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338- When Security and IT collide: The startup challenge by Paul Knight · You've Been Heard

• 0:04
  Speaker A: Welcome back to today's episode of dissecting popular IT nerds. I'm your host, Doug Kameen and today I'm talking with Paul Knight, the VP of Information Technology and CISO at Turnside Technologies. Welcome to the show, Paul.
• 0:16
  Speaker B: Good. Thanks, Douglas. Thanks.
• 0:19
  Speaker A: So, Paul, before we got on the recorded part of our interview here, we were talking a little bit about your role at Turntide Technologies. And it's a little unusual for you for a role to be both the VP of Information Technologies and a CISO at the same time.
• 0:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, welcome to startup. Having worked for both very large companies and also some startups, you're just expected to kind of get stuck in with a lot of roles. So, yeah, it's not a particularly mainstream that the head of IT and the head of security, kind of poacher turned gamekeeper, as IT were. So it's. But I think in a smaller company where security is absolutely paramount, running both roles can work with the right governance and structure in place.
• 1:10
  Speaker A: So tell us a little bit about that. I mean, there's a natural tension there because the CISO roles, a job in a generalized sense is oversight versus the IT leader's role is implementation and operations work. And you got to, you know, there's, there's going to be some work to keep those two separated. I'm sure you've got some, you know, level of consultants and people who you could trust to work on both sides of it. But, but tell us how you make sure to keep those two roles in, in a separated in a startup environment.
• 1:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think, I think, you know, my, my, my career has been pretty varied. I've been lucky enough to work holistically across many different disciplines within it over the, you know, the last 25 years. Everything I do, I get drawn back to security and I think personally from my own personal brand. What makes me unique is that I am able to look at that strategic security whilst also looking at the operational side of it. So from an operational side, I think it works very well. All of our solutions that we're deploying, all of the stuff we're designing, working with the business, all have security at the heart. And working in automotive technology, it's really important. But from a governance perspective, I have some senior security guys here who keep me honest and put me back on the right railroad when I come off.
• 2:32
  Speaker A: Nice. So you just mentioned that about automotive technologies and so turn tight technologies. You tell us a little bit. Two questions I think here. First, can you tell us a little bit about turntide? What they do. And second, you mentioned it's an automotive technologies. So I'd love to know a little more about the complexities of working in the automotive tech, the automotive business space from a manufacturing perspective. I know it's different because of how much rigor has to go into the work. So just talk a little bit about that.
• 3:04
  Speaker B: Yeah, so Turn Tide's been through a fair bit of change over the last couple of years, but our core, our niche, our USP is the fact that we take solutions for anything that moves effectively. Electric solutions for anything that moves. So power electronics, inverters, motors, axial flux motors that drive your, you know, electric vehicles and anything from excavators, marine right through to construction vehicles, three wheeler markets, anything that needs a motor that turns, that needs something to power that motor. And then we also have batteries, pumps, fans, thermal, so anything, lots of different components. And our customers are really varied actually. They range from very large OEMs, you know, JCB, Hitachi, BMW, right through to smaller niche players in the market, you know, smaller, smaller companies that are electrifying various various things that move. So when you're Talking about the OEMs, there's a lot of rigor, there's a lot of audits and there's a lot of hoops to jump through. I think the automotive market as a whole, in terms of its safety, functional safety and its cybersecurity is quite fragmented. The standards exist and people interpret them in different ways. I think as a company that's trying to operate in this space, all roads lead back to ISO 27001.
• 4:35
  Speaker A: Right.
• 4:35
  Speaker B: So most of the cybersec standards out there fit into that 27,001 framework. So yeah, it depends on the provider and depends on the customer, depends on how much rigor they apply to us.
• 4:54
  Speaker A: And I think about, I was also thinking about how in the automotive manufacturing world, the standards that you ultimately have to build to, not just the rigor from the manufacturers themselves saying, oh, it must be built to, here's our specs, here's our audits, here's our standards. But just these things get beat. This isn't light use type of equipment. These things have to live in. An automobile driven down the road at 50, 60, 70, 80 miles an hour or 100, 120, 150 kilometers an hour and survive for years and years of service, getting beaten up, getting just thrashed on all the time. So the, the, in the past when I've talked to folks who work in automotive manufacturing, one of the things that they often highlight is how different it is to work in that type of a manufacturing environment. Probably, you know, the next step up for that is like operating in space essentially, you know, where, where the, the, the challenges of making sure that the unit is durable is, is paramount to most everything else.
• 6:03
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think. And that comes back to quality, as with everything, you know, if you've got a good quality process in, then, you know, the shame is plug here. And that's why our products are actually considered some of the best on the market. People respect the heritage that we have as a, you know, a previous business. They respect the heritage of the product and, you know, the development hours have gone into it. So of course I'm going to say our products are the best. Yeah, you're absolutely right. They have to be. It's not just the mileage and the speed, but it's the heat and the cooling and the conditions that they operate in. If you're taking some of these electric vehicles into sub zero conditions, they have to be able to operate. And that comes back to having a solid development, manufacturing and quality assessment process.
• 6:52
  Speaker A: So going back to a little bit, just a minute ago we talked about being the ciso and a lot of times when we talk about, when I talk to IT leaders, you know, we're talking to folks in the operations side. So I'm going to, I'm going to focus a little bit on the CISO side of leadership here for you. And can you tell us a little bit about what, what's different about being a leader in the security in the oversight space as opposed to in the implementation space or the operations space?
• 7:19
  Speaker B: Yeah, and being a CISO and talking about cyber security, the moment you speak, people groan. Oh, my goodness, not security again. You know, so there's a, there's a reluctance, I think, to adopt cyber security because it's seen as expensive. Whenever, you know, security come in, they're always the no team. No, we can't do that. Oh, goodness me. Oh, no, that's going to be. And then we can do it. But, you know, we need, you know, a billion dollars to do that. Um, so it's a subject that everyone understands is important. It's a subject that everyone understands is necessary, but it's a subject that not many people understand or want to talk about. So it is a, it's a, it can be quite a lonely role at times. And I'm sure if you speak to other CISOs, you know, they'll, they'll tell you that they haven't quite got a seat at the table. You Know if, you know, like in most it, you know, if we're seen and not heard and everything's working, it's great. It's when it goes wrong that potentially, you know, that people, you know, want to, want to speak to us. So it can be a difficult transition sometimes. It can be difficult with messaging, it can be difficult with, you know, getting that governance, getting that, you know, that stuff across the line.
• 8:31
  Speaker A: And I think about now, thinking about similarities between the two sides of this, of those IT operations, 1 and the 1 that comes to mind is that you frequently don't get rewarded for saving the car from driving off the cliff. Yeah. So like, oh, hey, don't do that. You know, you rip the steering wheel back and people are like, you know, you're like, man, did you see that thing we just totally missed? And people are like, yeah, whatever, man, did you see what's going on over here? Like they, they don't, you don't get credit for that, that effort a lot of times. I mean, I'm not saying you never get credit for it. I'll just be cautious to say that so that, you know, our bosses are on the, on the line here. They know that we do get respect from them at times. But, but broadly speaking, the business as a whole doesn't recognize there's a struggle to recognize. I'm sorry, when efforts are put in to avoid catastrophe and avoid other challenges that may arise, those are often overlooked.
• 9:24
  Speaker B: Yeah. And I think it's really important as a ciso, certainly in a leadership role, that you recognize that with your team. Because we've got guys here that work incredibly hard behind the scenes. And I don't get rewarded for somebody not breaking into my house because I lock my door and just expected to keep my door locked, you know, my windows locked. And I think it's the same in cybersecurity. It is a really complex kind of topic. And discipline, there's a lot of threat actors wanting to take bites out of you. And you're right, you don't necessarily get the day to day recognition and reward. But for me as a leader, I reward my teams and make sure they understand that I appreciate everything they do. And I also make sure that the business understand that the, you know, the risks that are out there and the things that we're doing to prevent them, whether they choose to engage and talk about them, you know, that's still to be seen. But I think it's, it's important as a CISO that you recognize that with your teams, hey guys, this is Phil.
• 10:26
  Speaker C: Howard, founder of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds I just want to take a few minutes to address something it has become fairly apparent, I'm sure all of you will agree over the years that slow vendor response vendor response times vendors in general, the average is mediocre. Support is mediocre. Mediocrity is the name of the game. Not only is this a risk to your network security, because I've seen vendors on numerous occasions share sensitive information, but there's also a direct correlation to your budget and your company's bottom line. Not to mention the sales reps that are trying to sell you and your CEO and your CFO on a daily basis. That causes a whole nother realm of problems that we don't have time to address. Our Back Office program at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds we've put together specifically for IT leadership and it's on a mission to eliminate this mediocrity. And the best part is that we're doing this in a way that will not cost your IT department a dime. So if you'd like us to help you out, get better pricing, better support, and jump on pressing issues in minutes, not days, then contact us now so we can get on a call with you and conduct a value discovery session where we find out what you have, why you have it and where you want to go, and how we can improve your your life, your IT department and your company's bottom line. What you're going to end up with is, number one, just faster support from partners who care about your organization's uptime and bottom line. And because you're going to be able to access our 1.2 billion in combined buying power, you'll be able to benefit significantly from historical data. And on top of that, you'll also benefit from the skills of hundreds of on demand experts that we have working behind the scenes that are all attached to our back office support program. So if you'd like, again, none of this is ever gonna cost you a dime. At the very least, it's going to open to your your eyes to what's possible. Let our Back Office team provide you the high touch solutions and support that your IT team deserves so that you can stop calling 1-800-Gold-POUND San for support. Now if you're wondering what does this apply to, this applies to your ISPs, your telecom providers, all your application providers, whether you're a Microsoft Shop or a Google shop, what you might be paying for aws, even Azure, Colocation space, any of those vendors that you're paying a monthly bill to we can help you with hey, it's Greg the Frenchman, secretly.
• 13:10
  Speaker B: Managing the podcast behind the Curtain. To request a one on one call, contact us@internetopularit.net and remember if it will never cost you a dime.
• 13:22
  Speaker A: So looking at your leadership journey, can you share with our listeners about how, where you come from, Tell us how we got to now with your career journey coming up through the different ranks you've been in a number of different places, you're now at a startup, very dynamic environment. How did you get here?
• 13:45
  Speaker B: Yeah, so I, I, I, I left school early, I didn't do particularly well on exams, I've never been particularly academic and I think that's the first point to note. You know I, I do a lot of STEM work today, so I'm involved in a lot of kind of talks, chats at schools, mock interviews, that kind of stuff. And it's making it clear that actually there are many, many ways into tech. You know, being good at tech is a path in just being naturally kind of gifted towards it. I left school at 16, didn't really know what I wanted to do, did various jobs, went to college for a bit, didn't do very well in anything and then actually fell into it by mistake. I went for a job in a local computer store and ended up working there for two or three years and just building up my skillset really. Moved then into a professional company out on the road installing computer networks for schools and supporting schools and then that moved into my own network at a school and then eventually I moved into education and publishing and that's really where I would say I cut my proper systems administration teeth again. Technical, hands on day to day supporting users, moved up through first, second, third line into infrastructure and then spent about 10 years in defense and security so working for the UK's air to air refueling program as the head of engineering and that was a really exciting time. Flying around, watching these planes fly around, filling up fast jets while we supported all the ground IT services was really, really fun and actually polar opposites to the work I do today. Coming from defense and security into startup is polar opposites. It's light and dark and you just can't. In military you're very restricted as the services you can use and the things you can do. So you have to be really creative with your solutions. There's a lot more choice and a lot more flexibility when you move back into non military application. So yeah, and I've spent the last kind of 15 years of my Career working in manufacturing, both in defense, aerospace manufacturing, and then more recently into automotive manufacturing.
• 16:11
  Speaker A: So thinking about your leadership, where you're at now, and I'm going to just pull something we had mentioned just before we got on the podcast recording too. Again, you mentioned that today you're doing more work as a leader. As you've grown as a leader now, I think particularly in this role, you've been doing more work on public speaking and getting out here and talking and you're getting, getting your, your, I would call it, name and face. But the roles that you're in, you have a certain element of being out there and being in the, you know, in the community, whatever community that is, the automotive manufacturing community, the defense community, aerospace community, and those types of things. Can you talk a little bit about, like what, what have you been. And I think about this in the context of sharing with other leaders who are looking to build their skills and those types of things too. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing there and why, why you feel it's important and what you've done to try and, you know, build that, build that kind of muscle up for yourself? Because that's a little bit, I don't say unusual in it, but it's harder to find. You know, most of us in IT are very tech savvy, tech heavy. And then that transition to a more public face where you're able to be called on to give presentations, talk about things in a public forum and that type of stuff could really be challenging for a lot of folks in our space.
• 17:23
  Speaker B: Yeah, it is difficult. I mean, the, it started for me working with stem. So STEM is science, technology, engineering, mathematics. It's about how the next generation of people coming through the STEM disciplines and making sure they've got the questions, they know the doors to knock on, they know where the signposts are, where to go. How do I do this? What do I want to do? How do I get into that role? So it started about four or five years ago. I started doing a bit of work with stem, did some exhibitions with the company I was working at. Then that moves then to kind of mock interviews online. So as an ambassador and more recently, I've actually been running sessions at local colleges on all sorts of topics. Leadership, technology choices, manufacturing, how does it work? And a lot of the students that we interact with know they want to go into a topic, know they want to go into a subject, but are not really sure how to get there or what that actually means or what the job is. At the end, I'm interested in computers, but what do I actually want to do at the end? So there's a little bit of guidance and mentor in there. So it started about five years ago, just doing various things, and that's ramped up over the last couple of years. Just doing a bit more work with, with, you know, with STEM and local schools. And that's then kind of led on to companies asking, you know, I always question, as a media, you always say, how did, how did, when, when did I actually become a leader? When did that actually happen? Was there a demarcation point?
• 18:56
  Speaker A: This is one of my. This is, this is a very specific question that I ask in this podcast. So you're, you are, you are getting right to a question I've been asked at that moment. You transition if you do. So. Yeah, answer away, please.
• 19:08
  Speaker B: It's kind of, you know, when you're out for a run and you switch off and you're just running and then suddenly, oh, I'm at the park. You know, it's suddenly you realize that actually people are listening to you when you talk, people stop and listen. And I think as leaders, for me, the saying the shadow of the leader is so, so important. The shadow that you cast as you talk, walk, teach, whatever, is absolutely vital because that's the legacy that you're going to leave, the impression you're going to leave, certainly on those kind of younger students. And my ethos is always, if I can inspire just one person in my career to do something brilliant or to go into something they love, that's a win. I'll take that every day of the week. I didn't know what I wanted to do for such a long time. Technology has given me that kind of North Star. And I think, you know, I realized probably, maybe, maybe 10 years ago now, as I got into kind of operational leadership, I moved through that manager tier and a manager managing people and managing work and projects to actually, I need to start thinking about this strategically. And I think that's, that's tipping point for me certainly was the. I'm moving to more strategic thinking, and I care about the people that are doing the work. How are they going to do the work, you know, and how can I help them and what can I move out of that way? And that, I think is the, you know, the tipping point of leadership, which was about 10 years ago for me.
• 20:38
  Speaker A: Thank you. So, thinking about you, you mentioned about, you got involved in some of these community college classes, you know, whatever they were, you know, working in community Colleges and getting involved with students and other stuff like that. I'm thinking or I'm hearing you say, sometimes you just have to take the leap. You know, you have to say, you know what? I'm in a leadership role and the way to become a stronger leader is to put myself in a position where maybe I'm a little bit out of my comfort zone here, but I'm learning new stuff. I'm building up that muscle of being able to help these people, being able to show myself as a leader. And that's for you, has worked as a growth path to build up your abilities and put you to where you are today. I'm trying to think about this as how to translate it for our listeners and say, this is a path you can follow too.
• 21:27
  Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I think when you start asking your question, how can I move this obstacle to let this person complete the task, the project or whatever that they're on, that is when you start then thinking, actually, I'm moving into that leadership role. I'm no longer here to tell them how to do this. Whenever I recruit route, I always try and find somebody that's better at my job than me. You know, I think some people approach it from a different perspective. They see as a threat. You know, if I get something better than me, maybe, maybe I'm not going to. Maybe they're going to replace me with that person. If the company I work for can find somebody that's better than me and replace me for great. It means I've learned something along the way. So there is always an opportunity for everyone to learn. And I think leadership is about how you continue learning and developing yourself. But also it's more outwardly reflective on how do I develop and move obstacles for the people that I'm working with.
• 22:24
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think about the barriers that we have to remove for folks, and I'm thinking about touching on what you just said. Building your teams. Building teams that can replace you, if you will. You're not. You're not. Even though you're not needed, needed for the daily operation, you're not needed to run the system, you know, do the system administration to, you know, set up the new VMware cluster or whatever the case may be about what's going on. The, the role of the leader is to build a team that can function in one way independently of you, but also can be trusted to do the right thing even when nobody's watching and nobody's looking. So they, you know, they don't need not say they never need A leader, but they can work for quite a period of time without you coming in and meddling. If you set up the right team, you've empowered them the right ways and you've built up the trust that they need to say, I can work at the top of my license here, I can do this. I know what we need to do that aligns with the goals that we've got and stuff like that. So I think about those things as key elements of leadership. And you mentioned about how people are really afraid or not a lot of people, but some people build. Fraction of people are afraid of hiring the folks that may be smarter than them. But the most successful leaders are the ones who typically surround themselves with people who are either as smart or smarter than them in various different ways because they understand that that's what brings high value.
• 23:49
  Speaker B: Yeah. And let everyone into a secret. It's not completely selfless, right. Being a leader because we all want to come to work and do our best, but we all want to come to work with as little stress as possible, as little input as possible that we can get the job done with the, the path of least resistance. I mean, that's the dream. You know, having the processes in place, having the team in place, having the people there to just. Things just happen smoothly in the background with no hiccups. Now, anyone that's worked in it for more than about five minutes will understand that that's not the way it goes.
• 24:21
  Speaker A: That's always the dream, right?
• 24:23
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's not the way it goes. But I say to the guys and the teams I work in, if we can all sit here reading the newspaper and get all of the work done that we need to do, that's the dream. And you can only do that in a leadership role. I mean, I always go on four principles as a leader. I try and listen. I think is the, you know, by actively listening and you know, having an environment where people feel like they listen to and their point is heard is vital as a leader. Always asking why. So reasons from first principles always ask why. Explain it to me, help me understand that I'm not sure I may absolutely have a solution already in my head. And that that comes with experience and time. Ten, 15 years ago, I'd have been straight in there with a solution, whereas now I'm okay, well, what would you do in this situation? And you touched on a second ago, trust. I think that's absolutely vital, having a team that you can trust that are not always going to get it right. They're not always going to get everything absolutely spot on. There are going to be things that happen that, you know, you kind of have to take a breath, but it's making sure they feel empowered to do that. And the biggest thing for me in. In, you know, as. As a leader that I've been probably burnt with a couple of times, actually. And it's almost a life lesson you have to learn. It's the validation, you know, validating things without it being micromanagement. Being able to validate. Okay, you did that thing for me. How. How did that work out? Can you show me? I'm really interested in. In understanding. And it's the validation point, which I think a lot of, certainly some of my peers, but as leaders, we don't necessarily have the time to go back and do. And that's the thing that will come back and kind of bite you.
• 26:07
  Speaker A: And I think about. So for me, that touches on one of my tenants that I think about, which is that I'm always willing to share and explain. And so the validate, I think it circles around to validate is like the team version of that. So somebody else, so my supervisor, my boss, the CEO, whoever comes to me and says, hey, can you tell me more about this? Well, that's them validating. At the end of the day, they're asking me to talk through what's going on. And I expect the same thing from my team, too. Any member of my team should be able to sit down and be like, I'm happy to explain this to you. Let me walk you through how we did it. Let me tell you about the decision process that we got to get here and stuff like that. Understanding that it's coming from a place of understanding and trust, but also that there might be a time when we go through that process. And I'm like, you know, that, that, that step here, you know, step three. I don't know if we. I think we should change step three. You know, that it's a. It's a collaborative process to do it, but at the same time, I'm always happy to share, and the first time that I don't want to share is the time you should be suspicious, essentially.
• 27:14
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And I think we've, you know, we've come a long way in it. We've certainly come a way in the last 10 years, 15 years in it. You know, we've gone from that, you know, the IT person, a back office where nobody talks to and actually has absolutely zero idea of what they do. You know, it is every business, every single business on this planet is built. It's the foundational support. It's one of the largest cost areas, supporting all the users and I think sometimes that's overlooked. But sitting down and sharing information and reviewing stuff washing up like, how did this project go? The kind of the lessons learned side of it. But yeah, I think those for me, those four tenets for me are the things that I kind of abide by.
• 27:57
  Speaker A: Thank you for sharing those. I was just thinking about the thing you just mentioned about how when we. It is everywhere and I was just having a conversation with one of. In my company, we're in the midst of an enormous project to replace many of our core systems and the biggest one is implementing Oracle's netsuite.
• 28:18
  Speaker B: We're just doing the same we've got in it. We're doing a big migration project at the moment. So. Yeah, no, I'm with you all the way on that.
• 28:24
  Speaker A: Yeah. So as we're doing the work, one of the other things is my organization has grown pretty dramatically and now I'm in the nonprofit space. So different focus and different efforts than your work in the startup and manufacturing space. But certain things are always true across all these industries. And in our case, one of the things that came up was about how to formalize the process around what happens when people want new stuff. Hey, I need to add staff. Hey, I need to add this thing. We found this product that we really love and stuff like that. And one of the things that I know I've worked on in it to change is putting it at the first stop in those discussions when we're coming through your first stop of like, hey, we thought about this thing. And myself, I position myself as the in a CIO role as it's beneficial to speak to me first when you're thinking about new stuff. Not because I'm here to tell you, no, not because I'm here to be like, oh man, that's too much money. But I'm the one who's the keeper of things like our enterprise architecture, the ideas of how things fit together, why they work with stuff. I might know something about this team over on the other side of the company that you don't interact with is actually using a tool that's identical to this and we don't want to buy two of them. So why don't we look at combining your resources and your operations.
• 29:47
  Speaker B: Douglas, if I had a pound coin every time I'd had that conversation with somebody in the business I'd worked in, I'd be a very rich man, you've hit the nail on hand. It comes back to my first comment about being a cso feeling isolated. If we flip that into the CIO role and the head of IT role, there is still a reluctance for people to come and talk to IT because it's just expensive. And I've lost count how many projects have happened that somebody in the project teams put an IT line in for a fiver, you know, they put five, five quid in for it. And you go, well, if you'd have spoken to me, you know, you're now, you've now overspent your budget by 20, $30,000. If you'd have spoken to us at the start of this project, we could have had this conversation and found a, found a solution. And it's maturity for me in IT is, you know, I've got a presentation I do on Jungian archetypes and how they fit to an IT profile, you know, so as a, you know, Carl Jung, everyone comes into this world as an orphan, you know, you're so reliant on everybody around you to survive as a small baby. And then you move through, you know, kind of toddlers, adolescents, you relax, you rely less on your parents, and then you move into your teens, your 20s, you get your own family, you move into that stage, you know that I'm now the leader. And I think the IT life cycle is very, very similar. In a lot of businesses, that maturity is from that order taking. You are here to fix my laptop when it's broken, my phone is broken. I need some help right through to actually brokering those discussions. And some of the most successful businesses I've worked in are when IT are brought to the table very early. And everything that's done and it's at the forefront of everyone's mind because we can help solutionize. Not just the technical side, the laptops, desktops, mouse and keyboards, but also the business as they're developing products. If they've got networking. Well, funny enough, we have a network engineer, you know, if they've got servers, well, funny enough, we've got server engineers. And I think that's still a piece today, which isn't really grasped by a lot of executive leadership teams and just how important it is to do that. And, you know, as I said, some of the most successful businesses I've worked in are where IT are at the absolute forefront. And we're involved in everything because working in it, we are expected to understand finance, understand hr, understand manufacturing, understand product support, understand sales. And you go into these meetings Supporting these systems. And everyone thinks, oh, he's the IT guy. They understand everything to do with this system and all of our processes. And that's, for me, one of the fundamental draws to it is because you just get to be involved in the whole business right across the piece. And you're almost a broker a lot of the time. Oh, that person over there does that, or they've got that system, or we could just hook these in. So you're kind of pulling the strings in the background to keep the business running.
• 32:46
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think about it. Your description made me think about the idea of what's the role of the coo. But it's like the shadow coo, because you're not in charge of the people and the things. You're in charge of making sure that it all orchestrates correctly and seeing the threads that you pull together. As you just said, this team's working with this thing over here, and these two could work together. And my role is to pull those together because I understand the business as a whole. The modern cio, and this is probably been true for at least the last 10 to 15 years at this point, really has to be a business leader in many ways than they didn't in the past. You know, you went back 20, 25 years, it was acceptable for the CIO to be a technologist first and foremost and largely respond to the business needs to say, oh, you know, the finance team said they, you know, they chose a new finance package. We're going to implement it. You know, all right, let me rally the troops back here and get this going and stuff. But now I think about. I also think about the positioning of a CIO in the organizational chart. And in my.
• 34:02
  Speaker B: A boner contention, for me, Douglas, it's a bonus contention. Still.
• 34:06
  Speaker A: I was gonna say our listeners can't see you smile on this, but, you know, so I'm sure I anticipate a discussion coming up, but the. So in my role, so, you know, I'm the chief information and Technology officer for a nonprofit, and I think we're about the same size, we're about 500 employees. But in our case, I report directly to the CEO. And part of the reason for that is because we consider the technology infrastructure to be critical to the function and the strategy of our organization. I sit at the table with the other executive leadership. I've seen other organizations where the individuals in the CIO role are relegated to a second or third level down from a C level executive. And that can. I'm not saying it always does but it can impede the communication and that flow of that business knowledge that the CIO is bringing to the table.
• 35:06
  Speaker B: Yeah, and I'm in the process of writing a paper actually with a good colleague and an ex colleague and friend. Exactly. On that topic, how do we prepare B level people in tech so CISOs, CIOs, CTOs, to get out of that nerd space, get out of that tech space and into the business space. And it's not an easy transition and we're never going to get it right because, you know, you and I were technologists at heart. There's a reason we went into tech. And again, again, we're now expected to be able to operate at that executive level at the same time with little or no interaction because we never necessarily. In a lot of businesses, you're not invited to that table. You are. Well, what do we do with this big spend area? Oh, let's, let's, let's, let's report it into the cfo. You know, when it's money monetary driven because there's an expensive space or do we port it into the chief operating officer because it's operations? We're a shared service. We're always a, I like to think a value center, but we're seen as a cost center, of course. And a lot of the CEOs don't necessarily have the time, the understanding and certainly the headspace from the business to be able to, you know, work out what's going on, understand it and then make those decisions. And I think that's where a lot of people that are coming through that technology leadership into that executive space do need the coaching and we rely on the CEOs and the more business function led leaders to help us understand what do you need? How can we help you and kind of be integrated. But it is an interesting topic and we could probably do a whole podcast just on that, I suspect.
• 36:44
  Speaker A: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Where, where is the most appropriate place for a CIO or a C level executive in technology leadership, depending who you are.
• 36:53
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 36:54
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. So turning our discussion a bit to, I'll call it more just general interest, fun topics. I always like asking folks a little bit about just some of their personal stuff. So could you, could you, do you have, can you share something that people might not expect to know about you? And I'll, you know, I'll give, I'll give an example of myself. So I build things, you know, so I don't, I'm not just a tech guy. I actually can work you know, with my hands and stuff like that. And during COVID I, I took a, an old travel trailer and an Airstream, one of the silver travel trailers, and I ripped it down and built everything myself. You know, all the cabinetry, all this stuff. So I like, like I have. Yeah, so that's one of those things that I do. It's like, this is something about you that people might not, you know, be like, well, I didn't know Paul did that or something. Something about you, you know, maybe at the past of the. It was a kid, you know, I was, I was a world fencing champion.
• 37:54
  Speaker B: When I was like, well, you know, nothing that exotic. I, I actually, I actually met my wife salsa dancing. So I was on the Oxford University salsa team for a year and we met and did a few shows. So I dance and teach salsa.
• 38:12
  Speaker A: Salsa?
• 38:13
  Speaker B: Yeah. So great fun, good fitness.
• 38:18
  Speaker A: I am a salsa dancer myself.
• 38:20
  Speaker B: Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah.
• 38:22
  Speaker A: Yes. My wife and I, we have not danced in a long time, but my wife and I, back in the day, before we had kids, we're fairly regulars at our local salsa dances. Like that.
• 38:34
  Speaker B: Yeah. Unfortunately, kids are not really, you know, great for all night parties and all that dancing.
• 38:41
  Speaker A: So. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. That's awesome. So salsa dance, how did you get into salsa dancing?
• 38:47
  Speaker B: I just, it's just something I just wanted to do and a friend dragged me along and said it'd be great. He came twice and didn't really enjoy it and I did and stayed. And then, you know, 12, 12, 13 years later and a couple of kids and yeah, here we are.
• 39:04
  Speaker A: Nice, Nice. So you mentioned, you mentioned about in your past, you fell into it, you know, that wasn't, that wasn't what you set out to do when you were, you were in college and you were in high school and stuff like that. What can you tell us a little bit about what, what, what, what, what did you set out to do? What was your, what was, what did you think you were, you were going to be a doctor? Were you going to be like, no, I want to be, you know, whatever. I mean, I use doctor, but I don't need that. I don't mean to overstate what people.
• 39:33
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, no, no. I had absolutely no idea in school, you know, I was, I was, I was middle road. I was middle road in most of my subjects. I was always very good at art. I was very good on the creative side, very good at design, technology. And in hindsight, actually, you know, looking back now, I always had a bit of a flair for anything Technical. Whether it was, you know, electronics or taking stuff apart or, you know, printers, I always got a real interest in Zoom. Is that really nerdy now? Looking at menus and configuring things is kind of my thing. So, you know, I really didn't know what I wanted to do at school. And back in the, you know, in the, in the mid-90s, there wasn't the kind of the career guidance that there is today. You know, you went to college or you did an apprenticeship or you went to work. I mean, those, or you went to university. Those, you know, those were your options. And I went and did motor vehicle engineering just because a guy came to school and said, would you like to do motor vehicle engineering? Oh, that sounds great. I'll sign up there. Off we go. So I didn't really have a plan necessarily. And I did various roles between the ages of kind of 16 and 18. I did various roles and then at 21, as I said, I went to interview at a local IT shopping as a store assistant. Effectively think about that.
• 40:57
  Speaker A: And one of those things that just doesn't exist anymore, right? There's no corner computer shop. I'm going to go buy a computer here.
• 41:04
  Speaker B: Yeah, there are a few in the uk, but they're more kind of bespoke gaming custom machines now. But this was a small IT shop and we used to fix people's Windows 95 machines, which gives you some idea of how old it was. I come in, the modem wasn't working or the drivers had dropped out. And it's just lots and lots of repetition and stuff. And I just realized that actually I really enjoyed fixing problems and it just, it just ballooned, ballooned from there, really.
• 41:33
  Speaker A: But here in the States, there was usually, usually this, the discussion about Windows 95 in that period of time would lead to a discussion about online services like aol, which is America Online. But I don't know that AOL was actually available in the uk.
• 41:47
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, it was. Yeah, it was. Okay, so we should finish the podcast with goodbye, you know. Yeah, it's, it's aol. Yeah. When it was a penny. And I remember a time, actually, I'll tell you a little story. I, I, when I got my first PC, PC, my first Pentium PC, you know, I went and saved up for this, you know, computer. And it was when the Internet was a penny a minute and used to dial up on a 56k modem, but it was a penny a minute. And, you know, at 17, 18 years old. A penny a minute sounds great. It's not very expensive at all. And I remember the first phone bill. And the first phone bill came in and I came home from work and my mother was sat at the kitchen table and she said to me, how are you paying this? I said, what am I paying, mum? She said, the phone bill. I went, okay, no worries, just tell me how much is she? Like it's £600, which back in the 90s was an awful lot. I mean it still is today, but it was a lot of money. $1,200 was a lot of money for a month's phone bill because I'd just been spending time on the Internet, chat rooms and, and looking things up. And the fact that it took half an hour to download a single web page back then was neither here nor there.
• 42:56
  Speaker A: But yeah, yep, yeah, I remember I had, I had a similar experience with my dad once. I was, I think, I think I'm a couple years younger than you, so I was a little younger. I wasn't working, I did not have my own income. But you know, teenager get online and come over my. It was so bad. What the hell is this?
• 43:18
  Speaker B: I think it took me 10 years to pay that bill off. But yeah, no, and then when, you know, I was, I was banished from using the Internet in the house and I had to go down to the local, the when, when cyber cafes were a thing, you know, Internet cafe. It's like I'm going to the Internet cafe and I'm going to have an hour on the, you know, AOL on the chat rooms and stuff. And yeah, so when it was MSN messenger.
• 43:39
  Speaker A: Yeah, I was just at. So I, I was at a conference in Toronto a couple weeks ago and some of the folks that I, I was there with, they were all fellow attendees on the advisory council of online. So we get together, we go. They found a restaurant that celebrates all the sci fi and gaming and Dungeons and Dragons and stuff like that, which I was not, I personally not a big D and D person but I understand it's fun and enjoy being a part of the culture if you will. And you could take the 20 sided die and you could roll to build your own burger, build your own poutine. Of course we're in Canada and there was noodle bowls and the noodle bowls were. It was never winter noodles which reminded me on AOL of Neverwinter Nights, a massive online role playing game, text based that you would go through on AOL is one of those key things that people would come to the people who were into sci fi and gaming would go to play it just, I just.
• 44:44
  Speaker B: I just found it the whole, you know, whatever you're, whether you were 70, 60s, whatever, whatever, you're here. But for me, you know, the 90s and 2000s in it were just such an exciting space. And still today, I mean working inside, working in startup has reminded me the last three and a half years of why I got into it in the first place. Because I can, I'm still doing day to day support occasionally, you know, when the guys are a bit stressed out or they need some help. So because we are a startup, sometimes you just have to roll your sleeves up and lift servers, interact with, you know, with the team or whatever it takes to get over that hurdle. And it's just reminded me why I got into it. It's such an exciting space to be in. And I remember my first, the first game really that really gripped me and made me just want to constantly play almost like an addiction was a game on the Atari. And I remember My first gaming PC was an Atari ST 520ST.
• 45:39
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 45:40
  Speaker B: A little side load, three and a half floppy and it was a game called Carrier Command.
• 45:44
  Speaker A: Oh, okay.
• 45:46
  Speaker B: And you have a carrier ship and you have to build a base. And it was very, very basic, very wireframe y. But it was one of the first strategic games that really kind of took me and went, oh, this is really good fun. I get to choose where things go and how it. And I think that that, that was definitely a kickstart for me. And I'm still an avid gamer today. I think we're the first generation of gamers grown up with the Nintendo's right through to PCs.
• 46:11
  Speaker A: Yeah. I think about the distinction between I have two kids. My kids are 7 and 10. So they have Nintendo switches and we've got a Wii and some other stuff. But the ways that I interact with them as far as the gaming goes, I enjoy playing a video game. I'm not a big gamer gamer like sit down in my, you know, my own room and want to play all, you know, for, you know, give me the latest games and let me consume them. But I think about how my parents interacted with me with the games and it was really just a, it was a handoff. It was like, you know, go play that video game.
• 46:45
  Speaker B: And at Christmas once a year they'd have a go and you know, have the controller upside down.
• 46:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, like I'll go and my kids will be like, hey, can you come play this game with me? Can we go play this Mario game. Can we go play this, you know, hey, this Yoshi game or whatever the case may be. And let me show you guys the classic Legend of Zelda and how this game works at the gameplay compared to the new Zelda game and stuff. That growing up with the technology and the games and those types of things in our hands have really led to a really different relationship with our kids and how we interact with those tools and the technology. And it's really more of a bridge than a handoff or a barrier than I think it was when we were kids.
• 47:26
  Speaker B: And it's also about finding the balance. You know, we've gone through a whole generation of screen time and now I think we're going through the next iteration of that as a revolution happening at the moment of no, no, no, no screen time. You've had screen time. No screen time. And again I flip back into my role as a ciso. How do I protect my children from the stuff I don't want them seeing on the Internet? You know, it just. Internet version one was just open for all and it is finding that balance. I tend to play. I've got a six year old, so he's, he's, he's just being able to read things on the screen and, you know, respond to, you know, screen prompts. We play a lot of Minecraft together. We have our own server. We can both go onto the server together and build things and, you know, and it's, there are other games where as parents we're, we're absolutely acutely aware that there is so much danger out there on the Internet. And we have decided as parents that, you know, our children will not have smartphones until they're at least 18. And some people will look, my wife.
• 48:29
  Speaker A: And I, my wife and I absolutely go through the same discussion. We're like, when exactly like you can have a flip phone, like in sixth grade or seventh grade when you can.
• 48:35
  Speaker B: Afford to buy one yourself from money you've earned. You can have a smartphone. Danny, Can I have a phone when I'm 10? Yeah, you can have a phone. Absolutely. You can have a phone and it will make phone calls.
• 48:46
  Speaker A: That's right. You know, you could T9 text us, man, you know.
• 48:50
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 48:52
  Speaker A: 88222.
• 48:53
  Speaker B: But it is a scary, scary thought because technology is evolving so quickly to be tech out there that you and I won't understand in 10 years, 15 years maybe, you know, but there's going to be tech out there that we are going to struggle at some point to get our heads around and understand, well, how does that work? You know, what does that do? And that is the scary bit. You know, again, as a ciso, making sure that the computers have got restrictions in place is hard enough for me to do. How do we help the general public and friends and family make sure that their networks are secure, that their children are safe? Because a lot of people do not understand this.
• 49:32
  Speaker A: So as we're coming to the close here of the podcast, I'll go to turn us back just for a moment to call it the professional side here and say to our listeners what career advice you shared. Some really great tidbits as we've gone along, and I know you had your four tenets earlier about the ways you approach things and stuff, but is there any additional leadership advice you'd love to share with the listeners of the podcast as a takeaway here?
• 49:57
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think you're building successful technology teams is really hard and you've got to focus on your teams and their development and listen to what it is that they want to do. Tech is moving at such a fast rate and you can be consumed by all of the technology that's out there. I would say for me, find something you do and would do for free and get paid for it. If that's not tech for you, then may need to consider whether the technology is the right role or the discipline you're in in technology is the right way to go, but helping your teams and the potential technologists of the future, understanding the opportunities out there, what is available, is definitely a key driver.
• 50:43
  Speaker A: Thank you, Paul, thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.
• 50:47
  Speaker B: No, my pleasure. It's been great talking, but that's a.
• 50:50
  Speaker A: Wrap on today's episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I'm Doug Kamene and we look forward to coming to you on our episode.