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391- Become A Pleasantly Persistent Piranha z/Devon J. Delano · You've Been Heard

• 0:10
  Speaker A: Welcome everyone. Devin, welcome. And is it Delano? Am I pronouncing that right?
• 0:15
  Speaker B: It's Delano with a long a. Delano.
• 0:17
  Speaker A: Delano. So what, that's actually a great segue to your first computer. How'd you get started in this? What's your role? What do you do? Do you herd cats on a daily basis? And, and how did you get started in this world of it? What was your first computer? Let's go with that.
• 0:30
  Speaker B: The first computer, probably realistically was the TRS 80. If we're going to talk real computers.
• 0:38
  Speaker A: Radio Shack.
• 0:39
  Speaker B: Yep. All in one monitor, keyboard, extra extravaganza with maybe 12k of RAM or whatever it was. Five and a quarter inch floppy drives. Yep. Big platter discs. Yep. That, that was my first one except.
• 0:54
  Speaker A: Like write fourth grade papers.
• 0:56
  Speaker B: Well you. That was my first machine that accepted basic. You remember basic 10 print, hello 20 go to 10 execute, run bat. And then you got high all over your screen and then it's super awesome. If you added the tabs, you could get it tiered across the screen so it looked like we're scrolling all the cool stuff. Yeah.
• 1:14
  Speaker A: Maybe get a magazine with some, some different programs you could type into it, make it do stuff. Yeah.
• 1:19
  Speaker B: And my father, who was a schoolteacher, 6th grade school teacher for the longest time, actually subscribed us to a newsletter and I coded BASIC games, which is really exciting when you write 3,000 lines of code and then you got to go figure out where your syntax error is. So my father was an English teacher, so it wasn't exciting. Like I didn't get to talk about cool science and stuff. But he would always tell me that I was using the wrong past participle when I was speaking with a group versus singular or plural. And that's the wrong tense of that verb son. So yes it was. That's what it was like having a sixth grade English teacher.
• 1:54
  Speaker A: Okay. So we've got the history. It's a good history. How do you end up where you are though?
• 1:58
  Speaker B: So that's a natural progression of course into that to your city. The Commodore 64, the Apple II, the, the, the first P. IBM PC. Then I started building them myself when a. A 4 gig ram stick was, was really cool and the, and a 14144 modem was the way did a little bit of gaming with the app to 14:4. Yeah. You see this? It's. I've been around. I can model a modem screech. But most people won't like to hear that. And so then I actually went when it was time to go to college though, I thought I'd live the dream and be an architect. And instead of designing buildings, I was rebuilding people's PCs in my dorm room. So fit to come out of school, join a local startup, IT shop, did my MCSE certification and then I get into Cisco networking and get the weird opportunity to become a manager. And then this goes downhill from there.
• 2:51
  Speaker A: Then we had to learn, then we had to talk to people.
• 2:53
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean managing tech is great. Managing people is not great. And here we are, IT director at a shop here up in Maine.
• 3:03
  Speaker A: So which is perfect if you don't like to talk to people. What we have on our bullet points to talk about today to avoid being sidelined in the decision making process. And let's just talk about that. Like how so. So you mentioned you kind of alluded to it earlier, which is like the tech is easy. Like making things work is kind of like what we all do naturally.
• 3:24
  Speaker B: Right.
• 3:24
  Speaker A: But the IT world has progressed so much that that's just. You can't do that anymore if you actually want to be successful. Unless you want to just stay on the, I guess stand some back room in the help desk or whatever and even help desk. They can't do that. Really. Yeah. The people under the stairs. Exactly. There's no bars on your window. How do we work to avoid being sidelined in the decision making process? Or I guess what's better is what happens when you are sidelined from the decision making process.
• 3:53
  Speaker B: So I'm looking at my notes and it is actually really, I did actually take some notes as it would turn out. I think one of the big things is you've got to put yourself out there, you've got to make yourself available to your leadership and you need to be an active participant and a frequent participant in staying in touch with your leadership team.
• 4:12
  Speaker A: We like to say in a my team, I like to say you need to get up in people's grills. Yeah, in a good way. In a good way or a pleasant. You need to be a pleasantly persistent piranha. Is another way that we've said this before.
• 4:24
  Speaker B: I like that. And it's very clear. I mean the good news is that you're usually welcome until you're not. And I think the big points are when you finally break that, you break that ceiling and you get in there. It is best to listen a lot the first few sessions before you talk. And when you talk that first and, and, and most important time, you better be poignant, you better have some tangible Ideas and tangible responses. And you got to be prepared. Now I always that's we go to a bazillion meetings, right? We that most of them we don't need to be in. So when it's your time, be ready.
• 5:06
  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. It sounds like you've had some experience with this. Like maybe you've had some times not being ready or you haven't been poignant and there's some times that you've learned to be poignant. I mean, do you have any good examples or how do we do this?
• 5:45
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's 100%. So I won't divulge what actually happens, but that just happened very recently. We had a system that needed to be upgraded and the production floor thought they. Okay, well this is very easy. We know we have product X and we need to put in product. Yeah, product Y will do it better. So let's go get it.
• 6:05
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 6:06
  Speaker B: Okay. So they didn't talk to anybody. They didn't vet that out in any way. All of a sudden product Y is on the floor and product Y doesn't work well. Why doesn't it work? Well, it doesn't talk to the piece of equipment that the old one did.
• 6:19
  Speaker A: How much was product? Am I allowed to ask how much was product?
• 6:24
  Speaker B: I was say that was a. It was more than a Nissan Sentra, but less than a Lexus.
• 6:29
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 6:30
  Speaker B: Now.
• 6:30
  Speaker A: Painful. I've had some people ask me before, like, how much can you keep in a cash app? How much can you keep an ash cash app before you need to move it to like a prime wallet? And it was put this way, how much money that if you lost it would just be so like it would make you like, you'd probably pass out and vomit. You know what I mean? Like this type of thing. Not the amount of money where you'd be like, that really is bad. No. How much money would make you like have a psychological breakdown? It's on the verge of that much money. Yeah, it's kind of like really? But I mean if you have, I mean if you're a big business and you have money, you're kind of like, ah, why? It's not that bad. It's not, it's not ransomware attack.
• 7:14
  Speaker B: No, not that bad. So you know, but in this case, and then now what happens is eventually it bleeds its way up to the top and you have the, you have the CEO saying, hey, this system doesn't work. And if you can't get it to work, you, you call up the vendor, you, you send it back. Well, I wasn't involved. So not only do I had. Didn't have the skin in the game, I don't have the leverage. I can't go talk to vendor action, say, hey, your stuff doesn't work. He's going to say, who are you? You didn't sign the check, you didn't sign the scope of work. I don't have to listen to you.
• 7:47
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 7:48
  Speaker B: So what ends up happening is on the back end of things, I'm the janitor. I got to go get the manual, I got to pull it off, I got to find out what isn't working. And this story has a happy ending. We did figure it out. And product Y now works. And it's working really well. And in this case, because I got capped on the shoulder by the CEO, he's aware of it. But going forward, like for example, we're going to look at robotics. I'm in that conversation now. It's two years away.
• 8:17
  Speaker A: Somebody had to break first in order for you to get. I wonder if we can make up some fake breaking things. And Shane, by the way, is agreeing with you. He's saying sounds very familiar. He's saying sounds. These are not unfamiliar things. And it's back to kind of why we're like our entire purpose and meaning of this podcast and platform, which is to do to it what the iPhone did to the BlackBerry and change this, change this narrative. Right. But there's still 94%, 93 to 94% of CTOs and CIOs having a seat at the executive roundtable but not being heard well.
• 8:56
  Speaker B: And it. And it actually goes down to what I have found too, that's been very effective is once you're. Once your IT director or cio, whatever gets that gets that seat of the table. It's just as important to have the next level down, have the seat at the next level management down. So if your director is sitting with the executives, your IT manager better be sitting with department managers because you're going to lose the connection downstream if you don't have that. I have a trusted member. He does attend the department management Meetings and now we have a line of sight. Now the executive strategy boils down to the department manager. How does that impact Joe Average on the floor? So that is a, that's a bit of advice I can offer that does help a lot. It's not just. It's great if I'm aware of it, but if I can't push it down, I'm not succeeding.
• 9:48
  Speaker A: How do we make, and I do mean make. How do we make ourselves heard on purpose?
• 9:57
  Speaker B: Right?
• 9:58
  Speaker A: And it's not. I don't mean it to be like, oh, I just want to be heard because I'm like special or anything. I'm saying because it's very, very important for the, the benefit of the business. How do we make ourselves be heard in a way that people want to listen to us and be like, why is Devin not here? Who did, who forgot to invite Devin? Like, you're fired. Like, how do we make people want to have us in those strategic conversations?
• 10:29
  Speaker B: It's an injection in the process. So the way. What I mean by that is any strategy or any project should have a clear and defined aspect of the verticals that it touches. So any. If it's a production project, in this case, just because it's a production project, every project should have categories that you have to cross off meaningfully if they do not have an impact in that.
• 10:54
  Speaker A: I think a priority. Even a project getting on the table.
• 10:56
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Assessment. During the, during the assessment phase, what is the IT complement of this, of this project? Oh, well, we don't know because Devin's not here.
• 11:06
  Speaker A: Well, what words, measurements, KPIs, things can we bring to the table to ask questions to demonstrate that we are not business illiterate?
• 11:16
  Speaker B: Oh, I think the, the easiest one for us really is we need to ask for and be explained the return on investment. If our leadership is. Is easily. Can easily iterate that we can easily interject what we need from the IT perspective example. So specifically, we're going to add a piece of equipment onto the end of a machine.
• 11:37
  Speaker A: So I had a.
• 11:38
  Speaker B: What does that mean? Well, that means that this machine can run 25% faster. Okay, great. What does that mean to the profit. Profitability? If you don't get a clear answer, it's time to back out before we even talk it. Okay. And I've actually asked this question, okay, what does that do to the overall profitability of the business and what. And how are we reaching that number? In this case it was a pretty good example, but now we have to talk about. Okay, well has anybody talked about the integration cost? Well, what do you mean integration cost? Well, I'm guessing that we're not just going to bring that wheel, that machine on the, on the floor, plug in a couple power cords and have it run right now. We can. Now we're there. Now we're at the tape now. Now we're talking about integration, we're talking about hours of work, we're talking about labor, we're talking about people. Do we have technicians? Do we have the team that can do that? Is it vendor driven? You know what I mean?
• 12:34
  Speaker A: Like now the con, why that machine to begin with? What's the problem with the old machine? What's the problem we're solving to begin with?
• 12:40
  Speaker B: Now we've got a blossoming conversation that we sparked and that feels good. And it's not necessarily an I, it wasn't necessarily driven right on the it aspect of it. So that's to something in your, in your bullet points here. You've got to be aware of business alignment.
• 12:56
  Speaker A: You know what's interesting? I've seen this before and really kind of getting down to the challenge and the problem and if it is not involved in the challenge and the problem at the beginning, we might be solving the wrong problem and we might be solving the wrong problem the right way, right? And it's like, oh, it's successful and we're 25% production on that machine area. But if we had asked to begin with, like, why are we doing this? Well, because we've got all these other orders coming in and it's not producing fast enough and we're having whatever it is, we're, we're backlogged by whatever time. I've seen real use cases where it's come in, looked at an entire production floor and seen a production process slow down due to an inability to batch orders accordingly through whatever some ERP software or lack thereof or anything like that. And we're not able to produce these orders fast enough. But the actual problem was a batching problem because every time that we did a new order, machines have to be broken down, they have to be cleaned, staff has to be brought in for that. The broom is being stored over here when it should be stored here. And then now we're able to turn machines back up and re, and now produce the next batch of product. Whatever it is, it was different. Okay, so in this make believe scenario it might be, well, let's just buy another machine that does it faster, right? When in reality the problem was a batching problem. Does it make any sense? Like, we just did it faster. But if we had actually done all the small orders in this way and we took our biggest customers and we served them first. First, and we produced those orders first because there was like a downtime of like an hour and a half or two hours every time they had to clean machines, but they weren't batching appropriately. And the IT director was able to see that just by watching the shop floor. And he was like, why are. Like, why did everything stop? And why did they have to do all this and clean all of this? And he was able to reduce 100% of the temp staff. So they're able to take all the temp staff that they were having to hire to make these to produce this and eliminate it entirely just by being more efficient on how they produced orders. Whereas in reality, they didn't need a faster machine. They just needed better human management. They needed better. They needed better operations, like, operations like. So they needed to be able to like, whatever the whole process is. And every company has like an endless list of like. Like, for us, it's like, why are we using this to produce the transcript and then over here and step one and step two, all this to just produce just a simple podcast. And when you have the right integrator or like technical mind that's involved in the process from the beginning to ask like, well, what's, what's the problem? And can we go through this in depth real quick before we get to the implementation and solution? And I think that that's a big thing that happens in. It is often we're fixing. We're really good at delivering a result, fixing the wrong problem the right way.
• 16:16
  Speaker B: So true. And in fact, what's very interesting about that is what I have learned over 30 years is that one of the biggest. If you actually sit down, if you sit down, someone say, this is off the record. You say, what's the deal with you not talking to it? Well, you guys slow everything down. Okay, what do you mean by that? Well, you stop our process because you want to go back and you want to look at this, this and this and this and this and just. Right to your point, Phil. Well, yeah, I want to know the problem that you're trying to fix. Because if I don't. If we don't understand this problem, then we are implementing a solution without any backdrop. And that's actually happened. I have firsthand experience on that. I won't give any details of the who's and what's, but we implemented an MDM Mobile device management.
• 17:10
  Speaker A: Why?
• 17:11
  Speaker B: And I actually remember another member of the leadership team saying this is a solution to a problem we don't know we have yet. Wow. Now that is. Boy, your crystal ball is better than mine. Now the end of the problem Med the actual root cause of the problem was we wanted a clear way to make sure the company email was off of employees phone when they were terminated. That's like a 60 second stop with an active sync wipe. And we literally implemented a whole suite and pulled it off about six months later for that. So if we don't any think of.
• 17:47
  Speaker A: The prioritization of like the projects that it has given on a, I don't know, quarterly basis. I was thinking about this earlier which is how do we prioritize? Well, it's two things. What's a healthy mix of keeping the blinking lights on in the everyday activities to visionary technology projects, to learning and development. There's kind of like these different things that we need. We need to stay abreast of the new technology. We need to keep all the blinky lights on and keep the network up and do all that stuff and answer tickets and keep them in hand dryer working in the men's bathroom because we get a ticket for that. And the H vac stuff, we need to do all that. And then we also need to have a certain percentage of our time that's delivered to supporting the business and the business growth and scalability and all these different things and meeting with all the different departments and making sure that they're utilizing technology in the best way to grow the business. And there's not a single department that it doesn't touch. There's an argument that one time they paved the parking lot and that didn't involve it. But I know that someone cut a PO somewhere and that went into a DRP system. So I'd even argue that that's not true. And there's fiber running underneath the parked lot as well. So. And I spotlighted Shane's point here which is business processes and understandings. In my experience, any top level leaders don't fully understand the business processes. As a result, they have a difficult time understanding ROI and KPIs, which is.
• 19:14
  Speaker B: Let's. I don't want to talk about that right now. But that's gonna, I'm gonna paraphrase that when we maybe if we get to the AI conversation because that is super poignant.
• 19:22
  Speaker A: Oh, we're talking about AI today.
• 19:24
  Speaker B: If we get there.
• 19:24
  Speaker A: Yeah, but what's the healthy mix? It's just kind of like, sometimes it's weird. Like on the podcast, we go through these, like, themes that kind of through from quarter to quarter, we end up, like, highlighting a certain thing. It's just something just come kind of comes up naturally. But, like, what's the healthy mix? And do we even measure that? Or do we just show up to work every day and we're like, hey, we gotta take care of this fire today. And I've had people say, phil, I'm in a forest fire. This is what the CTO's roles like, I'm in a forest fire. Okay? There's fires everywhere. It's just. It's. I'm just literally in the middle of this massive forest fire. There's fires everywhere. I don't care about the fire that I can see way over there. I just care about the one that's burning my leg right now. And I was just like, that's your reality. At an enterprise company with 450 to 600 locations globally with maybe 40,000 end users, that's your reality.
• 20:19
  Speaker B: Ouch.
• 20:21
  Speaker A: For real. It's a reality. I mean, it's like ads, like, at a massive company.
• 20:26
  Speaker B: See, but nobody wants to talk about that, Phil. I mean, I've been in organizations where they look at the new shiny thing and you forget that your backyard's on fire. I mean, I get what that person is saying and that person's pain point. And that's not the IT Director CIO's fault. Typically, that is a failure of the business to understand foundational IT support and operation. If you don't have that, you are just nothing but firefighters. And you will constantly be firefighting and you're going to have conversations at the executive level of, why doesn't it deliver strategic results? Well, that's really hard to deliver a strategic result when my leg is on fire. And they. But executives don't want to hear that. And that's. I don't have a magic whistle on that one. I don't. I can't just flip a switch and tell you how that. How that happens. But. Or the. The answer, but it's real. And I. Your. That statement you just had hit home so hard because that is.
• 21:32
  Speaker A: That's just.
• 21:32
  Speaker B: It's a leadership.
• 21:33
  Speaker A: Sometimes it's reality in a larger enterprise, too. For things that have just been around for so long, when you've got factory everywhere and you've got antiquated stuff and the company's making a crap ton of money, and it's like, yeah, I don't care. I mean, I don't care about it. We're doing like moving on, moving forward as a business.
• 21:56
  Speaker B: I've been on a conference call where the global. Where the global CIO asked how come. How come we don't have a standard desktop on Everybody's desktop in 3, 4, 4 countries, 400 employees. Why aren't they all standard?
• 22:10
  Speaker A: Because we have different roles and departments that do different things.
• 22:14
  Speaker B: No, but I'm just trying to show that disconnection and me and my.
• 22:19
  Speaker A: Why did he even ask that though? That's an interesting. The fact that he even asked that is pretty powerful. Why did he ask that? Well, because he shows that he has some. He thinks he knows what he's talking about. This is another big problem that we find is the sea levels that think they know technology enough that's dangerous.
• 22:36
  Speaker B: And went to a conference and heard the furries economies of scale and wondered why it wasn't a proponent of economies of scale. I mean, are you kidding me?
• 22:44
  Speaker A: Why would they not be a proponent of economy of scale but has nothing.
• 22:48
  Speaker B: To do with it. His whole. His whole premise was if we got standardized workstations then we would be able to get it into the. Into economies of scale and everything would be okay.
• 22:58
  Speaker A: Then why. I'm just, I'm curious. I'm really curious right now. I just. I want to know why he thought that. Well, is it due to deployment? Is it management? Is it security? Is it. What is his reason?
• 23:12
  Speaker B: The thought was the end user experience would be the same for everyone so that when they needed to implement new software it would not be dramatic and it would never be in disharmony. It would always be the same. So if they want.
• 23:25
  Speaker A: I mean there's to be said about desktop design in the cloud. That's like a conversation we haven't really had yet. But there's a lot to be said about. And it depends on the industry and it depends on what you're doing. For example, healthcare or not healthcare. Telehealth, for example. Telehealth where you might have thousands of doctors all over the world that are all subject technically subcontractors to a telehealth system. In that case, I can see desktop design being very, very important when you're rolling out a training system or something like it just depends on the situation, I guess. Yeah, but in another company you might have. People just need different. I mean like if it's some kind of. Did you say architecture? You started out at architecture.
• 24:14
  Speaker B: Well, this company that I worked for was global and it was. And you're talking about the difference between business analysts, IT techs, straight up customer service reps, salespeople. You know, you run on the whole gamut like they all use different tools. They all use. They all have different expectations.
• 24:32
  Speaker A: I like the idea of standardized desktops, but not one, maybe five, maybe like different categories of. Did the sales guys need this? No, they don't. They could get by with this. Do the R and D engineers. They get whatever they want whenever they ask and don't care and break all the security rules. That's just a stereotype. This is like.
• 24:54
  Speaker B: It's a great call Bennett. That's just a stereotype.
• 24:56
  Speaker A: That's just like a really interesting. It's just a I. That's a fun. That would be a fun. That's a good conversation. That's actually an interesting. That would be like a good roundtable discussion like desktop design and standardization of desktops and where are we moving towards in the future and management of hardware and crap that gets shipped to it that ends up in a cardboard box in the corner or a white cabinet with a key on it next to a window.
• 25:21
  Speaker B: You get all these fresh ideas for. It's dependent on your seat at the table. You have to be able to iterate that to your leadership of where you are. I mean currently right now where I stand with my is that we are 5050 right now.
• 25:35
  Speaker A: We're.
• 25:36
  Speaker B: We're running the business 50% of the time and we're able to manage. We're able to do projects 50% of the time and I am trying to track that via ticketing and. And time spent tickets ver as time spent projects. It is a fairly large lift. It's worth it though. It is worth it. If you can get. If you can find the metrics and get them to work in your favor.
• 25:54
  Speaker A: How do you showcase your contributions and success to the business?
• 26:00
  Speaker B: I actually have regular meetings with my staff so I will meet them at the beginning of the week to talk about the week and then we will meet at the end of the week to determine what cut done and what we're going to look forward to. That may seem overkill. I find that pays to be good. Then I meet with my executive leadership twice. Twice month. So every two weeks and we have. I call it. We have the running the running project update list and on top of that I actually send my manager a weekly notation that has very high level snapshots of where we are as far as project statuses and current KPIs from the. From IT operations. Once you establish the template that is actually really simple to do and extremely helpful because I just had my review and the data is there, it's there, it's easily established.
• 26:52
  Speaker A: We haven't talked about MBOs in a while, but I was a big fan of anytime an IT leader or person is willing to put like their money where their mouth is or whatever that saying is and say, hey, I will deliver these results. But if I do deliver these results, I want a bonus. If I save the company $1 million, I would like something. Otherwise, what's in it for me? A job. You keep your job, guy. Okay. But MBOs help drive business revenue and I just, I don't see it that often. I've. I don't know. Do you, have you heard of an mbo? Do you know, have you ever.
• 27:30
  Speaker B: I always talking about what is IT Management, Business objectives. Yeah.
• 27:33
  Speaker A: Like in other words, if you hit certain objectives you get like a, there's a bonus and different things that are tied to performance. And I'm a big, I don't know.
• 27:41
  Speaker B: If you're looking over my shoulder, but I mean that's, we've spent the last six months trying to figure that out as an organization and I'm, and I'm heavily involved in that conversation as well.
• 27:48
  Speaker A: So I've been accused of being a meritocracy. I was opposed to what, communism?
• 27:54
  Speaker B: No, I mean you set your objectives on an annual basis and you drive to those objectives and when they change, they change. And as long as you're being clear and consistent with both your leadership and your staff, it isn't really a problem. And it's not a problem for me. But it is a big problem in the industry. That's, that's tough.
• 28:13
  Speaker A: So we're going to address Shane's spotlight thing here, which is business processes understanding. In my experience, many top level leaders don't fully understand the business processes. As a result, they have a difficult understanding the ROI and KPIs. And you said you had some deep thoughts on that. What's coming to mind?
• 28:31
  Speaker B: Well, it was, it was kind of about where we are with AI. But touching on this specifically or.
• 28:37
  Speaker A: Yes, we gotta get to AI. Go us.
• 28:40
  Speaker B: One of the things, one of the things that's paramount for an IT person is you need to understand the widgets. Not how to make them, how to fix them, but you need to understand what the widgets are, how they're being made and what's driving the business objectives around them. Spent. I'm about my third or fourth year in this organization and it just hasn't happened overnight. I mean but now I have a really good understanding of the business process here and the manage and the manufacturing information system or mis. Even if they say that you don't need to understand it, you do, don't listen to that. You need to understand it. You need to read some manuals. You need to have a feel of how the modules talk, how they integrate it. If you've got one system, fantastic. I but I bet you don't. That includes extraneous systems like your shipping modules, your accounting modules, etc. You don't have to know how to work them. You got to know how they talk and what happens and prioritize system uptime based on those things. So do the executives understand all that that I just said? To some extent. Right. Because they built it. Or maybe, maybe they built it. In this case they did. But if you didn't build it, you probably don't understand all that low level stuff which I think is what Shane is hinting at or what he's saying. If I'm wrong Shane, let me know.
• 29:59
  Speaker A: The yeah, what you just said is like if you're telling me that the executives don't know why a folding carton, packaging and cardboard boxes or how they're made or the importance of them and batching, all of that, it's how do we make progress in the logistics industry in a meaningful way? I'm just, I mean you have a very important business right now. Considering the number of packages that could deliver to my door every day, let alone everyone else's door, there's got to be some serious strategy and gaps and leaps and bounds to be made in that industry.
• 30:38
  Speaker B: Well, I mean I'm extremely fortunate. Whereas the leadership here is fully ingrained in the not only the build out but the process and the strategy. I don't like to use the word blessed but I'll use it. They, they get it. But I'm kind of hinting at a larger organizations where if you don't really understand how your role and decision makings actually impact business processes, that's a problem. That's a real problem.
• 31:05
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's a classic a leadership. I think a lot of leaders just make multiple decisions that are either bad or not timely or too many decisions too fast. I only know from my own. I'm like, I'm the guy that's always learned everything the hard way. I've learned everything and I told my kids this, like just don't be like me. Don't learn everything by mistake. But there's like a Lot to be said about that. It's like experience. It's kind of like, like it, like you can't go to college for it and then walk into a business and be successful. You've got to like have all these weird random things that happen and break and you got to be curious and you got to understand like how did that happen? And this weird trace routes and all kinds of stuff that's just like you, you learn by doing the leadership, making bad decisions as leaders. And I think what I've learned is that it's very easy to get excited about new technology, shiny objects and or ideas and it can completely derail you off of your main vision and purpose, which would be make boxes and sell boxes to said people and deliver packages and boxes and do more of that better, faster, cheaper, like whatever it is. Right. And we could completely derail onto an AI project. That may or may not be the number one thing that we need to focus on right now, but it sounds really exciting and we end up fixing again the wrong problem the, a very, very good way. And I know that we've been derailed with social media projects and other things that we thought would be cool to do in a community like training programs and stuff and but at the end of the day, what do we want to do? We want to, we want IT leaders to be heard by executive management and we want, want to move to two podcasts a day. We want to get more people heard, better, faster, and increase people's executive brand. It's very, very easy to get derailed a thousand different ways with a bunch of different projects that slow down that main vision. So I think many leaders do that. I think they've got many things that kind of derail them and we need technology people, really well grounded technology business leaders to keep that can know the business, know the vision of the business and keep it focused and say, no, this is not the time for that, this is a bad technology decision or this is going to overload us and take us off of some scalability path or something. So moving on to like these issues, give me a prediction 18 months from now that everyone will be talking about that we didn't expect like people to be talking about.
• 33:40
  Speaker B: Okay, first, to your point, do you, Are you a football fan, Phil?
• 33:44
  Speaker A: I grew up in Massachusetts, so I have had the pleasure of being a Tom Brady. Having Tom Brady long for many years until he left, but kind of a football. I'm not like a, I'm not one of those guys that's like constantly, I'm not doing fantasy football. I'm not like trading play. I'm not that.
• 34:03
  Speaker B: So one of my favorite coaches is the LA Rams coach, Sean McVeigh. Okay, so what? I don't know if you ever watched him against whatever team he's playing. There is a gentleman as a member of the organization of the Rams football team whose job it is to keep Sean McVeigh on the sideline.
• 34:24
  Speaker A: Exactly.
• 34:25
  Speaker B: That's part of his job.
• 34:26
  Speaker A: Perfect example.
• 34:27
  Speaker B: So that is who we are as it leaderships when our.
• 34:33
  Speaker A: What happens if he leaves the sideline?
• 34:35
  Speaker B: Bad things happen.
• 34:37
  Speaker A: I have to say. Like what happens?
• 34:39
  Speaker B: Like, he gets right, but he's excited and he's into it and that just happened and I want to be a part of that and I'm going to go get it and. And he runs out there onto the field and then you see this guy coming right behind him, reaches and he actually has a little thing on his pants that he can grab and he pulls him back onto the sideline and then 10 minutes later he does it again.
• 35:00
  Speaker A: Now I someone thinking it from the outside would be like, how can he not just control himself? And really, you don't understand. It's just built into the DNA. People don't even notice sometimes that they're doing something that's right.
• 35:14
  Speaker B: So. And I want that kind of passion in my leadership, but I also want the understanding of, hey, why did Devin just pull me back? What's going on? And I need to have established that trust over time that I got to listen to this guy. And this is where we're at with AI. AI is shiny and it's a bubble and it's amazing. Everybody's excited about it because they can sit down and they don't need to talk to anybody that isn't going to agree with what they say and do exactly what they say and give them all these cool functions and give them these new ideas. And in 18 months, and I want to be wrong, Phil, in 18 months, I sense a huge amount of corporate regret as they have lost human capital, as they have ditched human capital in lieu of AI Solutions.
• 36:08
  Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. Except I think coming with that is not going to be any regret. I think coming with that is going to be we dumped human capital. I had a fast gain, fake gain, albeit. And then I said, see ya, I'm going to go somewhere else. So I think it might be, I don't know, because I think people are going to find a way to kind of like not have a massive economic recession type of thing or A bubble blow up. I think they're getting really good at kind of morphing into another story and moving investment money here and there in VC money. This is just my thought, but it could be a massive bubble and then we see the weaknesses of that. It wasn't really an AI game. It was a fake excuse to lay off people and like kind of tell a story because there's a lot of kind of like marketing narrative.
• 37:14
  Speaker B: I mean but in a way I don't think that they believe it's fake. I, I honestly believe that leadership will believes there's tangible business savings and productivity increases in, in AI implementation.
• 37:27
  Speaker A: But if we lay people off and it doesn't work, we just laid people off.
• 37:31
  Speaker B: That's right, 100%. I mean that's why I think it's going to be in 18 months. It'll be a regret. There'll be human capital debt. I like to use the word technological debt. There'll be some tech debt as well. And I see it as, the reason I'm in this is because I experienced this before and basically I measure this by the number of emails I get per day from companies telling me that they're going to help manage, guide, strategize you into the, whatever the latest thing is.
• 38:05
  Speaker A: So what's the big AI theme for you?
• 38:07
  Speaker B: Generative AI right now.
• 38:09
  Speaker A: Okay, so generative AI, I get that, but what's the big, so an agent that's going to do what for a box manufacturer?
• 38:17
  Speaker B: Well, they don't care, they don't care what industry they're in. They're just coming up, they want to blow in your doors and they want to say, well, going to use AI to streamline your business processes. We don't know what they are, but that doesn't matter. AI will figure it out. That's, that's the sales pitch, Phil. I mean that is literally what I'm.
• 38:36
  Speaker A: Experiencing and people have got a niche a lot better than that.
• 38:39
  Speaker B: Well, I mean that's, and I just don't see this as tangible. The other, the other aspect of this and I just want to hit it on this because we only have nine minutes left. One thing that I am really struggling with is, is I round buildings and I've talked to some of my colleagues who are, who have IT management as well. You can't walk by stations without seeing an AI website and you're going to see topics about things as things have ever generate a spreadsheet that shows that gives me a graph of, of this. I, I, I need to tell My boss that I'm late on my project. How do I do that in a business in a positive light? These are the prompts that I'm seeing in the web browsers, right?
• 39:18
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 39:19
  Speaker B: So I'm all for productivity and I'm all for imaginative ways to use the tools. But where this gets really, really bad is now I'm seeing AI generated resumes and cover letters and wait, you see.
• 39:33
  Speaker A: What we do for you after this episode?
• 39:35
  Speaker B: Interview scripting. It's like yeah, interview scripting. Like sure, what you know there.
• 39:42
  Speaker A: What do you think that you're going.
• 39:43
  Speaker B: To get asked at this interview? Okay, well here's a generative AI answer for you. You. And I'm just like, I'm not, hi, I'm not hiring AI. If I want an AI solution, I'm going to go get it from these thousands of vendors that are talking to me.
• 39:55
  Speaker A: I want to hire you to sit.
• 39:57
  Speaker B: In the machine and do this. I think this is really, really dangerous.
• 40:03
  Speaker A: I'm happy to provide an aggregated, an aggregation. We, we have just a little shout out to devs AI who was on the show and my partner company purchased them. AppDirect purchased them, who I'm a partner for. But they provide basically an aggregated dashboard of all of the usual suspects. So OpenAI, Grok, Claude, Google, Gemini, even the Chinese one. Why am I forgetting that all housed in private Amazon, many are housed in private Amazon web servers and with a guaranteed I think SOC 2 compliant or whatever the security levels are. And the reason why that's so important is so that you can a trust that your data is not being like that. LLMs are not learning off your data. Second thing it's that's important is an ability to dip into if you have clean data, a single source of data or multiple sources of data to help your staff. But in your very simple use case it allows it or administrators to see what activity your end users are doing with AI. Not only the queries and all of that and see what they're using it for. Kind of like, just like you might if you guys are BYOD or you guys provide company provided cell phones, whatever it is just like an mdm like you can when an employee leaves, you have access to their email, you have an ability to wipe their, their cell phone and everything. So guys, this company policy, you can use AI in a secure, safe and secure way and this is, will give you access to every single LLM. Here it is, go have at it that you can build, you can build agents that would be potentially Helpful in your industry. But yeah, the AI things. So 18 months from now, you're saying there's going to be a lot of regret.
• 41:54
  Speaker B: That's what I think it's going to.
• 41:56
  Speaker A: 18 months regret marker. We need to name that the 18 AI regrets.
• 42:00
  Speaker B: Has anyone predicted AI? Has anyone asked. I'm sure they have asked AI where they think they'll be in 18 months.
• 42:06
  Speaker A: So, yeah, I mean, I think where we are making leaps and bounds is the, the dev space and like in the coding space. I think that that's where it's. We learned AI by using AI and by playing with it. And I think the more you use a tool, the more you use it, then you find out how people are really using a tool. It's kind of like we delivered this app to the end users, but they're using it for this, not even the intended reason. And then, so with that being said, what is. We can do it this way. I'll give you. Well, let's do these two things. What's the one thing that you wish every business leader would know about IT leadership? What's the one thing that if they could hear this one thing, what would that be?
• 42:46
  Speaker B: I have an interesting. Just. This is sort of a moniker about it. The one thing that I always find interesting about dealing, being an IT leader is everybody, and I mean everybody outside of IT has suggestions on how IT can run better, but IT is almost never asked on how the other businesses can run better. So that's the one thing that you need to know is IT leaders. We want to have more efficient IT shops. We do, but we want, we would prefer to help you run better. And we have ideas.
• 43:25
  Speaker A: Maybe we should just offer those up. Like, hey, I noticed you could sell three times more things if you just did this so well, I'm trying to like, re. Paraphrase it. So it's. The question is, what's the most important idea that you wish every executive would understand about modern IT and is that everyone thinks it could be doing better. Everyone's like, has something to say about the IT department. Department. But the IT department has something to say or something to offer every single one of your departments.
• 43:54
  Speaker B: And generally they don't. Generally, they don't want to hear it.
• 43:57
  Speaker A: You should be inviting them to the conversation. Yep. It's not criticism, it's amplification. Right.
• 44:04
  Speaker B: It's cooperation. It's not criticism, it's cooperation. Okay, that was one. You said you had two.
• 44:08
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And so now the opposite. The flip is what's. What's One lesson that every CTO or IT leader should. Should know. We could do it another way, too.
• 44:20
  Speaker B: And.
• 44:20
  Speaker A: And we've talked. Kind of talked about this throughout the show. But, like, what's. If you could fix one big challenge in IT leadership tomorrow, like, what would it be? And you're not allowed to say. I mean, that's. It's a similar thing, right? It's kind of like, what do most CIOs get wrong? That's obvious. That you think is obvious.
• 44:36
  Speaker B: It's making sure that the right people matter the most. In it, you see a lot of people fail up. I'm sure you've heard of that before.
• 44:48
  Speaker A: No, please, please enlighten me, please.
• 44:51
  Speaker B: Heard of fail up.
• 44:52
  Speaker A: I mean, I've heard of fail forward.
• 44:55
  Speaker B: When. If that.
• 44:56
  Speaker A: If that's what you're talking about, then, yes, leadership.
• 44:59
  Speaker B: Leadership does not have a good track record, but they get promoted anyway.
• 45:02
  Speaker A: Oh, okay.
• 45:03
  Speaker B: Failing upwards.
• 45:05
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 45:05
  Speaker B: So why stop doing that?
• 45:08
  Speaker A: Why don't you promote it? Oh, wait, are you saying stop promoting people that did it the wrong way, or are you saying, like, this is the big thing? Like, so who are we promoting that did everything the wrong way?
• 45:17
  Speaker B: That's right. This is a big problem in it. We get so fixated on the guy that does it really well, and he wants to move up, but we won't let him because we need him to do that. We need him to make this, or we need him to manage that, and we can't move him up, but yet we're going to move other person up who has a notoriously poor record as even opposed to this person, because we don't know what to do with them. But we can't fire him because they're not doing bad enough that we got to fire them. So we. There. This is a real thing.
• 45:49
  Speaker A: This is a real thing.
• 45:50
  Speaker B: Oh, yes, this is. This is another podcast for you.
• 45:53
  Speaker A: Does this happen?
• 45:54
  Speaker B: Oh, 100%.
• 45:56
  Speaker A: This is definitely going to be a. Greg, take note of this. This is a. We need to do a survey of this. How many people have seen someone that should have gotten fired but got promoted instead?
• 46:07
  Speaker B: I love it.
• 46:08
  Speaker A: That's crazy. That's the wildest thing I've ever heard. I'm just trying to think of how that would happen.
• 46:14
  Speaker B: Tell you like Pulse, some of your participants, to see if they know it.
• 46:17
  Speaker A: It's really ironic that you said Pulse because we built an app, like, over a weekend, and it's named Pulse.
• 46:22
  Speaker B: I know that.
• 46:23
  Speaker A: Crazy.
• 46:23
  Speaker B: You're researching me. I'm researching you. Google Plays.
• 46:26
  Speaker A: It's that's really kind of like a mic drop for the end of the show if it's never come up. It's really great. You actually silenced me. It doesn't happen that often. I'm really scratching my head on this one. Devin Delano. You've been heard.
• 46:39
  Speaker B: Thank you, Phil. It's been my pleasure.
• 46:42
  Speaker A: All right. Have a wonderful day, man. Okay, we'll talk soon. Bye.
• 46:45
  Speaker B: Bye.