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428- When IT Stops Being IT w/Luis Oliveira & Jose' Young · You've Been Heard

• 0:09
  Speaker A: After talking with IT leaders, I've come to discover one thing. And it's the same thing, you know, it's the same thing everyone else knows, whether they want to admit it out loud or not. Nothing gets done in any company without it touching it. Nothing. But here's the thing. When everything's on fire, when nothing's working, when the ransomware hits, when the whole business grinds to a halt, it is completely indispensable. You're the most valuable asset in the company. But when everything's running like a well oiled Tesla, you're a line item, a cost center on a spreadsheet. You've done the work, you've built the career, you've earned your seat at the executive roundtable. But having a seat at the table is one thing. How much nicer would it be to actually be heard? This is. You've been heard, Jose and Luis. So why don't we do it this way. Now, Jose, introduce yourself in your title, where you work. And then, Luis, you introduce yourself and your title and where you're at right now.
• 1:13
  Speaker B: Sure. Jose Nung, CTO at Beyond Air and also founder of Brightpeak AI Solutions as well.
• 1:20
  Speaker A: Cool. And okay.
• 1:23
  Speaker C: Luis Oliveira. I'm the director of a T4 guidance measurement. We manufacture measuring equipment for the oil and gas station here in Houston. Actually, I'm here, but companies all over the world.
• 1:35
  Speaker A: All right, beautiful. And so let's go back in time a little bit and I'll go first to you, Louise. First computer. How'd you get started in this wild thing?
• 1:46
  Speaker C: Okay, first computer. Back in Brazil, I had a. It's called a CP400 from a Prologis. It was basically a TRS80 clone. A lot of memory, like 16K. My output device, everything. I had a cassette tape, that was my input output device. No floppy disks yet. And connect to a little black and white tv, that was fine.
• 2:10
  Speaker A: Most likely you probably had to connect it with like a. Like what. What was that old thing? Like an RV switch or something? Like what was that? An 8, like AV something switch? I. I can't remember what that thing was called. What was that device called that we used to.
• 2:22
  Speaker C: No, I. I don't even remember. This was a few years ago, probably before I was born.
• 2:28
  Speaker A: And then we have a third person. This is getting even better.
• 2:31
  Speaker B: So we.
• 2:31
  Speaker A: We've got Thomas in the room too. And Thomas, welcome to the chat. If you got any questions or anything you want to fire away, go ahead. How about you, Jose? First computer, how'd you get started in It, I guess, for either of you guys at any time, what was the spark that kind of. Most people don't end up in IT leadership just due to the nature of how much technology has changed over time. Like, it wasn't a job really back in the day, I mean, it was kind of a job, but it's not like it is today. How'd you get started and what was the first computer? How do you get where you are the first computer?
• 3:01
  Speaker B: To be honest, I don't remember the first computer in terms of what it was. I just remember it was floppy disk. To Louise's point, I never got into tapes. That was a little bit before me. Yeah. But I definitely was in floppy. And like, I remember like Windows, I think it was 3.1 and you having like to put the multiple floppy disk to actually load the operating system and installing it and going through that. And I mean, to be honest, I loved it, even though it took forever to do anything. But like, it was just like such an amazing time to be in technology. I thought it was like you were like pioneering stuff. Right. And then to your point, what got me into technology was actually like that part of the time where I was like doing DOS prompt and programming and all those kind of things. And I was like, oh. Even though it wasn't visual at all. Right. But it was cool. Like for me as a kid, it was exciting. It was exciting to kind of get things kind of seeing what the possibilities of it and stuff. So that's kind of what got me to your point of it. Right. It was really the programming and getting to the nuts and bolts of things.
• 4:08
  Speaker A: I think we can definitely all relate to that. Luis, what's the fondest memory? And I do remember discs with like a Sharpie that you wrote on it.
• 4:18
  Speaker C: I have that one for you because what happens. I was going to school for electrical engineering back in Brazil. And then I came from my beach house to school to do a final exam in January and saw this training because I had taken a class in Fortran that I really enjoyed the semester before. And I told my friend, hey, if you see any other classes or courses, let me know. I would like to learn more about it. So when I came back, I said, hey, Louise, I'm. Let's see, I did a selection for this bank and to be a programmer. And I was hired as operator. So now they're doing the selection again to be programmer. Want to go in? So I went to the selection. It was a one month training on IBM in my hometown. And then I Got an internship on the bank and during the internship we had to use punch cards to code PL1 programs on the mainframe. And then I got the job and then one of the big rewards of the job was that forgot about punch cards. We can now use the terminals and store our data, our programs on network. So that's how I started. And I just love programming from the get go. It was cool to see you doing something and seeing the results also. It's pretty new, paid well at the time, so it was a good thing. And then from there I end up getting a job here in the States and moved a few years later and was supposed to be a three year stint starting in 1990. I'm still here.
• 5:34
  Speaker A: So one of the bullet points that we were going to talk about today was 30 years across different industries and what actually transfers and what does not across different industries. And because you guys are one's H Vac, one's oil and gas, maybe we can find some dissimilarity or I guess what doesn't transfer or what's more important. I guess it's an IT leadership show what is the same across all industries in IT that translates well across all industries. And Jose, maybe you take that one first because this is Luis's talking point. So I'm sure he's going to have some points to add.
• 6:09
  Speaker B: Okay, sure. Certainly for me, I've been in the late tier. I certainly don't have 30 years of experience, but I have some experience of course in technology and the different, I guess life experience that I've had in the different industries I've been involved in. What I can say is that, and this is part of when I moved from the trades and those kind of distribution to medical devices, that was one of the reasons why I went and I was thinking to myself, can my skills and the technology translate in those different. And it does, right. Technology is still technology, whether you're in H Vac, whether you're in oil and gas, or there's just fundamental parts of technology that you're going to need in a company.
• 6:48
  Speaker D: Right.
• 6:49
  Speaker B: Like everyone's talking about AI, blah, blah, blah, Right. So it's just part of technology that we have to kind of continue to face and also continue to adapt. Right. So in terms of specifics, I mean sure there you can talk about like infrastructure applications and all these different things, but at the end of the day, I think overall technology is just that there's no matter what, there's just core principles like making sure that you're aligning Yourself with business objectives. Right. Making sure that you're meeting the needs of your customer, whichever that be, whether it it's internal customer or external customer. Right. I think those are the things I think for me really translate.
• 7:26
  Speaker C: No, it's a great point. I think it is true. I think there's a lot of commonality in terms of technology infrastructure. But I think the key point is what it came out in the last is the business focus, the ability to build the networks and I think also the willingness to learn more. Like once you jump into a new company, a new industry you have especially when you're on a leadership position that you expect to hopefully discuss business with the leaders, participate more in strategic sessions, then you have to learn the nuance of the industry and try to learn that path sometimes involves going back to school like when I entered healthcare and doing my second masters to learn more about biomic informatics, listen about the basics of healthcare and so on. But I think the other key is to find commonalities. There's always something common and even when you bliss express like for example I spent 17 years in restaurants, then 10 in healthcare. And then you look at our restaurant look at a hospital could not be more different. However they're both customer centric. Like in restaurants we are helping the staff, making sure that the guests have the best experience can be like a quick lunch all the way to a big family occasion. Or in the hospitals you are also empowering your care providers to make sure they take care of the patients and make sure they give a great patient care. So it is completely different stakes, food and life and death. But there's nothing common that some of the principles apply when you're moving from one place to another. And I like to joke because I've been in Houston for like 30 years now and I think I finally made to oil and gas every 30 years.
• 9:02
  Speaker A: Well, a bunch of things were running through my head as you guys were talking. One was your IBM training in a small town and that is can you really go to school for it? And when we look at some of the biggest leaders in the industry nowadays, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and his counterpart Mark Zuckerberg, I think he dropped out of Harvard too. But what does that say about where we get our education from and how we get it? Just stating an obvious point or what should we be teaching our kids nowadays? Most IT leaders don't have an Internet problem. They have a management problem. Multiple locations, multiple providers, multiple bills, different contracts. We help IT leaders make Internet boring again by consolidating visibility, billing support and monitoring without changing providers or forcing upgrades. If nothing needs fixing, we'll tell you that's vendor neutral advisory. Just go to you've been heard.com and, and answer the seven questions to simplify, streamline and save.
• 10:11
  Speaker B: I think to your point, we've definitely have to have some sort of gut check a little bit now. Like, let's face it, like universities and this whole kind of experience may need to be changed in how they do education as a whole. Especially with the advent of like, I don't want to harp on it, but it's there, right? AI is there. And like people are now kind of questioning what they've kind of spent their money on and all these things. And because of the fact that there's all this kind of, here's the solution in front of me, not to say that that solution is perfect or anything by any means, but at the same time, like, there's some kind of reality there that we have to adapt and who knows what education is going to be like a couple years. But to that point, like, I'm in that kind of industry where like, thankfully it's not as, I guess, vulnerable to that. Right. But at the same time, who knows, 10 to 20 years from now, maybe it will. Right? So I think there's definitely something there in terms of education. I mean, I think you can't go wrong with kind of, yes, there's a lot of change in terms of layoffs and all these things, especially in technology. But at the same time, as I'm sure Louise can talk about, it's like you don't kind of run away from it. You kind of kind of face it and understand it and get to, and make sure you're, for lack of a better term, I guess, ahead of it.
• 11:31
  Speaker C: Right.
• 11:32
  Speaker B: I don't know, Louise. I don't think there's anything else.
• 11:34
  Speaker C: Yeah, I think I would kind of break in two pieces. One is there is your initial form education, traditional to college and so on. And I think it's very important because it gives you a lot of skills from life skills and how to manage your time, how to work, how to be critical thinking. So there's a lot of value on that. But I think nowadays you cannot count just on that. And I think it's, it's more about having a mentality of being the constant learner because especially if you're in technology, you're going to have to do that because you think you're good today and then six months from now they're Trying something different. So it's learning about that. Or in the case of changing industries, whenever you go, like now I'm in manufacturing for a year now. I had never been in manufacturing before, never been in SAP before. But last February I started work with SAP. In May we went live and I owned the system. And then in December, I owned the department. So it's like we have to always be learning and training. So I think the good news is that nowadays you have so many different options of training. Be there, online classes, even, you know, AI to help you on that, on the job training. But you have to understand that you're going to be learning and training pretty much lifelong.
• 12:45
  Speaker A: That should be a bullet point on. That's like a resume bullet point. If anyone understands, they understand. Which is like, I took on SAP, I knew nothing about it, and six months later it was running great.
• 12:56
  Speaker D: I know the feeling. We're still trying to go live on our SAP, so we've been there. Luis, to your point, yes, it is totally. You have to be learning every day. You can't rest on your skill set that you learned five years ago because it's changing that quickly. I have a systems administrator who's a real great guy, but when the first day I hired him, it was like, okay, I need you to put a cable together, a Cat 6 cable together. And it's like, huh? Don't you just take it out of the plastic bag? No, here, here's the thing. Go do it. So you're constantly learning. Nobody taught me that in school. I learned Fortran like you did on key punch cards. And I couldn't wait for that semester in college to be over with because me and the IBM mainframe were not friends.
• 13:49
  Speaker C: So we joked back then that our reader could not really read very well because it was frustrating because you're in school, so you have a program and you submit and it's five hours later comes back and then you look and you miss. This line here is wrong. So you fix that card and then you resubmit and oh, now it'll be good. And then six hours later comes back, actually next day when you come back to school with another line that was good that they read poorly because it was public school in Brazil. It was not, I don't know, it was not a very good reader, but that happens. And then you waste a day because of not your fault, because you fixed the issue. So, yeah, it was frustrating, but you live through it. And then you get excited when you get to the new step that you can just Submit and be back in 10 minutes.
• 14:37
  Speaker A: Thomas. I think people don't know how to do that anymore because Radio Shack's not around anymore. Yeah, go to Radio Shack and you'd buy the crimper off the wall with like a bunch of pieces. I guess now you could go hang out in the electrical section of Home Depot. There's going to be like the one guy in that aisle, like old man Marley that has a Home Depot like apron on that's like hired electrician that just is there because he needs, he wants to do something. Like that's where you probably learn that skill nowadays. Guys, tell me, is there a moment in your career where it was the hero where if your team hadn't been there or you and the team hadn't been there, like, pretty much the whole business would have come to a grinding halt? Can you think of a time and like a good story and first person that thinks of one, fire away.
• 15:24
  Speaker C: I think I have one here. We're in Houston, is known for weather and hurricanes and all that. The good stuff. So after we divested from lands, I was running just Crab Check and we had 130 some restaurants all over the country. And then our data center here, we got hit by hurricane. So system went down completely. Okay. And all our credit card transactions, for example, came through here to my data center, which was down and so on. And also all the help desk calls came to us to keep the restaurants going. And so my team was literally working from their cars because they had no power in the house. They had the cell phone plugged into the car taking calls to that. So as a team, that was our first reaction. But then we also had to rely on some of our partners and switch real quick. Like we had a point of sale system vendor to auto plan switch to take our calls first time. And then my team was relay, so we would jump through a lot of hoops to keep everything going because they think over dumb is a hurricane. But if you have a restaurant in California or New York or Florida, they don't care. There's a hurricane in Dallas, in Houston, they, they want, they want to eat and they want to pay and they want to work. So it was a really critical situation there. We pulled through, but it was rough.
• 16:44
  Speaker A: Okay, so I'm just curious, what data center was that they didn't have N plus one diesel backups, battery generators? Were they flooded like, or it was your data center that went down.
• 16:55
  Speaker C: Okay, funny story. I used to report to CFO at that time and for the past six months I had a proposal in front of him to move my. My data center was two racks, okay. Which is not big. Okay, Two racks. And I want to move it to Cyrus one, which a co location here that has all this stuff that you
• 17:14
  Speaker A: just said we need, plus one diesel routes.
• 17:17
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 17:19
  Speaker C: Didn't give him the budget to do it. So we finally did it and we moved after the hurricane, but blue hurricane. And funny enough, okay, I was there. The first day that I could get out of the house was there. The whole office was down. There was some water on the bottom floor, but computers are fine. And then about two or three days later we rented the generator. So we pulled this trailer on the top of the garage bin. We put a cable through, across the parking lot, through a door on top and down the stairs into my computer room. And we were up and running for two hours until the door, the top of the stairs got a gust of wind and closed and severed the cable again. So we were down for another six hours to recover. But stuff happens, right?
• 18:03
  Speaker A: That reminds me. Yeah. Hurricane Katrina is, I think what it was. And I was working for airband at the time, which was out of Dallas, actually was out of Texas. We had Houston, Dallas. But I remember during that we were doing a lot of fixed wireless, point to point shop for everyone that didn't have Internet. You would think wireless is not good for hurricanes, but it's actually one of the best like path diverse backups. That's a great story, man. It reminded me of like the ending of Running man where they have to like do satellite relays and everything and like, I don't know, just.
• 18:34
  Speaker C: That's the thought.
• 18:35
  Speaker A: The Winterman.
• 18:36
  Speaker C: But yeah, Jose.
• 18:38
  Speaker B: Yeah, I've got a story. So I actually have two. One was when I first got this new job around 2019 or 2020, and I literally had just started like maybe a week and a half right into the job and kind of to Louise's point, like we didn't have like a colo or any of that stuff. And I was literally like not even two weeks in the job. And their main database server, which housed their erp, just went shit to bed, right? And then they were saying we need to get another server, we need to spit order it, ship it overnight, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, guys, I mean this is like 2019. We should be moving this virtualized into the cloud, right? As opposed to like trying to ship a box in here. And we did that overnight. And I'm like, guys, we can do this, right? And to your point, it Was like a hero, right? Because in the beginning, we're like, with the database, everybody can place orders, like, nothing. We were like, totally shut down, right? Dependency technology. And so it just kind of takes something so small. You've gotten so dependent on, like, you know what I mean? Because people are just so dependent on technology nowadays. So that's one. The other one I strictly recall was during COVID right? Like when you're like all of a sudden, like, everything shut down and then now everybody has to work from home. And of course, it's like, you guys got to figure this out, right? You got to figure that out. So, like, where. How are you going to route the phones? It's like, oh, right, we have soft phone. So we remotely installed the soft phone apps on these salespeople so that they can take the calls because nobody could be in the office, right? And all that stuff. And then, like, we had to schedule people because nobody could be, like, in groups, right? So like, we have to schedule, like, appointments for them to, like, for some of them who didn't have laptops, like, get laptops so that they can work from home and all those things. So I mean, to your point, like, I think there are so many times that if people, like, take it for granted, there's it that can find the solution to kind of make it happen. Whatever, duct tape and glue, whatever makes it work, makes it work, right, Phil?
• 20:42
  Speaker C: Just to that point, I think since Jose mentioned Covid, remind me. I was working for Houston Methodist during COVID okay? So it was being part of a huge hospital organization. It was like life changing. But I have two examples that I think really key to that. One is right before COVID we were experimenting, testing what we call the virtual icu, which is basically, if you imagine, instead of having documents, all the ICUs is all the time we had this war room with a few very good doctors and nurses monitoring patients from different ICUs. And they were testing that to say, this is something that we can use to even help remote hospitals and so on. And then Covid hit and we ramped it up and used that technology to allow our care providers to provide care to COVID patients without necessarily being on the ICU all the time. And it was one of the things, like one of those times that it was supposed to be still in pilot where kind of alpha training and went to production. Really, it was all of a sudden, you gotta do it. And the other thing it was interesting also is that Methodist has a network of a couple thousand doctor's office and so on. And we shut all everything down in three days. So we had virtual visit telemedicine. It was not tested, it was rolled out by. We had an average of 20 calls a day. Maybe if that system wire and went up to 2,000 in three days.
• 22:08
  Speaker B: Trial by fire.
• 22:09
  Speaker C: Yeah. And being able to handle that spike, and it was not just a spike, was up and keeping kept at 2000 for a while. So it was very interesting. And I think we just realized how important technology can be on an environment that is literally life and death.
• 22:27
  Speaker A: I think that's a important business point too because a lot of times we don't do things or we don't make the change happen without, I don't know, the catalyst or something making it happen. And then I think that that's why sometimes just career coaches are so important because someone will just ask one question to you that makes you go do the thing that you know you've needed to do for so long, like. And I think one of those questions is how would your life be different 30 days from now if you had this, whatever this is at that point. And I think that makes a big difference. Now I want to ask like maybe some of the harder questions which is when everything is running perfectly, when everything is running like a well oiled Tesla, as we like to say, and it becomes more of a cost center on the spreadsheet and there's not things, big changes that need to be that you still see that change that needs to happen. You know what needs to happen because you see every aspect of the business, you communicate with everyone in the business and you know that you may need something but executive management might not see it the same way because maybe they communicate in a different language. And I think again that translating technology for people who don't speak technology in translating in a way that they can see that this is beneficial towards the business and it is not the department of it, this separate entity sitting in the back room somewhere that it's actually this valuable seat at the executive roundtable that doesn't just sit there, but actually is people that should be listened to and be heard. Do you have any examples of where you've been able to overcome and translate for executives that may have thought something is not that important, but all of a sudden you were able to help them see the light, so to speak?
• 24:11
  Speaker C: Yeah, that happened to me a lot when I was in the restaurant business because when I was at Adjo Krabschacken we would go to discuss budget for next year and capital investment and all that. I Had, okay, Maybe I want 200 grand to replace our storage device. And the other guy say I want 200 grand to open a new patio and do a scrap check in Florida and increase my revenue by X percent. It's hard for you to win those battles sometimes. But then I think two things become important. One is having the business partnerships, having people understand that you're not just asking for asking, but also talk in terms of risk. Like say, listen, this is okay, this is running, but what happens if you don't have your data? So if you talk from a business perspective, what are the consequences of not making that investment? Then it is, you're more likely to have a discussion more in terms of ROI than just cost. You also have to keep in mind yourself that you're not making money, but you have to support people that are making money. So you have to translate what your message means, like hey, in order for you to support that, I will need to put computers there. I will need to maybe increase my capacity for that. So I have to start talking their language and try to understand what your spend will be reflecting on day to day business.
• 25:29
  Speaker A: Basically you got to get with the patio guy before he goes to the meeting. Be like, hey, just so you know, if you want your patio, they need this.
• 25:35
  Speaker C: Also today I joke with some of my other business peers is like, okay, we are owned by private equity group, so our money is tight. So everything we have to go to the CEO and cost us five. I say okay, we have do it together if you want it. Because I'm good at the I part, I know how much this thing is going to cost. So you're going to come up with the R part and make kind of make a case for what kind of return we're going to get from the investment. So it has to be kind of working together because oftentimes we don't know the R, we don't know what the benefit is if you're asking for a specific investment. Like right now we have every SAP implemented, but we still have a lot of new modules to functionality to be added to that as we can. And each of those are being treated as a business case discussion. So for each of those I have to partner to a person that wants that on their side. So it becomes their question, not mine. I'm there to support from the cost perspective.
• 26:29
  Speaker A: Yeah, oil and gas is tough. One of the tightest margin industries, it's oil and gas. When you have such a tight margin, you have something that makes such a small difference. How does it get Money there. I mean, maybe we just brainstorm for a second. You guys give me your best ideas on how you translate technology into money for people or how you get what you want. I would love to know.
• 26:48
  Speaker B: Well, I guess for me, in terms of kind of what I was just trying to piggyback off of what Louise was saying, like, ultimately, you really have to be connected to the stakeholders. Right? Because at the end of the day, to his point, we're not just doing technology for the sake of technology. Right. We're doing technology to better the company, to better our customers. Right. And whether it's, again, internal or external, I think some technology people, I'm not saying it's us, right? But they may see it as, oh, let's do this, because it's a requirement or it's a compliance or whatnot. And that's great. That's part of the selling point. But part of it is also, to your point, we still have to convince or get the business user to buy into it. Right. And part of that is having those conversations. Why is it important to them, what motivates them, what makes them tick? Right. So I think that's very important to understand where their background is and why they need this technology and how it would help them and also even educate them, because how it could help them be more effective with what they're doing and whatnot.
• 27:54
  Speaker A: What else you got, Luis? Anything to add to that or anything? If we had to come up with the top three to five steps or top 10, how to convince executive management to increase the IT budget, I would think one would be speak the language of business, not the language of it and what's in it for them, and use some sort of roi. That would be like my input on that and understanding what's keeping them up at night. That would be my answer of some sort. But do you guys have specifics?
• 28:23
  Speaker C: Yeah, I think it's making them present and fight for it in a way, and make them their case, their idea. In terms of what you need, what do you need to improve your performance of your team or to increase your revenue, as the board has been asking you to do. And then the best case scenario for me is when they come to present and say, listen, I need this because that's what I need for my team and that's how you're going to raise my revenue. So I think this is just how you position it and you come in as a supporting partner as opposed to being the driver of the thing. Because people joke that most IT projects fail. Right. And I think they fail because they're IT projects. If they're not IT projects, they have a better chance.
• 29:08
  Speaker D: I agree with you, Luis, on that. There's a project that we're currently doing now, besides our SAP going live, we're in the process of researching scheduling software. And you think, oh, that's pretty easy. You can do that on Excel, spreadsheet or anything else. The people I work for, the stakeholders of the company, they want it so that they could measure how much personnel it's taken me to make this one product. How much time do they spend on this line? We have several production lines, so these people move from production line to production line depending on what's being made. Sometimes the production line goes down because it has to be cleaned and changed over to a different product. So we've been exploring that and it's been easy to get the managers to do their part of like giving me the staff their skill sets and everything so we can throw this into this database so that we can do assignments and stuff. And it's been easier with the leadership of the company to say, hey, we're doing this versus I go around just by myself and say, hey, they'd like us to do this. And here it is. And so leadership does have to, especially when you're working with the other parts of the company. Leadership has to be the one that buys into it as well as kind of be the cheerleader for it. And then we're here to facilitate it and make sure that it gets done.
• 30:37
  Speaker B: Yeah. So like, to add to your point there, Thomas, I think for me, like the three things really is, like, the first and foremost is what is the key stakeholders pain points. Like ultimately, what is the thing that, like you mentioned, Phil, like, what is keeping them up at night? What's bothering them? Why is it bothering them? Because to that point, if we can align the technology with resolving whatever pain point they have, then at that point it just makes that case much, much stronger. Right. And then of course, once you align that, then of course there's obviously a cost factor. Right. And then you kind of cost benefit analysis saying, is it worth the investment to do this because of this pain point?
• 31:17
  Speaker C: Right.
• 31:17
  Speaker B: And ultimately, I think nine times out of 10 people, I mean, if you give them the reason to solve their pain point, that creates a business reason for the company, most of the times they'll go for it. Because like what Louise has said, if it's coming from a business perspective and from a business user, it tends to be more successful because it's not Just it who's involved. Right. Like it's kind of like it's a we versus like an I. Right. Kind of involvement. So I think those are the three things that would help any project to kind of whether it's a board or like the manager or the CEO or whatever it is.
• 31:52
  Speaker A: Yeah, numbers definitely matter. I think numbers don't lie. If you guys have anything on KPIs or anything like that important KPIs. So when I'm trying to think of who it was, I think it was Marcus Merchant. I can't remember the software company that he used back in the day, but I interviewed him years ago. I mean he was in one of the first 50 and he worked for Old Thompson Spice Company and they had a manufacturing line. Right. So this is not typically it's job. But I think he went down and he was just watching the manufacturing floor, like I think even setting up cameras, like different things like this, watching the manufacturing floor over time. And he paused to ask a question at one point like hey guys, why did you stop all the manufacturing, shut the machines down, clean everything, sweep everything and then restart over again. They're like, well, we got an emergency order and we had to fulfill these different group of spices. If you go to Costco, you'll see old Thompson Spice Company and the big spice things. You know, I mean, I think they got bought out by Olam. And so he was like, how much time does that take? And it takes so much time to shut down all the machines, clean everything. They had so much temp staff and everything. So he brought in some data analyst company. I think it began with red or something. I can't remember what it is. It up gets in my book because it was a great example. They analyzed all the data and then they just started doing just batching better and using better data analytics on how they were fulfilling product orders and everything. And by just doing that and being using software to be more organized. Go figure. I'm sure there's an a great AI solution for this now, right? I'm sure you could pump a lot of this stuff through. They just started planning the manufacturing better and I think they were able to eliminate all of their temporary staffing. Right. And then like reduce labor by so much and increase production by like 170% simply because the IT guy asked a question. Why are you shutting down the Danish machine and starting to make blueberry muffins that in the middle of the afternoon? Well, we ran out of cheese danishes and we need to fulfill all the blueberry orders. I don't know, whatever it is. But again, that's one of those things. If we go back to the beginning where industry matters. Because in the manufacturing industry that's obviously you've got machines and you've got batching and different reports and stuff. And that's probably very, very. I think that would line up with health care because you've got scheduling and stuff there, but probably not oil and gas. Probably want to come up in the oil and gas thing.
• 34:23
  Speaker C: But I mean manufacturing actually because we. One of the guys is our customers, but we measure equipment. So I think some of the things that Thomas was resonate in terms of machines and all that and scheduling people from different lines and. Great.
• 34:35
  Speaker A: But that's where it is, not just a department. It's like, hey guys, why did you not call in Marcus earlier? Like, where have you been? Like, why has it not been at the table for. Oh, he's just the zero trust guy, you know what I mean? Like, he's just the guy that doesn't allow us to download a grok on everything that we want to have it on. Let's do a prediction and all of you can answer this one. What do you think everyone's going to be talking about 18 months from now that they're not talking about right now? I think the obvious answer is probably going to be like, what actually is AI going to change from you guys were talking about you can't. Everything changes so quickly from year to year. But I mean on AI it's literally overnight. Like you could be like Claude could be working great one day and then the next day like, oh, that's so 12 hours ago and you're onto something different now. So what's everyone going to be talking about 18 months from now?
• 35:25
  Speaker B: Yes, definitely AI is going to be part of that conversation. But I would say also like in terms of not just AI but in line with automation. Right. It's basically like a race to the. Whoever gets there first. But it's just so many fast moving parts from whether like you mentioned about AI and the learning and education and how it's changing, but it's changing even, I'm sure all of our industries right now and how we can use AI. Right. It's both exciting and like super frightening too. Like we just don't know what the implications. And you see it all the time where like people let's just use AI then it blows something up, right? Or like crashes something because they didn't put any guardrails or protocols because they were Just excited to use it. So, like, there's so many, both good and bad. But you've got to really be prudent about how to use technology, especially AI, at the same time because it's kind of like very easy to use. But it doesn't mean it's easy to use. You can be very good at it really quickly also. Right. It's like an illusion. Like you think that you're really good at it, but then it turns out you do something incorrectly and then it just blows something up. Right.
• 36:28
  Speaker A: I think it's widening the mediocrity gap. I think mediocrity is becoming larger.
• 36:33
  Speaker C: Sure, sure.
• 36:35
  Speaker B: And that's part of it too. Right. To your point, now you recognize what's actually good tech. I mean, sure, we already know as technology people, like, what's good technology and all that stuff. But in terms of AI, you mentioned, okay, now you've got cloud one day, now you've got ChatGPT another day, now you got GEM, like all these different things and it's like, what's the next one? Right. I remember, I guess for my time it was like the dot com era, right, where it's like you had, okay, is it going to be Microsoft or is it going to be Google or is it going to be, right, like, who's going to win this battle? Right. Or the Facebooks and I forgot what
• 37:10
  Speaker A: the other it was the netsuites and the like, Internet and it was like, which browser is going to win them?
• 37:17
  Speaker B: Exactly.
• 37:18
  Speaker A: It's safe to say Uber won that one. I mean, I don't know, someone might get angry about that.
• 37:23
  Speaker B: Right. But to your point, I mean, you're right, but at that point you didn't know. You maybe had an idea, but you didn't know at the end of it who's going to come out on top. And I feel like it that we're just at the cusp of that. Right?
• 37:34
  Speaker D: Yeah.
• 37:34
  Speaker C: I think 18 months, we might be kind of licking our wounds in a way in terms of like, what did blow up. And like Jose said, it's things that changed so much from A to B to C. I think that's gotta be some consolidation at some point. So there'll be a little bit of consolidation on that side. That's also going to be like, nobody knows exactly what would be the impact on jobs. But I think what's going to be happening in 18 months is that there'll be a group of people that will be feeling great because they learn how to use the AI tools and they Got better at the job and they probably got promoted and got ahead. And unfortunately, another group of people that probably lost their jobs because of AI, because the type of position or because they are in a type of job that should be using AI as a tool and they did not went into that constant learning attitude. And then they basically replaced by somebody that, not by AI, but by somebody that knew AI better than they did. Because it's going to be a tool just like we have today, so many other tools. So I think that's things that we're probably going to be talking about and because yeah, it's crazy. I heard somebody say one time that when we start rolling out all these models, it's like putting a thousand interns in your environment at the same time. Give me a lot of stuff done.
• 38:42
  Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, it's a thousand phone calls that you get as an IT manager or director from consultants that say, hey, we know AI, we can save you thousands of money and replace people in functions. My concern is, and it goes back to my pre computer days, but it's customer service. And I think we've all been through those phone calls menus that have like, no, I need a live person. And I think with AI, it's the same thing is that when you come in and you're trying to replace people and say, hey, the system's going to work smarter than a human. Sometimes that customer on the other end is just looking for that human voice. I'll give you a case in point. Two weeks ago I get one of those nice little fraud alerts from my bank. So I called the bank to find out why do I have a fraud alert. The AI wanted to give me my balance. I said, I need a live person. Well, what about your checking balance? I don't want to know. I know my checking balance. Just get me to a live person. It took me 15 minutes to get to a live person. And my frustration level was up here. And that's my only concern about AI. I mean, we all use it. We use it to find answers. I find answers and read them and say, no, that's not the right answer. That's not what I'm looking for. So. But really my fear in AI is that somebody within management will grip onto it and say, hey, we can save money. And they lose perspective that, yeah, you're going to end up losing customers too. Because there's a frustration point with any kind of automation.
• 40:23
  Speaker C: Yeah.
• 40:24
  Speaker B: And it's your point, I think, Thomas, you have a good point there. Like ultimately you can't lose sight of just using AI just for the sake of dollars. Right? There's gotta be a balance, right? Look, I can tell you right now, and I don't know if you heard us, Thomas, in the beginning. So like I'm co founder of an AI solutions company right now and there's tons of different solutions out there and my job is to kind of just provide the customer, hey, this solution might be good for you or this solution might holy suck. It sounds nice, but it's not the right solution for you. Right? And that's part of the conversations I'm having right now. I can tell you there are so many different solutions of AI out there, but doesn't mean they're all good. Right? And to your point too is like, doesn't mean even if they're good, it's the right solution for you. Right? So. And that's the part of what Louisa said too earlier where like at some point there's going to be a full circle. It's going to come back and say, hey, the ones who are using IT best or know how to use it and also are using it as an enhancement, like not being afraid of it, I think, are they going to want to be ahead of it? Right? Because it is a tool to help us. It's not a tool to. At least from my perspective, we're not trying to, hey, get rid of people. It's more like, how can we help you? Do you ten times better? Ten times more. Like instead of just me, I've got a thousand interns. Hopefully some of them are decent interns, right? If I do it, if I set them up correctly, right? Something like that, yeah.
• 41:51
  Speaker A: Here's the truth. Has a new technology ever cost less? Every technology that has ever come out has always cost more money. Right. How often does your IT budget go down? It's rare, right? At the same time, it's like the average IT project, right? I'm quoting my own website now, the average IT project cost overrun is 27%. One in six projects. We're not saying ERP here, we're just talking it in general. But one in six pro IT projects becomes a black swan with 200% overruns. Right? 85% of every company out there spends more money on it every year. So it's like I heard this crazy fact the other day too, that 9% of all Americans have a net worth of at least a million dollars, which is pretty wild. So people have money to spend. That's just a complete separate topic, but. And 85% of 80 to 85% of companies right now are missing the AI cost forecast by 25%. So what does it mean? Why am I stating all this? The point is that AI is going to be an investment and it's going to be used hopefully to do things better, smarter, faster. That's the idea of it. It's just my prediction is that at the end of 18 months from now, people are going to be kind of shaking their heads and being frustrated with how much time they've wasted investing in the wrong. Not thinking correctly about AI or investing in the wrong way, which would be like, yeah, the quick replacement of an employee or something like that. I could tell you my most annoying thing that drives me the craziest right now is everything's becoming the same. There's a lot of sameness. I think it's like the death of sameness. I hate when I get. And I. It's. We sent out an email for the roundtable today and I said to Greg, and I love Greg, I said, greg, it just sounds like everything else. I just can read AI. I could read it a mile away. I was like, greg, just say, like, hey, this is Greg. Phil told me I had to send out an email for the roundtable. Will you guys just pick a date and time and sign up? If this is what we're thinking about talking about, what do you guys think? Just say that because that will come off as actually real. It doesn't need to be like, you could just see it a mile away now. And I think that to me, the people that are going to be genuine and original from a marketing and from a sales standpoint, from a solution standpoint and what we see in front of everybody every day, I think that those people are going to stand out more.
• 44:29
  Speaker B: But to your point though, I mean, whether it's the restaurant or all these things and technology, I think overall the premise is still the same. I think the cream still rises to the top, right? Like if you know how to use technology and you will still come out. And I think as technology people, we are at the forefront of this, right? Whatever industry we're in, like, we've got to understand and kind of learn it. And yes, there's going to be some misses, right? You got to break a few eggs or something like that, right? But some things like that's gotta. Because at the end, to your point of. Back then, like you did come out with a Google, right? There was some good.
• 45:06
  Speaker A: It was the genuine thing. It was like we were just saying, like, just don't BE AI and it was like, how did I survive in a world where like, everyone was taught to say the same thing? Yes, I hear to stop by to introduce myself to the president or owner. Who might that be? Could you grab him for me? And I was like, that's never gonna work. Everyone's gonna kick you in the teeth. So I was like listening to like all the, like really going through education and listening to everything I could, which no one that just graduates from college do. Most people are like lazy and they don't care. They don't have a reason. One of the best excuses I ever heard was, hey, could you just help me out? Upper management forces me to do this.
• 45:40
  Speaker B: Oh, nice.
• 45:43
  Speaker A: It was just like real genuine, you know what I mean? It was like, hey, wow, it's amazing how many people really want to help you when you're just another human being that needs to be helped. And I think that's really what we do as IT leaders, right? Is help other people do their job better, faster, whatever, so that they can go home at the end of the day to their families or whatever they want to do. That's really what we do at the end of the day. And the more that we can be genuine, the better. And that's where I think AI is really going to fail humans. We've got to use it as research and to increase our ability to be better humans, not decrease our level.
• 46:23
  Speaker B: Yes, agree. And to your point, it just can't be a line item. That's because to reduce other line items.
• 46:28
  Speaker D: Right?
• 46:29
  Speaker B: That can't be the be all end of AI for sure.
• 46:33
  Speaker A: Okay, last question for you guys. If we could go back in time and tell ourselves some piece of advice back then that we know now that we didn't know back then, and maybe we're speaking to a young guy in IT right now, what would that piece of advice be?
• 46:45
  Speaker B: I think for me it's like, just enjoy the ride. You're going to have crazy moments where like you have a pandemic or you've got like emergencies and you've got different things, but enjoy it. There's. It's gonna be stressful sometimes, but enjoy the ride. Because at the end of it, it's gonna be exciting and just enjoy it. Enjoy the ride. That's what I would like to tell myself when I was young, because I didn't know. Because when I started it was like the.com@ burst. Everybody was. It's kind of similar now with all these layoffs, right? So it's like you're Like I just graduated and I can't find a job. Like, what's going on? Right.
• 47:20
  Speaker A: So yeah, I actually really like that.
• 47:23
  Speaker C: Yeah, I would say it's about the business. Keep learning all the time and don't be the guy with a hammer looking for a nail.
• 47:31
  Speaker A: Give me an example. What does it mean to be the hammer?
• 47:34
  Speaker C: I mean, you have a technology, like right now we have a, let's say like vehicle, positive, cloud, cpt, cloth, everything. And then say, okay, where can I use this thing? This is so cool, how can I use it? And then you gotta go backwards, like, okay, what am I trying to solve? And then what is my best tool? Is AI a good tool or not? Because I think that's where you, you need to understand the fit as opposed to technology. For technology sake. We have to tell ourselves that we're not the center of the world, no matter how much we want to believe that we are not. So technology is a support. Unless you work for a technology company that's producing software and that technology is your product, that's fine. But for Thomas and I, technology is not a product. We are there to help people who make money because if they don't sell, if they don't make stuff, we're toast.
• 48:22
  Speaker D: Exactly, exactly. I mean, it's a learning experience. I mean, even when I came here, one of my previous jobs, it was on the end part of the manufacturing. I was working for a ladies garment company. But we're sort of like inventory and office infrastructure and stuff like that, not the actual manufacturing lines. And then to come here, it was, we're making stuff from scratch. And I think the biggest thing I would have told my younger self in some of those other positions I had is what I found out here is actually learning what you're making. And it's that observation of, like you said before, Louise, going down and observing what they do and how they do it. And for it, it's important for us to know that. I think it's just to come up here and sit here and maybe plug a cable into a switch or make up somebody's new profile in Active directory and stuff like that. That's part of it, but the other part is knowing the business. Because in the end we're trying to turn around and help the business grow. And the only way you're going to know how to help the business grow is how the business is made on the production line.
• 49:41
  Speaker C: I sent my team to the restaurants to spend a day there and see what things really happen. And to help you understand, like when they call you say, oh, I cannot print on my kitchen printer. They don't realize that if they don't print the kitchen printer, the food's not going to come out, the guy's not going to know what to make. So they have to do that. And the stress of a full restaurant busy and taking orders, like when I just scraped up working here in Houston was like right when I started working for Landry's and we had some issues in the network and the thing would just crash. So I had to go to one specific terminal to reboot. The system restarts where you connect back to your server and bring everything back up. So I called the manager and say, do concept. So that's when they get people to dance on the table. Because if they're dancing, they're not ordering anything. But that's like, got to be creative. You got to feel that stress. Because when you feel that you understand what you're working for, what's at stake when they call you with a problem is not just somebody that cannot log in. The account is the guy that's trying to put a phone on somebody's table and is not being able to. So being able to be there and feel the stress, it's priceless.
• 50:46
  Speaker A: So that's embracing the moment, Jose. It's pretty mind blowing moment for me because not being the hammer is important. And we've all had that moment where the CEO comes back or read something in Time magazine or comes back from some expo event and thinks that they've got some new vendor or some new product that's going to change everything. And that's where you can be just like, don't be the hammer. I've been the hammer for too long. And when you do that, it can take you off vision. But it not being the hammer all the time is really, really important in understanding because it could easily derail the entire business and take them off track for a very long time. And they could also say no. If you know, understand the business and you understand the vision of the business and ultimately what it's trying to do, then you cannot be the hammer and say no to a lot of things that need to be said no to. And I've been joking around for the last two to three months of the metaphorical CEO. I can imagine one of you guys getting a call on a Tuesday or a Monday and being like, hey, where's our AI rollout plan? I need that on my desk by Tuesday. And you're like, why? Because I knew it's AI. Well, okay, what do we need AI for? I don't know, but we need it. It's like, what are we trying to accomplish? Well, I don't know, sell more crab legs or something. I don't know. It's like, how is AI going to solve that? Maybe from that standpoint. Yeah, but that's where the conversation needs to go and I think that's where we bridge the gap and it gets heard. Any final words of wisdom?
• 52:22
  Speaker C: Yeah, I just want to say something because I think we talk about pivotal moments and getting a sense of what the business really is. There's one story I think I wrote down, I think I sent you yesterday. But when I first came to States, I was working on a project for a 91 month system for the city of San Antonio here and system was live running, no problem. I had a friend come and visit and we went to see the call taking room and I was showing, even though it was mainframe, we had a GUI interface, it was pretty cool. And I was showing him, hey, you click here, you get information from the caller, goes to the other screen. And at some point he was not paying attention anymore. So I stopped talking. I hear the call taker saying to die on the phone says, so is the person shooting at you or just in a general direction? And then I'm like, my bits and bytes are right now at this very second being used to maybe save somebody's life. Because that's what we wrote, that's the code we wrote for six months to put that online. So that really ingrained in my brain that it is about the business, it's not about the technology and that's what we need to focus on. That was kind of early on my management side of my career, but still do me for, for because it's so true.
• 53:33
  Speaker A: It does make a difference in people's lives. I mean technology and even from the negative side, like, I mean, I think a pacemaker has been hacked or like from the Iot. Remember when we were talking about the IOT of things for a long time, that's like not any buzz. It's not even a buzzword anymore. Remember when our ovens were getting hacked because they have WI FI access and I used to be able to turn my oven on? I remember one time I turned my oven on, I was driving from Portland, Maine to Kennebunkport, Maine. It's like a 45 minute drive. I was like, well, we got the frozen pizzas, but the oven's not gonna be ready. I'm starving. And I remember I turned the oven on, like, via Wi Fi, 45 minutes away. That just seems problematic to me. And then the 911 call happened. But we use technology for that because Phil's house was burning. It's like my dev, I have a very, very strong willed devil friend who runs a dev team in Morocco, and he's just like, look, I build the software for the medical industry. He's like, don't talk to me about AI. People's lives are endangered here. He's like, you can have fun with your AI and all your other stuff. He's like, I don't care. He's like, you guys still need real coders for when it comes to healthcare.
• 54:36
  Speaker B: My only last thought would be like, to your point, this is kind of. Look, we're in a technology forum, right? But there's four of us here connecting right now. And I think that's the beauty of technology, is the ability of technology to allow us to connect. And, like, I don't think I would have ever met any one of you in person at all, in any chant in my life. Technology, it helps us connect in that way. So I hope that this, whatever technologies that we have, whether it's AI or not, also to your point, Phil is like, finds a way to actually make us more human, not less. Right? So I hope that's the case.
• 55:08
  Speaker C: Cool. Well said.
• 55:10
  Speaker A: Yes, it's true. This has been a pleasure. Thank you. And you've all been heard. Sam,