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399- The Department of Let's Find Out w/Bryan Shanafelt · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: Welcome to youo've been heard where IT pros get heard. I'm here with Brian Schenefelt, IT manager for the McShane Companies. Welcome to the program, Brian.
• 0:18
  Speaker B: Oh, thank you, Michael. I'm glad to be here.
• 0:21
  Speaker A: Yes, yes. I'm very excited you're on this podcast with me. So we're doing the Icebreaker segment. Random access memories. I ask a question and then you're going to respond with whatever pops into your head first. Your first question, Brian, is the printer is out of ink. Buy more ink or buy a new printer.
• 0:42
  Speaker B: Oh, man. I think it's going to depend. I buy more ink. Typically it's faster. I got people lining up to print something out. They got to have it today. Buying a printer involves installing drivers. I can't do that. That's at home. I'm buying a new printer at work. I'm buying more ink.
• 0:58
  Speaker A: That's the difference. If you're at home, it's like I'm not dealing with it. I can deal with all the. At home. I'm just putting a new printer in.
• 1:04
  Speaker B: Yep.
• 1:05
  Speaker A: I think that depends on the type of printer too. Right? I mean, it's.
• 1:08
  Speaker B: Yeah. If it's just a little inkjet at your desk, sure. Just replace it, no problem. But if we're talking the multifunction unit, the big one that everybody shares, we just buy more toner for that thing.
• 1:17
  Speaker A: That makes sense to me. All right. The display says press any key. What key do you press?
• 1:27
  Speaker B: I'm a spacebar guy myself.
• 1:28
  Speaker A: Space bar. Wow.
• 1:31
  Speaker B: Well, that's.
• 1:32
  Speaker A: It takes up the most room on the keyboard.
• 1:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's the big one and it's right there in front of me.
• 1:36
  Speaker A: Yeah. So that makes sense. And you can just slam your hand down and usually you're going to hit that spacebar.
• 1:40
  Speaker B: Right, right.
• 1:42
  Speaker A: All right. It's good to have you on. Todd. Let's talk about real quick. The McShane Companies and what the McShane Companies do. Okay.
• 1:51
  Speaker B: McShane Companies is a collection of other companies. So we have three companies under the umbrella and we all do construction.
• 1:59
  Speaker A: Primarily construction.
• 2:00
  Speaker B: Love it. The smallest company is Connor Commercial Development. And that's the developer part. They purchase land, arrange contracts, and build buildings. A lot of multifamily buildings, apartment complexes, and those mixed use developments where it's restaurants on the bottom and then living space up above.
• 2:18
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 2:19
  Speaker B: They secure the deals and secure the financing and put that together. And then once they have that, that's where the general contractors take over. And the original company was McShane Construction and they're based in Chicago. They have an office in Auburn, Alabama, Phoenix, Arizona, Madison, Wisconsin, Nashville, Tennessee. They had a California office for a while. They've been nationwide. They build a lot of those multifamily. They do a lot of work for Connor Commercial, but then they also do work for other firms as well. And they were founded in 1984.
• 2:50
  Speaker A: Yeah. It's funny because I just today wrote a blog about construction and IT and was talking about how construction and IT are actually very similar in the ways that you. You would do it. I mean, there's a lot of planning involved. There's a lot of building of that foundation first before you go and add stuff onto it. And if you get the foundation wrong, then you mess up for the rest. So it's just downhill after that. If that's.
• 3:18
  Speaker B: No, I've learned a lot. I've been doing construction tech pretty much my entire career and I've learned a lot of lessons from those project managers in construction because the way they schedule things and the way you budget and you forecast, a lot of those models can be applied to IT technology. Just anything that you're doing a project on, those skills are invaluable. And I love learning about their processes and watching them evolve in different processes. The way the industry goes and then applying that to it. It's really fun.
• 3:50
  Speaker A: That is true. It is amazing. For anybody that hasn't delved and worked with the construction industry, it is amazing to see those project managers at work. I mean, not only are they dealing with multiple sites, most of the time hopping from one to the other, having to work remotely and project manage, sometimes on phones, not even just computer devices, and they can keep all this straight. It is quite amazing to see these project managers work and how they are able to make everything not only move in the right direction, but at the right time. That's really the biggest impressive move there is that they're actually able to keep things going in the right order and at the right time and to prevent delays.
• 4:37
  Speaker B: Yeah, everything has a dependency in those schedules. And you say this cannot begin until this phase is complete. So I have to push this through because this crew doing this other task is on a deadline here. So I have to get this done. And like I said, those skills are just phenomenal. And learning those and using those for like software implementation, it's been very helpful for me.
• 4:59
  Speaker A: Yeah, let's talk about you a little bit too. Let's talk about your background and how you came to work at and be the IT manager at McShane Companies.
• 5:09
  Speaker B: Sure. So my first tech job, I worked at Radio Shack right out of high school. I was standard nerd since I was a kid. Having a computer at 10 years old in the 80s, 85. So working at Radio Shack was easy for me. I understood all the circuits and how things worked. And over time, the company became very sales focused. They wanted you to sell cell phones and batteries and stuff like that. But when I worked there, it was still very technology focused. It was a real fun job. And then after that, I went to work at Texas Instruments building DLP chips for the digital projectors. The processor was essentially array of mirrors that would either turn on or off. And that was fun. It was a clean room, lab environment. And my uncle was in construction. He was a superintendent at a different construction firm. And they had a server problem. And he said, my nephew does something with computers, I'll have him come in and fix it. And I came in and I just stumbled on the answer. I just figured it out and got it working. Then all of a sudden I had a job like, this is it.
• 6:09
  Speaker A: That's how it works. It's funny, but my tech to folks that have been around and you dated yourself already, so I can say this, have been around a bit that I stumbled into. It seems to come up a lot. I just stumbled into it. I answered a question correctly and then all of a sudden I was the IT person.
• 6:27
  Speaker B: Yes. I mean, it's always been what I wanted to do, but I didn't take the standard route of going to college and getting a degree and this and that. It was like, I just started working for this company. And they were like, well, we'll pay for some Microsoft certifications and we'll pay for this and help us get all out of Novell netware and onto NT 3.5. So it was real fun because it's a construction company. And that's why I still have the job, is because when things break down, I want to find out why. I want to do the research. I'm up all night looking for why, figuring it out and then making it work. And so the next morning, I come in, I have the answer. Here it is.
• 7:05
  Speaker A: It's really interesting to say that a lot of times I think that people that are not in it think that we know all the answers about it. And that's not the case. Right. It moves so fast and so quick. People that are true it know that they know hardly anything in it.
• 7:21
  Speaker B: Right.
• 7:21
  Speaker A: There's too much to know. There's too much to learn. But the true IT nerds, right? And those are the ones that go and research and figure it out. And that research, that plant and it's gotten better, right? It's, it's a lot easier research than it was in the past. Now that we have access to all sorts of these tools to be able to figure it out. Probably too much access, but that research is huge. That's a big part of it.
• 7:48
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean you gotta look it up. You gotta find out. Like you said, I have Reddit and all sorts of community substacks and githubs and all sorts of resources to go look up things. YouTube. Even in the early 2000s it was sparse out there and I had subscriptions to some forums and things that we had to pay for. But that research was invaluable. There were places you could go to get this information.
• 8:15
  Speaker C: Most IoT leaders don't need more technology, they need less noise. Over the years, infrastructure quietly gets complicated. Multiple locations, multiple Internet providers, different contracts, separate bills and reactive support. Nobody plans that way, it just happens. What we do is vendor neutral advisory. That means we don't sell platforms or force change. We start with low friction areas. Internet telecom, Microsoft licensing. Places where complexity builds quietly and and can usually be cleaned up without disruption or capex. Sometimes we find savings, sometimes we find nothing. Either way the outcome is the same. More clarity, less distraction and it that's boring in the best way possible. If you want a second set of eyes from people who sit on the buying side of enterprise infrastructure every day, just go to you've beenherd.com and answer the questions to simplify, streamline and save.
• 9:10
  Speaker A: So what does your current day look like at the McShane companies?
• 9:14
  Speaker B: So I learned early on in construction it I have to get here early when I was young in my career you stumble in 8:30, 9:00 like everybody else. But construction job sites start at 6:30 in the morning sometimes. And if you don't get here early, I show up to a pile of messages. My phone's been ringing off the hook. Somebody needed something two hours ago and I'm just now getting to it. So I get here at about 7am every day. Me and a handful of the old timers, a lot of the younger generation still kind of stumble in at 8:30, but I get in at 7:30. That's my me time. If there's no fires to put out, that's my chance to catch up on emails. Just kind of organize my day, get my thoughts ready. And lately it's been One meeting after another, just figuring out who needs what, how to assign it, then, you know, meeting up with my team later and kind of delegating those responsibilities and deciding who's going to be the specialist for this task today.
• 10:05
  Speaker A: Wow.
• 10:05
  Speaker B: That's the fun part about building the team is deciding, identifying the strengths of each of my team members and saying, you seem really interested in this and I've got a project for you and watching them kind of light up when they do that discovery.
• 10:20
  Speaker A: This is great. So let's talk about what you love to do at your job. What do you do? How's your day go?
• 10:28
  Speaker B: So I love looking at our processes and seeing where the inefficiencies lie. I'm one of those Six Sigma, always improving kind of people. So I always look at a process, I look at a software and I say, why are we using this? Why are we doing it this way? And when the answer is, that's the way we've always done it, that's the red flag for me. I'm like, no, no, you have to tell me that this is the most efficient, the most cost effective way to do it. And if it's not, well, let's find something that is. And I love evaluating software and taking a look at everything that's out there. Going to those tricks trade shows and seeing like this software that's available and then coming back and trying it out for myself and saying, is this actually going to make us better as a company? Is this going to take our department where it needs to go? How is this going to help? And that's what I love about it.
• 11:21
  Speaker A: I love that you take the technology back and you ask that question again. It's not just, am I in love with this software or is it cool? Is it flashy? Is this going to make our company better? Is this going to improve processes? Is this going to reduce the amount of time we need to do things and improve our productivity? These are all great questions to ask when you go to implement anything, especially new software. I wish everyone asked those questions prior to doing it.
• 11:49
  Speaker B: Exactly. At the end of the day, I think construction companies and pretty much every company, all we do is at our computer now. Like, we don't do anything else. At my company, we build buildings, but when you boil it all down, we initiate contracts to get those buildings built on the computer. We sign contracts, we issue, change orders and look at blueprints. Everything is on the computer. And our computers can't be the roadblock to getting our jobs done. I don't want A guy in the field thinking about his computer, he needs to just get on there and get his job done. And he thinks about his job and what his job is. He doesn't need to think about, is my computer gonna work today? Or, oh, boy, this, this program is slow. Or this, this login takes forever. I have 45 passwords. I don't want him thinking about those things. His job is building the building and getting those contracts written. And that needs to be transparent. Yep, Yep.
• 12:44
  Speaker A: Agreed with that.
• 12:45
  Speaker B: Oh, wait.
• 12:46
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah. And the reason that we have. You've been heard podcast because essentially what happens is when you're doing all. Everything right, things get quiet. People go, why do I need it? Right? How do you combat that?
• 13:01
  Speaker B: There's a lot of metrics, obviously, there's trouble tickets and there's metrics. We can, we can say, oh, I've closed so many tickets and we get so many responses. And we do this and we settle everything in under three hours. We're SLAs being an internal department. I don't have to answer that as much as when I was working for an msp, but there's still a lot of projects that happen. We report a lot to our CFO about how much money we're spending and why we're spending it this way and the projects that are undergoing. But the biggest part is that communication. You have to send out that email, and you have to send out an email that says, I'm migrating file servers to, from here to here over this weekend. When you log in on Monday, if everything's right, you won't notice. Your, your drives will map, everything looks good, you won't even notice. And that's the goal. And so you, you just communicate that to people. Hey, we've done this migration, we've installed the software, everything's being deployed in the background. Here you go. You're welcome.
• 13:58
  Speaker A: Yeah. So that communications is extremely important. I agree with you. Communication out to stakeholders, huge. Right? Communicating that you're doing things, big deal. But how do you, and I'm specifically asking you specifically, how do you ensure that you're communicating to executives, right, what you're doing and why you're doing them and what the impact it has on the business.
• 14:26
  Speaker B: Oh, that's a great question. Because it changes on a daily basis. It depends on the executive. A cfo, he's looking at the bottom line, how much is this going to cost me? Whereas an operations officer is going to say, how is this going to impact our workflows and how is this going to impact our daily operations. So the approach is a little different, but it's about being proactive with that communication. Showing up on a monthly meeting and saying, hey guys, these servers are going over six years old, these are over eight years old and these are over 10 years old. So we have to replace these this year. And these are the systems that rely on these servers. So we need to look at either alternative systems that don't need these servers or cloud based or do we look at replacing servers and what's our long term plan for that? So it's all about framing that communication. But you have to do it proactively. I can't come to them and say our servers are blown up. What do we do? Because they don't.
• 15:18
  Speaker A: I'm glad you said that. Differentiation. I had a CIO one time who we had a ton of projects, just, I mean an outrageous amount of projects. So he went and sent an email, one to the CEO, one to the cfo, Right. And one to the CEO. And the email was what are the top five projects that I need to be working on? Right. Came back, there was only one project in common.
• 15:46
  Speaker B: Yeah, I figured you'd get 15 different projects. So you got one?
• 15:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, we got one. We got one. So we turned around and we sent that email list back to all three of them at once and said, how about we all get together and figure out what the top five really are. And then it was a big eye opener. Right. Because it was like, oh wow. Even at the leadership level we're not all on the same page to be able to give those projects out. And that happens. And I'm glad you brought that up. That the communication is different because the priorities are different per. For each one of those folks.
• 16:15
  Speaker B: Exactly. It's different not only for those folks, but in my specific example, I've got the multiple companies. I've got a development company and then nationwide construction firm and then I've got a Texas based construction firm that focus on different market segments and different things. And so their needs are different and so their operations, their workflows are different. So now like I said, I may have two different accounting systems to support on a shared set of hardware, shared servers that run everything. We share one Office 365 domain where everybody's logged into each other's teams and calendars and we can, we can collaborate between the companies, but it's lots of different organizations that have different needs and you have to communicate that differently than prioritize and pick. These are going to get top billing Right now because this is the most critical based on deadlines or sometimes finance. Sometimes it's like the software is just too expensive. We're going to go with some lower hanging fruit, clean that up first and then move on to the big fish.
• 17:13
  Speaker A: I, I have to imagine that you being at a construction company, have a lot of projects and not all of them are going to be directly related to construction. So a lot of them are going to be related back to your infrastructure and back to your needs.
• 17:30
  Speaker B: How, how do you prioritize prioritizing the IT projects? It's tough. I think it's based on what I feel like our ticket volume looks like. When I look at our help desk request, I say, what are people asking for? Are they asking for file system stuff? Are they asking for file shares and security access and resources to SharePoint files? Do we need to look at that and find out is that what they're doing? Or are all of our tickets about printing? Are people having issues with printing? And we need to look at something that's a little bit more managed or scalable for printing management solutions. So that's my priority list is I look at how much they're taxing the IT department because it increases that visibility. On the operations side, when somebody's thinking about their computer, I would print, but ah, the printer is such a pain in the neck. I don't want them to think that. So when I see what the troubles are, I realize that they're my customers. Right? They're not users, they're customers and I know what their problems are and I need to fix their problems. So for me, that that's my priority.
• 18:31
  Speaker A: Well said. Yeah. So you had mentioned to me a little bit about making something out of nothing and I wanted to bring that up specifically on this podcast because it's such a unique take on that. Expand on that and expand on it based on what I believe you were talking about related to YT making something out of nothing.
• 18:56
  Speaker B: So a lot of my favorite parts about it when I was younger and even today he's getting my hands dirty on projects and building something out of nothing. Coding and writing scripts and writing programs is it's about taking something that doesn't exist yet and making it a reality. Somebody brings me a problem that doesn't have a solution. Somebody's bringing me a problem that it's either never been dealt with before or people are just dealing with it. Or maybe there is a solution, but it's just too expensive, it's out of reach and I can take the resources that we have. And I love trying to figure out how to take what we've got and make that fit into that and make that solve that problem. I want to solve the problem. So when somebody comes up to me and says, oh, we need connectivity at this job site trailer. And it's over here and it's over there and I'm like, well, it's too far to run a cable and this and that. So then I'll sit there and I'll go down all the checklists until I'm down to a solution where we can take some equipment that we've got and repurpose it into a fixed point wireless transmission from trailer to trailer.
• 20:01
  Speaker A: Love it. Absolutely love it. That same concept too, I believe can be applied to building a team.
• 20:09
  Speaker B: Oh yeah, absolutely.
• 20:11
  Speaker A: I think when it comes to leadership, you put a bunch of people together, you don't necessarily have a team.
• 20:17
  Speaker B: Right.
• 20:17
  Speaker A: That's not what makes the team. That just makes a bunch of coworkers. Right. But how do you build that team? And I think sometimes the nothing is a bunch of co workers getting together to do a job. The something is taking that and building a team that can do some crazy, amazing things. Right.
• 20:37
  Speaker B: I like to start out right when I'm in the hiring process. It's a lot easier for me to sort out people. I recently have a new person starting next week and during the interview process, I was focused on personality and focused on is this person communicating well with me? Are they communicating well with the HR staff that was doing the recruiting? I want somebody that's got those, those skills to diffuse, de, escalate. I got you. I'm going to take care of this. I'm on it. I need somebody that's gonna have those communication skills, that's gonna be a part of the team from the get go. Because it people, we tend to be nerds and we're very direct. Sometimes people say, oh, my password isn't working, your caps lock is on. Come on. It happens. And so having somebody that's friendly out there, so I have to have the right person for the right role and finding out what that role is and saying this is the right person. But building a team, it's like you said, we're not a collection of coworkers, we're a team. Everybody's got a strength and as long as we understand this is his strength and this is my strength and we're doing, we're not doing each other's jobs, we're not stepping on each other's toes. We're not fighting for tickets. So I try to foster a lot of communications.
• 21:54
  Speaker A: Right. It's really good and thank you for keeping it. And I think one of the important things I learned is that you're in internal staff are your clients too, right?
• 22:03
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 22:05
  Speaker A: That soft skills, when you turn around and talk to a coworker, a team member. Right. Then they need to have that same respect, that same things that you would give the client. Right. Same kind of concept. And those soft skills go a long way. I'm glad you brought that up. How do you reinforce that to your team?
• 22:24
  Speaker B: It's tough. I lead by example, of course. I go out and I talk to people and the more approachable we are, the. The easier it's going to be for us to get forgiveness down the road. So it's part of our job to have that relationship with our co workers. It's part of that job to be likable, and it helps make our jobs easier.
• 22:43
  Speaker A: Managing teams, and especially when they're remote, is always a challenge. Right. I've managed teams in India and Philippines and all over the United States, and trying to keep them all in sync is quite a challenge. How do you do it and how do you maintain that team culture when you do it?
• 23:02
  Speaker B: I try not to have a lot of meetings. I don't want to have too many meetings. But we do have a weekly team sync up meeting where we just kind of hop into a meeting, we talk about the biggest challenges, we talk about the biggest things of the week, and then we just try to keep those communication lines open. So we talk business during our meetings. But there's a lot of personal stuff and we celebrate with each other. And as long as we kind of uplift each other, that helps keep communication open. I know what everybody's doing and we're not going to be judgmental. Somebody says, ah, I'm sick today. We're not like ignoring him. We're not cutting him off. He's still a part of the group and he can come to us with that information instead of saying, I'm afraid to go to my boss. When I was younger, my boss, I thought that they were looking for everything I did wrong. They were microscope. And I realized later that were coming across wrong. But a good manager is there to support your team. And every meeting I have to think, what do you need from me today? This isn't, I'm coming to you to find out what you're doing wrong and how you can improve. This is how I can help you get your Job done. And I have to bring that approach every day to help them get their jobs done. And that I feel like that really helps that camaraderie because they're not afraid to come to me and say, I'm struggling with this, this ticket's taken too long, or whatever the case is, they could bring that to me. And I'm not going to say, oh, you failed, you're a failure, knock off your KPI's negative one score for you, it's a, hey, let's, let's find somebody else. Let's form a brain cell and get this taken care of.
• 24:34
  Speaker A: I bet that team building you do helps with your IT strategy overall.
• 24:40
  Speaker B: Oh sure, for sure. The IT strategy, like I said before about identifying the strengths of each team member and putting them in the right role and putting them in the right mindset and I'm all about career growth.
• 24:52
  Speaker A: So it's interesting to listen to you because you come across when you're talking about the team is that you have designed a team and have a strategic vision for this team, that you've got a strategy in place for this team. Right. And so I was going to talk a little bit about IT strategy in general. Right. But from your management of this team itself, I'm actually getting some of your IT strategy and design and architecture pulled from that. Just from talking about this piece. Do you do a lot of other hands on work as well?
• 25:27
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I'm the only IT person in the office that I'm in right now. We have a very lean team. We have eight offices nationwide and only four IT people. Five coming up next week. Wow. So there are offices that don't have any IT professional at all and typically they're smaller and we rely on outside msps or we just drive there or fly there when we need hands on. But as far as changing out a cord or plugging in a monitor or something, that's all me. And I get in there and do that and I like doing some of the harder work. I'm a lead by example person.
• 25:59
  Speaker A: I've done it all my life.
• 26:00
  Speaker B: And so I just, I loved saying I'm going to do this hard project so that my team can focus on what they are good at and what they enjoy doing. And then if somebody wants to learn it, hey, come on, join me with this project, we'll learn it together. And I just, I learned that by example. I do it myself. There's no job that I'm going to tell my team to do that I'm not willing to do myself 100%.
• 26:21
  Speaker A: That's a great way to look at it. And it shows it your competence, but also shows the ability to go ahead and delegate that stuff out. When you're doing your job daily right, what are the things that you believe are the most love things that you do? Right? What are the things that really just make you tick in a day and make you want to keep coming back?
• 26:41
  Speaker B: I like the challenge. I like learning things. I like solving problems. So when people bring me a problem that requires something new, a new software or a new solution or a new something, I love that process of let's try a new software, let's try something new, let's put it to the test and let's find out all of its weaknesses. Does it do this, does it do that? When it prints out, does it print poorly when we're going to test every single aspect? And I love that penetration style testing of softwares and processes. That's what gets me excited. So a lot of the new software all comes through me first. And I work with the operations team and say, is this scheduling software going to be what we need it to do? Is it going to produce the critical path model that we need? Are we creating baselines? Is it easy to use? Does it work on an iPad? We're checking all those boxes. You can hear me getting excited about it. I'm rambling now. That's what drives me. I get excited about that. And when we find the solution that works, I know that like I said before, the company's in a better place. Our operations team now has an easier job to get their job done. And I've made that happen.
• 27:51
  Speaker A: That's awesome. It's nice to do the things you love and it's nice when the things that you love are the things that you're doing. Yes.
• 27:59
  Speaker B: It's rare that it happens both ways.
• 28:02
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 28:02
  Speaker B: All too often the IT department is kind of a department of no. People say, oh, can we have this offer? No. And I've switched that mentality to a department of let's find out how we can make that happen. Sometimes the answer is no at the end of the day, but it's not an immediate no.
• 28:17
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's like a, well, let's see.
• 28:20
  Speaker B: Yeah, let's find out, let's figure it that out together. Or we tried this last year, it didn't work out and here's why we. And that's a much more satisfactory answer. When somebody comes from another company and they say, well, my other company, we used Google Docs, And I'm like, okay, we tried it once, it didn't work. Here's why. And typically it's an acceptable answer. Or it's like, well, let's give it a shot and we fire it up. We sign up for a trial, we run through the tests, and maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.
• 28:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's a great way to look at it, and it's a great way to keep progress moving without stifling ideas and innovation. That's a big deal. And speaking of innovation, we've reached the fun segment because we get to come up with what we think the future of it can look like 18 months from now. Right. And the fun thing about this is I used to ask this question and make it like five years down the road, but it was just too hard to predict because things go so fast now. 18 months is like a good indicator of what enough of. I could probably figure out what I'm going to be seeing and I could probably stay on that path.
• 29:29
  Speaker B: I appreciate that 18 months approach. I think if you'd asked me five years ago, AI would not have been on my radar in 2021. I would have not said that everybody was going to have AI. So 18 months is a pretty good indicator. I think AI is where we're at right now. And in 2024, I went to a lot of trade shows and conferences about construction technology, and everybody was AI this and AI that. And there's half a dozen AI startup companies that cold call me every day and tell me why their AI solution is different from everybody else's. And spoiler alert, they're all exactly the same.
• 30:08
  Speaker A: You're all using the same basic technology, but. Okay, go ahead. Yeah.
• 30:12
  Speaker B: And so AI was there. And then in 2025, I think people discovered that they jumped into the deep end of AI before their data was ready to support that. At the beginning of this podcast, you mentioned about, like, building the foundation for good technology, and the data platform is that foundation. Your AI is not going to give you good answers. It's going to give you wrong answers if your data isn't organized properly. And so in 2025, all of the conferences were about data and data structure, and we're seeing a lot of those startup companies now for, like, data lakes and data organizations that are integrating AI.
• 30:50
  Speaker A: So I'm going to pause you for a second because you said such a great thing that I want to circle back to us so people understand just how dangerous this is. Right, right. If you have bad data and you hand it to AI. Right now, everybody that is using that AI has that bad data and they're making decisions based on that bad data. And then they're creating things based on that bad data and propagating that bad data. It like amplifies it.
• 31:21
  Speaker B: Yes, AI amplifies what's out there. It learns from what's out there and it creates more of that. And so yeah, that foundation is critical and people have found out that they jumped into the deep end of AI. They spent all this money in AI and now they've got a sunken cost. We've bought all these AI tools, we've subscribed to all this, we've written our processes around AI and it's not giving us what we need now we have to go back and sort the data. So I think 18 months from now we're going to end up seeing a lot more data jobs, I guess, careers in the data and data analytics field. And you're going to end up with even small mom and pop shop, 10, 15 employees and they're going to have their own in house data person that is just in charge of data governance and connecting all the APIs together to feed it into the AI tool of choice. And I think that's what we're going to start seeing.
• 32:14
  Speaker A: That is an interesting prediction. I'm actually interested to see if that actually comes.
• 32:18
  Speaker B: Yeah, I'm going to mark on my calendar for summer of 2027 to come back and re listen to this podcast and be like, did that happen?
• 32:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's actually a really interesting thought that even mom and pop shops, little SMBs could be turning around and being like, I need a data person to come fix my data. But it makes sense, especially if all of the applications that they may be using will be using AI and amplifying their bad data. Right.
• 32:43
  Speaker B: You can't not have AI now. Everything has AI built into it. We're on a zoom call and it's got an AI built in.
• 32:49
  Speaker A: It does.
• 32:50
  Speaker B: You're everywhere running and honestly, if you're not using it, you're not, you're falling behind. And because we discovered that if we're not using AI can replace steps in a process, that it's a manual process. I've got triple entry, I've got quadruple entry. And now I can just scan in a batch of 200 invoice PDFs and tell CoPilot, okay, make me a spreadsheet with every invoice number, every amount due and every due date.
• 33:18
  Speaker A: Yeah, this is why we're Seeing a stall in hiring. Right. Because it's not necessarily the replacement, but it's a. Wait a second. We can run leaner and stuff, but again, once everybody's running leaner, then you run into the same issue we had. Right. It's right. We just got to catch up.
• 33:35
  Speaker B: And that's, that's where I'm seeing those data jobs coming in. I don't know that we can replace them, but we have to replace them with a data job. You're not going to replace your AP clerk. You're going to replace that person with a data clerk. And that's where that's going to happen, I think. So we're going to see a lot of those data jobs, even a small mom and pop shops, just somebody that, even if it's administrative assistant, you're going to see that person putting on a data hat. That's. They, they answer the door, they answer the phone, they get the mail, and they control your data governance.
• 34:04
  Speaker A: Which is just interesting to see. That is, by the way, one of the most interesting predictions I've ever come across in doing this podcast, by the way. So I will also mark my calendar and see if Brian Shanefeld is right that 18 months from now there will be data people, even at the level of clerk. But I, I think that is a fantastic prediction and I'm eager to see if that comes to fruition. If everything's working, you're invisible. If one thing breaks, you're an emergency. You've been listening to, you've been heard. A platform for IT leaders to get heard. And we've been talking with Brian Shanefelt, IT manager for the McShane Companies. Brian, thank you so much for the program. We appreciate it.
• 34:47
  Speaker B: All right, thank you so much, Michael.