Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Off-road: mapping your EUC career w/ Tom Rodgers & Logan Stelly (Edward Jones)

Transcript

Off-road: mapping your EUC career w/ Tom Rodgers & Logan Stelly (Edward Jones) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

• 0:01
  Welcome it change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGrath.
• 0:07
  Let's get into it. Where do you see your EUC career going in say
• 0:12
  the next five years, How do you plan for it? What relationships do
• 0:16
  you need to develop with technology, with technology vendors? What skills do you
• 0:22
  plan on acquiring to stay ahead of the curve. To explore these questions and
• 0:27
  more, we're joined today Tim and I by two guys We met in at
• 0:31
  Boston Experience and experienced Boston, I should say last year. We liked them
• 0:35
  both very very much. We wanted to have them on a show there from
• 0:38
  Edward Jones, which is a fairly well known financial services firm as you might
• 0:42
  know. And they are Tom Rogers, who looks after Digital Experience There.
• 0:46
  Hi, Tom, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks guys for having
• 0:48
  me, great pleasure. And Logan Stelly who looks after Digital UX and Engineering.
• 0:54
  Hey, Logan, great to see you again it Hey nice to talk
• 0:58
  to you. Absolutely. So let's let's let's hear a bit about you both
• 1:02
  first of all, to set the scene before we delve into this theme today.
• 1:07
  So Tom, since this episode is very much as I say, about
• 1:11
  the evolving euc career. Let's hear from you first of all, So tell
• 1:15
  us how you got it in, how you got into it first of all,
• 1:19
  and where the career has taken you so far. Yeah. So I
• 1:22
  started in the help desk, and I'll recommend help us is a great place
• 1:26
  to start your career. You get kind of that landscape of the entire company.
• 1:32
  You get to see and hear a lot of different things. But from
• 1:34
  the help desk, I went to the cidrics stack, so kind of work
• 1:38
  my way all the way up to the top of Citrix, and then there
• 1:42
  was an opportunity where a new team focused solely on user experience kind of was
• 1:47
  being stood up and I took the opportunity to jump into it. And from
• 1:52
  there it was it was just kind of understanding what what does a user experience
• 1:57
  team mean? How do you measure user experience? And that led me down
• 2:01
  a couple of tool selections, got into some dex tools and uh and started
• 2:07
  kind of traveling the country doing site visits, talking to people directly, one
• 2:13
  on one, understanding their frustrations and uh, it really took a lot,
• 2:17
  uh you know, took back that feedback live from them. It was pretty
• 2:22
  good, pretty amazing experience. And you used the phrase when we met in
• 2:24
  Boston. I never heard it, and I liked it a lot because I'm
• 2:28
  a mad Max fan road warrior, Right, that's what you're referring to.
• 2:32
  Yeah, I mean it was. It was out there on the road like
• 2:37
  like a like a traveling user experienced salesman. If you will, oh,
• 2:42
  contrere o contra you were anything? You were, you were you were,
• 2:46
  You were like a doctor on the road. I'd say, so, I'm
• 2:47
  not a not a salesperson, I'm sure. And uh, Logan, what
• 2:52
  about you? What was your path? Yeah? Mine was a little different.
• 2:57
  I started from a packaging background and then move onto the desktop end user
• 3:01
  compute engineering and then onto the deck side. So I really had that background
• 3:07
  in scripting and automation. So I was able to kind of leverage that throughout
• 3:13
  my career in terms of automating some of the desktop build and management processes and
• 3:19
  then onto automating some of the end user experience monitoring and improvement processes. And
• 3:25
  Logan, do your two roles kind of intersect quite a lot? Maybe give
• 3:29
  us an overview of what they collectively encompassed. I would say hugely Yeah.
• 3:35
  Having that understanding of some of those lower level processes and how things work on
• 3:42
  the system is really big for being able to take something that you're seeing on
• 3:46
  the deck side and then get down to well, why are we seeing that?
• 3:53
  And then where do we need to look to find an improvement that we
• 3:57
  can make. Tom, let's go back to That Road war an awesome set
• 4:03
  of movies. I almost feel like taking a pause and go and watching one
• 4:06
  now, but we'll say that earlater. My career at the Hartford I was
• 4:12
  an insurance company for twenty years, very much at desk job, except for
• 4:15
  the last year maybe when I got into employee experience as well. What did
• 4:18
  you like about that travel? What did you really like about being that road
• 4:23
  warrior versus some of the pains and things you didn't like so much? Yeah?
• 4:28
  I think getting out there talking face to face to people, really understanding
• 4:32
  and seeing their frustrations like in real time, you know, just a little
• 4:38
  story here. One of the sites I went to, there was a lady
• 4:42
  that I sat with. She talked about how her job was paid based on
• 4:46
  how many things she processed a day, and then she showed me spinning wheels
• 4:51
  and airrors and just the steps that she would do just to get through the
• 4:58
  day, and how was impacting her life and like she wasn't meeting her goals,
• 5:02
  like being able to hear a story like that talk to her like she
• 5:05
  almost broke down in tears, right, Like it's it's really impactful to kind
• 5:11
  of hear that that conversation. And then what I didn't like is you're kind
• 5:15
  of helpless in a way, right. I mean, I'm one guy of
• 5:19
  a one small user experience team and I can't fix, you know, problems
• 5:26
  of an entire company, right, so that you kind of it's the good
• 5:30
  and the bad of being being able there to listen to see that to take
• 5:34
  it back to the rest of the company, but then also be helpless in
• 5:38
  the same same statement. Man So yet to be formally announced, but I'm
• 5:43
  starting a YouTube channel called the Proactive it Guy where we'll start a bit of
• 5:47
  a community and get up there. Exclusive Productive it Guy would love to have
• 5:55
  you on and tell some of those stories. I traveled to forty field offices
• 5:59
  in my time and I and the stories that you come back with are just
• 6:01
  some of them are just jaw dropping. So I'll give you a shout in
• 6:05
  the meantime logan, talk a little bit about your professional transition. What was
• 6:10
  the role DEX made a huge impact on my career and my career trajectory.
• 6:15
  Talk a bit about decks and how that technology played in your career transition.
• 6:21
  Yeah, so I came from that desktop engineering background to DEX, which I
• 6:28
  feel like is a pretty common way that a lot of people go. And
• 6:33
  for me, being able to go from working a single issue with a single
• 6:39
  user, you know, you get a ticket, you work an issue,
• 6:42
  being able to take some of that same troubleshooting methodology and then take and expand
• 6:48
  that group that you're looking at who else is having the issue? And then
• 6:53
  how do we apply that same thing to more people and fix you know,
• 6:58
  thousands of devices instead of just one at a time. I find that really
• 7:02
  satisfying because you can take instead of just helping one person, you know,
• 7:05
  help hundreds of people at a time. And I think that that's a really
• 7:10
  easy thing to sell to, right So in terms of your own career perspective,
• 7:15
  it's easy to say, look at the big impact I'm having, so
• 7:18
  Tom in my in my career change the next thing. I came here because
• 7:21
  I wanted to see that oh my God moment over and over again, or
• 7:27
  maybe the more PC version, the holy cow moment. What became possible for
• 7:32
  you with this technology that wasn't possible before. Well, I think kind of
• 7:38
  Logan alluded to it a little bit, right, is thinking on a company
• 7:42
  wide perspective. I think without some of this, this level of detail,
• 7:46
  this information, you're kind of on the one user, one problem mentality,
• 7:53
  and then all of a sudden you just get flooded with this data. You
• 7:56
  can you can look and see, okay, I have one person, but
• 7:59
  then you could expand it out to like Logan said, thousands, right,
• 8:03
  And then you know, if I look back on the site visits that I
• 8:07
  talked about, we were going to the site that yelled a lot of us,
• 8:09
  right, And now we can go and look objectively at data and who
• 8:15
  is actually having the worst performance and then go figure out why. Right,
• 8:18
  So you're not just going on that subjective feedback from Hey, I think I'm
• 8:24
  having the worst in the in the company. Right. It was one of
• 8:28
  the one of the legendary comments from our CEO, and I was in my
• 8:31
  times in it. We said to him straight to his face, Liam,
• 8:35
  we don't know they have issues unless they call us, And this puts that
• 8:39
  entirely to bed, right. You don't need to worry about the squeaky wheel,
• 8:41
  you don't need to worry about the people who aren't calling. You can
• 8:45
  cover it all. And that's the adrenaline that I love to see people get.
• 8:50
  It's not being the firefighter that solves something at two am. It's the
• 8:52
  proactive IT person that solves something at one in the afternoon for a thousand people.
• 8:58
  Logan talking a little bit more about careers, how important do you think
• 9:01
  that concept of proactivity is to the end user compute professionals who want to ensure
• 9:07
  they really secure future opportunities. Can you really stand on being a proactive IT
• 9:15
  guy to move your career? Oh yeah, absolutely. I think you know,
• 9:20
  trends are things moving more proactive, So you know, while there's always
• 9:26
  jobs on both sides, you're proactive and reactive, and you always need that
• 9:30
  reactive because you can't predict the future and things will happen. I think that
• 9:35
  from a career perspective, things are moving more proactive. So jumping to that
• 9:43
  side earlier, you're going to have a lot greater opportunities and you can really
• 9:48
  expand your reach more in terms of the impact you can have. Ye.
• 9:52
  I like the fireman perspective there. You always need someone putting out those fires,
• 9:56
  but you also need someone looking who can prevent those fires from happening in
• 10:01
  the first place, and doing that freeze up some of those reactive resources so
• 10:05
  you could focus more proactive. I'd like to add to that analogy once in
• 10:11
  a while by saying that there's an it arsonist in the back room that lit
• 10:15
  that fire a month ago, right, and then we show up and we
• 10:18
  let it smolder for a month, and then we show up as heroes and
• 10:20
  put the fire out as just not sustainable. Tom, what other trends are
• 10:24
  you seeing in technology? What technology advances do you think are really vital to
• 10:30
  planning and preparing for future career opportunities in end user compute, Yeah, I
• 10:35
  think in the past there was this concept of the CIS admin that knew everything
• 10:41
  about everything, and then then we had this just boom of new technology come
• 10:46
  out. Things got really complex and everybody got siloed. I think with this
• 10:52
  user centric user experience mindset that's coming, you kind of have to have a
• 10:58
  little bit of knowledge on everything. I think we're going back to that cis
• 11:03
  admin know everything about everything mentality, because when to map out a flow of
• 11:09
  the user experience of what they see day to day, you need to know
• 11:13
  what they're you know, what's going on on their Windows laptop, what's going
• 11:18
  on in the centric stack with their applications, you know, I mean take
• 11:22
  you know, Logan and I right, like we were both kind of siloed
• 11:26
  into Citrics for me, desktop for him, and then now we're kind of
• 11:31
  spread across everything looking at it from a user experience mind. So it's I
• 11:35
  think that's going to be something that's kind of changing, is being able to
• 11:39
  kind of not be siloed into one technology but kind of see a little bit
• 11:43
  across horizontally. I would actually suggest that you don't necessarily need to know it
• 11:48
  all, but you need to see it all, right. It's about visibility,
• 11:52
  seeing what's going on across those stacks, and then getting the right specialists
• 11:56
  to go deep with a surety that the problem does exist there, then they've
• 12:00
  got to go figure it out. So I think it's a really valuable position.
• 12:03
  I've been I've been thinking lately a lot about how whatever career you're in
• 12:07
  at the moment, give or take. Technology is offering or threatening in times
• 12:15
  a lot of change and with a lot of opportunity, and often it's the
• 12:20
  external providers and developers of that technology who you've got to engage with and work
• 12:26
  with. How do you ensure in your professional life that you may and guide
• 12:31
  the right investments for your organization and build those relationships right both for your own
• 12:37
  future as well as the organization's well being. You know, as I say
• 12:41
  that theme of staying ahead of the curve and working with external vendors to do
• 12:46
  so. Yeah, I think that's that's critical. You have to have a
• 12:50
  partnership with the vendor that you're working in. There has to be back and
• 12:54
  forth, you know, working together to to both give value from the product.
• 13:01
  I think it is it's it's something that you know you can help the
• 13:05
  vendor see things that they don't always see and then you know, obviously you're
• 13:09
  getting value from from what you're paying with uh paying for from them. Right.
• 13:16
  I think Logan has a good story about his partnership that he's been doing.
• 13:20
  Yeah, well, we we work pretty closely with our vendors to to
• 13:24
  foster close relationships because we can, you know, help them test new features
• 13:31
  and then meet with their their product managers, give them our feedback, our
• 13:35
  ideas, and help guide the product in a way that brings the most value
• 13:39
  to us. But then to them it also brings value where they can make
• 13:43
  improvements to the product in ways that benefits them and their customers. And so
• 13:48
  together we can each help each other sort of be better and and move the
• 13:52
  needle in a way that helps everyone. M Yeah, that's that's very interesting.
• 14:01
  Logan another one for you, event what is the future maybe taking all
• 14:05
  of this into account for proactivity, the influence of AI, the influence of
• 14:09
  vendors in the space and technology, what does the future if the euc professional
• 14:15
  look like to you? I think that it's someone who's deeply in touch with
• 14:20
  the customer experience, the user centric design, what are the different employees actually
• 14:28
  experiencing. And someone who has knowledge in quite a few areas, like you
• 14:33
  said, who can kind of see over everything, but has like maybe not
• 14:37
  in depth knowledge, but a little knowledge of a lot of areas. So
• 14:41
  when they see something they could go, oh, that's probably an issue with
• 14:45
  you know this, and then they could kind of focus down on what area
• 14:52
  needs more focus there, But also the ability to be curious and look at
• 14:56
  issues, dig into issues, and then you could kind of flip some of
• 15:01
  those findings to be proactive and look to improve the experience in that area that
• 15:07
  you you see a gap. Very that's very beautifully said. And last word
• 15:11
  for you, Tom, I just got to bring it back to the road
• 15:13
  warrior thing. I don't I just I just like using a phrase, what
• 15:16
  do you what do you miss about it? Most? I think I think
• 15:20
  you know, you could send a survey, you could send out these sentiment
• 15:24
  requests, right, but you just you don't get the same impact of sitting
• 15:28
  talking face in the face with somebody really, you know, seeing what they
• 15:35
  what they experience every day. You know, you can, you can try
• 15:39
  to quantify it into a survey, but you just you just missed that one
• 15:43
  on one time. It's the way of the world, guys, It's the
• 15:48
  way of the world. And were we all miss irl? But you know
• 15:52
  we're gonna flower ahead. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna
• 15:54
  do? But guys, it was an absolute pleasure to talk to you both
• 15:56
  in Boston. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you both today.
• 16:00
  I would like on behalf of our dex Hub editor Seauan Malvi to invite you
• 16:04
  both to contribute articles to the hub. I think we'd love to have you
• 16:10
  on individually altogether again as guest authors, because I think you bring something really
• 16:17
  fresh to the discussion. It's been great to have you guys. Thank you
• 16:18
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• 16:22
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• 16:33
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• 16:41
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