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143. Do More Than Keep Computers Running: Own the Status Meeting with Randy Kellum · You've Been Heard

• 0:00
  Speaker A: You know, if we're not involved in those leadership then we can't, you know, be prepared to bring what you need to have to support what your, your initiatives are.
• 0:18
  Speaker B: Everyone out there listening? You're listening to dissecting popular IT nerds. Today we are talking with Randy Kellum. Yes, I have this correct. Director of Information technology for maker of airbags.
• 0:31
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 0:32
  Speaker B: Airbags.
• 0:35
  Speaker A: Yes. Airbag inflators. Yeah, we manufacture inflator.
• 0:39
  Speaker B: How many airbag inflators are there out there in the world? Manufacturers of airbag inflators?
• 0:44
  Speaker A: Well, manufacturers as far as the largest, we would be. Second one. The second largest. So there's two of us that are the primary or leave and are just uplimary. How many exactly? I don't, I don't know.
• 0:59
  Speaker B: The point is, is there's not many. So if you guys. So if the data center goes down, we're gonna have some problems with airbags.
• 1:06
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 1:07
  Speaker B: This is excellent. Excellent. So Director of Information technology, how many at and the company is arc or do we say arc? I want to get this right.
• 1:17
  Speaker A: Yeah. Our employee base is about 1500.
• 1:20
  Speaker B: Beautiful. Are you guys a Microsoft shop?
• 1:23
  Speaker A: We are Microsoft shop predominantly. We do have a number of Linux platforms so we run Oracle databases across all our plant sites and they're all Linux based systems. But otherwise we're primarily Microsoft.
• 1:37
  Speaker B: Excellent. You never know, someone goes, people go Google every now and then. People do G Suite. I've known some very, very massive organizations that just said no, we're just going to go G suite just because Microsoft stuck it to us a week ago.
• 1:52
  Speaker A: Right.
• 1:53
  Speaker B: You know what I mean?
• 1:54
  Speaker A: I hear you. That's right.
• 1:55
  Speaker B: But I love you, Microsoft. I'm not saying anything. It's a love, it's a love, love, love, hate, maybe a little bit relationship. So talk to me, give me. Let's do this the old school way. What was your first computer?
• 2:06
  Speaker A: It was probably an IBM PC 8086 system.
• 2:10
  Speaker B: We pick it up.
• 2:11
  Speaker A: Where did I get that? No, I got it from IBM. I think my dad brought it home. So I don't really remember exactly where it came from. He picked it up. I believe it's back.
• 2:19
  Speaker B: Back in the day no one knew they would be in computers for life. They did computers for fun. Did you, did you have any idea you're gonna, you know, do this for like that, like you know, something to do with computers would actually become like a real job and living.
• 2:31
  Speaker A: No, I didn't, I. In college I was, I studied physics so my intent was to Be a physicist. And I started out that way. When I was in college, I vowed that I wouldn't do it, work for a living. I took a Fortran course my junior year, Fortran programming course. And I hated it. And I just said I won't do this for a living, you know. But then of course, now I've done it for over 30 years. But I got into it initially working for Naval Intelligence after college and I had to get into some programming there to help with my research. And that's how I got started.
• 3:05
  Speaker B: It's amazing we did anything back in the day without technology or primitive. Like we sent people to the, the moon, supposedly. Supposedly there's some people out there that believe we didn't go to the moon. But you know, we sent people the moon without, without the Internet. I mean it might have been, maybe we should call it intranet back then, I don't know. You know, there might have been, you know, but I mean for the most part we, we sent people to the moon and while working on floppy disks.
• 3:36
  Speaker A: You're right. Which is amazing.
• 3:38
  Speaker B: I just find that quite. Yeah, quite. You know, and I'm only saying that from, you know, you know, if you studied physics and you know, I remember, I remember physics and memorizing equations and it was probably one of my weaker, one of my weaker points in time. But yeah, yeah, you know, trajectories and orbits and stuff like that, you know, math, slide rules. I wonder. Someone probably used a slide rule somewhere along that, somewhere along that line. My son in law is an engineer. I asked him the other day, I was like, he do you know what a slide rule is? He's like, no. I had to Google it and show him a picture of what a slide rule is. Like it was some archaic thing.
• 4:14
  Speaker A: So yeah, I just, I think about the programs being a stack of cards, you know, and just that card stack and you feed those through the card reader to execute the program, you know, and get a card out of sequence. You know, trying to figure that one out. Where that card was, you know, out of the sequence seems next impossible to figure out. So.
• 4:32
  Speaker B: And we complain about speed nowadays, but you and I know what real speed issues were. So as a director of Information Technology, how big a team, what do you guys have? Let's start off maybe with, I don't know, what do you think? What's some of your biggest challenges nowadays?
• 4:50
  Speaker A: Of course, this past couple years, working, balancing the remote work was a challenge. We had not been a remote workforce. So supporting that was a huge challenge. And still we have some that are working remote, but we're primarily back in the office. But you know, implementing that infrastructure or having prepared that groundwork for something like that ahead of time was a big plus. That's one of the things, you know, keeping our systems databases up and running or getting the information into the appropriate person's hands. Looking at analytics, that's huge. We're implementing analytics now to really try to improve that visibility to our leadership team, to our quality group, to engineers, as to what's really going on in the factory, where our problem areas are, what we can do to change things to make it, whether it's processes or product, that's, that's what we're looking at. So we're in the process of implementing a large analytics platform now. So those are some of our key.
• 5:48
  Speaker B: Challenges as far as the analytics goes. Where do you guys begin with that? And is there any kind of like AI or data scientist type people we need to bring in for that type of thing, or is this something you guys are getting just from like, let's just observe and measure.
• 6:05
  Speaker A: Right now it's internal. Our staff is going through training with our product that we acquired. Engineers are involved. Quality group is going to be the largest users, at least out of the box here. And then I have some IT people that are going through the training to help support that. The data loads or any kind of questions that we might get from the engineers user, we need to support that. But right now it's mostly our quality staff. So the initial plan is to just generate, you know, provide that data in a reader format, a meaning format, to help shed some light on where our constraints are in the factory process, manufacture, manufacturing process, but ultimately integrate that with machinery to where we may shut down an operation or shut down a line if something begins to, you know, show it's getting out of specific or maybe even predictably. So take a look at shutting down an operation. If the statistics are showing that, hey, you're going to have a problem in the next hour or two. So that's where we're headed with it.
• 7:08
  Speaker B: Have you guys found any inefficiencies yet or is this just the beginning?
• 7:12
  Speaker A: It's just beginning. So we've just completed our first training cycle. So we're looking right now probably May June timeframe before we start to implement, looking at the inefficiency side. So it'll be a couple months out yet. But you know, we have a lot of high expectation, I think with this and the product that we researched and spent about six months with a research evaluation of various products. So we have some pretty high expectation with the one that we selected and.
• 7:45
  Speaker B: To maybe just be a little more granular. In what sense? From a sense of labor productivity, from a sense of staffing appropriately when on the manufacturing floor, to changing processes and improvements or time to, I don't know, make an airbag.
• 8:02
  Speaker A: I would say it's, you know, what we're looking for is to improve the quality so less and less. Create less parts, you know, that have a problem. So, you know, they got to pass the quality checks. So you want to lessen your scrap, reduce the scrap, basically, is what we're.
• 8:18
  Speaker B: Gotcha, gotcha here. So. And I meant not airbags. Airbag pumps. Correct. Inflators. Yeah, inflate. I'm sorry, inflation. Just out of curiosity, how's that work? Are we talking like some sort of, like, canister filled with gas that inflates a bag? Real quick, how does it work?
• 8:35
  Speaker A: Yeah, it does. It's. It's energetic that we have an energetic that does inflate, create a high, I guess, temperature. High temperature that inflates the bag rapidly. And that's the, that's the thing. It's inflated instantly.
• 8:47
  Speaker B: So, yeah, that's.
• 8:49
  Speaker A: That. That's achieved with something that I call an energetic.
• 8:52
  Speaker B: Okay. Rewinding back to physics in college and saying that you were never going to do this for a living. Did something get exciting about this job? Or did you just say, no, I'm just stuck here and I just have been doing this forever, so that's why I'm in it?
• 9:06
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, for me, I came from software development. I love software development, and that's what really got me into it. So initially I wasn't too jacked up about it, but, you know, I went back after some time in naval intelligence, I went to graduate school. And while I was in graduate school, I got a job working in the business office as a programmer. So it was there that I really started getting excited about developing software, solving problems, that type of thing. And so from there just kind of say, you know, the different companies, different situations. But I've always been very excited about software development. So that's where I've managed the bulk of my career. It's in the software side, then moving into senior roles as a director, taking on not only the business system side of it, but also the infrastructure side. So I enjoy the infrastructure side because we are planning out for the future strategically, so putting infrastructure in place that can support new business initiatives down the road. So I also enjoy that I enjoy coming to work every day. I mean, I get excited about this work. So making a difference for our business is ultimate, ultimate goal.
• 10:14
  Speaker B: A lot of. One of the common themes that comes up a lot on the show is it technical, software minded, engineering minded, people not necessarily enjoying talking with, working with, understand people and users to begin with. I have a show that, that I recorded the other day that was just quite hilarious where he said, no, don't ever put me in front of the people. I hate talking with the people. And the. It was kind of ironic because I thought we were recording a podcast and he's like, no, we're supposed to be talking about a Microsoft Teams migration. I was like, oh well, can we just turn this into a show also at the same time, because it's just so funny that you literally said everything that is like the stereotype of an IT director, you know what I mean? So you went from software, which is probably the most stereotypical. Sit in a closet in a dark room in front of a screen, coding 2C suite and stakeholder presentations and understanding the language of business and presenting, all of that. Where did you get that experience and. Or courage or ability to be able to do that? Because. And once you've been doing it long enough, you don't really think of it as a courageous thing anymore. You don't think of it. But I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that have anxiety when they go to present to C Suite or if they never have even the thought of maybe stepping out of their comfort zone and starting to do some of the things that may not come firsthand.
• 11:56
  Speaker A: Right. Yeah, it's, you know, I got more exposure for big pins. I'm down in Florida, so that's where I really grew, I think the most significantly amount. And so I moved in. I was a business manager of business systems for a number of years there before I move into the director role and I'm reporting to the CEO. But I, prior to that I didn't really have a great deal of experience doing C Suite meetings, presentations, what have you. So let's have a learn as you go, basically experience. The company did invest in me in the sense that they sent me to some senior level leadership programs and that type of thing with centers for creative leadership. But beyond that, it was just getting in front of a CEO and giving them the present. And the companies and the CEOs, I mean, they're different, the expectations are different. I worked for a Japanese automotive company earlier in my career and there when I did Some presentation to our president. You know, it's very brief, very scaled down, one page. But then let's dig in on that.
• 12:59
  Speaker B: Let's just dig into that real quick. When you say one page, bullet points like, this is what we have, this is what we're looking to do. This is how much it costs. Good, better, best, yes, no, or maybe.
• 13:11
  Speaker A: Yeah. So I would give a status report. So I would do whatever the project is. I'd show the project name and then out to the side it would be a circle, a delta or an X. And that would tell them a circle meant that everything was going according to schedule, everything is according to plan. A delta means some problem, they want a little bit of an explanation. X means it's not going well at all, and they want a lot of explanation. So that's really bad. That was about it. It was a grid like that. And so, you know, as far as the budget type of stuff or money type of things, I would present a one page document that would just summarize the dollars, you know, how they're being spent, what they're being spent on, but very, very little information. Not a lot of detail behind that. And then I give more of a brief version, verbal presentation, last five minutes. And it was a yes or no with the project. It was that quick.
• 14:02
  Speaker B: Kind of like a temperature check. Kind of like a temperature check with all departments, I'm assuming. Do you have any examples of those old reports?
• 14:09
  Speaker A: I don't think I have any anymore. No, I don't. I haven't. I did not keep them.
• 14:13
  Speaker B: I would just love to even, even if it was just a, a napkin drawing example of that.
• 14:19
  Speaker A: I could do that.
• 14:20
  Speaker B: Yeah, that'd be cool. I'd love to just see an example of that. Okay, so you have that. So you have the quick, the, the quick experience then. Okay, so what were some of the other examples? I guess.
• 14:30
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, so I moved. When I left Denso, I went to bic. And so my first status meeting with our, my new boss, you know, I asked him, what kind of format do you want for your status meeting? And he said, once you, once you just bring something to the meeting, we'll see, we'll do it your way. So I brought that same format to the status meeting that I used with the Japanese automotive company. And he was like, what is this? Where's the details? You know, that now went from very little to. I had to have pages and pages of detail. So it was, it was a very.
• 15:04
  Speaker B: Different approach, but pages of detail. So.
• 15:08
  Speaker A: Yes, yes.
• 15:09
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 15:09
  Speaker A: And this is not the CEO at that time. That's the director of IT I was reported to when I went to work for Big. But yeah, he liked a lot of detail. So, you know, meeting a status meeting with him ago, an hour and a half, and I would be going through a great deal of detail on a weekly basis.
• 15:26
  Speaker B: Was it useful from now that you're in a director of IT role, what's your preference if people come to give a report to you?
• 15:33
  Speaker A: Yeah, I, I, I'm in between. I'd like a little detail of the project. So we have something that I call an issues list.
• 15:41
  Speaker B: Say that again. What was it?
• 15:42
  Speaker A: An issue. An issue list.
• 15:44
  Speaker B: Oh, issue list. How appropriate. How appropriate in technology.
• 15:48
  Speaker A: I know this.
• 15:50
  Speaker B: What's your issues list?
• 15:52
  Speaker A: Let me see it. So it's, you know, it gives a summary kind of like I did for the Japanese company, and then, you know, section for small details and just, you know, are we on target? Yes or no kind of thing. So it's a little more than what we did I did for the Japanese company, but not near the extent that I was required to give that big.
• 16:13
  Speaker B: So issues list.
• 16:14
  Speaker A: I like. Yeah. Issues list.
• 16:16
  Speaker B: How many issues are allowed to be on the list? Do we have, like, a minimum of issues?
• 16:19
  Speaker A: Yeah, I don't have a cap. It's, I have whatever your open issues are. You know, they actually stay on there either closed or open forever. So it becomes a good audit trail and a good summary for what you've done in the past. The guys use it to kind of summarize their year when they're doing their, their annual reviews and that kind of thing.
• 16:38
  Speaker B: Look at how many issues we resolved.
• 16:40
  Speaker A: Yeah, issues. The details. Yeah.
• 16:42
  Speaker B: I have 500 issues.
• 16:45
  Speaker A: And now that meant it's not a good thing.
• 16:47
  Speaker B: Yeah, no. Are you guys doing that in some kind of shared document or anything? Or you check things off or, like, how are you managing that? I'm just curious.
• 16:55
  Speaker A: Each staff member has their own document. They are, we have a shared folder, but I believe most of the guys are keeping it local to their, their own computer. And, you know, they tend to email me the documents, which I'm fine with it, but they're on document. They just send it to me, an email. Then when we meet, we just, we sit down and review it together.
• 17:14
  Speaker B: How are you? How many guys do you hear in Knoxville?
• 17:17
  Speaker A: There's just four of us right now, so we, we've really, we've scaled back last couple of years, so we're running really lean here in Knoxville. We do have sites and we're responsible, not directly managing the other staffs indirectly, so other staffs at other sites, and we are responsible for managing some of the infrastructure and planning the infrastructure at some of our other site locations. So big items, the big hitters, we were responsible for out of here.
• 17:44
  Speaker B: And servers, network. Gotcha. And end users. Do you have direct contact or do they allow you guys to talk with the people?
• 17:52
  Speaker A: Okay, yeah, we have direct contact with users here in Knoxville. I mean, we do a lot of on site. We'll go, you know, face to face with the users or contact with the user via phone, via teams, what have you.
• 18:04
  Speaker B: Yeah, yep, gotcha. The biggest change during the pandemic, what was the biggest. I don't want to say showstopper, but what was the biggest crap, we need to do this now.
• 18:17
  Speaker A: Yeah, it was when. When we started working from home. It was really trying to make. Making sure that we have enough equipment. Suddenly everybody needed a laptop. And so we were in the process of moving our staff here at Knoxville, the laptops, but we still had quite a. Quite a number of desktops, so.
• 18:35
  Speaker B: So you're going to. Going to every Best Buy in Target and buying up laptops and shipping them out.
• 18:40
  Speaker A: We did. We did acquire a few laptops, and we also had some old laptops in there.
• 18:44
  Speaker B: I had one guy just saying. I was. I just started calling every Best Buy. I said, okay, what do you got? All right, take them all off the shelf. Put them there. That just sounds crazy to me. Okay, so it was getting people equipment. What about communications? Were you guys. I mean, how did you guys do your voice to teams or what we do or, you know.
• 19:04
  Speaker A: Yeah, the bulk of it was done through teams. You know, we. In the prior year, we had just implemented nesting when really improved our interconnectivity among our facilities.
• 19:13
  Speaker B: Can I take a guess? Well, first of all, let me take a guess. Was it equipment based or was it cloud based? Sdwan.
• 19:21
  Speaker A: Well, it's. It's cloud. We. I mean, we do have some equipment on each of the sites, but the. The services that we. We get, the firewall services, the security services that we get from them, it's all cloud based.
• 19:33
  Speaker B: Cato Networks. Cato.
• 19:36
  Speaker A: Cato. That's exactly right. Cato Networks.
• 19:38
  Speaker B: I got it on the first try.
• 19:40
  Speaker A: The first try.
• 19:42
  Speaker B: That was. And it was only because you said the security piece, too, because a lot of the SDM providers are not fully baked yet. Not fully baked at Cato is great. I love Cato. I'm under NDA with this other big company that we just did a Cato rollout for. But I use Cato for a lot and then I have another company that's big manufacturing company with manufacturing over in China and Cato is really good at getting around the Great Wall of China.
• 20:05
  Speaker A: That's right.
• 20:06
  Speaker B: So that was, you know, if you've got VPNs that go down every time Chinese Congress goes into power, then Cato Networks and give me a call, I'll help you. I'll make the introduction if you guys want. I've done plenty of Cato for anyone out there listening. Tons of Cato rollouts. I'm a VeloCloud fan too. I definitely am. And a few others. But Cato is great for international backbone or anything global. If you're doing global travel. And then as far as their. Their whole security piece around the mobile device management, being able to, you know, have mobile devices securely access your network without worry and stuff. So cool. So that helped. So then we're using teams for voice for making phone calls and stuff like that or what?
• 20:44
  Speaker A: Yeah, I had some. There's some of that. Our. Our voice system is a Pantera network. So not Pantera, you know, old school voice over. Yeah. So there was a lot of that. So, you know, you install the app on the phone.
• 20:56
  Speaker B: Yep.
• 20:56
  Speaker A: Your cell phone. Make calls from the office in that way.
• 21:00
  Speaker B: Cool. I haven't heard Pantera in a while, but yeah, still there. It's like genband. It's like when I hear genband, if that comes up, you always know this. People still have some stuff. You can always tell by the. Have you ever noticed you can always tell by the hold music. You're like, oh, that's genban pipe. Oh, but okay, excellent. So just curious internally, what was the. When the pandemic hit and people were working from home, I'm assuming there was maybe some supply chain issues and other things that might have affected the business. But how about just in general, like the. How did it. Was it a calmer or was it like, were you guys like the calm to the storm or was it more like everyone's throwing all kinds of stuff at you and you're like, we're going to lose our mind.
• 21:45
  Speaker A: No, it really wasn't that bad. I mean, for us. And you know, from a connectivity standpoint, I really. Again, back to Cato. It's, you know, the client. Excellent.
• 21:55
  Speaker B: Oh, they're giving out free VPN connections. They're giving out during. That was another thing. That was awesome. Yeah, they're like, how many do you need? A couple Hundred. Okay. Here you go.
• 22:03
  Speaker A: That's right. Yeah.
• 22:03
  Speaker B: Yeah, that was. They were really, really cool with that. Awesome. Excellent. I don't know where to go from there. That was just. That was. Tell me. I guess when you talk with your colleagues, I'm making this up at the top of my head. I've never asked this question, but when you talk with other. It's folk. It. Do you have. You know, it's kind of like you might be somewhere where people don't really know. They can't talk the jargon. They would have no clue what SD WAN is. They would have no clue what all these acronyms we are. When you are with people that understand you, what's your most passionate subject of choice? And it might not have anything to do with it whatsoever. It might be, I don't know, Bitcoin or something, you know.
• 22:47
  Speaker A: Right. No, I guess. I mean I. What I enjoy talking about the most and it's. It would be more, more the lines of software development. I just, I. I get excited about it. Even though I don't do it so much anymore, I still do it. I still try to keep myself enough to, you know, do that. But it's. I'm always interested in new techniques, new possibilities. You know, I'm always. I like to develop a new technique in software development such as take an approach like you're making a part, you know, you got to build a material. Can I develop software where I essentially generate components that are like a bill of material and I can assemble those components into a final assembly that's a program. You know, we're taking a little bit of a design approach. I don't know if that'll work. You know, it's, you know, there's some things like that today. I know what's object oriented programming as such, but it's just. I'm interested in, you know, the development of software development technique or the software.
• 23:38
  Speaker B: Development approach from, From a Software. From a DevOps kind of perspective, there is this. I see it as a problem. I see this kind of typical problem. We'll put this on the. What do we call it? The list again? The list that you have, the issues list. Okay, we're going to throw this on the issues list. On my issue list. If I worked for you, on my issue list would be trouble. Finding a good software development team. How do we find good software developers for in house software development? How do we find them right? How do we not find just some janky dude that says, a team that says, yeah, we can do this. This and this and whatever, throw it out to upwork and offshore this and that. And we basically end up with a bunch of copy code and kind of stuff put together and it's like hey, we got the job done. But no, we want good software dev people. How do we find that?
• 24:42
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's. And one of the things that as an evaluation tool and maybe maybe considered old, I don't know but it's, you know, as I've in the past when I've gone through interviews, you know, it's, it's. There's some testing involved, some something to measure your, your skill level, you know and so I've always had to go through something like that. Not only the face to face interview with the individuals, but maybe a technical interview with a team individuals, but also sitting down and getting going through some sort of a test that tries to gauge your level of skill, your skill level with the software development.
• 25:19
  Speaker B: So I want to know what that test is because what if we're even throwing that test out to yeah, maybe we're outsourcing some software development because we don't have the in house, I don't have the money to hire. We're not Netflix, we're not going to go cherry pick everybody and get the best software development guys in the world. What do we, what's that test look like for you guys? Is it top secret?
• 25:40
  Speaker A: No, it's not top secret. I mean we just some basic. So we look at some design, you know, asking some design questions. How you would approach a problem solver, for example, how I guess how you. What kinds of questions you would ask in terms of gathering the information to begin the process of development. So are you asking the right questions to the person that's presenting a challenge to you to solve analysis side of it and the design side of things? So we look at that. Just some basic questions along this line. Nothing, nothing super deep, but just some top level. The kind of gauge did they have a good technique, a solid technique in terms of how they approach software development. And sometimes you ask specific technology questions. So if you're hiring a C sharp programmer, you may put in some C sharp questions and see how well they least of basic level of C Sharp. Even though kind of gauge your level of knowledge in C Sharp you may do some of that. The best test I ever went through was a test that you know, fired questions at you and as you got more right. The complexity of questions that you got got higher and higher and higher. You know, tougher, tougher, tougher. And then as you Miss Questions. They would kind of scale it back. Okay, a little easier. A little easier to kind of really kind of gauge the level that way. That was. I don't know who put that test together, but that was a pretty, pretty slick test to kind of gauge.
• 27:02
  Speaker B: That's a pretty solid methodology actually. If we could do that, if we could actually do that with vendors, all vendors in general, like, hey, yeah, take this test real quick to see if you're full of crap or not. It would, it would be, you know, it'd be great. You know, and these vendors rated this, this, this and that. But it still begs the question is like, how do you find the people to begin with in IT Right now, from what I hear is there's a. Well, we're in the midst of the. What do they call it? The great Resignation. And, you know, there's a shortage of IT jobs. And I'm trying to understand why. So there's a lot of opportunity, I would think, out there for IT directors to grow, expand.
• 27:45
  Speaker A: Anyways, we haven't used recruit. We've, you know, sometimes we use recruiters to kind of, you know, submit the. I guess, find candidates for us to submit a resume. But we've also used some of the online services, you know, such as. Indeed or such as. I don't know. I mean, some of the other services that are out there, we've. We've kind of gone. Gone through those, through our HR group in terms of sourcing resumes and that type of thing. So, I mean, that's, that's some of the things we've done. I've. I've found that it's just been really tough to get good, solid and you know, at times with candidates and through some of that, that approach. So we, you know, we've had better success when we've sourced through recruiters.
• 28:25
  Speaker B: Are you hiring right now?
• 28:27
  Speaker A: Not for the IT department, we're not. I mean, there are other areas of the business that are, but we're not.
• 28:31
  Speaker B: Gotcha. Gotcha. For IT directors out there, what is the end game? What's the end game? Do we. Do we retire? Is there a 401k? What is it?
• 28:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, yeah, I want to work forever. I mean, I just, you know, that's. My plan is to work till 70 at least. But that's. Yeah. I mean, from a retirement standpoint, I don't, I don't. I hadn't really thought about it. I guess the retirement piece of. Yeah, there's a 401 caters all of that, but I was thinking that end game when you asked the questions, what are we, what is our goal? Is IT directors to achieve as an end game for the IT for our business? You know, and that's to show value in our business. So we, you know, we have to not only engage with, you know, employees in our business, but also with the leadership in our business to understand what the top level needs are, what the main needs are in our business, but we have to show value by delivering on those needs. So for example, if we, you know, if we stand back and we're just the guys that keep the lights on and keep my computer running, you know, that's, that's important, but that's really not where the biggest value can be brought. And so we have to solve business problems through either, through the implementation of new technology, whether it's hardware, whether it's software. But the end game is really to, you know, provide that business where we can improve our process, reduce our costs and improve our efficiencies to meet those overall needs of our business, where our business can be successful through the use of technology. That's to me the end game as.
• 30:02
  Speaker B: Far as what it so IT guy, there's plenty of people out there sitting right now in a cost center. They're sitting in the cost center right now. It is keeping the blinking lights on in the business. They are not asked to spend necessarily, really sit in and take part in very valuable business decisions. What does that IT leader need to do? What are the questions they need to ask? Who do they need to cattle prod above them to get them to wake up? What do they need to say? What bravery, what brave step forward do they need to take?
• 30:44
  Speaker A: Yeah, and it's, you know, it's really, again, there's a very, I guess there is a myopic view of IT from some businesses where it's a very narrow. You don't have software developers, maybe you don't have analysts, but you have infrastructure folks. So they are, you know, supporting the business in a critical way, but can't really bring maybe business software process changes. You need people to understand, be able to understand the business. So we, we have to sell that to the, to the corporate leadership, the CEO, the cfo. I report to the CFO directly here, but we have to sell them on that idea. And part of that is to be able to step into projects, get involved in the projects. At my level, I kind of pushed my way into some product and to show where we can add value. We need to be involved, we need to know what's going on because I don't know that we don't need to budget for 10 new servers or whatever. I don't know. It's just, you know, if we're not involved in those leadership, then we can't, you know, be prepared to bring what you need to have to support what your, your initiatives are. So, you know, I have to sell that and that's on me to talk to the CEO, to talk to the cfo, you know, to show them where we can bring that value. But we have to also be given that opportunity and I have to force my way, push my way into project.
• 31:58
  Speaker B: How do you, how are you doing that? I'm just curious. How are you forcing your way in?
• 32:02
  Speaker A: Yeah, so, for example, we, you know, we have a New York platform and it's, you know, we're looking to upgrade that. So, you know, I'm really trying to drive, drive that process to where we can, you know, bring ourselves up to a current release of that. That sounds like it's not a big deal, but it's been a while since we've upgraded. I mean, upgrade is not cheap. So I've had to kind of push that with our leadership that, hey, you know, we're about to run out of compliance in the sense that I'm going to start having technology issues here. I'm going to have, you know, browsers that aren't going to, with the product anymore. So we stand to, you know, lose our capabilities with the system. So I'm selling them on that idea because that's the truth. That's what's going to happen if we don't make a move. But other things like mrp, we want to roll out mrp, improve our inventory. You know, I'm involved with that to show them how that can happen. Getting involved with some of the key players in that, that area, not necessarily directly with the CEO, but in the other area managers, the key players said, hey, we got, we can help here. You know, we can help you understand how this is going to work, we can help you with the implementation process and we can help with testing and so on. So we've kind of pushed our way into those areas of the business and we're moving forward with some projects right now in that area. The analytics was initially driven by it as well. So I led the team to go through an evaluation and selection and, you know, we've got that product now. We've already purchased the product, we've got it in house, we're going through the training. But I drove all that initiative as far as getting that set up, getting it done, getting us through that process. So that's an effort to show those areas of the business and what we can do to help the business, and so we continue in that area. I have IT people going through training still to help there. So all those we had to push our way into to kind of get involved and show where we can bring that value.
• 33:55
  Speaker B: And I would imagine your job is a lot more fun and exciting when you do that.
• 34:00
  Speaker A: It is. I mean, because, I mean, what I want to see us do here is broaden our IT to where we're now bringing into some development. We can do development. You know, you have a request, there's things that you need you don't ask for, because we don't have maybe the. The skill sets or what have you to do those things. So as we get more involved in these things, I want to see us bring on analysts and software folks and kind of broaden that IT perspective across our whole business. And so that, you know, we'll be able to deliver improvements, whether it's here in Knoxville or whether it's in China, but we'll be able to deliver improvements.
• 34:36
  Speaker B: And what's cool is you can say you're blowing hot air, right? And we're not just blowing hot air, or we are. You know, like, you get a. It really. It. It fits nice. It fits nice into your business. Randy, I've been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much. Very insightful to basically jam it down the throat of your CFO for the betterment of mankind and the company and making more money.
• 35:00
  Speaker A: Thank you. I appreciate it. I've enjoyed it.
• 35:03
  Speaker B: Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. If you like this or any other episode, make sure you rate it and share it with one of your friends. And remember, when it comes to it, you always need to be dissecting, analyzing, and improving.