the bell for them in terms of why we need this. Well, I need this because you have an expectation of 99.9% of uptime for a certain system. So got to have some controls, redundancy, high availability, et cetera. But when you come with to those terms, we gotta skip the technical like jargons and try to connect to construction industry. Right. So the most important thing in constructions like usually is the foundation. Otherwise if you don't focus on the foundation, everything can fall apart later on. So that's kind of a try how I try to articulate that and that's certainly the most challenging thing I, I see day in and day out.
• 5:02
  Speaker A: Most IT leaders don't have an Internet problem. They have a management problem. Multiple locations, multiple providers, multiple bills, different contracts. We help IT leaders make Internet boring again by consolidating visibility, billing, support and monitoring without changing providers or forcing upgrades. If nothing needs fixing, we'll tell you that's vendor neutral advisory. Just go to you've been heard.com and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save. So again, after 300, I say again because it's been 380 episodes, I don't even know what our number is right now. The conversation has always been kind of the same and that is maybe, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years ago. However, a couple decades ago, maybe less than a couple decades. Everyone subconsciously knows. I hope they subconsciously know, or if it. Where they want to admit it or not, at least all the IT directors have been on the show. There's one common theme, right? And that is that nothing gets done really in any company without it touching it. I believe someone made an argument that maybe like the parking lot got paved and like it had nothing to do with that, but someone's IT department had something to do with that because a PO still had to be cut. You know what I mean? Like, it did touch that. So I would argue like, no. And there's fiber running underneath that parking lot and electricity, something so that. No, I, I disagree. So, but that's the one thing we all know, right? Marketing can't do its job without it. Sales cannot do its job with it. Logistics, shipping, receiving, right? Massively, big deal. It, everything, everything. Nothing gets done without it touching it. So people, whether they want to admit that or not, is one thing. So it has a seat at the executive roundtable. It's there, Right, but. And the reason why I'm asking this question now, and I usually kind of save it for the end, but. But because you touched on it, how much nicer would it be to be heard also? Not just have a seat, but actually be heard. And you talked about translating that. A lot of technical people get up and they speak a lot of jargon, kind of goes in one ear and out the other, and then maybe they're not quite heard and maybe that's the problem, is that they sound too smart. So executive management thinks, well, they can do that, so just throw. It can do it. And then it ends up getting flooded with multiple, multiple projects. Plus they're already juggling thousands of other things. And there's emergencies that come up and there's fires that you're putting out and patches and upgrades and all kinds of other things. And then there's, oh, hey, by the way, can we do that with AI? My question to you is if there was one message that the world could hear, whether it be end users or the C suite or whatever it is from technology, if there's one thing that you want to get across to them to be heard from the technology leadership, what would that be? And I think you touched on it by saying. I think you touched on it by saying, like, it's not that easy. You know what I mean? But I don't know if that's the message. I don't know if that's the message you want to say, but what is that message that's going to help everyone outside of it understand it more and help it help them understand more?
• 8:16
  Speaker B: Well, that's an interesting question. I say it's hard to articulate on a single message. The first thing I would say is that I think we need to clarify to executive management, upper management, first of all we are on their side, not the opposite.
• 8:33
  Speaker A: It's not an us versus them exactly.
• 8:36
  Speaker B: It's not about what it wants. It's about you have us here and we want to be your trusted advisor, your trusted technology business partner in a way that I need you to give me information, a good, well informed information about the business. And so from a technology perspective, we are going to see how we can help with revenue generation, increase margins and lower the cost. Okay. I think the challenge that most of us face when I say most of us, I say most of the technology folks is that we all came from a very technical background, most of us. And I put myself on it. I used to work behind a black screen for several years. So sometimes I think we do have a hard time to articulate that message. So first of all it's stopping the us versus then second is we want to be, we are your trusted business partner. And trust me, as you said, it's not that easy as the AI and some other like sources make it look like we have an entire ecosystem that need to first of all keep up and running with decent performance. And we also need to keep up with technology advancements. We need to keep up with, which is fine, endless requirements from the business demands and still help the business creating like competitive advantage, differentiation from other players and stuff like that. So it's not an easy message.
• 10:33
  Speaker A: So we're your business partner, first of all is the message where your business partner. We're not an afterthought. In other words, what you're saying is it is not the afterthought. I guess what happens, what goes wrong when it is not the business partner or not involved in that.
• 10:50
  Speaker B: Well, I think when it is not.
• 10:52
  Speaker A: Because I know you've seen some, you have to have had some stories from the past.
• 10:57
  Speaker B: Oh yeah.
• 10:58
  Speaker A: Where that's happened, where it's been. Yeah. Like we got thrown a new CRM and they said hey guys, here's the new CRM. Can you implement this in 30 days?
• 11:06
  Speaker B: Yeah. I usually say, and I tell my team quite often what I'm going to say now when it is not heard, when we don't have all the key stakeholders, I mean on the Table to kind of go through most of the time. What happens is the problem statement is not well defined. And when you don't refine the problem statement, you might resolve the wrong problem. Sometimes I say, love that. Yeah, I mean, sometimes we hear I need a new CRM. Hey, okay, you might need a new CRM, but what if you tell me what's your problem statement first?
• 11:47
  Speaker A: Yeah, we have no. I don't know, I'll just make it up. I'll role play with you. We've got no reporting and this old SQL system is kind of a mess and we have no way of tracking activity and it's just, yeah, it's really clunky. And the salesforce guy came in and they showed us this, that and we could have reporting and we can track all this and we can know what people are doing.
• 12:09
  Speaker B: You know a silly example I can give you, Phil, and it's very silly and small, but it's just to illustrate what we are talking about, we went to Baker has an annual conference with directors and above where we review the annual operation, plan all our targets, review previous plan, plan next year, review previous year results and plan next year's ahead. Right. I had one vice president or HR director of one particular business unit telling me, hey, listen, I need Spanish speakers at the service desk.
• 12:48
  Speaker A: Sounds like an AI case.
• 12:50
  Speaker B: Definitely.
• 12:51
  Speaker A: You can just do AI, just throw AI at that.
• 12:54
  Speaker B: And I was thinking like, hey, first of all, I like to say the answer is always yes, because it's the business, we are here to partner with them. Right. So I usually start with yeah, of course, but tell me, why do you need Spanish speakers at the service desk? And they say because we have our craft workers, 80% of them, they are Spanish speakers. They're not tech savvy and we need them to be able. We need someone at the service desk to answer the call and pick up in Spanish and help them with resetting passwords, getting to the payroll system, et cetera. And then I quickly and just like simply said, hey, listen, yes, of course we can help. But listen, when people call about payroll questions, they don't even call the service desk. They call the hr, the payroll team. And my team doesn't even have access. And I think they should not have to reset passwords on the payroll system. So that's up to the HR and the payroll manager, director, whatever. So just telling you, if I put more Spanish speakers at the service desk, it's not going to solve your problem.
• 14:07
  Speaker A: Comprendido?
• 14:08
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's just simple. And the guy was kind of looking at me and say, hey, I'm not saying I don't want to help. I still want. And I can engage with the payroll team and we can talk through it. We can explore. I think we don't need more humans in there. Maybe it's just a matter of. Of having like a little bit of an agentic AI that can answer calls, that can reply text messages, that can reply emails. Those repetitive tasks. They can definitely. We can fix that. But let's first focus on the problem statement.
• 14:43
  Speaker A: Okay, So I don't know if that's the biggest challenge, but if there is one, if you could fix one big challenge across IT leadership tomorrow, like the thing that might keep you up at night the most, or the thing where you're just like, not this again. I don't know what's the biggest challenge? If there. If you could solve one big challenge in IT leadership tomorrow, what would it be?
• 15:02
  Speaker B: IT leadership. Right. Just like what I was saying that it's hard to articulate the message. Also take the heat on it, that sometimes I think IT leadership doesn't know how to articulate that message and translate into business terms to laymen. So I think the challenge with IT leadership is more about business acumen. So understanding the core business and how we can literally translate. Because most of the cases we are speaking a totally different language from the business. And that's, I think, where we find a hard time to sometimes approve funding and investment and some of the initiatives that we will certainly help the business. We have a strong business case, but we just don't articulate the message. So developing that business acumen, I think it's one of the most important thing in IT leadership.
• 16:04
  Speaker A: I think it's one of the most important things for business leaders as well. Yeah, I think a lot of business leaders know the. They know ebitda, they know roi, they know words and everything. But I think even just a lot of business leaders in General, at least 80% of famous old 8020 rule, are all over the place trying to fix different things and not focus. Now, it's very easy to be. It's very easy. The shiny object syndrome, just like it is in it. It's very easy to kind of get derailed from what your number one vision or goal or challenge is at the time. And I can't remember what Bezos was with Amazon back then, but it was just like everything has to be like one click. It was just like simple like that, Like a simple focus. Right. I think for us, for the podcast, it's like, how do we scale to two podcasts a day? And what does that have to do with two podcasts a day? Like, if we ask that question every time, like, what's the challenge? So I guess my question to you would be then is like, how clear or how well connected is IT leadership, do you think, with the actual vision and challenges of the business? But the business, first of all, has to have good leadership as well. So if the business doesn't know what their number one challenge is, then how can we expect it to know what the number one challenge is? And if the business doesn't know what the number one challenge is, but you've got a really, really good business leader in it, can IT help uncover that? So what's the biggest challenge to growth for any company at any one time? And how can it help alleviate that? I guess without being pulled in a thousand different directions, trying to fix 8,000 different things without any focus, you know?
• 17:39
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think you hit the nail when you say that first of all, the business has to define clear, concise, like and achievable objectives. Then not only it, but other leaders across the organization, they need to kind of understand how their respective functions, and in this case we are talking about technology team, can help achieving those goals. Okay. And I think when we do our, let's say, internal assessment on how can it help, for instance, with revenue growth or with margin or lowering the cost. Okay, so you're going to sit down with our internal IT leadership team, refine, review everyone's perspective on how we can help achieving that particular goal objective and by when, et cetera, how. And then we need to get back to the business or to the leaders and say, hey, here is how we see it fitting and helping on achieving these, this, this goal. Okay, but we need then to refine and help prioritizing. First of all, they need to review whether that really is in line with their vision. Right. Otherwise it doesn't make any sense. And then, okay, so in order to do this, we need to have a major program or projects, et cetera, and we need to prioritize. The first thing is understanding the limitation we have that we cannot do everything at once. Right. So we need to prioritize. And prioritizing means that the business, upper management needs to be involved and they need to give direction and guidance. So then that's. We are talking about alignment. Right?
• 19:39
  Speaker A: Right.
• 19:40
  Speaker B: Once those two kind of stakeholders, technology leaders and the business are well aligned, I think they both shake hands saying, yes, okay, what you're saying, like this is the goal. And the technology team understands that by doing this, you're going to help us with these goals, right? Oh, Yeah, I agree 100%. So let's go do it. Let's create a roadmap. Let's see how. Let's prioritize what comes first, what comes next. Okay.
• 20:12
  Speaker A: You think there's a lot of companies that just have rogue projects going on, like sales calls it and is like, we need this and it doesn't. And it gets approved, but it doesn't even make it to the roundtable?
• 20:23
  Speaker B: Well, a hundred percent. And that's where we know it happens. But yeah, and that's where I see in. In a lot of cases, I can tell not only at Baker, but at my previous. I mean, some of my previous assignments. Sometimes there is a clear understanding from upper management on where they want to be. Okay. And they cascade that down to the different departments, the technology, finance, hr, whatever. And I see that. I have seen that my entire life, I should say. And then when it goes down to the lower levels, sometimes middle management is totally not aligned with that because they are asking for those rogue projects. I say, hey, this is not connected with the major goal of the organization or one or two or three goals that we have set for this period. It's totally disconnected. And I think that disconnection, I don't know why and how it really happens, but basically when I was talking about business acumen, we were talking about the technology leadership, right? But the technology leadership needs to cascade down that message to our teams and help them understanding and developing that business acumen as well. So there's going to be a disconnection because our teams will not really understand why they're doing what they're doing, or they don't understand our vision, which is connected to the business, to the company's vision. So with other departments, I think that happens a lot. This disconnection that leads to rogue projects or initiatives that are definitely not connected with the goals and again, is gonna probably resolve the wrong problem.
• 22:18
  Speaker A: I mean, some of this is just business foundational business best practices that probably, as the business grew, fell massively out of alignment. Things like, I know for us, like one of our. One of our three core values that we're working really, really hard on, that I want us to work really hard on this year, is just communication, because you can have multiple people all on different islands kind of operating and doing things, and they're not in alignment with everyone kind of on the. On the same vision, Right? So someone's Doing one thing, another person's doing the other thing, and they're everyone's intentions are. We want to assume everyone's intentions are good. Right. But I can imagine in a larger company where you have top down, top down communication can fall apart. And when you have middle management and people showing up, and I'm showing up and doing my job, when that vision in communication doesn't flow through all the way to the bottom. And I think that's very common in a lot of companies.
• 23:16
  Speaker B: Yeah. And the communication, like organization change management, I think is key for that. Right. And I think communication within not only large organizations, I mean, in most of the places, communication is really one of the most challenging things we can see because we can send a message. And how can we make sure that everyone is on the same page and understand the message, understanding what exactly we want them to do, or take it from there? It's not easy. We see that every day.
• 23:49
  Speaker A: What do you think most CIOs, CTOs, IT leaders, in general, what do you think most people get wrong that you think is that's like obvious to you?
• 23:59
  Speaker B: You mean from the business perspective?
• 24:01
  Speaker A: You just look at it and you're like, ah, it's so obvious. Why do we keep doing that? Or I don't. I mean, it's just like, what do you think most CIOs or most IT leaders get wrong? I've got statistics. I mean, I've got like 94%. I could tell you one thing, but I'm just curious if there's something that pops into your head. You looked at it like, do we keep doing that? Or here's another way to ask it. Another way to ask you is like, is there any universally accepted best practice that you think is actually damaging and stupid and we should throw out the window?
• 24:29
  Speaker B: Well, I think one of the most common things I see, let's say with my team most of the time, is that they usually come with the tool, with the technology. When I go back and I say, hey, what is the problem you're trying to resolve? Because I'm a biggest advocate, I tell them all the time that the rules should come before the tools.
• 24:53
  Speaker A: Ooh, I love that. I like that. I haven't heard that one.
• 24:56
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's good. Again, sometimes we should still focus on people and process, and the technology will eventually come to help and be part of that. And everyone wants to be heard, but you only be able to do that once you have the right message. And I'm not saying that I'm that guy that Always has the right message. I think it's still a challenge we all have to tackle. But, yeah, being heard is amazing.
• 25:28
  Speaker A: I think it's being heard after you've listened really, really well.
• 25:32
  Speaker B: You've got to listen out first. You got to understand how they work, how they are wired. It's very important to understand how people are wired. So you can then articulate the message. You can communicate in a way that they understand what you're saying using the channel that they use. I can give you one example which I particularly think I failed when I first came to Baker. So construction business, they use a lot of text message, of course, because people in the field, they just don't have a computer or an iPad all the time, so it's easier to communicate. And I did not really understand or even map that at the time. And I insisted on reaching them on teams or emails until I found teams is not really their biggest strength in terms of communication. And after some time, I talked to the CTO and she said, oh, try text messages. That's all they do all day long. And they started to be very responsive.
• 26:47
  Speaker A: Isn't that amazing?
• 26:48
  Speaker B: And that's a minor thing that I just didn't really do my job well, first by understanding how they operate. And that's a very basic thing. And I stayed here a couple of months waiting for answers, and I was eager to prepare my strategy, my assessment, my plans. And I was waiting for information that they never came until I pick up the phone and I call and I text message. And I just came from a very different business with a very different culture. So that's the other point. Understanding that the organization, a culture is. It is very important as well.
• 27:29
  Speaker A: It's the flip side too. So when I say you've been heard, it doesn't necessarily mean. It doesn't necessarily need to be the IT leaders been heard. It might also mean that you've been heard. Like as IT leaders, we hear you, we listen to our end users, we listen to you, we hear you loud and clear.
• 27:46
  Speaker B: Absolutely.
• 27:47
  Speaker A: It's. It's universal, it's profound and yet so simple. So simple. If you've ever seen what about Bob?
• 27:53
  Speaker B: And the thing is, like, when we, when we do say something, I think it's. It gotta be clear for them. When they ask what is in it for me, they clearly understand that if we're not able to kind of present something, that when they ask themselves what is in it for me, and they clearly understand what is in there for, then what, what should it be? What should be their take, what should be the action and how they can support. Then we failed to communicate.
• 28:27
  Speaker A: So you're in a good industry because you're in an industry that's there's a lot of. You move a lot of dirt around, let's just put it that way.
• 28:33
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 28:34
  Speaker A: I'm assuming you've got some guys that wear steel toed boots and drive trucks and stuff like that.
• 28:38
  Speaker B: Okay, 100.
• 28:40
  Speaker A: So I need a prediction from you. 18 months from now, what will everyone in it be talking about that people ignore today? Can you think of anything, whether it be 18 months from now, 36 months from now? I, I like a year and a half, but you need to go three years. What do you imagine is going to change in the field of it?
• 29:01
  Speaker B: I, I think in 18 to 36 months from now we are going to have a way better understanding of the AI impact as a major industrial revolution. But I think we are at this very moment, I think we are on a big hype. Everyone talks about AI. I really challenge a lot of the ROIs in terms of the AI initially. So for many leaders it's still a buzzword where they don't really see. Because when you talk about productivity, yes, there is a huge productivity gain, but translating those things into measurable ROIs with hard dollars is really hard to.
• 29:49
  Speaker A: Okay, so what's the part about AI then that people are ignoring? That they should be leveraging. So everyone's talking about like AI agents and generative AI. We're going to have bots replacing people and all this craziness, which I don't believe is going to happen, I believe that to me, I believe will not happen in 18 months. But there are some aspects of AI that people might not be leveraging or something. Is there anything there that you think, is there anything people are missing out on? It doesn't even need to be AI. It could be like, oh, we got this whole other thing going on in the IT industry that people are completely ignoring. But is there something that people are ignoring like a, I don't know, secret weapon or secret blind spot or. I don't, something bad. Is there anything that you can think of? I ran into one this morning.
• 30:33
  Speaker B: Well, I can't think of anything specifically like another technology that we might be missing.
• 30:39
  Speaker A: Like I, I, okay, I actually, I think the secret. This is just me. I think 18 months from now to 36 months from now, I think almost the entire development world is going to be destroyed. I think the, I think the AI piece that is not hype is the actual coding aspect, I think we're gonna go from just like. What do they call those coders? Like the fake coders? Vibe coders. I think we're gonna go from vibe coding to like a whole nother level. Because what I saw that my team was able to provide today blew my mind. I mean, built a whole. Almost like an entire tracker, like a whole good portion of a CRM in a weekend. Like custom, like, I think a lot of software is going to become. Why are we to use Salesforce? I. I'm. My prediction is that companies like Salesforce will be out of business.
• 31:33
  Speaker B: You think so?
• 31:35
  Speaker A: I do, Yeah. I think coding is going to get. I think the coding is going to get so good that someone's going to be like, why would I pay that much money and why would I pay a custom dev guy to take forever to do this when I can just own my own CRM specifically to my use case and host it myself? That's my prediction. That might be wild. That might be wild. But after I saw what my team is able to do and I don't have millions of dollars. Right. When I saw, I was blown away.
• 32:08
  Speaker B: Yeah. I think the development industry will certainly face a major disruption because AI can certainly do more with less and 24 by 7 and precisely. But I don't know.
• 32:25
  Speaker A: It'll work out. The bugs. They're going to work out the bugs. They're going to work out some of the glitches, they're going to work out some of the. What do we call it when hallucinations. Some of this stuff's going to start to get a lot better. That's my prediction. That's where AI is very useful to me.
• 32:39
  Speaker B: Yeah. However, I. I don't really know. Like, maybe you're right, but it sounds a little bit extreme to see.
• 32:47
  Speaker A: I'm going to show you out of business. No, no, I know that's extreme. Okay. But massive losses, not needed as much. Or rather than paying a company to do custom dev work for you like that, those guys will be out of. Those guys will take the first big hit or those guys will be the first people to learn how to use AI from a coding perspective to really speed up the process.
• 33:13
  Speaker B: It's kind of funny because they helped developing that and historically you have like infrastructure guys. And when we had the DevOps, they all thought that they were going to be out of business because everything was going to be automated, like the seamless provisioning, et cetera.
• 33:33
  Speaker A: There's gonna have to be some new stuff. I mean, we're gonna need the vision.
• 33:37
  Speaker B: But now I feel like the developers are way more threatened than the infrastructure guys.
• 33:43
  Speaker A: Yeah, of course, Absolutely. Completely agree. The like the low level dev guys are gone. You're gonna have to be the best. And then like it's gonna be weird because there's gonna be really big gap. There's gonna be this huge gap of like, well, how do I even get to that level? Like, what's the point even?
• 34:02
  Speaker B: Yeah, but that also leads to a major, let's say, risk and challenge that I should say that I face these days is now empowered by AI. Everyone thinks it's a technology IT guy. And I do have a lot of shadow AI, which used to be shadow IT and moving slowly within the organization. Like some business users that they knew or they had some background and they started developing things, products that I would just call MVPs. Never really real product until we take ownership because they don't think about scalability, about how to support that later on and how that product can survive without them. Right. So now it's like I haven't.
• 34:49
  Speaker A: I know exactly what I mean.
• 34:50
  Speaker B: Yeah. And now with shadow AI, it's like exponential the number of people they are getting to it and they are all building their custom products. And I think that's gonna make our life so difficult in the near future.
• 35:11
  Speaker A: It's exactly. You're gonna have to have really good visionaries and oversight. So for example, like our example was an app. It was an app to track people, track activity for recruiting people to be on the podcast. Simple thing, right? Go to go from spreadsheet to active application with gamification, hosted mobile version, web version. Awesome. Absolutely. Came out amazing.
• 35:39
  Speaker B: Right?
• 35:40
  Speaker A: So then I'm talking with Greg this morning. He's like, well, I don't think we need like our email like or I don't think we need this anymore. I was like, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, no, see that's the ver. That's where you need oversight, where you need technology leader oversight. I was like, no, no, no. Because even if you could build your.
• 35:57
  Speaker B: Own.
• 35:59
  Speaker A: I think it was like a serve. It was like survey and quizzes and email automation and all this type of stuff. Even if you could do that, it's going to get killed by like your email deliverability rates, your like spam scores. All this stuff's gonna get absolutely destroyed and you're gonna have no score like it that in that use case it would never work and you would need someone to be able to say that. But if you've got some dude in marketing that's like, yeah, I built this, like, crazy thing. And then all of a sudden you're like, well, why did our email delivery rates go down? Oh, and think about that. So you're gonna have to have some people with some good oversight, which is challenging.
• 36:34
  Speaker B: And not all organizations have the level of governance to do this oversight. And then people will start building those custom products that they cannot be supported later on, mainly if they turn their back on the organization. And the challenge is that the IT team is not scaled to take all of this in and make it, like, reliable, I mean, with decent performance, and then support that later to make sure that we do the lifecycle management of the product like any product has. So, yeah, that's some of the challenges that I see. I have seen that right now, and it's gonna just go skyrocket over the next 18 to 36 months, in my point of view.
• 37:19
  Speaker A: Understood completely. Okay, so last question. What's one lesson that every IT leader should know? Was there, like, ever, like, just a big learning moment for you where you're like, oh, yeah, that if I had known that back then, I wouldn't have done that or I would have done this more of. Right. Like, for me, it's like, well, if I had known that, I wouldn't have wasted two years in biochemistry and then doing creative writing, I probably would have just jumped right to business management. But what's one lesson every emerging IT leader should know?
• 37:52
  Speaker B: I think the lesson is we should not underestimate how important it is to work and refine the problem statement so we don't fix the wrong problem. I think that's something I learned and I did wrong a lot of times over these, like, 20 years that I've been working in the IT industry. Just a small oversight where you think the problem and say, okay, let's go ahead of this. No, like, just spend time. It's not spending. It's about investing time on understanding what is the pain point. Okay. Refine it, validate it, and then you start solutioning.
• 38:42
  Speaker A: I think we could use some vibe coding and come up with a problem statement app.
• 38:48
  Speaker B: That's right.
• 38:49
  Speaker A: So basically, like, this morning, we have a big problem with scheduling. It's really, really difficult because we have a lot of hosts that all have different schedules. And so we get to, like, a certain point where, like, you know, someone's like, well, I'm available on this date, on that date, and I'm available at certain times, and Doug's available sometimes, and Mike's Available time and Michael is available at other, well, different times. We all work for different companies because they all have day jobs as well. Or it's like, okay, well he has his calendar link, he has kittens calendar link. And zoom won't allow us to unify because they all got to be under one domain. And then we're. Well we could use calendly and we could. It's like this crazy kind of weird. It seems like a simple problem to solve, but that's exactly what we started with was like a long hour long session this morning just recording the problem statements and then we're going to break it down into steps and like different solutioning and that type of stuff. And I think when you do that but versus just like I don't know what vendors are available. Okay, we got this one, let's try this one. Okay, let's try this one. And this what you end up with is just non unified communications and feel.
• 39:53
  Speaker B: Like sometimes an AI is doing that a lot these days. Right. So AI is all about efficiency, productivity, automation. Right? Yeah. And guess what, why I focus on the problem statement like AI and all the automation. When you automate a bad process, it will speed up the problem exponentially. With now empowered by AI, it's a speed of light. Because we could stop that before like in previous years, when you automate a bad process, you would end up with okay, just a small chunk of bad data. Now it's a big chunk of that.
• 40:34
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's like, oh, I need a product, I need a vendor that can do this, this and this. And AI will just tell you okay, do this, this, this and this and try this. And all you've done is yeah, your process was wrong. AI just amplified your wrongness.
• 40:49
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 40:50
  Speaker A: It's going to agree with you. It's just going to answer you and agree with you at least from the.
• 40:54
  Speaker B: AI is going to be as good as where they've been trained on is a pre trained.
• 40:58
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Giuliano, it has been a pleasure. You've been heard.
• 41:04
  Speaker B: My pleasure. Phil, thanks for the invitation. It's been a pleasure being here with you today.