Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / DEX SHOW LIVE FROM LONDON (w/ Robert Doornbos & Honeywell)

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DEX SHOW LIVE FROM LONDON (w/ Robert Doornbos & Honeywell) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Welcome it, change makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGrath.
0:07
Let's get into it. Welcome to our first ever Deck Show live.
0:13
I'm Tom mcgrah. I'm joined as ever by my main man, Tim Flower.
0:16
How's everyone doing? Welcome from me as well. So the first the
0:21
first session, the first episode of a live podcast here at Experience Everywhere,
0:27
the first show of four around the globe, and when Tom and I were
0:31
given the opportunity to do one live on stage, we just couldn't pass it
0:34
up. We certainly couldn't. If you're wondering who we are, we present
0:38
a weekly podcast called The Deck Show. Recently passed a one hundred episode milestone,
0:44
which is really incredible because that's actually one episode for every year of Tim's
0:48
IT career. Astonishing stuff. Really, we couldn't. We couldn't say no
0:53
when we were asked here, you know, I surprised him. Val,
0:56
Yeah, that was good. So the podcast actually came out as a result
1:00
of I think it was twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen. We were on stage
1:03
in New York City with a great couple of customers and as we wrapped it
1:07
up, I said, what a shame that the only people that could take
1:10
advantage of that conversation were the people in the audience. So to bring it
1:14
to a podcast format has been really great for us. Three years, one
1:19
hundred episodes. I thought it was four thousand streams a month. It's ten
1:23
thousand streams. Agnificant. It's not just one show. It's not just the
1:26
Deck Show. There's a sister show called Reality Bites where we get a little
1:30
more technical and it's all due to the great work Tom McGrath and the folks
1:34
behind the scenes that make it all happen. Absolutely And one of the things
1:38
we do in mis show if you don't listen, is we do speak to
1:41
hundreds of fantastic IT leaders. We do it over time. We also occasionally
1:46
like to step outside of it and get a different perspective on the digital workplace,
1:49
on the changing evolving nature of work and workplace technology, and that's what
1:53
we thought we'd do today. So we are going to welcome Darren Wright from
1:57
Honeywell onto this stage in about ten fifteen minutes. But our first guest is
2:01
not from the IT world O contrere you might say. He's a former F
2:05
one driver, motivational speaker and entrepreneur ladies and gentlemen, please welcome with me
2:12
Robert, a bast of the stage. Robert, welcome. Let's get comfortable.
2:27
Robert. You had a pretty interesting career, pretty interesting life. Maybe
2:30
in a minuture of for anyone who doesn't know you yet, maybe give us
2:34
in a nutshell, sir, in a nutshell, in a nutshell. Well,
2:36
I'm I'm Robert normal, so I live in the Netherlands. I'm a
2:39
father nowadays of two beautiful kids. And I finished my racing career. But
2:45
I started my racing career as a very lucky guy because I made from my
2:47
hobby my profession. And I think if I speak to the founders here of
2:51
Next Thing as well, they speak with so much passion about their company.
2:54
I think they have the same feeling. If you can make from your hobby
2:58
of profession, you don't feel like you have to work lay in your life
3:00
and to be honest, to drive race cars at those speeds and to get
3:04
paid for it, it's quite a lucky job, not bad. Always curious.
3:07
And you learned to drive a few years ago, and if you're a
3:12
professional driver and you're unber road, this is a very relevant question. But
3:15
do you look at everyone. Do you look at the rest of us like,
3:17
what are you all doing? I mean we look like a horror show,
3:20
or we look I'm terrible. You're a terrible driver to sit in the
3:23
car next to somebody, I'm terrible. I see. I actually asked the
3:27
Uber driver last night to change seats, but it didn't let me. And
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you're not going to go very fast on these London streets. No, no,
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I don't think. Well street circuits are I do like them? Yeah,
3:37
So let's connect racing technology with enterprise technology. So how do you accommodate
3:46
change? Racing technology has to have it's got to change every year. And
3:49
the problem in enterprise tech is that when something changes, something breaks, Right
3:54
I say it often every time I t touches something, it breaks. How
3:58
do you accommodate change in technology and make you better versus a negative impact?
4:04
Well, first of all, you can break race cars. Yeah, I
4:08
think I have a few team bosses that were not so happy with me at
4:10
the end of the day. But what I did learn is coming through the
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ranks. You're start in go karting, you go to Formula four from LA
4:15
three, from LA two, and finally, if you're lucky enough to get
4:17
to Formula one DAYTA in those days wasn't really there and his junior formulas only
4:23
to manage the engine side, but not really to help the driver improve his
4:27
skills. So I had a teammate, for example, with Formula three and
4:30
he told me on a new track here in England Bridges, Formula three was
4:33
the best in the world. So I had to be here to to challenge
4:36
myself. And my teammate said, I'll turn one and in servers on easy
4:41
flat. I said, yeah, sure, I've never been here, it's
4:43
easy flat. Yeah. So I did it and I ended up in the
4:46
cornfield outside the racetrack and he was laughing because nowadays data doesn't lie anymore.
4:50
It proves where you can go flat out, where you have to break,
4:54
where you have to shift gears. So the technology exploded in racing world well
5:00
to make the driver better, to make the car better, to make the
5:01
team more efficient, and obviously to get a better result altogether. Yea,
5:06
So how do you accommodate as a as a driver yourself when you're working with
5:14
technology in the car. Do you ever wish you could just go back to
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a four speed and a carbureted engine. And just let me go, or
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has the technology gotten to a place where you just can't live without it?
5:25
Those were your days that hundred years ago. No, no, to be
5:30
honest. When you get to Fromula one. The first day, I remember
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Eddie Jordan was a famous team owner and he gave me the first opportunity in
5:36
my life to drive a Formula one car. And besides handing me over the
5:41
contract, he also handed me over a manual and it was like this stick
5:44
and it was only the manual of the steering wheel I had to learn on
5:46
the flight to Shanghai to learn how to manage all the functions on the steering
5:49
wheel. Nowadays, Formula one cars have up to seventy functions on the steering
5:54
wheel which you have to be able to use while driving two on the twenty
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miles an hour. So it's it's quite a challenge to understand what all the
6:02
technology can do to you. But if you don't understand what it can do,
6:06
it won't to help you go fast on the racetrack, So that was
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quite quite a challenge. The first time I got out of the pit lane,
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which which button was which button? You can imagine if you're doing clean
6:15
and klumbus an hour, and if you look one second down to the thing
6:18
we'll were was the button. By the time you look back up, you're
6:21
a football field further down the road. So it's technology is interesting, but
6:27
you have to spend a lot of time in it to also to understand it
6:29
and to help the engineers and yourself well. So I mean not just thinking
6:32
about your career as a driver when new technologies meant you had to adapt,
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but also I understand prior to becoming a professional driver, you're a tennis player.
6:41
After being a professional drive, you've been an entrepreneur, you're you're motivational
6:45
speakers today. Adaptation or adaption, I should say, is obviously being a
6:48
big part of your life and your career, So whether it's technological adaption or
6:51
otherwise, because it's something we're all living with and very conscious of, particularly
6:56
at present. What advice would you give to people in terms of approaching chain.
7:00
Yeah, I think what I learned in my racing career is how much
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risk am I willing to take to get a maximum result out of the weekend?
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And that is something I also use in my entrepreneur life with my business.
7:11
If I want to take more risk. Okay, there's more rewards,
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but there's also higher risk that it feels. And on the other side,
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I think that's more like a character building stuff. If things seemed under control,
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it wasn't going fast enough for me. So and coming from Formula one,
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went to IndyCar. Finally my career. I finished my career. I
7:29
survived it because Indy Car is quite dangerous as well. Well. Speaked about
7:31
it a little bit later. But then coming into the business world, I
7:34
was pleased and with my efforts, but when things seemed under control, I
7:39
was not feeling comfortable anymore, and I had to challenge myself to dig deeper.
7:43
And I think that's more like a character building than anything else. And
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one of the things we're talking about here today obviously is AI and its impacts
7:51
on its Yeah, I went to so many breakfast meetings. AI like American
7:56
companies, they always have breakfast meetings. Right I invest in started and there
8:00
was this AI company invited me in Amsterdam six am breakfast meeting. Is that
8:03
earlier off for you? I said, well, I have two smoke kids,
8:05
so I'm awake by then easily six am. That was That was a
8:09
bit challenging, but Yeah, the AI stopped. It goes so fast.
8:16
I mean, it's that's that's something I'm you know, pushing myself in to
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learn a little bit. I think interesting thing about AI and I T is
8:24
that balance between technology and the individual. I mean, we've all do you
8:28
have a sense of like how AI is impacting racing specifically right now and how
8:31
do you retain that the primacy, if you will, of the driver themselves
8:37
at the center of it. Yeah. Nowadays, you know, the Formula
8:41
one world is changing a little bit. The budget caps. Back in the
8:45
back in my days, there was unlimited budget, so the teams were spending
8:48
up to three fifty million dollars a year just to improve the car and to
8:52
do extra mileage on track and being a test and reserve driver the first few
8:56
years, especially at Red Bull Racing. My first year I flew all over
8:58
the world. First race was in Australia, Melbourne. I did the practice
9:03
there on Friday. On Saturday they flew me out to Barcelona. There was
9:05
a testing there to get more mileage in and every day testing from Law one
9:09
car will cost a million dollars per car per day, so it's hugely expensive
9:13
and it just the gap with the bigger teams and the smaller team just increased
9:18
too much, so it wasn't the level playing field anymore. And then the
9:22
from Loan organization. Do you know what, there's a budget gap one hundred
9:24
and forty five million dollars per team. You can spend as you wish as
9:28
you like, except drivers salaries because some drivers are a little bit up there.
9:33
And what you see is that they started investing their money into simulators like
9:39
technology. Okay, we don't go real time to the race, right,
9:41
but let's build a simulator that's half the size of this room and see if
9:46
we can find the perfect correlation between on track activities and sim not real life
9:52
activities. And now, the first thing I got into dissimulator was driving,
9:56
and I felt like I was driving a PlayStation. But then I look beyond
10:00
and I saw twenty engineers really focused on setting up the car, and at
10:03
one stage it felt like I was driving a real car except of the g
10:07
forces, but gathering data so they could improve the car. That is something
10:13
that is in the past ten years really exploded. And for those of you
10:16
who are watching Formula One, if you see real race cars on track like
10:20
in Qatar last weekend. There's always a simulated driver back in the factory who's
10:24
doing even though with the time difference, just driving and testing different setups and
10:28
trying to maximize that. Yeah, amazing. I forgot totally what the question
10:31
was, but there was such a good answer. So we're going to get
10:35
to our next guest momentarily, but before we divis is just a wet view.
10:39
Audience's appetite you are on latest city, Yeah, yeah, tell them
10:41
a little bit about what to expect. Well, yeah, at the end
10:46
of the day, I think the dust around the drinks time right, four
10:48
o'clock, five o'clock probably there. I'm going to take you into behind the
10:52
scenes the world of Repell Racing. It's a team I know quite well.
10:56
They've done extremely well in the past years with Maxrostopa and obviously winning their constructors
11:01
championships as well. So that's a bit of the sportive side, what it's
11:05
like to be in the car. So I'm going to take you really around
11:07
the lap and hopefully you're going to enjoy that, and then I'll take you
11:11
more into the the entrepreneur side of the of running a Formula One business and
11:15
obviously the data side. And yeah, we'll just do like a speed course
11:20
Formula one in less than thirty minutes, so it will be very energetic.
11:24
Amazefully. Be there, thank you, stay there. Yeah, we wanted
11:30
to bring you into the conversation a little bit more, but we're going to
11:31
introduce our next guest now. Yeah. So, and you brought the simulator
11:33
with you, right, I brought down. I did bring actually a physical
11:37
steering wheel of Red Bull. They gave it to me. It's worth about
11:41
fifty thou pounds, so it's somewhere in the safe show to you later.
11:45
But it's amazing. These cars are driven by data. I'm built to win.
11:48
Hope you'll enjoy it. Let's amazing, Thank you. So let's introduce
11:50
our next guest. He was with us last year, had an amazing presentation.
11:56
It was the talk of the town, my town anyway, because I
11:58
couldn't stop talking about it. Amazing results. I pride myself and being a
12:03
customer. I love talking with other customers. So please welcome to the stage.
12:07
Darren Wright, VP of it, right, Darren welcome, Hey,
12:18
Darren welcome man. Yeah, he was he's not joking down. He was
12:24
talking about it for months routing your statistics. He absolutely loved it, but
12:31
I'm sure some of the audience saw it a year ago. It was fantastic
12:35
and maybe give us a quick refresher not to set him off again. You
12:39
understand I was gonna say, I risk doing that. So yeah, what
12:43
I talked about last year was really some of our some of our key results.
12:48
So some of the things we measured was around our productivity hours that we
12:52
can save. So I think we were talking in the I think it was
12:56
a year to day eight hundred thousand. So we finished the year rang nine
13:00
hundred thousand, targeting one point two million this year. That's that's our target.
13:05
We also talked about how much automation we can do. We ended the
13:09
year around sixty percent, targeting this year seventy percent. So that's how much
13:13
more automation we want to keep driving into the company. Fantastic And if you
13:18
were to bring us up to date, what of the intervening year between these
13:22
two experience it's been like for you? So I think few things. So
13:28
I kind of call it doing the basics, but maybe some people wouldn't say
13:31
it's the basics, but it's looking at the use cases, looking at the
13:33
opportunities doing more automation. You know, we just want to do more and
13:37
more of that proactive. So definitely we just keep doing the same thing,
13:41
just finding more and more opportunities. CMDB integration was a big one for us,
13:48
kind of a you know, a bane of many people in it's lives.
13:52
I think, just getting that good up to date data. So that
13:54
integration has been really helpful for us. Windows eleven has been key one.
14:00
We've used next Thing a lot for that, just in order to us to
14:03
bring all of our bring all of our environment up to date. Another key
14:09
one I'm looking at is what we call digital drives. So you know,
14:13
the more we look, the more we see how everything gets so out of
14:18
date so quickly when you've got things on three, four or five six year
14:22
cycles. So we're really focusing on understanding, okay, which drivers are causing
14:28
us problems, what do we need to keep uplifting to. So that's another
14:31
been another really really really keeping and productive year. Always always lots, I
14:37
mean i'd say that one other thing I just mentioned is like, you know,
14:41
we're on there, we're on the infinity journey, and I think as
14:46
well as looking at the environment, you know there's more and more capability coming
14:50
through the tool, so we kind of look at it that way as well
14:52
as like, we can see what we need to do, but what is
14:54
the tool able to do that? Maybe we haven't thought about it yet,
14:58
So that's another way we look at it. So the conversion that I did
15:01
last year, and I'll do it again with your new number, nine hundred
15:05
thousand hours for the audience is an equivalent of four hundred and fifty FTEs.
15:09
So you have all been hired at Honeywell and you're going to work all year
15:13
long and get paid all year long to do absolutely nothing. That's the equivalent
15:18
savings that he's talking about. It's massive. You did a great job of
15:22
communicating your accomplishments. How do you communicate internally what a lot of people considered
15:28
an intangible right. It's easy to count tickets. We went from fifty two
15:33
thousand to eight thousand five dollars a ticket too and a half million dollars.
15:35
How do you communicate the value and the benefit of time. That's the that's
15:41
probably one of the toughest things, one of the biggest challenges. So yeah,
15:46
we got good at the sort of inside outview of, like you say,
15:50
counting, we're all it people. We're getting good at all the data,
15:52
but when you think about the outside in and what that really means,
15:56
that's a lot tougher. So I'd say a couple of things things that spring
16:00
to mind that we do. So one is, although we can see everything
16:06
that's going on in the environment, we also do things like our voice of
16:08
the employee sort of they give them their opportunity to come tell us what they
16:12
think about it not usually great, but that really gives us that opportunity to
16:18
do like that trust and verify, so we kind of know what's going on.
16:22
But when we get that opportunity for them to kind of highlight some of
16:25
these things to us, it gives us that opportunity to communicate those things back,
16:30
to say we listened, even though we can probably see it already,
16:33
but we listen, here's the action we take in and then we start communicating
16:37
the heck out of the results. So if they're complaining about, you know,
16:42
their poor WiFi or their slow boot up or whatever, it's things that
16:45
we can say we listened, we took action, here's some of the results.
16:51
So you know, it's just one of those things that you keep doing
16:52
over and over. Another thing I'd mentioned, we've got a good framework internally
16:57
where we kind of trying to game of five things a little bit between our
17:02
sites, between our countries. We got you know, we've got texts all
17:04
over the world, and we really try and game of five things to say,
17:08
you know, what's your average boot time, you know who's who's going
17:11
to get the best, what's the best performing country, what's the best performing
17:15
region, things like that. So that's another one that we can do internally
17:19
to actually drive some of those results and again help us communicate very cool.
17:23
Robert, you talked about time. Time has to be the number one metric
17:27
for the whole F one team. So here's a question for you. You've
17:30
got a million dollars, how do you decide where to invest that million to
17:36
get the maximum benefit of time? Is it in the car? Is it
17:38
in I would hire much the stopper. I would hire much of stopper for
17:42
one level. You know he can do it. It can make a difference.
17:45
It's it's frustrating to see for sometimes the teams to invest fifty million to
17:51
make the cargo faster two or three tenths of a second. Per leap.
17:55
If you find the ride driver engineering combination. It's a team effort. Right.
17:57
So maxis now leading the World Championship and obviously you want it for the
18:02
third time in a row. But behind him there are thirteen hundred employees that
18:06
make it also possible for him to achieve at his highest level. We talk
18:10
about the pit stops, that's performing under pressure. That's really a challenge,
18:15
but behind the scenes that people are working in the factory getting the car ready.
18:18
So all in all, you cannot if you have one million dollars.
18:21
Yeah, I don't think you can even start the engine properly. But let's
18:26
I'll tire much stop here. Yeah, and Darren, you know the element
18:32
of time for an IT team. When you think about justifying an IT expense
18:37
for your shop, what kinds of things do you think about in using time
18:44
to justify your increased speed? Right, you've got competition yourself, you need
18:48
to win the race. How do you take the time element and actually not
18:52
just communicate it to the business, but use it for justification of either a
18:56
purchase or a renewal. I mean again, it's a tough one. I
19:00
think you know. I'm sure I'm not alone that we have to continually rejustify.
19:04
So the fact that we had a good business case for next thing five
19:07
years ago doesn't necessarily mean it's a good right in this case. Now every
19:11
year it's like, why are we still spending that money or what is that?
19:15
What is that bringing to us? So I think we I kind of
19:18
look at these you know, there's kind of two things is again it's kind
19:22
of like the inside out and the outside in. And I think from the
19:25
IT perspective, we're always looking at you know, can we do more with
19:30
less in terms of the technician time or that's reducing the IT costs. Right,
19:33
Another big win we had this year were looking at our microsoftware in You're
19:38
we actually compared, you know, what's installed versus what's used half a million
19:42
dollars worth of software and not being use So, you know, that's a
19:45
nice justification. But me personally, I think is where the biggest value is
19:51
is when you start looking at it from that outside in. You know,
19:53
I think you talk about those productivity hours. If I can save or I
19:57
can make the one hundred twenty thousand employees across Honeywell ten minutes more productive each
20:03
year, you know, like that's that's you know, another five hundred more
20:07
employees actually doing. So we constantly try and market those things that we're doing.
20:14
I think the IT stuff is easier, but the real benefit to the
20:19
customers that's a little bit harder because they're you know, we we kind of
20:23
call them soft benefits, you know, so they're like, yeah, you're
20:26
saving ten minutes, but are you really saving you know, so five hundred
20:30
more people, So does that mean we need five hundred less employees. No,
20:33
we don't. We're trying to We're trying to actually just make them more
20:37
productive. So we just keep keep talking about it, keep measuring it,
20:41
keep sharing it cool one hundred percent and obviously a very future facing experience this
20:45
year. A lot of innovation, a lot of innovation in the pipeline when
20:49
you look ahead, Daran, what excites you short, medium, long term
20:52
at Honeywell, so a couple of things again, I think, you know,
20:57
I mentioned in you know, we've been on the journey. We've had
21:00
the relationship with with next Thing five more than five years now, so we've
21:04
gone from the on prem solution to the cloud, you know, now we're
21:08
on the infinity infinity journey and then if I was a buzz lightyear, I'd
21:14
say infinity and beyond you know what else? What else is possible? So
21:18
you know, I think we so we constantly look in at that, like,
21:21
you know, what's the art of the possible. And then we also
21:25
looking at I think a couple of the things that kind of make a that
21:29
I'm passionate around is I think it was brought up earlier. I mean the
21:33
days of the time based refresh of PCs is gone. You know, we
21:38
you know, do we even know if we're matching the right PC to the
21:41
right person? And you know, is it is it end of life in
21:44
three years? Four years? So you know, we call it performance based
21:47
refreshed. So we've been really looking at all the analytics around that to really
21:51
start making much smarter, data driven decisions around that. So that's one thing
21:56
we were looking at within Honey, Well, we we've we've got an investment
22:02
with move Works. We have read is our kind of digital first facing support
22:08
persona within it. So that's another area that we're really really continueing to focus
22:15
on, is more and more integration between next thing with move Works and our
22:19
other tools like service Now, et cetera. I did I did hear,
22:23
Tim, I did hear, honeywell, maybe has a little pre experienced a
22:29
flow, which, of course we just wondering. It's nothing bad, you
22:33
know, if you got anything to share. So yeah, so so yeah,
22:37
I've been great to be part of these these things and get the early
22:41
views, so I think, yeah, talking to the team, I mean
22:44
we've we've now used flow on fifteen of our different campaign so you know,
22:52
existing and some new ones. Feedback is, you know, really good,
22:57
very easy to use. The ground co winterface is great, particularly good with
23:03
like those really complex complex scripting that might take you know, days to do
23:07
before good quote from you know, the my leader for next thing, Nico,
23:14
he said it was so good that even I could use it. So
23:17
I'm thinking of a career in it. Yeah, yeah, I think we
23:22
might be able to make it. So we got a minute or two before
23:25
we get the hook before we leave, though, what advice would you give
23:29
to IT leaders? We talked a little bit about perception of it. It's
23:33
typically negative, especially the network team, right, how do you how do
23:38
you as an IT leader change that perspective and do you see it eventually where
23:45
it becomes a business enabler or is seen as a valued partner versus a cos
23:48
center. Yeah. I mean, I say, I've seen it change a
23:52
little bit over time, and I think sometimes it's dependent on you know,
23:57
which part of it, because when I think about that, you know,
24:00
sometimes you can justify it as an enabler when you're implementing a customer facing application
24:07
that you know there's a direct correlation in everybody understands. What I think is
24:11
much harder is the kind of you know, should I say, sort of
24:14
more back office things. So if you're investing in a move works or a
24:18
next Think or a SEWERVI, itce now much much harder to you know,
24:21
to actually quantify that and do that. So you know, for me,
24:25
I think it's just keeping that conversation going. It It's not just about the
24:30
hard dollar savings of what it can do more with less. That's important,
24:34
but it's really focusing on that the importance of giving those users, those employees
24:41
those great tools to be able to do their job really well and be able
24:45
to articulate that in terms of that productivity. So you know, it's really
24:48
for me just keep keep keep marketing, keep talking about that. So let's
24:53
wrap it up. Robert awesome to talk with it. Thank you for joining
24:56
darn thank you for joining us here. But one last request before where we
25:00
go, and I'll turn it over to Tom to wrap it up as well.
25:02
How about a quick hello from London for everybody listening to this podcast down
25:06
the road one, two three, Hello, thank you, good job.
25:10
That was kind of a good job. A final word, A final word,
25:14
huge, thanks for our guess, huge, thanks to your huge,
25:15
thanks to experience ever for having us, And if you want to listen to
25:18
the show, you can find us on Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen
25:21
to your podcasts. Gentlemen, audience been a pleasure, Thank you so much.
25:25
And oh we've got to welcome on stage before we go, vet her
25:30
Na, so that's welcome. Thank you all so much. To make sure
25:36
that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in Apple Podcasts,
25:38
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25:44
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25:51
how next Thing can help you improve your digital employee experience, head over to
25:55
next think dot com. Thank you so much for listening until next time.