Speaker 0 | 00:07.239

Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today is a very special day. Like it’s a very special day in the history of the podcast because I think we’re speaking with maybe the third woman in IT ever, even easy, Gomez, and also Brazilian. So that makes it like, I don’t know. You’re more than a one percenter in this world of IT. So welcome to the show. You are officially an IT executive. And I would just like to ask you, we usually start off the show with this. And I didn’t tell you any of the, we were talking earlier about like, should we map this out? And I was like, no. So I didn’t tell you any of the like, you know, secret questions that I’m just going to fire at you. And hopefully you’re ready to answer these. This is pretty easy though. How did you get started in technology? What was your first computer? Can you just… speak to me a little bit about that?

Speaker 1 | 00:58.884

Well, I can. It is very interesting because I started using computers. I was maybe 18 when I decided to go to technology school. So I had my first computer. It was like a 386 computer.

Speaker 0 | 01:15.772

Thank you.

Speaker 1 | 01:17.193

Floppy disks. And oh my goodness, I’m old. I’m officially giving

Speaker 0 | 01:24.196

That was my third computer, okay? So you’re not old. My first computer was a Texas Instruments. My second one was an Apple IIc. There was probably something in between that. Then I got the app. Then I got the 386, but I’m very happy that you had a 386. But there’s some of us out there that had a 286. I don’t even know if there’s a 186. Is that even a thing? Is a 186 a thing?

Speaker 1 | 01:44.504

I don’t know.

Speaker 0 | 01:45.945

How much RAM? Let’s get real nerdy about this. How much RAM was in there? Did you have to boot up Windows? Did you have to boot like win.exe type of thing?

Speaker 1 | 01:55.750

I didn’t even use Windows at this time. It was DOS. Loving it. I’m that old. And well, I’m Brazilian, so I lived in Brazil. I was four, so it was a big thing.

Speaker 0 | 02:09.721

Yeah, how’d you pull that one off? And did you know English already at the time? Because DOS, it’s a different language.

Speaker 1 | 02:15.686

I was studying English when I was about this age to go to school because everything is in English. And I started working, so that’s when I got my first computer. You know, my first job, and then I got a computer. Other than that, I used computers at the university or the library.

Speaker 0 | 02:35.763

It’s fascinating. What did you do on SED 386 back then?

Speaker 1 | 02:42.228

Oh, my God. Well, I wrote. I was a programmer. So I started my career developing in A and C and all this.

Speaker 0 | 02:50.676

old languages that nobody else studies anymore yeah i remember like seeing kids take like this this big thick book with like c plus plus on it in college and i was like what’s that dude because i was like a creative writing major i was a completely worthless person in college i want to say worthless i should speak a little bit more highly of myself than that but um so yeah you were way were you what were you thinking were you thinking this is the way of the future were you thinking this is like this is the way to be successful um this is the way to get out of i don’t mean to pigeonhole you or be whatever but poverty in brazil or anything at the time like what were you thinking yes i was not a like or

Speaker 1 | 03:34.357

like living in a slum poor but i my parents couldn’t pay for college so i went to a public college uh and i wanted to help and i was pretty good at math and uh I was like, okay, this is the future. I should give it a try. It was really good because I didn’t expect that to be as good as it was. I loved it and I had a lot of fun. So it was a win-win for me. It was a good way to start working very soon and helping my parents with money and then envisioning a different type of life.

Speaker 0 | 04:10.639

Yeah. And it was really exciting and fun back then. It never gets old to me talking about… Like you said, floppy disks or what people say, like, Hey, my, my cup holders broken on my computer. Can you fix it? And really that was the CD ROM drive. You know, that’s like the old joke, like, you know, the meme or whatever. It’s weird to me that we worked on a computer that didn’t have access to the internet.

Speaker 1 | 04:31.598

Oh yeah. It, it didn’t have,

Speaker 0 | 04:34.640

there was no internet drive. It’s wild. Yeah. You’re saving, saving papers on floppy disks. Remember that? Like, Hey, I wrote too long of a paper or I ran out of space. I need to save it on an. on floppy disk too um i can’t even remember if you could print like did it pause like what if when you’re printing a paper i can’t even remember like yes you could print in at college i remember we could print but printers were like impossible to buy

Speaker 1 | 05:01.265

They’re very expensive.

Speaker 0 | 05:03.266

Hot Matrix.

Speaker 1 | 05:05.187

Yes, yes. Very noisy.

Speaker 0 | 05:07.688

Everything was like a compartmentalized. I really do want to start collecting, have like my own computer museum and just, I don’t know. I just want to play some stupid old game that we used to play, like Hero’s Quest or something. At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never-ending, from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try one’s patience even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you how we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes, and we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure. You get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts so that you’re not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short, we are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So we’re still human, but we are some of the best and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what’s on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier, and we’ll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day. This is cool. You have an amazing pedigree of sorts. I mean, January 2000. And two, if I go, I’m just looking at your work history. I’m sure it goes before that. What, IBM, IBM, and then General Motors. This is, this is no, these are not small names. You know, what was the first job? What was the first real paying job in technology?

Speaker 1 | 08:11.229

Okay. My first paying job was like, I was a consultant for a small software development firm that worked for. So my projects were pretty big since the beginning, although I was very young. And I worked as a developer, like finding out what people needed to develop and then developing programs for them. This is what I did for a few years. Then I worked at a very big Brazilian university also developing and then managing projects. So my career. kind of started in a very, very technical fashion as it was normal at this time. So we didn’t have so separated roles in IT, right? You didn’t have to, like, you were a developer, you were a business analyst, you were a project manager. We did whatever, right? Whatever people needed, we would do. We knew a little bit of everything.

Speaker 0 | 09:08.753

We were true nerds, like true nerds back then, because it was, no one knew, like, it wasn’t like a real, I always say that wasn’t like a real thing yet. But it was because whatever software you’re consulting with HP, I don’t know how to tape backup, whatever. But what was the software accounting software was most stuff revolving around accounting or, I mean, inventory.

Speaker 1 | 09:33.266

I started working with banking. How can I say banking automation? So banking transactions. And this is very big in Brazil. It’s being big since the 90s. because the banking system in Brazil is extremely complex and taxes and everything involving finance in the country and Latin America overall. It’s very complex. So they leveraged a lot of development and computer to do that. So this is what I did. And I worked more specifically on networking development. So connecting machines. Very low level, really. And I really enjoyed that. It was a lot of fun.

Speaker 0 | 10:11.723

Early networks. People take it for granted nowadays. Everything just is networked. We had to physically run cords and put in network cards into a 386 computer. And I remember my friend saying that to me. I still say that probably maybe one out of every 10 shows. I remember him being like, let’s put network cards in a computer. We’re going to drill a hole in the wall and run a cord. And I was like, what’s a network? And what are we going to do with that? We could play the game at the same time. Don’t you see?

Speaker 1 | 10:39.855

No, this is truly amazing. Because when I started doing this type of work, imagine that there was no Windows, like the visual Windows. There was DOS. I worked with… Yes, yes. And I worked with Unix, not Windows at this time, DOS. And the only way to access the internet back in the beginning of the 90s was Telnet and Gopher. There was no Navigator. Navigators were launched in like 1905, maybe?

Speaker 0 | 11:11.778

It was very, very, yeah, it was very like a stereotypical hacker looking at numbers on a screen. um everyone probably want like young kids nowadays probably are like why is there an f1 f2 f3 f4 like what are these keys i don’t even why do we need to know what f1 is and you know no one understands that and then you you go get a job i remember i had a job for quest uh communications which was i don’t know if you request they were like a you know like the at&t of the midwest i think they got bought by century link and then century link got bought by what uh level three and then level three became lumen you know typical telecom nightmare and joe nachio went to the president went to jail but i remember when i worked for them in college in the billing systems everything was like you know green screen kind of weird you know like f1 f2 and if you got really good at like hey i can put her you know working a keyboard i don’t know it was it was fun it’s good times i don’t know if it’s exciting is is it as exciting now as it was back then i think it’s a different type of exciting

Speaker 1 | 12:15.934

And why I say that is because some things are so complex now that you have to figure things out in a different way. What I always tell people when they… I do a lot of talking about career. I like to go to schools and talk to kids about the IT career. And one of the things that IT people need to learn to be successful is to be curious and adapt. Because everything changes pretty much every week. So from when I started to hear what is still true is everything is changing. So I find it very exciting that at this level of my job, now I don’t program anymore, but I have to still figure out things. Talking to people that ask me questions, how do I sell more products? in a faster way? How do I get market share for my company? And I still have to figure this out to the technology level. So I don’t have to make the programming piece, but I still have to figure things out. So the analytical skills are still there. You know what I mean?

Speaker 0 | 13:26.239

I absolutely know what you mean. You actually just blew my mind in a very, you made me very happy because you said things that are the bridge between… technology in the business C-suite, right? So one of the topics that comes up a lot on the show is how do I get a seat at the executive round table? IT is not appreciated. IT is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? But if you really love what you’re doing and you can ask those questions and think out of the box and say, how can I take technology and use it to make money? How can I take this piece of technology and use it to make money, save money, be more productive, whatever, affect the bottom line, do all these things, then you truly become, to use your words, which are… Not really your words, but you chose these words, right? Strategic IT partner. Yeah. How do you become a strategic IT partner? What does that really mean?

Speaker 1 | 14:17.474

I even will provoke you a little bit on what you said, because it’s not like use IT or technology to make money. It’s you tell me how much money you want to make. Describe to me your market, how you go to market, what is your strategy? And I’ll figure it out. figure out with you what is the technology that will make you successful. So there are so many options and so many different ways of doing the same thing today. And this is where the trick is, right?

Speaker 0 | 14:50.759

So I have a question for you that I’m going to answer that question for you right now. I would like to make $1 billion with an IT leadership podcast. How do I do that?

Speaker 1 | 15:06.412

Okay.

Speaker 0 | 15:07.913

There you go. There you go. And if I do make a billion dollars, I’m very happy to give you $100 million of that. And the rest, we’ll try to, I don’t know, we’ll, I don’t know, we’ll do something in Brazil. I know we’ll do something in Brazil. Yeah. Okay. leave i will learn portuguese um in one year that’s that’s challenging but possible i will leave and i will go live with some family that does not speak a lick of english okay and i will have them beat me silly every day till i learn portuguese these thoughts just come to my mind i don’t know it’s maybe it’s not a coffee i love that you asked the question because one of the i would say that one of the challenges to

Speaker 1 | 15:55.056

shipped from a service provider, like, or a ad hoc IT person that people that yell the most get what they need first, which is how a lot of people operate to a strategic partner. You need to, when you start getting executives asking you such questions is when you know you are successful, because usually what happens, everybody thinks they know technology. So because they they have access to that in Internet, magazines, whatever, and they think they know solutions, technical solutions. And instead of coming to your partner in technology and saying, you know what, I need to sell more products this year and and bringing the business context for me and asking me to help. They tell me, oh, you know what? I’ve heard in a podcast that if I buy a tool. X. I’m going to sell more products. So can you buy me to X please? I’m like, no, no, no, no. That’s not where we are going.

Speaker 0 | 17:03.827

I’m guilty. I’m guilty. I’m guilty. I’m guilty. But, but, but it’s not, will I sell more? Because if there was a product out there that would help me sell more and make more money, I’m buying that thing. But Salesforce, it’s in the name. Yeah. It’s in the name, but really what they don’t know is it’s, you’re going to pay um the no money you’re gonna sales sales i don’t know what’s the uh that’s sales down sales down sales cost no sales cost there we go sales cost that would make sense but salesforce is awesome to in their defense i really love the tool um

Speaker 1 | 17:46.660

i love it but it is very expensive uh But again, this is one of the issues when you are partnering with executives. I want Salesforce. I’m like, okay, why? Why do you want Salesforce?

Speaker 0 | 18:01.752

Because I read about it.

Speaker 1 | 18:03.593

Because, yeah, because I want to sell more. Okay, how Salesforce is going to help you to sell more? These are the questions. And this is why I think having the analytical mindset, and this is something that you learn as an IT professional, you should learn. is where you get successful because you will save your company or yourself money by asking the right question and avoiding extra costs or buying or deploying a solution that will not bring the benefit to your experience.

Speaker 0 | 18:35.000

I’m loving this. Absolutely loving this. I have to ask what you were thinking. We’re going to play a new part of the show. I might even… I might even use your words to create a new section of the show. We’re going to call this section of the show. First thing that comes to mind. First vision that comes to mind. I shouldn’t say person because that could get us in a lot of trouble. First vision that comes to mind when you think of whoever yells the loudest and the most gets what they want. First example. Go.

Speaker 1 | 19:15.307

Maybe a pizza place or. You know, this waiters that they, they scream at the kitchen. I want to stay well done. Whatever. Whomever screams the most, get the most in Brazil was say pizza plays. Like you go to a pizza place and you’ll say, put me there. Give me a pizza slice that you’re right. And pineapple, olives, whatever horrible things I do like to put on your pizza.

Speaker 0 | 19:41.688

Yeah. And you might end up with, I don’t know. I just got pizza hut. I’m not making fun of Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut back in the day was the greatest. It used to be so good. go to pizza hut there’s a whole experience there was like the salad bar all of that type of stuff but nowadays you could just get hit with an advertisement and they’re just yelling louder they’re the person that yells loudest and i end up with a garbage pizza another garbage pizza but they’ve got a good erp system or crm or whatever we want to call it they’re banging out coupons um yes yes yes um so strategic partners they want to ask questions we don’t So what’s the piece of advice? What’s the piece of advice we can give to leadership, whether it be C-level leadership, whether it be IT leaders in the space? What’s the biggest piece of advice? How do we find a strategic partner? What are the questions we should be asking?

Speaker 1 | 20:39.718

To find your strategic partner?

Speaker 0 | 20:42.279

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 20:43.240

I think you need people that really are focused on the end results. It’s not so… Every time I have conversations and I’m driving a few projects right now and they’re in the beginning and I keep people get annoyed sometimes because I keep asking the questions. OK, so tell me what is the business objective and how this is aligned back to our long term strategy? It sounds like an easy question. It sounds like an easy question, but it’s not because sometimes people cannot articulate that answer. And if they cannot, it’s fine. But you need to understand that if you cannot articulate an answer to, okay, how this objective of mine, and I’ll give you an example. I need to reduce my inventory variation by the end of the year in my next physical inventory. Okay. Why you need that? Okay. Because inventory means cash flow, whatever the answer you have. But what’s your baseline right now? How big is your variation? My variation is 2%. Oh, okay. So is that bad? How much you want to decrease? You want to go to zero? And then you start negotiating like, okay, but for you to get to 0% variation, you need to spend $2 million. How much your variation means? $200,000. Is that worthy? Are we helping the company by investing that type of money? Because sometimes people only think about their own objectives and not the company’s objective. Right. That’s why asking the right questions, that would be my advice. Work with people that ask the right questions and they ask a lot of questions. You know the five whys methodology or the technique? You should be asking five whys. So first of all, I want that why. Why, why, why, why? Until you get to the fifth one, you shouldn’t be satisfied. You’re going to get to get the root cause and then start thinking about, okay, this is the best move for us right now. Because sometimes what happens is IT people can be very oriented by delivery and checking boxes. Oh, I delivered that project. I installed that tool. Okay. Did you check if people are using the tool? Did you check if the tool was the right thing for this person? Frequently, sadly, the answer is no. If you look at any digital transformation benchmarking, you’ll see that, no kidding, like 70% of the digital transformation projects, they don’t deliver the benefits. And that’s all about the questions, right? In the beginning.

Speaker 0 | 23:45.458

I can honestly say this is one of the best shows we’ve ever done. This is really good. We delivered the product. What do you mean? We delivered the product. What do you mean?

Speaker 1 | 24:00.182

I worked on a project. Happily for me, I was not the leader on this project. I was kind of supporting the project. But we delivered a project that the company broke their vendor. That’s it. provided materials to them because they deployed a new ERP and people in the shop floor, they didn’t know how to add orders to fulfill the material supplies in the new system. So they only realized that they didn’t have materials when the material ended in the shelves and there was no time to ask for more. So, and the system had, the system was perfect. It was IT, check the box. We delivered a. Very beautiful, pretty system for you. It’s your fault that you don’t know how to use it. And if you was an IT person, you don’t care. You cannot be an executive, honestly. If you don’t care about the end results, you are not doing a good job as an IT person.

Speaker 0 | 25:09.328

Let’s go through some questions. We’ve got five whys. We’ve got… I’m selfishly thinking about this podcast the entire time. How can we make more money? How can this pod… How can this podcast make any money? Because I can tell you right now, the podcast is not making any money at all. This is a labor of love. We are, I am just spending money. I am spending money on this podcast, whatever it is, you know, web hosting and, you know, production and recording space, whatever, you know, whatever, Zoom or recording this on Zoom right now. So, yeah, I mean, very simple, very simplistically, I was thinking, yeah, how can we make money with this podcast? How can we get vendors to pay money to be to sponsor this podcast? And what kind of benchmarking and goals and examples should we have? Let’s talk about benchmarking. What kind of benchmarking should we be doing and thinking? Are we are we using any type of data to, I don’t know, measure said benchmarking?

Speaker 1 | 26:14.222

I love that question because this is something that IT leaders sometimes don’t do. And this is extremely important. And again, I think IT executives need to partner with their peers in other departments and ask those questions. So there are several types of benchmarking that can be useful for you in your job, in your company. So I do that frequently. And as much as I can. So you can do benchmarking externally. So for example, if you’re working with somebody from marketing, you can look for marketing research. It all depends on the objective, right? You want to sell more. You want to have more penetration. You want to have more market share. Whatever. I don’t know. It depends. So you have to figure out what kind of benchmarking helps you to get to the objectives you map. You can do internal benchmarking as well, like voice of the employee, what people feel about that. So this is very frequent. I like to work like that, like asking the questions, how our customer feels about that? How our employees feel about that? What’s the process that is in place? Some people call this voice of the process. You can even look at very strict or crunch the data to understand. how things are operating inside your company, your group. And all of that should be input for you as an IT professional to help to be a good advisor. Because sometimes we are not the decision makers and we shouldn’t be. We need to advise our partners about the best solutions. And how do you do that without benchmarking? Even technical benchmarking, go to, I don’t know, Gartner. And figure out, okay, who are the big players here? Who are the best for my company, the size of my company? Am I manufacturing? I’m services. What I do? Like your question about the podcast. To answer your question, I would have to understand better your business. Like how podcasters make money? I have no idea. And then we can start figuring out. So what are the variables that we have in this equation? that we can change. You know, like, I don’t know the name. What’s the name of when you do like sound and you do like fine tuning, like a board?

Speaker 0 | 28:53.126

Yeah, I don’t know. I call it like editing. I don’t know, sound editing.

Speaker 1 | 28:57.829

It’s that every situation or every scenario, it’s like you have a lot of tuning buttons, right? Which ones you want to move? to make a difference you have like

Speaker 0 | 29:12.759

30 which ones are the ones that make a difference so you brought up a good point you brought up in which you have no clue what i’m thinking right now but i’m gonna say it the what do we ignore so i i have a problem with like a flood of thoughts and you know everyone has it i what do we call it what’s the technical term for it it’s like um um context switching so We have like a thousand thoughts that go through our mind during the day and if we’re not like really lasered in and focused and we aren’t organized people or we’re ADD or whatever it is. We make these context switches constantly. We jump from task to task. We don’t have a good ticketing system. If we don’t have something, then our leadership could be jumping from making context switches from any given subject at any given time and being vastly, vastly unproductive and being taken off task to tasks that don’t even matter, right? So you just talked about like, what dial are you going to run? Who cares? They send it off to production and they take care of it, right? And what’s a dial? What’s a dial going to make a difference anyway? So what I was thinking is, what are we not doing that we should be doing? Which is probably like, you know, speaking with vendors or asking or reaching out to other podcast people and sharing. And then it’s like, okay, well, what are we going to do? Well, AI is the answer. So let’s just use AI. But, you know, which is another insane thing to take on. So I don’t know. I think it’s a good question. What are they doing? And you mentioned Gartner, which holds a very special spot in my life because many of us know that’s a pay-to-play model. And how do you decipher, especially nowadays with all the information out there, and you mentioned marketing and all these other things, and vendors, and how do we know what vendors are going to just start throwing stuff at whatever the next shiny object that’s going to solve a problem that we didn’t ask, like you said. What is the objective? How does this align with the business objectives and all this? How do we filter all that?

Speaker 1 | 31:23.279

I feel it’s really very hard. And you have a good point because I love Gartner, the way they operate. It’s extremely expensive too. But their service is, it’s a dream for an executive because you get to these guys and you just ask the questions, can you please bring me the top five players? in the area XYZ and they do all the research for you and they bring experts and they give you templates and it’s awesome. However, it’s pay to play. So you pay a lot of money, but I wonder also if there is a gap or a blind side, because what about smaller companies that probably are doing a great job, but they do not get through the filters? of a company like Gartner.

Speaker 0 | 32:17.161

I am going to tell you from actual experience, from doing this for two decades, and from working at large companies and startup companies, that that is an absolute accurate assessment. Because not only are the people paying… Gartner’s double dipping. Yeah, I know. If I disappear off the face of the earth, I say this in every episode. Because every episode I pick on somebody. And I’m going to probably die someday. Like the last episode, it was like, I don’t know, vaccinations. And, you know, anyways. So Gartner, so the executives wanting Gartner’s information are paying. And then the vendors are paying Gartner to get on said magic quadrant. And if you don’t pay, you are not on said magic quadrant. There is not a single person. Gartner’s going to come. By the way, yes, there is. And click, shove someone on the magic quadrant that hasn’t paid. Quick, Phil Howard’s. I hope that we get that popular.

Speaker 1 | 33:12.685

I really don’t know the other side, like as a vendor, what is the relationship with Gartner? But that makes sense to me because you were small. They’re not assessing everybody.

Speaker 0 | 33:23.793

Look, you know, from coming from Brazil, you know, from bootstrapping yourself to going to IBM, to going to GE, to knowing all this, to being a software consultant for HP, you know, you know that there are better. nimble companies out there that may fill a gap that answers and checks, checks the box. We’re not just checking the box, but also checks the box of what is the objective? How does this align with our objectives? They could be real nimble and real ninja and help you achieve your objectives, but you don’t know who they are.

Speaker 1 | 33:55.982

That’s true. That’s absolutely true. And I, uh, on top of my current job, I am also an advisor for a startup here in Pittsburgh. And, uh. And this is exactly right, like breaking through and getting to the big companies for them to know what you can do and them to trust you. Because this is a problem. If you don’t have like a stamp mark from Gartner or anybody else, you’re kind of, people will not give you money, you know, to try. So it’s hard to be.

Speaker 0 | 34:33.345

Well, there is things called POCs, which I’m of a big philosophy. I’m a big philosophy carrier. For example, here’s a Gartner example. COVID comes along, everything shuts down. Who do you think is on the UCAS? top upper right hand magic quadrant of Gartner after one year. Yeah, probably. We may happen to be using that technology at this very moment while we’re speaking. Any ideas?

Speaker 1 | 35:04.373

Yeah, Zoom.

Speaker 0 | 35:05.654

Yes, yes, yes. What will Gartner magic quadrant not tell you? It’s a snapshot. It’s a box. It’s a piece of paper. It’s something that we read. What are they not going to tell you? They will not tell you. Hey, by the way, Zoom’s operations department, I’m just guessing, I’m not making it. I actually do know, but I’m not going to, I’m not making any accusations here. Okay. What they won’t tell you is that maybe the operations department is vastly overloaded with tons of, I don’t know, orders possibly because we’re in the middle of a pandemic. What they won’t tell you is that maybe possibly you should be worried about some security issues. What will they tell you? They are the leader and everyone will stand up at a microphone and be like, congratulations. And Zoom will be like, we’re printing money. We’re rich. That’s, I don’t know. It’s just some important insights that we at Dice, I think popular IT nerds may be very secretively behind the scenes, be developing and giving you inside information on stuff that’s real time all the time. through a very awesome group of IT leaders and different people and gathering all this information together and giving you real-time data, because numbers don’t lie, people lie. So it’s just interesting how you brought that up. And it does match up with something that we are trying to do very much so for mid-market IT leaders, because I find that, well, like you said, business startups, mid-market IT leaders, they don’t have access. They have to do a lot with very little, and they don’t… Always have the, you know, time management. This is kind of what I was getting back at is like, what do we, what do we ignore? What are we not doing? And how can we leverage other resources to kind of, I don’t know, make this world of IT better, simpler, less complicated and not overcomplicate our lives. And I find that I tend to overcomplicate my life, even though my job is to make other people’s lives simpler.

Speaker 1 | 37:05.431

Can you imagine? I don’t know. It just occurred to me if there was like an. I would say open source magic quadrant that IT professionals could like rank applications and, and collaborate. That would be awesome.

Speaker 0 | 37:22.639

You’re hired. We need to be able to say, I need to be able to say we are 10% female employees.

Speaker 1 | 37:42.321

Maybe something like that exists and I don’t know about it, but it would be like more power to the people, you know, having like a…

Speaker 0 | 37:51.608

It gets watered down. So we had Spiceworks for a long time, right? So Spiceworks, we have like other IT forums, I guess. IT forums are going to say, hey, what do you use? The only problem is every company is different and you know that. And you know that from a software aspect. You probably utilize, I don’t know, how many end users do you guys have over there?

Speaker 1 | 38:10.920

It depends on the system. For sales for me, currently, we have like 200 people.

Speaker 0 | 38:17.043

Oh, so I would imagine across the entire company, though, across the entire…

Speaker 1 | 38:21.105

Just North America.

Speaker 0 | 38:23.306

Okay, so I would imagine you probably have at least 80 applications.

Speaker 1 | 38:27.869

Oh, my goodness. Much more than that.

Speaker 0 | 38:30.590

Okay, so there you go. Now, no one can tell me that any given company that there’s like a… I hate the word magic quadrant because it has the word magic in it. There’s just no such thing as magic. There’s no such thing, right? There is no silver bullet magic, this, that. There is not. Every single company is different. Every company is trying to do something different. And if they were the same as another company, then they wouldn’t have a competitive edge and they would need to be doing something different. So that’s the problem. The problem is we really need creative, like you said, out of the box thinkers that there is no one size fits all for any given company. That’s why it’s… I have a problem when people say, we’re only looking at people in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Do not bring us anyone else that’s not.

Speaker 1 | 39:16.852

But imagine that open source, I don’t know, evaluation of tools. We could have the entirety of the experiences there. Like I worked in a company that is $30 billion. I also worked for companies that are much smaller and different businesses. You could even evaluate. things based on your experience with company X that would give you all the details that you need. Like this is good for this company, not that good for this other.

Speaker 0 | 39:49.830

So I do, I am a partner and sit on like a inner circle type of advisory role. I guess you could say for a company called AppDirect, we’re kind of like a CSP master agency on steroids, you know, like the single source software platform to find, buy and manage all of your stuff. And I mean, I know that there’s like a rating way of going in and rating people and multiple stars and stuff like that. But I mean, how can you really trust that? How do we know that there’s not some other company out there saying, hey, jump on this forum real quick and go do this. At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never-ending, from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic, dealing with ISPs, can try once patients, even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you. How we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes and we use our 1.2 billion in combined customer buying power in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate. the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts so that you’re not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short. We are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So, we’re still human, but we are some of the best, and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what’s on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier. and we’ll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day. By the way, we’re rebuilding the website right now, which is a huge, massive forklift for us at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, and we really want to provide something that would be very, very useful, and this has really sparked my creativity here. So we need like a gatekeeper. We need the gatekeeper of all gatekeepers. We need like the gatekeeper to sift and sort and filter, almost like we need to like take… blood tests we need something to really lie detector test maybe i don’t know uh some kind of like a screen like you do not get through into this universe unless you have passed this this and this yeah um and i guess we’ve got like 300 shows so i guess we could start with like 200 people maybe a couple people would screen themselves out i don’t know um anywho

Speaker 1 | 43:30.957

i just i like where you but then connecting back to your to your original question, benchmarking is very important. But I agree with you. We need to be careful about it. No, but this is true for everything, right? You need to know exactly the biases involved in every benchmarking you do. So if you go to Gartner, for example, you need to know they will always try to push to you the very big vendors.

Speaker 0 | 43:58.191

Their partners, the people that pay them. Yes.

Speaker 1 | 44:00.752

So it is what it is. So you take it for what it is. You need to know. I mean, that’s why having different sources of information is good. Talking to people, I agree with you. Networking, asking questions to your peers and to your networking. LinkedIn can be helpful with that. I don’t see a lot of people being so open in LinkedIn. To me, it’s more like a platform to promote yourself.

Speaker 0 | 44:33.254

than really have having open open conversations you know um well please follow dissecting popular it nerds and maybe we can try and fix that i don’t know it could at least dm the problem with linkedin now is it’s become overrun with I don’t know.

Speaker 1 | 44:48.256

There’s a lot of,

Speaker 0 | 44:49.777

there’s a lot of AI stuff. There’s a lot like be human. The problem is, is you’ve got to like for every 20 inbox messages I get or 30 inbox messages I get ones actually, I like, I just know right away, like, wait a second. If I click accept on this one, I know I’m going to get a paragraph with a bunch of links in it right away.

Speaker 1 | 45:06.508

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 45:07.649

Then I do. Um, that’s why I try to be as human and quirky as possible so that people know like I’m a real person. Uh, but it’s very hard. I’ve had people just, you know, I’ve literally had to start off like with, Hey, I just want to let you know, I’m not trying to sell you anything. Uh, number two, unless, you know, unless you want something, then let me know. But, um, you know, or number two, you know, like, Hey, I know this probably sounds weird. Cause you probably get a lot of questions for people to be on a podcast and it’s not a bait and switch. And like, you know, they’re like, Oh, you wouldn’t believe me. I get people saying like, Hey, you want to come on the podcast or it leadership? And they’re like, how much are you paying me? I’m not paying you anything. Like the. this is our colleagues. Like they’re used, like they’ve already been used to that gig or something. So yeah, I don’t know. You just gotta, I guess, trust LinkedIn and be able to sift again, sift and sort it. I don’t know where to go from here. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. I could talk for another hour very easily with you. So is there something, maybe a piece of advice to IT leadership? Because the advice that you’ve given so far is, Um, very, very valuable. I guess I would say something around, let me ask you this. Should it leaders be asking for an MBO or a management by business objectives type of role? Should they be saying, I want a bonus. If I achieve X number of results, should they be tying some sort of ROI and tying their, their, their title to the bottom line of the company? What’s your advice to grow in this role? And I don’t want to say that it’s been harder for you, but it probably has. And that might be why you’re so well polished and stuff, because you’re the 0.001% Brazilian woman IT leader in the industry that had a 386 back in the day. And you’ve had things going for you and probably extra hoops that you’ve had jump through, which is why you’re so polished. So congratulations on that. What’s your advice? Because your advice is going to be very useful to some people that… you know, I don’t know, may have, you know, need, they’re really going to need this. I just know it.

Speaker 1 | 47:22.590

I would say we talked a lot about being analytical, which is probably easier for people in IT. So I would, I like the way you framed it, like try to get your results or your bonus or your compensation related to the results of the company. I think this is absolutely what you want to do. And you should be thinking, like, as I say, keep the eyes on the prize. Don’t let technology lead your life. You need to be working on results for the business, for the company to grow, to get better results. So you had a better bonus. That’s what I would do and what I try to keep doing. And I am very, very lucky to work with other IT executives that think the same. And there is one component that I would. I have a very strong advice about. A lot of people in IT, they perceive relationships as a nuisance to their lives. They don’t want to talk to people. They don’t want to talk business. They want to talk path. And you need to learn to have good relationships and to build trust, to speak the business language and to behave yourself like the business. By the way, my boss. He keeps calling us, his team out about, do never, never say IT in the business. IT is the business. Two, IT is as much the business as marketing, sales, HR, whatever else. It’s not like IT versus the business. This doesn’t exist. And I completely agree. But this is something that is so enrooted in our mindset. as people from technology, that we forget about. And we need to remember. So my advice would be, yes, leverage your analytical thinking. Most people in IT, they’re extremely smart and they are analytical. What’s going to make a difference for you? Speak business language, connect your results to the benefits that you’re bringing to the company, to the results of the company you work on, and learn to deal with people, to negotiate, be financially savvy. know how to discuss their ROI, you need to be able to calculate benefits. defend your projects, right? This is going to make a huge difference for people that want to be leaders in IT.

Speaker 0 | 49:55.848

I have nothing to say there. That was amazing. I’m going to say thank you very much for being on Dissecting Popular IT News. It was an absolute pleasure.

Speaker 1 | 50:02.554

Oh, it’s been my pleasure. So very nice talking to you.

Speaker 0 | 50:05.818

Thank you.