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354-  What really kills senior IT careers today? with Chris Meyerpeter · You've Been Heard

• 0:02
  Speaker A: Welcome everyone back to dissecting popular IT nerds. We're actually live for the very first time in history, although it's only me and Chris Meyer Peter right now that are actually live. Eventually this is going to go onto YouTube and LinkedIn. It's going to be a lot of fun. And I don't know, we were just getting, we were just getting Chris's backstory kind of. But let's really go way back in time. What was your very first computer? How'd you get started in this insanity?
• 0:28
  Speaker B: Oh, that is a great question. So, so I, you know, my, my parents were blue collar middle class. I did not have a computer growing up. Didn't really even see one through high school early days. I joined the Navy because that was the only way I was going to be able to go to college. And that was the first time I really got into, started to understand networking infrastructure. I was a, I was a radioman in the Navy. And that job doesn't even exist anymore. It was combined with three or four maybe even more other jobs. Now it's called ip, which is of fun. But yeah, so that was when I got my first touch in computers and good, good friend of mine while I was in the Navy, he was, he understood them really well and so I kind of learned from him. And that was when I kind of said, hey, this is, it's interesting, I understand how it works but you know, got a lot of experience in the Navy and you know, I always joke with folks, you know, came out, went to school, got a job. But I, I kind of tell people I was mid-90s, I had a pulse and I understood computers. So at the time, you know, everybody was going through the Windows 95 migrations and all this other stuff and they were just looking for anybody they could find. And that's how I got into it. I didn't see and start getting involved with computers or technology till early 90s. And then I would say more, more, more deeply around the mid-90s. 95, 96.
• 1:58
  Speaker A: Yeah, it was. Anyone that could fix the printer or I don't know, plug in that. What was the big, what was the big cable that we used to call like the Anthony cable or something? What was that? Big fat printer cable. What was.
• 2:09
  Speaker B: Yeah, that, yeah, what was that? Was that cable?
• 2:12
  Speaker A: Yeah, say some super pin cable.
• 2:14
  Speaker B: I remember using token ring neck networks at my first job. We had, we had the world's largest Apple talk network for a while, something like that. It was, it was back in the wild, wild west days of, of It. And you're trying to get to some sort of standard.
• 2:30
  Speaker A: Were you on a ship?
• 2:31
  Speaker B: Those fun times, that's when you started realizing that put the wrong IP address on a. On a computer without firewalls or anything, everybody in the world could access it. It was, it was, it was an interesting time.
• 2:42
  Speaker A: Yeah. I worked in a call center with like 500 people and there were. All the computers were networked together. There actually was no such thing as firewall. We could all play big networked games of Civilization, which was really fun. We all had dial up at home and. But we had like an OC12 in the. Which I had no clue what that even meant during the call center days. I just knew that we had really fast Internet. Was I. I felt like I was in the Pentagon.
• 3:07
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
• 3:08
  Speaker A: That was wicked cool. The. Were you on a ship, Boat, Submarine, deployed? What? The Navy is kind of a broad thing, but like anything cool.
• 3:16
  Speaker B: Lots of cool stuff in the Navy, you know. I think the most important thing for me when I joined was I wanted to see the world and I wanted to learn kind of where I was going. I was coming out of school. I wasn't ready to go to college anyway. The Navy was a really nice wake up call for me. People ask me that when they find out I've been in the military. They ask, do you want your son to go? Would you want your daughters to go? The answer is absolutely yes, if they wanted to. I believe that it helped me to grow. There is no place that I can think of where they give that much responsibility to kids. Honestly have no reason to have that kind of responsibility and, and force them to really grow up or, you know, you're kind of, you know, weeded out if you don't. And you know, it was a great experience for me. If they. I always joke if they paid a little better, I probably would have stayed longer. But it was time for me to start my family. My at the time, wife. Now we're getting serious. So that's why I got out. But you know, I was on the USS Dahlgren when it caught on fire. That was a scary, scary moment and was a wake up call as well. When you're out on the middle of the ocean and your ship is burning you, there's nobody to put it out except for the crew on that ship and some really brave folks on that ship that day. And you know, but like I said, a lot. Too many experiences to go through. Those are some of the ones that stand out to me. But really enjoyed my time. Loved Going around the world, been fortunate enough to step foot on every continent except Antarctica. And I'm trying to get there before, before the Big guy takes me.
• 4:55
  Speaker A: Can the. Yeah, there's a whole, there's actually like a whole. Antarctica is interesting. There's a whole like conspiracy theory group that like you can only go to a certain piece of it and can't get past like the certain like, I don't know, what is it, the like 58 or 60 second parallel line or something like that. Most Americans are terrible at geography, but you're in the Navy, so you're probably really, really good at it and reading like charts.
• 5:18
  Speaker B: I don't know about really good at it, but I will be. I will. I am not a conspiracy theory guy and so therefore I tend to shut out most conspiracy theories.
• 5:26
  Speaker A: So then I want the. We, we want you to go to Antarctica then and, and tell us all about it.
• 5:31
  Speaker B: Validate.
• 5:32
  Speaker A: Yes, validate. Try, try to fly a drone if you can and let us know if.
• 5:36
  Speaker B: They like see what I can do.
• 5:38
  Speaker A: The. Okay, we're talking earlier. Are you an, are you an agile guy? What's, what's your agile story at dissecting popular IT nerds?
• 5:47
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• 6:36
  Speaker B: Yeah, again, like, like we chatted a bit earlier. I, I believe, I believe strongly in the idea of iteration. I like the idea of continuously checking in and making sure that we're doing the right thing. I also though am a strong believer that true agile, following the full manifesto in non tech, non software, non technology companies is really hard. This idea that there, you know, there aren't any deadlines except for the next Sprint. This idea that you just keep doing things until everything is right. You've got to find a balance a little bit I think in what I like to call kind of the real, the real world. You know, I'm the CIO for a flour milling company. At the end of the day, our job is to make flour. People can bake bread, cookies, you know, pizzas, cakes, you know, all of those, those types of things. And so trying, trying to implement what I'll call kind of true agile is, is not proven successful in any of the roles that I've had. However, finding ways to blend it with some of what you know, the old traditionalists would call kind of a waterfall approach. This idea that you've got milestones you're trying to get to, but to get to the milestones you're using sprints and iterations and continuing to kind of adjust your priority and work through, I think is a nice balance. So that's kind of where I stand. So, you know, I think on the surface, yes, I believe strongly that the agile model can be effective and work. I just think that you have to tailor it to your, to your situation and to your business. And what I, what I found in my experience is you, you hire people and, and it's a religious war, whether we like to kind of call that or not. You got these agile folks that are just, I mean, devotees to the manifesto itself and kind of how it works and then trying to help them to, to maybe soften that a little bit sometimes doesn't work out as well as you would hope or like. And so that's, you know, I think a big part of what we, what we try to balance. But you know, we do, we do use it. We're, you know, we're, Is there a.
• 8:47
  Speaker A: Tool or a, like a Kanban board or something that works better than a Kanban board? Or is it a piece of paper? Is it a spreadsheet? What's the best organization tool?
• 8:57
  Speaker B: Yeah, you know, what we've been, what we've been trying to do is we've been trying to use, and we're, we're on, we're, we're Microsoft Shop, so We use Azure DevOps to really kind of manage the stories, the boards, the epics, that type of work. And that's where, and how we're using it. We've looked at all of those other kind of tools and again, we kind of have to blend it. You know, we, the way we set, the way we set up our IT organization is, you know, the first, the first, you know, I would say entry point into our IT group is really around process design. We have business architects and, you know, folks that quite frankly could easily be in other functions outside of IT because they're really focused on the Process and we try to use Agile principles in process design, which is iterate, try to show it, we try to walk through it, we try to get buy in, try to make sure that all the stakeholders understand what's going on. Then you get into our product team. Now our products, we define products a little bit differently because again traditional technology organization, product manager owns the stack all the way. When you work in a company like ours, your products probably go across multiple technology stacks. So we have product managers that enable business processes. So if I think about something like an order, an order management product for us that has to go across three different platforms. Salesforce.com, we use Dynamics 365 as our ERP home. We've written a, a, a homegrown application that manages and creates contracts that we work and use with our customers. So you've got to, you've got to play across all three of those platforms. So the product manager is at a disadvantage. They don't have to, they don't, they don't typically have a, what I would call a deep technical understanding of the back end. And so you need your different engineering teams to kind of help them. So it's a little bit of a balance. So you go from business architecture to our product teams to our delivery, um, and then the delivery teams will have our software architects, our engineers, our application development teams, our support teams, our infrastructure teams, security, all them. That that's kind of how we, you.
• 11:07
  Speaker A: Said something pretty cool. Well, I don't know if it's cool. It's just an observation that you only know if you know if that makes any sense. And I think you'll know when I say you know what you know and that is you use Salesforce, Dynamics and a homegrown thing for your contracts. So I don't want to assume here because everyone knows what happens when you assume. But my assumption is that Dynamics is in a iteration DevOps growth phase itself in becoming what would should be a full blown, very well working ERP for manufacturing. But it's not quite there yet and it has some opportunities for growth. AKA why you have Salesforce and also another contract, contract, homegrown thing kind of all is that this is, is, is Dynamics the central thing here and everything kind of plugs into that or is it more revolving three circles and a wheel around each other?
• 12:07
  Speaker B: That's a great question because, because Dynamics is our ERP and quite frankly more, more specifically for a majority of our financial processes, our order management happens in Dynamics. But what we, what we've done and What I've learned and I'll, I'll be honest with you, I think majority of the ERPs for companies like mine struggle. We're not an auto manufacturer, right. So, so even if you had an SAP or whatever it is, we also custom built our own manufacturing or you know, call it an MRP if you want. Mainly because we knew regardless of what ERP we went to, we were going to have to heavily customize that to make it work for flour milling anyway. And so then you've got the cost of the software package, whether it be an SAP or a Dynamics or Infor or Oracle or any of them. And then you've got the cost of managing and maintaining all the stuff you had to build on top of it. And so, you know, we, we made the decision that we're going to use these tools and then you brought up Salesforce as well. We could have easily went with Dynamics CRM, but we also, because we have a heavy reliance on Microsoft, we didn't want to put every egg in one basket as well. So that was the reason why we decided Salesforce would work. But I do agree with you that Dynamics is in its early stage. They're making a lot of investments in it. We're seeing a lot of growth in capabilities that we have around that. And so we've got. Oh, sorry about that.
• 13:41
  Speaker A: Let him speak. He has issues with Dynamic. He loves Dynamics Buddies or he either loves Dynamics or just likes it, but I think he likes it because he's like, why are you speaking bad about our baby?
• 13:52
  Speaker B: But you know, so we try to blend and use these tools like a Dynamics of Salesforce workday, you know, those for the things they're built for and we manage them appropriately because of that. And so that way we're not heavily customizing because we don't have a lot of people. And so when you heavily, I mean everybody knows when you start heavily customizing these apps, you don't get as much support from the, from the companies that actually own them. And you, you have to manage them a little bit different.
• 14:23
  Speaker A: In your history of, since the days of you have a pulse and know how to plug in a printer, you've, you've seen it move from, hey, we need some nerds that know how to work this stuff. And it wasn't even an example to now it's a actual thing that you could probably go to college for and then get out in the real world and have to learn everything all over again. Or for the first time we have a few, we have a Few fun questions to answer.
• 14:51
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 14:51
  Speaker A: What is the most ludicrous request you have ever received from executive management? And this could just be a make believe request. It doesn't actually have to be real, but it could be close to possibly the truth. What is the most ludicrous request you've ever received from executive manager?
• 15:09
  Speaker B: Oh my, my goodness. The most. Well, that is a great.
• 15:13
  Speaker A: There's just so many we can't choose.
• 15:16
  Speaker B: Yeah, I'm actually drawing a blank.
• 15:20
  Speaker A: First thing that comes to mind, the.
• 15:22
  Speaker B: First one actually comes to mind was early in my career where, you know, people were really struggling with how these computers worked and what they were working on. And I had somebody that spent, you know, all day working on something I guess, you know, I'm going to assume didn't save it or something like that. It was well before we had Autosave going on any of these words. He's working on a PowerPoint presentation for a big, it was a big deal because we were in the midst of a merger that they were going to break, break up, break off. So they were doing board prep and I, I felt terrible.
• 16:03
  Speaker A: I can feel it already.
• 16:04
  Speaker B: Six hours turned off his computer to go home or something. Didn't save. I'm like, well, it had to warn you about it. And he goes, well, I always get all these pop ups, right? You know, so I just hit no, no, no, no, no. And, and he's like, well, you got to recreate it. It's got to be in there somewhere. I was like, ah, look, I don't, there's no chance to be able to do. And he was not happy. He was, you know, of course you got the. Why do I pay for IT resources when you can't solve problems when they're there? And that's the one that I, I remember just looking and going, there's not a thing I can do about this. But you felt, you know, I felt terrible for the guy. I'm sure there are other ones, but I mean, I don't know. To your point, we probably just block them out. I can't think of any really good points.
• 16:53
  Speaker A: What type of. You can pick either or what type of IT leaders are going to fail in the upcoming years, in the future ahead, or what type of IT leaders are really going to excel.
• 17:05
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think there's, there's a shift and it's already happening and I, I see it around but the I to me, the technology leaders that, that just continue to focus only on technology and don't understand the business and the business Problems that they're solving are not going to last. They're already not lasting. It's, it's, you know, I go so, so our company, although you know, at a revenue line we probably look like a pretty big company. I think we're about four or four and a half billion the revenue line. But we're a flower manufacturer so you know, we're scraping pennies off of that. So you're, you're selling four and a half million dollars to hopefully make about $300 million. So you gotta run pretty lean, you know, more like a mid market, maybe a little bit bigger than a mid market. So I go to a lot of conferences with also, you know, they'll call it kind of larger organizations and mid market organizations. And the difference that I see is a lot of the, the mid market leaders are just hell bent on this new technology is out. So I have to find a way to wedge it into whatever I'm doing as opposed to, you know, you know, our, you know, the question that we make our team answer every time is how will whatever we're doing help us sell more flour or make it at a better cost or sell new products? If we can't answer that question, there's no reason for us to be doing it. And so, so to back to your question, these folks that are here trying to implement technology for technology's sake are the ones to me that are going to get left behind. And when you're balancing that and understanding kind of the, I'll call it the industry you're in and, and, and what is the right thing for that business? I think those are the ones that continue to, to grow, to, to drive change, to align, to be looked at as a partner, to quite frankly to be looked at as a, as a fundamental resource for that business as opposed to a cost center and expense of that.
• 19:03
  Speaker A: What's the key differentiator or what's the key piece that makes someone a business partner versus a dude we slip pizzas under the door to in the server room?
• 19:17
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean to me it's business acumen. It's truly understanding how the business works and then how technology compliments that business. And there's a lot of folks that again, you start talking to them and you realize they really don't have any idea how their business works. They're just trying to drive new technologies. And some of them, you know, and again we see the, I see these a lot. You've got these folks that are, I call them resume builders. Right. They want to implement some Technology so that they can move to the, to the next thing and they've got something on their resume that kind of talks about that. But you got to balance it. And believe me when I tell you this isn't rocket science. More and more people we're seeing shift to really understanding the business that goes. I am so sorry, Phil.
• 20:01
  Speaker A: Nope, you're good. Happens all the time. Usually it's my kids setting up the fire alarm. So had that happen like five times, toasting a piece of bread, setting off the fire alarm. Okay, here's what's, this is very interesting to me. You're at a conference, you're with some mid market guys or you're with a bunch of dudes. What are the top three telltale signs? They have no clue about being a business partner in it.
• 20:23
  Speaker B: Yeah, because the easiest way for me is I start trying to talk to them about how, you know, what, what margins they make, where and how, you know, how their, how their company, you know, just asking simple questions like, all right, what do you guys sell? And then you get into, well, what, what's the margins on that? Are you creating that or are you buying it from somebody else? Are you a pass through? You start asking them questions more specific to their business, whether it be how they manufacture, what their sales approach is, you know, that type of thing. And they can't answer the question. And you start looking and you're like, well, how do you, how do you know which technology to implement if you don't understand, you know, what and how your business operates? You know, so like, I think about our, our business as well, right? Not only are we having to manufacture the flour, so we're, you know, procuring wheat, we've gotta, we've gotta bring it into the elevators, we've gotta, we've gotta grade it, then we've gotta separate it, we've got to break it out, we've gotta test it. You know, we build off big contracts, but being able to kind of explain your business is the first and quite frankly, only sign I usually need.
• 21:36
  Speaker A: So no clue what gross margin is?
• 21:39
  Speaker B: Well, and even, even if you don't know how it's calculated, you should have a pretty good idea. If you're the head IT person of a company, you should be able to answer some basic questions like, what's your profit margin? What are, what's your, you know, whether you do ebit or like we do profit before tax instead of ebit. And, and, you know, how does that work? You know, what's your revenue? You know, Just trying to kind of, you know, for me, I'm kind of, you know, one of the, one of the leadership qualities that we look for, or quite frankly just qualities in general for people, we call it relentlessly curious. And that fits me perfectly because I'm always trying to kind of understand a bit more about whatever it is somebody's doing. So tell me more about what you know and how your company operates. What are they selling? Who are their customers? Who, who would buy who. Who buys that type of stuff? Like people ask me that all the time. Who's your customers? Because. And then you start telling them. They're like, I don't even know who that is. And I'm like, yeah, because they're big. Huge. You know, bakers and such, you know, you know, you say Mondale and they go, I don't know who that is. And you say, have you ever heard of Oreos? And they're like, yes, I have heard of Oreos. I was like, you know who Mondelez is? But, you know, it's these bigger, it's.
• 22:50
  Speaker A: These bigger companies that are General Mills, 21st century grain. We should go through. Been going through all of these things.
• 22:56
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
• 22:57
  Speaker A: You and I actually have a lot in common. I haven't told you, but my, my cousin's actually, he's a retired captain and from the merchant marines that had been running a massive ship that's like so big. I can't believe it. Forever gone for like eight months out of the year. My father in law was like President and CEO of 21st Century Grants. Before that it was a ConAgra guy. I don't, I don't know, some crazy high up level in conagra and he makes grain sound exciting. Kind of like trying to make it sound exciting.
• 23:27
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 23:28
  Speaker A: But our number one value, our number one value under our values, right below the mission actually for the podcast is intellectual curiosity and diversity of thought. So curiosity. Curiosity is, um. I liked how you put it more of a. What'd you say?
• 23:44
  Speaker B: Relentless or relentlessly curious?
• 23:46
  Speaker A: Relentlessly curious.
• 23:47
  Speaker B: Call it. Yeah.
• 23:49
  Speaker A: So love it. The. Okay, so number one, you. Of the. Of the top three telltale signs that no one has a clue that they're a business partner or ever will be a business partner is you are unable to explain the business or in short, probably don't know what gross margin is, even if you don't know how to calculate it. No big deal. What's another one?
• 24:08
  Speaker B: Yeah, another one is when they start showing me the SQL that they're writing for some. I don't know, patch or something. We used to always use this term for them. We would call them patches. So if they're the ones that are having to write out the SQL codes or the scripts and that's how it's like. Again, that doesn't feel like the best use of the time for the lost of the minutiae. The top IT person. Right. And. And I'll be honest with you, it's been so long since I wrote anything. I. I would look at and be like, okay, I'm sure that's fine, but, you know, but I have.
• 24:52
  Speaker A: They actually asked you to check it. Okay, yeah. Okay. And there could be any number of examples of that. Some. I don't know. Yeah, maybe DBA thing or something.
• 25:02
  Speaker B: Unfortunately, you'd be surprised how many times people have tried to show or share with me some code or script that they write or. And I was like, yeah, you know what, Great. Let me give you, you know, whoever it is on my team that you should share that with.
• 25:17
  Speaker A: But I mean, I wonder if I, I doubt Zuckerberg still codes, even though I'm sure he.
• 25:21
  Speaker B: I mean, he might. I don't know. But I would hope that he doesn't.
• 25:27
  Speaker A: No, he's busy with Jiu Jitsu. Yeah. Okay, we need a third one. Third telltale sign.
• 25:33
  Speaker B: Yeah, third one.
• 25:36
  Speaker A: You should be our guy. That's just like a sidekick that comes on like, we should be like, okay, vote, business partner or not. And we're like, yeah, or something. You know what I mean? This would be fun.
• 25:45
  Speaker B: I'm trying to think the other ones. And this one, this one's a little bit tougher. But when, when everybody comment coming out of their mouth because, Because I see this one. A lot is around just security, which again, isn't a bad thing. But when, when, when all they're really more a CISO than a. Than a cio. And that's not a bad thing. But if you get, you know, hell bent into one specific area, it's really hard for you to be. Be good at supporting all the. The rest of those areas. And how do you balance that time? Now, that one's a tougher one because whoever that person's working for, depending on the size of the org or whatever it is, security might be the thing they have to be. Right. But I think at some point it will limit their upward mobility, whether it be within that company or branching out beyond that company.
• 26:35
  Speaker A: In other words, what you're saying is it could just be their biggest challenge right now. And why, you know, I Guess why I don't tout them for that or something. You know what I mean? Because that just might be their biggest challenge, and that's why they're asking you. But the coding one's a clear example. Okay, so they talk about security more than they talk about being a generalist and a leader of sorts. I guess.
• 26:56
  Speaker B: Yeah. And like I, Like I said, you know, it's. You talk. You talk to them and understand a bit more about the size, and then you're thinking and you try to kind of understand if you're leading all of it, why are you so focused in one area? And not that security is a bad place to be focused. Don't, don't, don't mishear me. But, but that's. That would be the other one that I, that I see a lot where I'm like, okay, this, this person, this person is really more of a cso and, and, and, and I, you know, I need some really smart people that, that are really good in that space. I mean, honestly, time. There are times when I'm, I'm like, I should maybe try to recruit this person to come and work in our security group because they have such passion behind it.
• 27:42
  Speaker A: The. Well, you brought up another point. Upskilling and finding good talent and keeping good talent is that we, we find here after the data shows that that is a problem.
• 27:54
  Speaker B: Oh, it's definitely a problem. It's, It's. You know, I, I think there's. There's a couple things. One, One of, One of them is we, we. We rob instead of trying to figure out the best way to build the talent base. Right. I think the other one is. And there's. There's a program that we're implementing at Art, at Mills. We call it Earn and Learn. But the idea and the concept behind it is, is kind of shifting this paradigm that says there are more jobs in technology, it in particular, that do not actually require a college degree than there are that require college degrees. And so how do you break this paradigm that says, you know, maybe people that can't afford to go to college or. Quite frankly, what I find is, you know, some of the best developers don't have the patience for college. And so how do you help them flourish, learn, grow, and build? You know, I'll call it a larger base. The pandemic helped us in this space because it allowed us to, you know, we've kind of embraced hybrid and remote work. So back when we had to have everybody in Denver, it was much harder because you were just robbing from each other. Right? I mean, you know, anytime you were filling a role, you were taking it from. And we had a bit of a close community in Denver and with the tech leaders. And so you're kind of robbing from, from your buddies in some way, shape or form. And so we were really trying to kind of build the talent base up. Being able to work remote has expanded our reach. But I still think one of the biggest gap areas here is helping people understand that technology is in everything. And no matter what job you're going to be, you have to be a technologist. Right? I mean, we, like I talk about with our mills, even in our mills, folks that are working the production lines in our mills have to understand technology.
• 29:45
  Speaker A: So is there something about the team dynamic then that no matter what you, you become, how do you become unrobable?
• 29:51
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's about culture. So that's about how you help to, you know, have people be heard. You listen. When you've got these folks that are, you know, we talked, we started earlier on the Agile zealot, so to speak, and you listen and you try to help them and you make them think through a little bit more of the why, you know, we need to blend this a bit. You, you need to make them feel and understand why what they're doing every day matters and how it drives to the bottom line. When I first got to Ardent seven years ago, we do a, like, at most companies, we do an employee survey. And one of the questions on the employee survey was, what, you know, what impact do I have on the customer experience? And my IT group basically said, we have the impact on the, on the cutter experience. I'm like, well, that couldn't be farther from the truth. And you know, we, so we walk through a few examples to your point. When we went live in Dynamics, we had a big impact on the customer experience for a while. You know, like most ERP implementations, right, they're not easy because they span across every function and every process. And so helping them to kind of bring a little bit more of focus and vision and mission to what they do every day, to the broader good. And, you know, it's. I've worked in agriculture and food production for 29 years now. And what I love is when I get to go out and talk to folks like you and others, you know, and they ask me kind of what we do, my answer is always, I get to help feed the world. And there's no bigger, you know, in my mind anyway, there's very few bigger missions than that when we think about kind of our world and where we're at and, and what we need to do to continue to, to progress and make sure that nobody's hungry, that there's enough food and how do we, how do we manufacture and do that the right way and so how do you help IT People connect what they're doing every day to that broader mission. That's how you try to become, you know, quote, unquote, unravel. And we've done a good job with that. You know, our attrition rates are pretty low and so you know that that's a long, it's a long winded answer to your question. But that to me it's really the culture keeps manager and the culture keeps people. But you've got to have a way to get the right talent in and not put barriers around it. And, and really barriers that, that don't mean that much. Finding the right people is the most important thing. Attitude, aptitude, those are the two things. Everything else, if you got the right attitude and you've got the right aptitude, the rest of it, we can, we can bring you along and make you really great at what you do.
• 32:26
  Speaker A: Two more things. How do we, how do we, how do we con? Is that convinced? But how do we sell? Since you brought up selling, which I think is important and that might be a. Maybe the question is more what's, what's the attitude or, or the thing that we don't know or the paradigm shift that a, you know, curious IT minded person has. What's the biggest, I guess what's the biggest paradigm shift? What's the biggest paradigm shift in thinking that an technology minded person needs to make in order to become a business partner?
• 33:09
  Speaker B: O that's a really good question because I'll be honest with you, I'm not convinced every person in technology needs to have a full and complete understand. I think everybody should have a high level understanding what they do in particular what they're doing every day that enables what we as a business where I see people struggle the most is really this idea about being relentlessly curious in the fact that most people. You've been in technology for a while. I've been in technology for a while. If you're in technology, it's typically because you love technology, you love the advancements, the ideas. I'm sure there are things that are happening even today as we start thinking about AI and now deep sea coming in and potentially, you know, disrupting. But, but that tends to get a lot of it Tech folks really jazzed up and that's the stuff they really like to continue to learn. And then you start throwing in and some, you know, I had a couple people tell me in the boring business stuff into that, and it's like, yeah, okay, I can understand why you might say it's boring, but the more you understand about it, the better you can go out and find really cool technology to enable. So to me, the biggest hurdle to get over is this idea that the business stuff doesn't matter as long as I get to do cool technology. And what I try to tell people is it's understanding the business stuff that gives you the license to bring in.
• 34:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, you may just be wasting time and blowing up the business with all your technology.
• 34:45
  Speaker B: Yeah. If, if all you want to do is bring technology in and you have no way to show the value it brings, why on earth would they do it? They shouldn't do it.
• 34:55
  Speaker A: Do you see a, do you see a. How do we convince executive management that this new explosion in AI is not going to replace it?
• 35:09
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm, we're in the middle of that right now. And what I, you know, I continue to use, and again, I didn't coin this phrase, I heard it somewhere else and, but I liked it and I use it instead of artificial, I use augmented. So to me, AI is augmented intelligence, the ability to have information quicker so that people can make decisions. And what we continue to remind folks are, is that in no way, shape or form has anything we've ever done been done to try to replace or get rid of people. Now we work in an industry, Manufacturing in general has a shortage. So, so we're, we're forced to implement some of this technology because we just quite frankly can't recruit enough people to run our. And we're not the only ones. It's not just flour milling that's struggling in this as we go. And so this, this, this concept of augmented intelligence allows you. So think about this today. And, and this is the example I use with, with our senior leadership team as we were talking about kind of the value that AI can bring. And, and so today, if you're in our customer service organization and you have a customer call us about status on an order or where, where it's going, you potentially have to go into multiple systems to get all, a little bit of information about all of what AI allows us to do. And when you're in a company like ours, because we explained orders at the beginning, part of it's done in salesforce Part of it's done in our custom tool called Vault, part of it's done in Dynamics and you're looking in reporting and some of the other areas. So what we're working on right now, and the concepts are showing that it works really well, is having an agent for our customer service to say, give me all the relevant details on this order and it goes out and it immediately brings that to them instead of them having to go out and do it. Now I'm not on the customer service team.
• 37:02
  Speaker A: Basically an API call screen, pop from everything or gather all the information, pop it in on screen versus three different screens with F1, F2, 4, 4 or 5, and all these other keys.
• 37:10
  Speaker B: Well, nine times out of ten, Phil, they got to look at them and say, hey, let me go and look and I'll get back to you.
• 37:15
  Speaker A: How about even a third have taken even. Because I've seen some use cases where you've taken it even a step further. I know it works really well in the medical industry, but really kind of finding out what are the majority of your calls about to begin with. So like in the medical industry, yeah, you know, it's like 30% of the calls are, no offense to the elderly, but you know, what, what's the location of where my appointment is? Right. So that's something that AI can really quite knock out of the box right away. It can pull up a caller ID and, and say, are you calling about your appointment today at 2:00? You know, and, and because in the, and where it's located, you know, like that's, that immediately eliminated something like, you know, 30% of some odd calls in another place. Are you calling about the billing notice? You know, it's like, like those are the type of things that I don't know if I'd really call it maybe AI or, well, I guess it's automated, you know, you know, got, it's got.
• 38:16
  Speaker B: AI features to it. But I think you're, I mean to me you're, you're spot on. The, the what, what particularly this generative AI capabilities and some of the others can do is some of the mundane tasks that have to be done today that people don't like to do, but they understand it's part of their job. So how do you take some of those things so that. Because I guarantee you go to any person in any role, I could do it, you could do it, anybody can do it. And you can list and say what are the things that, you know, you have to do, but it drives you crazy. But you have to do it. And because you have to do those. What are the things you're not able to do that you would really like to do that you think would bring some value? That to me is the value of AI.
• 38:58
  Speaker A: And when we blend it with security, which you said we don't want need to be talking about that the only time. Which brings us maybe to our final question or one of our final questions and just because I want to put this information out there, because to me, security is an ocean of vendors constantly in my LinkedIn inbox. Phil, Chris, someone's so of, of whatever security team would love to be on your podcast. Yeah, no, just maybe. Well, maybe. Are you gonna pot? Are you gonna sponsor top five or top three? Pick one. Top three security vendors that are very useful to you. Like just. I want some vendors that are like, knock it out of the park for you. Is there anything that's just like, you know, I love this. I'll never leave for at the moment until they change and blow up the company or sell to Broadcom or something.
• 39:47
  Speaker B: I don't know. Great question. First one that pops in the. The value that we've gotten from this tool and capability has been astronomical compared to the cost. And I hate saying that on a podcast that they might see it. So then all of a sudden the cost will go up.
• 40:05
  Speaker A: But no, we're going to, we're going to blank it out. We're going to be, we're going to be of this beep. You got to subscribe to the community to get, to get the answer.
• 40:14
  Speaker B: Exactly. It's a little tool called abnormal. And I don't know how little it is anymore. We've, we've been on it for a while now and I, I came across it in a, in an investor briefing where, you know, there's a group of folks in Denver that they, they would have these, these private equity companies come in and they have, you know, a couple of their companies out of their portfolio present and they presented this abnormal. And you know what, what I like about it is it runs behind the email gateway, but it's constantly looking at, in particular was looking at things like, hey, normally you, when you're interacting via email or others with Phil, he's in. I'm just going to make it up because I don't know where you're at in the U.S. when you are in the U.S. but let's just say Philadelphia. Normally he's in Philadelphia. Now all of a sudden I'm getting emails from him from Morocco or you.
• 41:06
  Speaker A: Know, and Phil doesn't use these words.
• 41:10
  Speaker B: Maybe, well even, even that. But it starts to, it starts to let you know, hey, this person might be compromised. So, you know, and what really stood out to us is, was really, really cool that, you know, I talked to them, my team talked to them, they said, hey, we could plug in real quick and just do a 30 day trial. Doesn't cost you anything. We'll just show you. We won't, we won't, we won't filter anything. We won't.
• 41:32
  Speaker A: I'm a big promotant. I'm a big proponent of the poc.
• 41:36
  Speaker B: Yeah. And that's exactly what it was. And the beauty of it was it showed us that our finance team was interacting with, I think it was three different partners that had been compromised. They did not know because they were smaller partners. And we were able to tell them, hey, you guys have a problem here? And abnormal picked it up. So abnormal at the top of the list.
• 42:01
  Speaker A: Now you're a business partner for your other partners. Not even just technology alone. So now you just helped other exact customers of yours. Interesting. Okay, next one, next one.
• 42:11
  Speaker B: So, so that one would always be at the top of the list. It has continued to just prove valuable over and over again. You know, I think, you know, we, we've, we've Cisco and some of the new capabilities that they're building into their routers and all that allow firewalls and, and the separation between OT and, and your corporate networks and all that, they've been really good. And then we, we use a, we use a partner that's really more for mid size. They do a lot of our security operations work there. It's called Pareto Cyber. Smaller company, but fits us perfectly. We're not a company that can build out a huge cyber organization.
• 42:50
  Speaker A: And are they like soc, Are they like a SOC service? Like security is a, they do soc.
• 42:55
  Speaker B: We pay them a little bit for kind of like a fractional CISO work mainly to help us with the strategy on kind of what's continuing to, to happen in the market and kind of what goes on there. So is it, how do you spell that? P E R P A R E T O. Yeah, just, you know, like I said, a little bit more built for mid size companies. You know, they do a really good job for us. And then, you know, always, my Microsoft reps will hate to hear this. I always, I always hate them.
• 43:27
  Speaker A: I mean we got Cisco, but Cisco is like saying like, are you guys like, is it, is it like a Meraki shop or like Is it higher end stuff through Cisco or is it like the full.
• 43:35
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good question because I don't know what the new stuff is that we're buying. I know we were with Barack, we had Meraki and it's good.
• 43:43
  Speaker A: It's a network guy. You're like the network guy is in charge of that.
• 43:46
  Speaker B: Exactly. I, I, I couldn't tell you, but I know it's allowed us to step away from some of our other firewall vendors because they now have more robust tools to be able to do that. And then, you know, I don't usually like giving Microsoft credit, but you know, I told you we're a Microsoft shop. We have to obviously pay for a lot of their security capabilities and they are, they are absolutely, I think about.
• 44:08
  Speaker A: A year or two years ago and.
• 44:10
  Speaker B: Doing a pretty darn good job.
• 44:11
  Speaker A: Yeah, a year or two years ago it was kind of like we're considering it now. It's strong and strong and better. Strong to quite strong. My Microsoft portfolio is strong to quite strong.
• 44:23
  Speaker B: I would agree.
• 44:24
  Speaker A: Mine is too, so. Well, Chris Meyer, Peter, thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popularity Nerds. It has been a pleasure. Any final words of wisdom or anything to send out to your peers?
• 44:39
  Speaker B: You know, the only other thing that I, that I would say and one, thank you. Thanks for the time. It's great chatting with you. I really enjoyed it. I apologize for all the interruptions.
• 44:48
  Speaker A: No, no, this makes it more fun and it makes it more realistic too. You know, like if I every now and then my Internet goes out, so.
• 44:55
  Speaker B: Makes it definitely more real. Only other thing I would say for all of the great IT leaders that are out there is none of us would be where we're at without the great teams of people that we have around and making sure that we're continuing to recognize those folks being comfortable with ourselves and letting other people learn, grow, develop. That's really to me what's going to help to foster and build that next generation of, of leaders. And I'm sure you have a bunch of them in your, in your, in your network and community here as well. But you know, none of us would be where we are without great teams around.
• 45:37
  Speaker A: Well, a couple questions about, around that actually since this community has only been open for a couple weeks and I've only invited people that were on the podcast as alumni, so to speak, so that we can start to build the seed this community or build the foundation of something that should be meaningful. And when we talk to people about expos that They're a part of or the Norexs of the world or the Gartner magic quadrants of the world or Gartners, sorry of the world that all have various different models and everything. There was four major frustrations that came out of it and that was when we get together and meet with people, it's a mixed bag of people. So we can't have discussions on a, of a sophisticated level because a lot of times in the room it's a mixed bag of people. Number two, it's typically sponsored by a vendor. So it's not that there's like always a problem with that. But typically a lot of these events are secret or vendor events or so we don't really get the, the, the opportunity to connect with each other and have the conversations we want to have maybe behind closed doors and the other one is maybe time and location neutral was a problem. And the fourth one was just a lot of times the participation is uneven. So it might be just one ego dominated guy that wants to get and talk about how he coded something the entire time. So I don't know if that rings true with you. Have you ever been a part of a community that's really meaningful and what were the main aspects that you really loved about it?
• 47:08
  Speaker B: Yeah, and the one that stands out to me is the group that we started through a different organization, but that organization became a little bit more commercialized than we wanted. And this was when in Denver and we decided because we just got along so well that we were going to create our own group. And, and it was exactly what you just talked about. A place where we could be raw, share failures is as much as we could share some of our successes, learn from each other. It was a great, it was a great community. I hosted them in our offices in Denver a couple times. They're still getting, we still get together. But it is exactly what you said. We have no vendors there. People show up because they're genuinely interested in the dialogue and the interactions that they have. And those to me are always the best. It's why I love them. I always kind of joke around to your point about these events you go to, you get the Instagram version of people and my kids taught me about the Finsta Gram way back a long time ago. I don't think Finsta is still is a thing, but I remember asking them and they're like, well, this is where we can be real. This is where we can share kind of our flaws and, and who we really are. Not just the everything's perfect in my world, and nothing's ever bad. And, and those are, to me, the, the more authentic communities that I've ever been a part of. And this one in Denver was phenomenal.
• 48:36
  Speaker A: If you don't mind me asking, what was the. How often did you guys meet monthly and what was the format usually? And who put the format together?
• 48:47
  Speaker B: Yeah, it was, we did have somebody that was kind of like the facilitator, and they would go and ask who wants to host? And whoever the host was would typically talk about either a recent success they had that they were wanting to share with folks to kind of say, hey, look what we've done, or talk about a challenge that they're facing and say, hey, who else has faced this challenge?
• 49:09
  Speaker A: Like a hot seat type of thing.
• 49:11
  Speaker B: Exactly. And so we've done. We've done both of those. So the two that I hosted, one of them was sharing about that Earn and Learn program, how, you know, how we're thinking about it at Ardent Mills, and you know, how we would love for other companies in Denver to come along with us. We're not perfect in it. We want to continue to evolve and learn. The other one that we did was around, I'll call it kind of our bumpy and disjointed data journey. And some of that had to do with some decisions that Microsoft made about technology deprecation and some other stuff. But we, you know, in my mind, we were, we were kind of lost in the wilderness a little bit, trying to kind of figure out the path to go. And so, you know, I wanted to share that with this group to kind of say, all right, who else has either gone through this or is going through this, and what are the ways in which you're trying to help lead your team through it and beyond it, and just great dialogue and we get so much good participation. To your point, we don't have a single person that dominates the conversation. We hear from everybody. They're fantastic people. And, you know, it's, again, that, to me, is the ideal community. How did you guys handle at the door? And you're just there to either learn or teach.
• 50:28
  Speaker A: One of the two did you have. We kind of want to take it even a step further. We kind of want to take some of these, like, success stories and even have people maybe turn it into worthwhile articles or even further presentations that could be turned into potentially even an upskilling course or something like that, or something that could actually be maybe monetized. There's some other ideas as well. Did you guys have like a dues, like a yearly dues or anything like that?
• 50:57
  Speaker B: We, we haven't because we weren't doing big events or anything along those lines. We weren't. Like I said, the facilitator was kind of just putting it together. I don't think anybody was ever opposed to dues, but it was always around kind of what makes sense and why would we do it? Right. I've got another group that I'm a part of that does something similar and it's through AD Gateway, it's called Ag cio. So it's a bunch of agricultural IT leaders that get together. We do have dues and the beauty of those, those dues is we, we use them to do two things. One, we bring college students to the Ag Gateway that want careers in agriculture and we sponsor them to the Ag Gateway Conference annual conference every year so that they get access to other IT leaders and, and other business leaders in ag. And then the second thing we do is because a lot of our, our, our members there are in smaller shops. They don't necessarily get what I'll call kind of the, the, the white glove treatment from a Microsoft or an Amazon or whatever it is. And you've got a couple bigger shops that do get that. And so we started putting together like we did one trip up to Seattle and we spent a day with Microsoft, we spent a day with Amazon and then went and toured. We did another one in Denver where I hosted them and then we had Google come in because Google's got a big office in Boulder. And then we brought in a couple folks to talk about automation, RPA from some of our, our members, those, those two groups, the, the Denver CIO group and this Ag CIO group. There are no vendors, there are no sales pitches. We, we, we curate the, the content that, that they're there to present. We're trying to help drive that. That is to me a great use of those dudes. It allows them as a member to pay into it and then we've, we typically will fly or will cover their hotel costs at the, at the spot. They just have to get there and it works out really well and we get a lot of really good feedback from some of these small co ops and small shops are like, hey, we don't ever get that kind of audience with Microsoft. We're just not big enough. But as a collective group we are. And that's, you know, obviously enticing to a Microsoft and Amazon, a Google, a Cisco. I mean we can, we can you pick your big vendors and then we can kind of see what's on the roadmaps and such. And I think that's where they get a lot of value.
• 53:22
  Speaker A: Beautiful. If you don't mind me asking, what's the dues for that type of group?
• 53:27
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think for Ag cio, I think we paid two grand a year, something like that. Not much.
• 53:32
  Speaker A: Okay, cool. Really appreciate the feedback, man. All right, so here's what happens next. I take this. It gets curated by our production team. They cut it up, make a few shorts and one minute video. You get a webpage on our website with a link to your LinkedIn. The. I don't know how many podcasts are in the queue right now. We might have five or six in the queue. Probably release in a week or two and it'll go up on, you know, DPIT dissecting popular IT nerds.com or popularity.net and we'll release it on. On the. On LinkedIn. Of course. We're kind of in the midst of. We never really got around to doing Instagram and YouTube that much because, I don't know, it's. I mean, it is exciting, but I don't know if it's like YouTube exciting. It is a little bit. But the. But we're working on that. So if you will be part of that now. So you've been one of the first and any feedback or anything that you have for us, you're in the community now. So we've got in. Chris Roberts. Event will be coming up. I don't know if you know Chris Roberts. He's in Boulder actually.
• 54:35
  Speaker B: I do not know.
• 54:36
  Speaker A: He's a CISO with like a. Like a big long kind of goatee, Scottish dude that give. That does a lot of talks, but he's actually in Boulder. I went to csu, so don't hold that against me.
• 54:48
  Speaker B: I didn't go to Boulder or csu. I'm not from Denver originally, so I don't have any affiliation.
• 54:54
  Speaker A: I'm. I'm a Massachusetts guy originally. So. Yeah. So I really appreciate your time and been a lot of fun.
• 55:00
  Speaker B: Yeah, I appreciate it. Sorry about all the interruptions.
• 55:03
  Speaker A: No, it's all good, man. Have a great day. We'll be. We'll be in touch soon.
• 55:06
  Speaker B: Sounds good. Take care.