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340- From Shadow IT to Innovation: Transforming Business Through Technology by Jeff Cann. · You've Been Heard

• 0:04
  Speaker A: Hi, nerds. I'm Michael Moore, hosting this podcast for dissecting popular IT nerds. I'm here with Jeff Can, Chief Information Officer at Encore Electric Incorporated. Hey, Jeff, how's it going today?
• 0:14
  Speaker B: I'm doing great, Michael. I'm really happy to be here today. Thank you.
• 0:17
  Speaker A: Well, we're happy to have you. We're going to jump right into our first segments, our Icebreaker segment. We love to call it Random Access Memories. I ask a question and then you just respond with the answer that comes to your head.
• 0:29
  Speaker B: First.
• 0:29
  Speaker A: First. The first question you got is if you could give any IT related advice or tip to your younger self, what would it be?
• 0:39
  Speaker B: I would say probably the biggest thing is be prepared for lifelong learning. I think it is such a great field and it can be applied across all businesses. We like to talk about the idea that we're in the technology business even though we're a construction company, because we can't really do anything without technology anymore. And so through the different industries I worked in, it's shocking to me how much, and this is the fun of it, how much you have to learn about how these businesses operate. And so for me to learn an industry through technology is really the most exciting part of it. And I think further in my career I was really all about the tech skills and getting really good at different things. And really now I see the bigger picture of wow, these things really apply these technologies and skills applied to solving business problems. That's where you really get the satisfaction of the job. Because then people who are struggling with a problem, they now have a solution that you've helped create. And so I think that's what's the most satisfying part of it. So that lifelong learning that leads to problem solving, which leads to user satisfaction, that virtuous circle is really important. And I think that's what advice I would give my younger self.
• 1:42
  Speaker A: Yeah, lifelong, constantly accelerating learning is really what it is. That's a good advice. I agree with it. If you could create any IT related community or group, what would it be and why?
• 1:59
  Speaker B: I think I would create a construction focused IT community. I think because construction is now being inundated with new technologies. There's been more than 1800 companies started in the past six or seven years specifically focused on IT construction problems for two reasons. One is the construction industry now can afford some of these tools where in the past they couldn't. And the tools are sufficiently advanced to tackle the more difficult problems of construction. But now you have a bunch of siloed practitioners in different companies. Whether GCS or specialty mechanical electrical plumbing like we are. And I just don't know that we figured out how to really talk about our problems as a group and try to collectively solve them outside traditional sort of user conferences and things like that. But I think that generic construction, it would be a great group to build.
• 2:51
  Speaker A: And literally build with construction. Your last one is what is the most exciting or thrilling IT related game or challenge that you have played or participated in.
• 3:05
  Speaker B: I'm going to go back to our Covid days when we had a team building exercise. This is the middle of COVID and we decided to do a virtual escape room. And as an IT leader, I was looking to experiment. I was trained as a scientist, so I'm always thinking about things in terms of experiments. And I was really, I didn't give the teams any direction. We broke up into different groups and I was just a teammate at that point. No one was really a leader. And I was really curious to see would we solve the escape room using our talents as IT people or will we just individually try to be the smartest person in the room? And so it was a very thrilling time. It was like the submarine escape and you had to figure out the whole puzzle or else the submarine was going to explode. And so ultimately we failed because we just went into like, I'm really smart, I'm in it, I can figure this puzzle out. And we didn't work together. So that was an experiment to me that said, gee whiz, what can we learn from this? How can we grow as a team? How do we work together as a team instead of just being a collection of really smart individuals? So it was really fun experiments and I think we definitely learned from it for sure.
• 4:13
  Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. Well, I mean, and you segued really very well, really into kind of our next kind of spot where we, where I wanted to actually talk to you a bit about this. I looked at, I do a little bit of cyber stalking ahead of time. Right. I look at people's profiles and, and look. And look at what they say and you have all over your profile how much you enjoy working with teams, building teams and getting people excited to do things. I was, I was intrigued by this because, you know, we haven't had a. Had lots of people in here having different discussions and stuff like that. But I wanted to dive into something specific that I think is always interesting. It's always, you know, people love building teams and I, I think a lot. It's a great, it's a great opportunity. You get to meet Great people. You get to great create, you know, and pick what you need to build these teams. I always kind of say it takes several years usually to, to build a good team. A lots of, lots of kind of, okay, we got this. Now we got to figure out what we're missing here and add these different things. And during that time the business itself will experience good times and they'll experience bad times. Right. And so we all kind of feel sometimes, you know, things are going well and you can get those resources to get those teams. You can, you can work in that. But, and, and we focus sometimes in that realm. But what we don't talk about a lot is the times where things are not going so well. Right. And you don't get all those resources for the teams and you get a lot of, there's a lot of pressure that builds. There's a lot of, you know, items and maybe cost restraints and, and, and different restraints that happen. A lot of pressure from multiple groups coming at you. I would love to hear how you build a team right during those times.
• 6:14
  Speaker B: It's a great question, Michael, because one of the things that's interesting about construction is if you laid out a grid of industry by IT spend, construction is just above hunting and farming or even below retail and banking. So if you ever interview folks who work in those sectors, they know that the purse strings are a little tighter. And so naturally we have constraints about those issues, resource constraints. So I've learned over the years it's really a multi phase conversation. One is we'll come back to the team building part. But the bigger picture is how does the company understand the role of it? How does the company understand the priorities that it's giving or not giving to the IT team? And so I think that's a big part of it because IT folks want to be helpful and generally they say yes often. And I think we sometimes accidentally learn to not say no. And so that's part of this is finding our voice to say no. We don't have the resources to do that. Or if you want us to do X and we've agreed to Y and we can't do both, pick one. Which one do you want us to work on? Which one's more important? So I think that's always a big strategy, Michael, is to have the business partner with you, if you will, your partners throughout the company to try to decide which of these priorities is most important if you can't do them all. Now one thing about construction that's nice is we only have so many Electricians that we can have on job sites. So this company, Encore, tends to intuitively understand that if we need foreign electricians and our customers bring needs for another 200, we just have to say no, we don't have the other 200. So it's a little bit easier here in some respects. So I think that's part of it because that helps take the pressure away from the team of trying to do everything for everyone all the time. Because I think that's unsustainable.
• 8:00
  Speaker A: I agree, yeah, I agree. No to interrupt here, but I agree with that and I think that's a fantastic strategy. I've actually seen it work before and seen been many different methods that people have employed to do that. I want to follow up on that though and specifically tackle your method and how you communicate that to the other executives. So that, and not only that, how you communicate to, you know, communicate it out to your team when they communicate at the non executive level. Right. So the message is coherent and stays, stays throughout the entire team.
• 8:40
  Speaker B: What we've done, Encore is kind of a twofold approach. The first is really basic. It's just like trying to be clear on what are the priorities. So we have four priorities of work. One is something we call vital few project, which is an enterprise project. It affects everyone. And, and we use that language, vital few to mean like so for example, we're doing a UKG HR implementation. That's a vital few project. It affects the entire company. We need to put resources behind it. All the executives agree and support it. Then there's tier two things which are sort of enterprise or company wide level, but not a vital few. Priority three is department level things and priority for individual contributor things. So you might have someone in payroll that says I'd really love to add this field to this report. Right, that's a priority four. And so by communicating those priorities that helps contextualize how much time should we spend on each of those. Obviously the vital few requires the most time. But we don't want to forget about the fourth priority ones because that payroll report might be really important. Just it'll never get done if we just focus on the top two or three priorities. So that's, that's step one is having that clear framework and then using that language and communicating with all the folks, whether they're executive level or sort of that middle manager level, grassroots level, to say, hey, you brought us a level 2 or priority to project. And here's what that looks like. Here's the time when we think we can start to work on it. And that feeds into our scrum approach with, you know, how do we select and work on work as it comes forward. So that's the kind of the functional way, Michael, that we try to understand priorities. Because without priorities, we found that people who had a simple request think it's just as important as the enterprise project. And that's not untrue from that user's perspective. But ultimately what they need to do is figure out, hey, this one thing's going to help you, this other thing's going to help 1200 people. So we've got to figure out, given our limited resources, how to focus on those tasks without forgetting those individual needs that are. That are important. So that's how we do that. The other part, in terms of how do we get other teammates to buy in, it's really having those executive relationships, having one on ones with key executives like the coo, the president, strategy officer, cfo, et cetera, talking about what are their team priorities. This ties into our business planning process and to just. And then at the end of the day, we get to the end of our business planning and I usually have a pretty long list of projects that people want and we've talked about it, we understand them. And then we try to go through that process of saying, okay, as an executive level, can we decide which projects we want to look at funding for this next year? And then go back to those folks that, oh yeah, we're going to work on this project or no, this one's going to have to wait. And we just have to manage those relationships very carefully when you have to tell someone no, because we feel like it's better to say no, we're not working on this now, to be clear, versus not responding to you or letting you believe that we're working on it when we're not really working on it. So that old adage of let your nose be nos is something we've tried to embrace instead of just trying to keep people happy but not disappointed. The fact of scarcity is that we don't have unlimited resources, we don't have unlimited IT people. We can't get every project done. So we just have to be honest with ourselves and honest with our teammates across the company about what we can and can't do. So I think that clarity, Michael, is really the essence of this whole thing. And we try to use relationships to make sure at the executive level that if they have a pet project, for example, and it doesn't get funded, they're not going to poison the well, with sort of being upset that it's not been funded and whatnot. So it's a delicate balance. It takes a ton of time and effort and you can never set this kind of thing on autopilot. It just has to be said and cared for on a regular basis. Otherwise things, bad things start to happen in terms of morale and conflict and then team on stress on the team happens as a result.
• 12:29
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• 15:12
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• 15:25
  Speaker A: Hey, let's talk about that too. You got so you got, you know, you get stress on a team all the time. You're going to get it because even if you can plan out all these projects and get them approved and prioritize them and stuff like that, we all know that, you know, something's going to go down. You're going to have something shoved in to your project pipeline that goes above all of them because it's a legal matter or has to do with something that is blown up and needs to be fixed. You have these unplanned, unexpected projects that appear out of nowhere that will push other things to the side, stress people out. Right. So how do you galvanize people, right, during times like this? Right? It's easy to, you know, to get people excited when you got a lot of stuff, everything. But when you go to look at your bag of treats and it's nearly empty, right? You know, at what point, you know, what kind of tricks do you pull out of your sleeve to be able to, to make people excited and, and continue the work and put their best foot forward?
• 16:30
  Speaker B: That's a great question. And I think it has to do with the kind of people we try to hire onto our teams. I think the best profile for our team is someone. We call them A players and we use the who method. It's a method for hiring a players. It's a great book. I highly recommend it. If you follow their sort of recipe, you'll end up hiring great people. And an A player is someone who's excited to be there. They're motivated by really serving others and so they understand that sometimes it's serving others on a project that's going well and it's planned. And serving others means fix the accounting upload that breaks every third Tuesday or whatever. And so I think that's where we tried to remind ourselves that we're doing more than just firefighting. Sometimes firefighting is important, but it's also an incentive for us in some senses to fix that thing that breaks every Thursday so it doesn't break anymore. So for me, it gives an incentive for automation and sort of true problem analysis and troubleshooting. On the IT side, it also helps the customers feel good. I think also it's important to have that one on one relationship with individuals to try to understand what is their motivating factors for work, what satisfies them. If some people like to firefight and we joke about them, that a culture of firefighters breeds a lot of arsonists, and in IT terms, what that means is you don't, you always band aid stuff and it has to break and then you have to come in and be the hero to fix it. I try to preach more like, hey, the less firefighting we have to do, the better it is to work on the fun stuff. So, for example, we have a lot of need coming up for API integrations. And so the team is really getting ramped up on that technology and they're chomping at the bit to use it. And so that's an incentive that we can have to say, okay, well, let's get some of this firefighting taken care of, push it to where it's breaking very infrequently so that we can have more time to work on sort of the fun stuff. And I think so trying to remember people that they're servants to everyone, no matter firefighting and projects, trying to have a balance of incentives and then also kind of making sure that the team understands that everyone's equal, everyone's got to jump in and fix that firefighting problem. We're not just going to stick it to the new guy or whatever that even the most senior people get involved. It tends to create a meritocracy where people kind of by their efforts can earn, you know, praise and plaudits from their teammates, but also rewards, et cetera, as an employee. So I try to make it like a true, hey, we're all equals here. The best ideas win. Let's just work together and make things better. And when you hire the people who have that philosophy, they're excited to do that. Right? So I think that's the key ingredient. You've got to have the right people who match that philosophy.
• 19:13
  Speaker A: I think that's great. And let's. You mentioned firefighting. Right? But so when we take an extinguisher and we put out all the fires and, and you know, we Talked a little bit about the, the bad times. Let's talk about the good times, right? So we, we put out all the fires and things are running great. We've got projects planned, but they're. And they're set. They're set up correctly. And, and the business is not hearing much from, you know, stuff that's going on. You. Then you have the other problem, which is the business is not hearing much about what's going on. Right? And they're like, hey, why. Why do we have so many people in the IT department? You know, why do we have. Why do we have so many research? Why are they taking up a bunch of money? How do you handle that?
• 20:00
  Speaker B: It's a great question. I'll tell you a quick story. This was really fascinating to me. One of my colleagues years ago commented to one of my teammates who had switched his career from electrician to IT guy, which is actually more common than you would think. They're very overlapping skill sets. And so this gentleman who was a former electrician, was talking to this other person and he kind of said, why do we have so many IT guys? My laptop never breaks. And so in that conversation, my colleague on the IT team figured out that his model, this guy's model was. It is like the mechanics, and we're just sort of waiting in the bay for you to drive your car in with the problem and then we troubleshoot it and fix it. And so this, this former electrician who fielded this question, I was not in the room. This was fantastic. I heard this secondhand. Later, the gentleman who fielded the question sort of took that opportunity, explained to him and said, well, actually, we don't just fix the computers. There's this. There's networking and there's firewalls and there's enterprise services and all these other things. Well, that's actually what all these people are doing. And so it was a really great way for a non technical, non IT person to kind of understand what's all the stuff that you don't understand and you shouldn't need to. That's why you've got the IT people. But what's all the stuff that they're working on? And so that's. That's actually that really. That was probably six or seven years ago, Michael. And that was really an epiphany moment for the team where we're like, oh, actually, we need to kind of try to educate our teammates, these electricians that build really complicated buildings, data centers, hospitals. You can look@oncoelectric.com and see all of our great work. It is super complicated stuff. These guys are very intelligent, they're great craftsmen, and yet they're kind of intimidated by it. So we have to make sure that we talk to them in their terms and make sure we're clear on what we're working on. And so again, it's that constant communication of here's what we're doing. And so, for example, this week we have a quarterly management group meeting where it's about 50 or so department level folks and one of my IT managers is going to come and show a graphical scoreboard that lists our eight services for the help desk and shows trend analysis of how we're doing on phishing and how we're doing on this and how we're doing on that. Because we're always constantly having that conversation of what's the value that it's bringing to the business. And when things are quiet, that's a good thing. But we're still busy, we're still working on projects and here's the scorecard for the project. So it's that constant reminder of all the things that you don't know unless you're on the team of it, but we're still busy, we're still working, etc. So I think it's again, it's one of those things that requires a lot of care and feeding to make it effective.
• 22:35
  Speaker A: And it's a, it's a great response. The, I do love the fact that he did stand up for that and said, hey, hold on a second. There's other items that you know, that are under the surface. I think I once did a presentation in which I showed an iceberg. Right. So I showed, I showed the, what people see in it and then underneath all the other items that they don't. And, and it was a pretty effective visual to show what it is actually built on. Yeah, there, that's a great response to that. I think that's a, a fantastic way of doing that. I, you know, you have in business, you have these ups and downs and it sounds like to me what you're telling me is that you have to adjust the strategy a little bit during those times, adjust the communication a little bit during the times. But in both times communication is important, you know, and the way you communicate is important with that, you know, looking at, looking at this and, and people know we chat a little bit ahead of time to kind of talk about the different skill sets people have and everything. And one of the things that you have is a way to communicate where you can Basically communicate ideas from the IT portion end of things and understand them and then translate them into a more tech based, sorry, a less tech based description and more into the layman's terms, so to speak. For these. That is an exceptional tool to have in your pocket and, and one that is for nit, almost indispensable if you can grab it. To be able to take something extremely complicated and be able to break it down and, and say that in a way that other people can understand it is, is huge.
• 24:34
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's been really fun. A recent example of that is we're going through one of our teams that does uses scrum to get a lot of work done. And we're running into this problem where we don't have a business analyst role that's really doing requirements and user story development. And so each member of this team has to do their own. And so we were trying to think of an analogy to the construction world. And so if I'm an electrician and I show up on a job site, I need to have a plan, materials and time to do the work. And if I have all those things and my questions have been answered, I can just get busy to being an electrician and installing all the systems and so forth. Well, if I have a question, there's a formal process in construction called an RFI request for information. And that's where I'm electrician and I need to know. Actually you didn't say in the drawing where this lamp has to be in the ceiling and I'm not. I don't want to guess because I don't want to be wrong because it's expensive to move it. So I'm going to write this formal request back to the designer or the owner and they'll respond to me. And so we use the RFI concept to say to our teammates, for every user story that we work on, we might have five questions or five RFIs. And so when we put it in those terms, I'm speaking to an electrician, a leader of electricians. They understand what that means. And so we sort of say, well, if there was a way to answer these RFIs more quickly, the IT team could get more of their work done, much like an electrician could without having to stop his work, answer those questions answered an rfi. And so that's an example, Michael, where we try to like co opt our industry language of construction and try to like convey the same concept that we have in it. The problem is we have questions and we need someone to answer them. Otherwise we can't finish the solution. And so I don't know why my brain does this. It just does that. And I think my team jokes with me about being the master of analogy. Or they'll talk about Jeffisms, but on the fly, I'll just come up with analogy. Sometimes that helps us all understand what we're talking about, because sometimes the IT guys are acronym heavy. They're trying to talk tech. The business people don't understand those acronyms. They get frustrated. And so seeing that dynamic play out for years and years, somehow, naturally, maybe it's because I'm a middle child. I don't know what the psychology is on this, but, like, somehow I'm there, I help people connect, and I don't have to be there all the time. I don't want to make it sound like that. But trying to get the IT folks to see it from the business person's perspective is a big part of the solution. Because sometimes I'm like, well, if you consider this or have you thought about that from the business perspective, that helps them build, I would say, empathy for what, what the other person on the other side of the conversation is struggling with. And so just trying to get people to break the ice and just communicate better, have some understanding of what each other's talking about, use clarifying questions, use tools like fierce conversations, pool of shared meaning, things like that, that help people just to break through the barriers of communication. Because that's usually what the root cause of confusion is. We're just not clear on what we're doing. And so that's what it's about. It's about being that person to help drive clarity so that everyone can feel successful. Wrong, mute.
• 27:38
  Speaker A: I absolutely love an analogy. So I'm, I'm, I'm really happy that you brought that stuff up. One of the things that I wanted to talk to you about, though, based on what you just talked about, is do you think that AI is going to get in the way of some of that, some of that communication? Right. There's a lot. I mean, and you know, and usually we tackle some of the, you know, you know, the futuristic stuff in a later segment. But, but think about this for a moment. AI is already here. It's not a thing that. It's actually been here for quite a while. Right? But it's not a thing that is a new thing anymore. It's actively being applied right now in ways that work in ways that don't. Right? So if you think about that, right. If you think about the AI coming in and people are asking questions and it's trying to respond to them and give them that knowledge and stuff like that. Do you think that that's helping or do you think that that might be getting in the way of being able to describe things accurately and communicate effectively, or do you think it helps the communication? I actually don't know the answer to this question. I've gone back and forth with it. But I'd like to hear your thought on it.
• 28:58
  Speaker B: It's a great question. I like that question. Because what I am the use cases for me right now with Copilot that are powerful are, are helping me kind of cobble together concepts into a coherent sort of framework or answer, right? And it used to be like Google something, open 16 tabs and sort of read through those tabs. I think Geni has definitely automated that process. So I think it can help. It's helped me get up to speed very quickly on a new concept that I want to learn about and in a very digestible and probably somewhat accurate way. So I think in that sense, if people are using it as a tool to help them come to a conversation with more understanding or knowledge, I think AI could absolutely help with that. So let's say I don't know anything about Microsoft fabric and I want to like, well, what is Microsoft fabric and what can it help me with? And show me some examples and I can have kind of this precursor conversation of understanding. So that when I talk about Microsoft fabric with the team, because they're saying, Jeff, we think we want to implement this because it's going to solve our business intelligence framework problems. We can come to that with some kind of a common understanding. So in that sense, Michael, I think AI could possibly help us be more educated in a more directed way. Could AI replace that off the cuff analogy, conversational coming together understanding, meaning of minds, all those kinds of concepts? I don't know about that part of it because I think there's something pretty impressive about our human or just our humanity, our brain, the nonverbal, all the voice inflection, the D knows. Like there's parts of human communication that are not yet well mimicked by AI. I'm not sure they ever will because I just don't know how much of the humanity you can sort of mathematically recreate programmatically. But I do think, you know, who knows, I mean, when quantum computing becomes more effective and there's a lot more cycles to compute things, maybe things start to open up differently. But for now, I don't know if it's going to replace that human to human conversation that's so critical to get a common understanding so that you can get to the outcome you're ultimately looking for.
• 31:12
  Speaker A: It's good. Good answer. I drove up to a fast food restaurant the other day, right. And the person that was helping me was not a person. Right. You know, I, I was ordering via an AI chatbot, you know, and it did a good job, right? And, and it, and it took my order and, and there. But, but that's all it did, right? Like, like it lacked a certain sense of. And, and I know it sounds silly, right? But you know, you pull up to, you pull up and if you're anything like me, you pull up, you stumble your order, then you laugh about it and then you're like, oh, can I have this instead? And, and then you joke with the person and then you go get your order and there's a certain, you know, person, you know, feel to that. You know, there's a certain. And lacked. It, it was, it lacked all of that. It tried it, you know, it did that thing where, you know, they try to make it sound like it's, it's human and you know, by making it, make it a little bit of a stall and the way it words things and be like, oh, you know, hey, you sure you wanted that? You know, you know, some silly things in there they put up in there to make it. But it's still to me sounds robotic and doesn't give that, that feel that I feel is so important when relaying these messages. When you tell me that, you know, you can communicate and make these relationships with people at these different levels from, you know, executive, you know, all throughout the organization and you are constantly working on these relationships to make sure they're staying solid. Right? And you got that communication there, you know, and I'm not saying AI is going to replace that, but at certain point AI is going to replace some of those interactions to some degree. And I just, I don't know, based on our conversation, whether or not that's going to be fruitful for the business or not.
• 33:25
  Speaker B: I think the big thing for me, I just read Donald Miller's story Brand, which I highly recommend for everyone to read. If you have any interest in learning about how companies can build their brand through storytelling.
• 33:39
  Speaker A: Yeah, but I think you should start a book club.
• 33:41
  Speaker B: Yeah, really? Well, I'm going to quote Steve Jobs. He says the most powerful person in the world is a storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come. So that was Steve Jobs talking about telling stories. And remember he told us that story about I won a thousand songs in my pocket and then the ipod came around. So I think telling stories is what helps us understand our brands. And so Encore has a story, every brand has a story. And I think to your point, Michael, I've used that same AI, you know, ordering system at a fast replace and it was fine, it was efficient and if I was clearly enunciating and so forth, and we did fine. But is that the brand? Like, is that helping their brand or is that just helping them be efficient? Or maybe they can't find enough English speakers to work the window and it's actually better for the customers, I don't know. But I think that's the big wrestling part of this, is how will the company understand its brand could be impacted by AI? And is that a good thing? Because I think some brands might be enhanced by AI, like Tesla. Tesla doesn't do a lot of advertising. They're all word of mouth, really, sales. And so how do they maintain that if there's automation and parts of it? And yet they want to promote self driving cars, which is absolutely an AI driven phenomenon. So I don't know the answer. I just think it's interesting to observe, like how AI is going to affect business and culture in general, because I think some of these things which we value, we may not miss them until they're gone, honestly. And then we might wonder now what. And if the computer, so to speak, can't replace that, what's missing? We might see people go back to sort of the way it was. So I remember when they were trying to do mobile ordering kiosks and fast food and they fit the first gen of those touchscreens, it just didn't work very well. And so a lot of restaurants ended up pulling it out because it was just too soon. So I don't know. I mean, it's interesting. It's the push and pull of technology. And if you even go back to the issue of technology, it takes many years for new technology to be adopted, whether it's telephone, that iPhones, PCs, et cetera. And I think this is just part of that ongoing conversation. It's going to be 10 years before we really know how has AI impacted our culture, business, our relationships, our technology.
• 36:00
  Speaker A: Another part to AI that is kind of challenging is that since it's so new, since there's not a lot of proven pieces to it, there's not a lot of companies that, that you know, you've got your major players, right? But let's talk about like the third party kind of players that ride on top of those. Those are unproven. You know, there's not, it hasn't been a lot of work with that. So we're kind of in the wild, wild west of AI at the moment. And especially when you try to take AI and apply it to business and business processes, business applications. I know a couple of things you're good at are, are taking, you know, taking new processes and sorry, new tech and stuff like that and trying to apply it in a business process and, and, and help them solve these business problems. On top of that, you also mentioned that you're good at vendor relationship, partner selection. And so you take, take those two items, right, and apply them to AI and you got big challenges, right? You've got unproven partnerships, you've got issues with, you know, tech that could affect major processes that, that get run on companies. That is completely unproven at the moment and it's uncharted. So how do you navigate this? Because I will, I will say that I've spoken to a lot of, a lot of CIOs, a lot of senior IT leaders and, and sat at some roundtables where the top executive brass is pushing them to use AI, to reduce costs, to increase productivity. All the fun things that top executive brass wants to do, right? And they're scratching their heads, right, trying to figure out how to do it. And, and so what is, so you know what, how are you going to navigate that? I guess is my question.
• 37:58
  Speaker B: Yeah, I, I probably don't have a very good answer, to be honest with you, Michael. I think first of all, I would start with the Gartner hype cycle, which is one of my favorite phenomenons and I'm sure you're familiar with it. But if you look at the 50 different types of AI technology, you can go get this on Google, they chart a point along this hype cycle and gen AI is really at the top of hype and it's going to go down into the trough of disillusionment and then it later becomes productive. And so I think that's the problem is that so many white collar executives were like, what do you mean? This thing can write emails, I'm not going to have a job. And lawyers are like, it can read contracts. And things got a little bit blown out of proportion if you're not understanding of what generative AI really is and the large language model. And so why would you, right Nobody even knew what that was three years ago. But I think that spooked people and then they bought into the idea that AI can solve a lot of problems. But what they don't understand is when technology comes out, there's a future promise that the Gartner hype cycle really reflects well. That future promise is you have to get through and understanding of how does this technology really change the landscape. Go to that trough of disillusionment where, like, actually it's not as great as I thought it was going to be. But hold on, there's still some really great things, so let's go get those problems solved because we haven't gone through that hype cycle with Gen AI. I think there's too much expectation by the top brass, as you'd put it, and they just don't have a realistic expectation of what the outcomes will come to. Because for me, Gen AI is nice, but it's really like, go back to the first chatbots. I mean, this is just a more sophisticated chatbot in some respects. I don't think you can ask it to do a lot of things that would qualify as business process automation. I think it's great at helping you write code. I think it's great at helping you do research and writing emails. And I've used it for a lot of those things, but those are really specific use cases. And so I don't think the top brass understands those specific use cases translate into, oh, now my business process is 15% more efficient and I can cut costs. I just don't think the solution is dialed in enough yet. And I don't think that's why IT leaders are scratching our heads. We're like, you're asking me to fix a process, but I only have a wrench called Gen AI and it turns out I need other tools possibly to help with that. So I just don't know. I just don't know if it's going to be that panacea that the folks who are getting so excited about it will turn out to be. So we'll see. We should have this conversation again in a few years and see what's changed, because I don't honestly know what's going to happen.
• 40:34
  Speaker A: I welcome it. Yeah, no, I agree. And it's. It's been, it's been an interesting kind of. It's an interesting kind of ride to see what, what happens. I think, I think you're right about when you go into the disillusion, even say it. The disillusion. Oh my gosh. All Right. The you say it. I. And apparently my. Right. Disillusionment. So when it goes into that phase, right. I. I'm gonna have fun, right? Because I. Because the. Because that's when you can really play with it and, and actually get some good, good stuff out of it. And it's not so hyped up, it's not so blown out of proportion. I agree with you and that's a great. I'm glad you brought that up because I had forgotten about that. That little curve that happens with new technology. Absolutely love it. I think it's a great discussion to have and it's always fun when you bring in a new technology, right. And watch how it gets applied and it catch. It just kind of, you know, throws back into what you talked about with a, with the constant learning. Right. Earlier on when we were having that conversation. Right. This is one of the reasons why it is constant learning because new technology comes at us faster and faster and faster and we're expected to know what to do with it and how to apply it. And you can sort of look at older models of how different technology got applied, but it's so different than that. You kind of like, we know how it's going to go, we know how this is going to happen, but we still don't know where everything's going to flush out and where it's going to end up. And it's a really interesting kind of course to plot and follow at the same time. I did like how, you know, you talked about communication, different styles and you're kind of like, we talked about a universal translator able to kind of talk to a whole bunch of people back and forth and communicate ideas. And that soft skill is a skill that has a recurring theme on this program over and over and over again. That ability to be able to constantly shift your communication strategy and your words and know who you're talking to and what audience you're talking to and be able to communicate that effectively with many different groups. That ability seems to connect in with senior IT leadership, being productive and being able to lead a team to do awesome things and be able to convince the executive team that they can do it right and keep them up to date on it and keep them informed and happy and be able to get the money, that resources that you need to be able to continue to. To build it. What's interesting, what's interesting, it seems to be to me, is this constant battle that happens, right? Which is I need money and resources to do the things that you want, right? And and then it's like, well, I only have this much money, right? And then it's like, well, okay, then what do you want to do? Because it can't do everything, right? And it's just this constant shift. And it always seems to me it would be easier to go, I have this much amount of money, what can I do with it, right? And let's all decide on the projects and just skip them between part. But that doesn't seem to be what happens. It's always kind of the other way around. But have you experienced that? Have you been in a spot where you've gone to a good cadence and been able to be like, hey, this is just how it rolls, right? This is how we work. We're able to have good communication and understand that there's only a certain amount. I mean, is that where you're at now? Or do you still have to kind.
• 44:33
  Speaker B: Of, you know, I think we still need to mature that process. I do like your idea about it wouldn't be simpler if we just had, like, classic business management. We're like, okay, we have this program called technology, and we're going to fund that program to a certain amount, and then people are going to decide what falls into that program for projects. And then each project that completes helps forward the program. And so what I like about that is it feels good because it's planned out and it's kind of dialed in. And you can put metrics around it and figure out, is this investment paying off. And those are all good things. I'm a big believer in ROI business cases, and those are the ways that we can help people understand, is this technology worth the juice, worth the squeeze? Is it worth the investment? I think, though, what I've learned is that the reason that's not successful is it becomes a little bit too bureaucratic. And so then these companies, these large companies, go through that shift of we have a pmo, and then after five years, it's two bureaucratics, so we fire everyone and we go back to doing business innovation. And so I think there's something to be said about this lean principle of where the people who do the work are experts at knowing the problems. And so it goes back to Toyota, Link Manufacturing, Deming, all those guys. And so if you believe that, you've got to look to your people who are suffering with a technology problem and ask them what's wrong with the tool you have, or if you had a better tool, what would it do? Or if you could stop doing things in spreadsheets and Email, what would that look like? Because the people who don't do that work day in and out don't really know how bad it is or how inefficient it is. And so they kind of generalize the problem to say, well, it's inefficient. Well, that doesn't really lead to innovative thinking because you're just saying, well, make it more inefficient. Well, what you have to get in the details. So I think my point is you need to have that grassroots innovation coming from people who are suffering with either they've got great ideas or they've got a problem they want to solve. And that that has to filter into the program some way to get investment to solve that really annoying problem that so and so has that would actually save us hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know. So I think there's a lot of innovation, a lot of creative people. What I've seen is the newer, younger generation, so to speak, have come through that grew up in as technology natives. They have a lot more savvy about technology. They're asking a lot of different questions than maybe like Gen Xers or Boomers. And so there's this push and understanding of using technology that's also going to help us be innovative. So I think it's gotta be a balance of both planned execution and funding of a program so you don't break the bank, so to speak, but also allowing for that influx of innovation and good ideas, problem solving from sort of the everyday workers who have great ideas. They just need to enter the right person so they could be executed.
• 47:20
  Speaker A: I like it. So let's take innovation for a minute, right? And let's move into our last segment, which is the IT crystal ball. Right. So in this segment what we do is we look to the future of IT for, you know, the next five years. What, you know, what is in it, you know, what, what's going on, what's going to happen. Always fun to go because it's completely, nobody knows. So this is completely fun topic, but it leads to some really interesting, interesting topics in this one, in this scenario, right, since you mentioned innovation, right, let's focus on that. Let's focus on business innovation and, and let's focus on this, this method. What, what is coming for business innovation, right through, through it. That's going to revolutionize business processing, right? And if you want to, you can limit it to construction or you can go out of construction if you feel like it. I'm going to give you that rain, right? But let's what is, you know, what's coming down the pike, right. That's going to basically say hey, these are some, these are some new tools maybe or whatnot that can, that are going to make your business processes run, run smoother, run more effectively. What do you see? What are you seeing out there?
• 48:47
  Speaker B: I think as you're saying that Michael, I'm thinking of two things that come to mind and one is something I heard at Treadmill Dimensions last week. And so part one of this answer is software manufacturing is beginning to be transformed and will continue to be more transformed by Gen AI. I'm pretty confident in that the bigger software suppliers are learning how to write better code, learning how to write better test plans. And so what I would hope is the software manufacturers have a faster cycle of innovation. I don't think they'll necessarily lower their prices. I don't think people like that, but.
• 49:22
  Speaker A: I do think lower their prices. That nobody ever lowers their price.
• 49:25
  Speaker B: Nobody lowers their price. I know but I think the key is like the innovation that can come through these off the shelf systems will increase and I hope the quality will improve as well. I think this is one of the biggest breakthroughs potentially with Gen Ed that can help with software engineering, which is where I started my career and so I understand that world a little bit. So I think we're going to see. So how does that affect business? Well that means there's maybe sort of more improved experiences, better business software. A lot of complaints you have is like well why does it work like my iPhone? And my response is business software doesn't have billions of dollars of R and D to put into their devices. But I do think with this gen AI it can help close the gap a little bit. On the business software side. I think businesses will get better quality software with more innovations and higher quality systems. So I think business by its very use of those business technology platforms will be improved. So that's part one, the other part.
• 50:24
  Speaker A: Before you go to part two. Right. And if you can hold that in your head for a minute because I do definitely want to go to part two. But let me ask you a question about part one. It almost sounds like that it's actually like the AI is actually educating the, the folks that are writing the plans, that are doing the coding that they're actually benefiting from AI and actually uplifting their skills. Is that sound like what you're saying?
• 50:51
  Speaker B: I think it's twofold. I think it's skill uplifting for less experienced software engineers. I also think it's Efficiency for even higher, like no matter what level of experience you are on the software engineering career path, I think, because if you can do more things, like if you can have AI write your test plan for you and it's 90% right, that saves you that 90% of the time you would have done it yourself. So I think the efficiency in getting things done more quickly and maybe that leads to better work life balance for some of these software engineers or maybe it leads to just, hey, they get into a more predictable cadence of releases or testing new features and implementing new features. So I think it's really just, it's more like an assistant, I think Michael, than anything in terms of making these engineers be more productive, more successful with higher quality. Right. And that also helps with the, as you know, the shortage of high quality engineers. Between software engineers and cybersecurity, like there's hundreds of thousands of openings across the world and I don't know that we're able to fulfill that for whatever reason from the university system. And so there is continues to be a gap in resources and so AI will bridge some of that gap. I don't think it's going to replace anyone by any means. And I don't think AI is going to write its own program at this point. I don't know how that in my next five years in these. So I think it's going to be higher quality, more efficiency, helping software engineers be better at their jobs and just uplift everyone. So in that sense I think it is going to be a game changer.
• 52:20
  Speaker A: Excellent. Okay, so now part two is up. I hope you remembered it.
• 52:24
  Speaker B: Part two is on the micro level. I think it's back to this idea of innovation. And I look at our old friend Excel, which is what, 30 years old now or something like that. The stuff I've seen built into Excel is remarkable over the years. It's unbelievable. When I was at Standard Poor's they were like, I don't know, $3 billion company that ran a significant part of their modeling software for ratings, all on spreadsheets.
• 52:47
  Speaker A: I've seen it happen. I've seen it happen. It's amazing.
• 52:50
  Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm like, that's very impressive that you can do that. And so what I love about Excel and tools like it are that someone with an idea and a little bit of elbow grease and know how and some trial and error can figure out a solution to their problem. I think that's where AI is really going to help. I think between AI and low code, no code platforms like Power Automate, et cetera. Pick your favorite one. I mean, you can start to do some pretty interesting things. For example, you might have an ERP that's got this certain set of screens that just is frustrating for the users. You've been begging the vendor to change it for years. They have other priorities. Well, I'm going to write my own screens in power apps and I'm going to have a front end now that has all the business rules I need. That then through API calls, sends the right data to the database, into the rp. I think those kinds of things that citizen developer, if you've heard that term before, I think citizen development is really going to improve business processes on that taxable or micro level for an individual company or a group of people within a company. It's not going to be an industry change per se, but it's going to lead to that, call it 5 to 20% efficiencies of eliminating some friction, making things better, not relying on the software vendor to provide every solution. I now have the power as a citizen developer to start to take, take my own ideas and implement them to make this project better, the software better, so that ultimately the business outcomes I need to happen can happen more quickly. So I think that kind of taking the power of your own hands on that local level is going to be part two of that equation of innovation.
• 54:21
  Speaker A: All right, let me give you a, let me give you the alternate to that though, too. Right. So what about citizen development creating shadow it?
• 54:32
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, there's, there's no doubt and I think, I would argue we already have shadow it in one sense with Excel, so.
• 54:39
  Speaker A: Agreed, agreed.
• 54:40
  Speaker B: I'm less afraid of shadow it because I look at it as an opportunity to look and see what can we do. So, for example, we have electricians who are pretty good with certain tools like Excel. They'll build a very sophisticated spreadsheet and then they'll try to maybe make Excel do things it wasn't perfectly designed to do. And so that's when we can come in and almost take their prototype and say, okay, well can we take this spreadsheet and turn it into this better business process? Kind of add that professionalized it, touch to it to make it scalable, secure, better data quality, all those things that maybe when I built my prototype in Excel, those weren't at the front of my mind. I was just trying to solve that problem. So in the sense of black ops, I want to invite all of my teammates at Encore to be innovative, to try stuff out, to build the one line tool in Excel and then show us what you did and then maybe we can help improve it and then make it standardized so that everyone can reap the reward of your innovation. So that's where I think Black Ops can be. You know, I mean, the guys who build those tools, Michael, they trade in the social capital being really smart. And if we all say, oh, Carl over there built this amazing tool and now we've kind of polished it up and now everybody gets to use Carl's tool. That goes a long way in making Carl feel like he didn't just solve his own problem, but he solved a bunch of people with the same problem. And so I think using those ideas help with the Black Ops course.
• 56:03
  Speaker A: No, I actually, I agree there. And actually, or even if the solution that was put in was a solution that we probably, that's not scalable, that may not grow, we can grab that person that created that and say, hey, we love your idea because you understand the process and stuff and we can use you as a point person to be able to help us build the next tool that will be scalable and we'll replace the starter tool that you created. Right. So that's actually not a bad idea, embracing shadow it, which is kind of a, it's kind of an interesting concept, embracing shadow it to, to essentially not turn around and be like, you shouldn't have created that, that's bad. But actually go like what you created. Let's, let's use your ideas and implement them in a more scalable solution so that your, your process can live on and grow within the organization. It's a, it's a great way to handle shadow ideas, in my opinion.
• 57:10
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's working well for us. It's funny, we actually have a guy who came to my team who built one of those tools and we've subsequently learned it's basically a materials management tool. And it's in Excel wasn't the right tool choice, but he only had a hammer, so that's what he used. Fast forward a few years. That prototype really got people ready for an actual off the shelf tool that we're going to be implementing. We just signed the contract last week, which will then bring like a app handheld. I can order materials, do all these things with my, my at the foreman level and the job site that I would have had to go back to that spreadsheet that was okay, but people don't love. And so he set the groundwork for now going into a more automated system where that prototype helped break the ice from the old Sort of email call to vendor type of procurement process. And so yeah, in that sense it absolutely was the first step. And we were joking today with the procurement manager. We said actually if it weren't for that prototype that was built in Excel badly, we wouldn't have been poised to make a decision to go to a better tool, which is going to cost some money, but ultimately save us a lot more time and effort in managing our materials. And so for me, that's where you can co opt people's innovation and that itch they want to scratch. Encourage it, ask them to experiment if they have time and then try to reap the rewards for everyone from it. I mean, who doesn't want to do that? I always felt like shutting down Black Ops was like, you know, does it have all the answers? No, we do not have all the answers. So let's stop pretending we do and let's partner with our teammates to get the best answer for the company. That's really what I'm interested in.
• 58:47
  Speaker A: So it sounds like to me you see, you see a future with more cooperation.
• 58:52
  Speaker B: I think, I think between citizen development and, and AI, I think you're going to be going down that road. And I think if you try to keep it in that traditional model of service and we just have all the answers and we, I don't know, I think it should really be used less. Well, it depends. But most IT teams probably are better at building scalable and secure solutions rather than innovating because these IT people are not working in the business. If they're not working in the business and suffering with that problem, I don't believe that you'll have the innovative ideas necessary to solve it. Now you can tell the IT guy here's my problems and then he can go be innovative. That's fine. But I think sometimes for people that do want to experiment, why not let them experiment? They obviously get satisfaction from it. So let's be, let's support them in that effort and then help them achieve a better outcome than they would have by their own. Because that's where Black Ops falls down. You only get so far in the implementation. You get to give up, you got a day job, you're busy, like that's when IT can step in and kind of take it to that next level. So I really see it as like a two step process which in the past, Michael, I'm not sure I would have described it that way.
• 59:56
  Speaker A: Embrace the shadow, guys. That's what we're talking about, nerds. This has been Michael Moore hosting this podcast for dissecting popular IT nerds. I've been here with Jeff Can, Chief Information Officer at Encore Electric Incorporated. Thank you, Jeff, so much. I appreciate you.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker B: It's been a pleasure, Michael. I've really enjoyed our conversation, and I look forward to speaking with you again.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker A: Same.