Speaker 0 | 00:00.000
You never know, someone might join. There’s like 100 really important high-level CTOs and CIOs and VPs of IT in IKAS. What did we used to say back in the day? Kind of a big deal? Kind of a big deal.
Speaker 1 | 00:12.906
Kind of a big deal. All right.
Speaker 0 | 00:15.168
Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. We’re actually live for the very first time in history, although it’s only me and Chris Meyer-Peter right now that are actually live. Eventually, this is going to go on YouTube and LinkedIn. It’s going to be a lot of fun. And… I don’t know. We were just getting Chris’s backstory, kind of, but let’s really go way back in time. What was your very first computer? How’d you get started in this insanity?
Speaker 1 | 00:41.993
Well, that is a great question. So I, you know, my parents were blue power middle class. I did not have a computer growing up. Didn’t really even see one through high school, early days. I joined the Navy because that was the only way I was going to be able to go to. college and that was the first time I really got into started to understand networking infrastructure I was a I was a radio man in the navy and that job doesn’t even exist anymore it was combined with three or four maybe even more other jobs now called um but uh yeah so that was when I got my first touch in computers and uh a good good friend of mine um while I was uh in the navy he was he understood them really well. And so I kind of learned from him. And that was when I kind of said, hey, this is it’s interesting. I understand how it works. But, you know, got a lot of experience in the Navy. And, you know, I always joke with folks, you know, came out, went to school, got a job. But I kind of tell people I was mid 90s. I had a pulse and I understood computers. So So at the time, you know, everybody was going through the Windows 95 migrations and all this other stuff. And they were just looking for anybody they could find. And that’s how I got into it. I didn’t see and start getting involved with computers or technology till early 90s. And then I would say more deeply around the mid 90s, 95, 96.
Speaker 0 | 02:12.270
It was anyone that could fix the printer or I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 02:15.804
plug in that what was the big what was the big cable that we used to call like the the night anthonyl cable or something what was that big fat printer cable it was that um yeah what was that uh is that cable yeah it’s a super pin cable we’re using poke and ring net networks at my first job we had uh we had the world’s largest apple talk network for a while something like that it was uh it was back in the wild wild west days of uh of it and you’re trying to get to some sort of standard um
Speaker 0 | 02:44.724
Were you on a ship?
Speaker 1 | 02:45.484
It was fun times. That’s when you started realizing that put the wrong IP address on a computer without firewalls or anything. Everybody in the world could access it. It was an interesting time.
Speaker 0 | 02:57.147
Yeah, I worked in a call center with like 500 people and all the computers were networked together. There actually was no such thing as a firewall. We could all play big networked games of Civilization, which was really fun. We all had dial-up at home. But we had like an OC-12. in the which i had no clue what that even meant during the call center days i just knew that we had really fast internet was like i felt like i was in the pentagon yeah exactly that was wicked cool the were you on a ship boat submarine deployed what the navy’s kind of a broad thing but like anything cool lots
Speaker 1 | 03:31.424
of cool stuff in the navy um you know uh i think the most important thing for me when i joined was i wanted to see the world um and and i wanted to learn um kind of where I was going. I was coming out of school. I wasn’t ready to go to college anyway. The Navy was a really nice wake-up call for me. People ask me that when they find out I’ve been in the military, they ask, do you want your son to go? Would you want your daughters to go? The answer is absolutely yes. If they wanted to, I believe that it helped me to grow. There is no place that I can think of where they give that much responsibility to kids, honestly, have no reason to have that kind of responsibility and force them to really grow up. Or, you know, you’re kind of, you know, weeded out if you don’t. And, you know, it was a great experience for me. I always joke if they paid a little better, I probably would have stayed longer. But it was time for me to start my family. At the time, wife now. We’re getting serious. So that’s why I got out. But, you know, I was on the USS Dahlgren when it caught on fire. That was a scary, scary moment. And was. a wake-up call as well when you’re out on the middle of the ocean and your ship is burning you there’s nobody put it out except for the crew on that ship and there’s some really brave folks um on that ship that day um and uh you know but like i said uh a lot too many experiences to go through those are some of the ones that stand out to me but really enjoyed my time loved going around the world. I’ve been fortunate enough to step foot on every continent except Antarctica. And I’m trying to get there before the big guy takes me.
Speaker 0 | 05:10.088
Can the, yeah, there’s a whole, there’s actually like a whole, Antarctica is interesting. There’s a whole like conspiracy theory group that like you can only go to a certain piece of it and can’t get past like the certain, like, I don’t know, what is it that like 58th or 62nd parallel line or something like that? Most Americans are terrible at geography, but you’re in the Navy, so you’re probably really, really good at it and reading charts and stuff.
Speaker 1 | 05:32.824
I don’t know about really good at it, but I will say this. I am not a conspiracy theory guy, so therefore I tend to shut out most conspiracy theories.
Speaker 0 | 05:40.890
So then I want the we want you to go to Antarctica then and tell us all about it. Validate? Yes, validate. Try to fly a drone if you can and let us know if they allow you.
Speaker 1 | 05:51.319
See what I can do.
Speaker 0 | 05:53.641
Okay, we were talking earlier. Are you an agile guy? What’s your agile story?
Speaker 1 | 05:58.660
Yeah. Again, like we chatted a bit earlier, I believe strongly in the idea of iteration. I like the idea of continuously checking in and making sure that we’re doing the right thing. I also, though, am a strong believer that true agile following the full manifesto in non-tech, non-software, non-technology companies is really hard. This idea that they’re… you know, there aren’t any deadlines except for the next sprint. This idea that you just keep doing things until everything is right. You’ve got to find a balance a little bit, I think, in what I like to call kind of the real world. You know, I’m the CIO for a flour milling company. At the end of the day, our job is to make flour so people can bake bread, cookies, you know, pizzas, cakes, you know, all of those types of things. And so trying to implement what I’ll call kind of true agile, has not proven successful in any of the roles that I’ve had. However, finding ways to blend it with some of what, you know, the old traditionalists would call kind of a waterfall approach, this idea that you’ve got milestones you’re trying to get to, but to get to the milestones, you’re using sprints and iterations and continuing, you know, to kind of adjust your priority. and work through i think is a nice balance so that’s kind of where i stand so so you know i think on the surface yes i believe strongly that the agile model can be effective and work i just think that you have to tailor it to your to your situation into your business um and what i’ve what i’ve found in my experience is you you hire people and and it’s a religious war whether whether we like to kind of call that or not you got these uh agile folks that are just i mean devotees to the manifesto itself and kind of how it works and then trying to help them to to maybe soften that a little bit sometimes doesn’t work out as well as you would hope or like and so that’s you know i think a big part of what we what we try to balance but um you know we do we do use it we’re you know we’re is there a tool or a like a kanban board or something that works better than a kanban board or is is it a piece of paper is it a spreadsheet what’s the best
Speaker 0 | 08:18.948
organization tool?
Speaker 1 | 08:20.208
Yeah, you know, what we’ve been trying to do is we’ve been trying to use, and we’re a Microsoft shop, so we use Azure DevOps to really kind of manage the stories and boards to Epics, that type of work, and that’s where and how we’re using it. We’ve looked at all of those other kind of tools, and again, we kind of have to blend it. You know, the way we set up our IT organization is, you know, the first… you know i would say entry point into our i.t group is really around process design we have business architects and you know folks that quite frankly could easily be in other functions outside of i.t because they’re really focused on the process and we try to use agile principles and process design which is iterate try to show it we try to walk through it we try to get buy-in try to make sure that all the stakeholders understand what’s going on then you get into our um our product team now our products we define products a little bit differently because, again, traditional technology organization, product manager owns the stack all the way. When you work in a company like ours, your products probably go across multiple technology stacks. So we have product managers that enable business processes. So if I think about something like an order management product for us, that has to go across three different platforms. Salesforce.com, we use Dynamics 365 as our ERP. home, we’ve written a homegrown application that manages and creates contracts that we work and use with our customers. So you’ve got to play across all three of those platforms. So the product manager is at a disadvantage. They don’t have to, they don’t typically have a, what I would call a deep technical understanding. of the back end. And so you need your different engineering teams to kind of help them. So it’s a little bit of a balance. So you go from business architecture to our product teams, to our delivery. And then the delivery teams will have our software architects, our engineers, our application development teams, our support teams, our infrastructure teams, security, all of them. That’s kind of how we…
Speaker 0 | 10:29.070
You said something pretty cool. Well, I don’t know if it’s cool. It’s just an observation that you only know if you know. if that makes any sense and i think you’ll know when i say you know what you know and that is you use salesforce dynamics and a homegrown thing um for your contracts so i don’t want to assume here because everyone knows what happens when you assume but my assumption is that dynamics is in a iteration devops growth phase itself in becoming what would should be a full-blown very well working ERP for manufacturing, but it’s not quite there yet. And it has some opportunities for growth, AKA why you have Salesforce and also another, um, uh, contract contract homegrown thing kind of all is that this is, is, is dynamics the central thing here and everything kind of plugs into that, or is it more revolving three circles and a wheel around the other?
Speaker 1 | 11:30.821
That’s a great question. Um, Because Dynamics is our ERP and quite frankly, more specifically for a majority of our financial processes, our order management happens in Dynamics. But what we’ve done and what I’ve learned, and I’ll be honest with you, I think a majority of the ERPs for companies like mine struggle. We’re not an auto manufacturer, right? So even if you had an SAP or whatever it is, we also custom built. our own manufacturing execute, or, you know, we call it an MRP if you want, mainly because we knew regardless of what ERP we went to, we were going to have to heavily customize that to make it work for flour milling anyway. And so then you’ve got the cost of the software package, whether it be an SAP or a Dynamics or Infor or Oracle or any of them. And then you’ve got the cost of managing and maintaining all the stuff you had to build on top of it. And so, you know, we made the decision that… We’re going to use these two. And then you brought up Salesforce as well. We could have easily went with Dynamics CRM, but we also because we have a heavy reliance on Microsoft, we want to put every egg in one basket as well. So that was the reason why we decided Salesforce would work. But I do agree with you that Dynamics is in its early stage. They’re making a lot of investments in it. We’re seeing a lot of growth in capabilities that we have around that. And so we’ve got.
Speaker 0 | 13:02.259
sorry about that uh let him speak yes he has he has issues with dynamic he loves dynamics but he’s he’s or he either loves dynamics or doesn’t or just likes it but i think he likes it because he’s like why are you speaking about about exactly baby but you know so so we we
Speaker 1 | 13:18.032
try to we try to blend and use these these tools like a dynamics of salesforce um workday you know those for the things they’re built for and and we and we manage them appropriately because of that And so that way we’re not heavily customizing because we don’t have a lot of people. And so when you heavily, I mean, everybody knows you start heavily customizing these apps. You don’t get as much support from the from the companies that actually own them. And you have to manage them a little bit differently.
Speaker 0 | 13:46.915
OK, in your history of in your history of since the days of you have a pulse and know how to plug in a printer. Yeah. You’ve you’ve seen I.T. move from. Hey, we need some nerds that know how to work this stuff. And IT wasn’t even an example to now it’s an actual thing that you could probably go to college for and then get out in the real world and have to learn everything all over again or for the first time. We have a few fun questions to answer.
Speaker 1 | 14:18.575
Okay.
Speaker 0 | 14:19.335
What is the most ludicrous request you have ever received from executive management? And this could just be a make-believe request. It doesn’t. actually have to be real, but it could be close to possibly the truth. What is the most ludicrous request you’ve ever received from executive management?
Speaker 1 | 14:36.833
Oh, my goodness. The most. Well, that is a great question.
Speaker 0 | 14:41.434
There’s just so many we can’t choose.
Speaker 1 | 14:43.575
Yeah, I’m actually drawing a blank.
Speaker 0 | 14:47.556
First thing that comes to mind.
Speaker 1 | 14:49.376
The first one actually comes to mind was early in my career where, you know, People were really struggling with how these computers worked and what they were working on. And I had somebody that spent, you know, all day. Working on something, I guess, you know, I’m going to assume didn’t save it or something like that. It was well before we had autosave going on any of these words. He’s working on a PowerPoint presentation for a big deal. It was a big deal because we were in the midst of a merger that they were going to break, break up, break off. So they were doing board prep and I felt terrible. I can feel it already. Six hours. He turned off his computer to go home or something, didn’t save. I’m like, well, it had to warn you about it. And he goes, well, I always get all these pop-ups, right? So I just hit no, no, no, no, no. And he’s like, well, you’ve got to recreate it. It’s got to be in there somewhere. I was like, well, there’s no chance. And he was not happy. Of course, you’ve got the why do I pay for IT resources when you can’t solve problems when they’re there. Very. That’s the one that I remember just looking and going, there’s not a thing I can do about this. You know, I felt terrible. I’m sure there are other ones, but, I mean, I don’t know. To your point, I tried to block them out. I can’t think of any really good ones.
Speaker 0 | 16:20.898
What type of you can pick either or. What type of IT leaders are going to fail in the upcoming years and future ahead? Or what type of IT leaders are really going to excel?
Speaker 1 | 16:33.594
Yeah, I think there’s a shift and it’s already happening and I see it around. But to me, the technology leaders that just continue to focus only on technology and don’t understand the business and the business problems that they’re solving are not going to last. They’re already not lasting. So our company, although at a revenue line, we probably look like a pretty big company. I think we’re about four, four and a half billion. the revenue line, but we’re a flower manufacturer. So we’re scraping pennies off of that. So you’re selling four and a half million dollars to hopefully make about $300 million. So you got to run pretty lean, more like a mid-market, maybe a little bit bigger than a mid-market. So I go to a lot of conferences with also, we’ll call it kind of larger organizations and mid-market organizations. And the difference that I see is a lot of the mid-market leaders are just hell bent on this new technology is out. So I have to find a way to wedge it into whatever I’m doing, as opposed to, you know, you know, our, you know, the question that we make our team answer every time is how will whatever we’re doing help us sell more flour or make it at a better cost or sell new products? If we can’t answer that question, there’s no reason for us to be doing it. And so, so to back to your question. These folks that are here trying to implement technology for technology’s sake are the ones to me that are going to get left behind. And when you’re balancing that and understanding kind of the, I’ll call it the industry you’re in and what is the right thing for that business, I think those are the ones that continue to grow, to drive change, to align, to be looked at as a partner, quite frankly, to be looked at as a fundamental resource. for that business as opposed to a cost center and expense of that business.
Speaker 0 | 18:32.451
What’s the key differentiator or what’s the key piece that makes someone a business partner versus a dude we slip pizzas under the door to in the server room?
Speaker 1 | 18:46.737
Yeah, I mean, to me, it’s business acumen. It’s truly understanding how the business works and then how technology complements that business. And there’s a lot of folks. Again, you start talking to them and you realize they really don’t have any idea how their business works. They’re just trying to drive new technologies. And some of them, you know, and again, I see these a lot. You’ve got these folks that are, I call them resume builders, right? They want to implement some big technology so that they can move to the next thing. And they’ve got something on their resume that kind of talks about that. But you’ve got to balance it. And believe me when I tell you, this isn’t rocket science. More and more people. we’re seeing shift to really understanding the business that goes. I am so sorry, Phil.
Speaker 0 | 19:31.600
Nope. You’re good. Happens all the time. Usually it’s my kids setting off the fire alarm. So I had that happen like five times, toasting a piece of bread, setting off the fire alarm. Okay. Here’s what’s, it is very interesting to me. You’re at a conference, you’re with some mid-market guys or you’re with a bunch of dudes. What are the top three telltale signs they have no clue about being a business partner in IT? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 19:53.549
Cause The easiest way for me is I start trying to talk to them about how, you know, what margins they make, where and how, you know, how they’re. how their company you know just asking simple questions like all right what do you guys sell and then you get into well what what’s the margins on that are you creating that or are you buying it from somebody else are you a pastor you start asking them questions more specific to their business whether it be how they manufacture um what their sales approach is you know um that type of thing and they can’t answer the question and you start looking and you’re like well how do you how do you know which technology to implement if you don’t understand, you know, what and how your business operates, you know, so I think about our business as well, right? Not only are we having to manufacture the flour, so we’re, you know, procuring wheat, we’ve got to bring it into the elevators, we’ve got to grade it then, we’ve got to separate it, we’ve got to break it out, we’ve got to test it, you know, we build off… big contracts, but being able to kind of explain your business is the first and quite frankly, only sign I usually need.
Speaker 0 | 21:06.713
No clue what gross margin is.
Speaker 1 | 21:09.075
Well, and even if you don’t know how it’s calculated, you should have a pretty good idea. If you’re the head IT person of a company, you should be able to answer some basic questions like what’s your profit margin? What are, what’s your, you know, whether you do EBIT or like we do profit before tax instead of EBIT and kind of, you know, how does that work? What, you know, what’s your revenue? You know, just trying to kind of, you know, for me, I’m kind of, you know, one of the, one of the leadership qualities that we look for, quite frankly, just qualities in general for people is we call it relentlessly curious. And that fits me perfectly because I’m always trying to kind of understand a bit more about whatever it is somebody’s doing. So tell me more about what, you know, and how your company operates. What are they selling? Who are their customers? Who would buy who buys that type of stuff? Like people ask me that all the time. Who’s your customers? Because and then you start telling them, like, I don’t even know who that is. And I’m like, yeah, because big, huge, you know, bakers and such, you know, you know, you say, you know, the Lees and they go, I don’t know who that is. And you say, have you ever heard of Oreos? And they’re like, yes, I have heard of Oreos. I was like, well, you know who Mondelēz is. But, you know, it’s these bigger.
Speaker 0 | 22:20.690
it’s these bigger companies that are general mills 21st century grain we should go through been going through all of these things yeah you and i actually have a lot in common i haven’t told you but uh my my uh cousins actually he’s a retired captain and from merchant marines that have been running a massive ship that’s like so big i can’t believe it forever gone for like eight months out of the year um my father-in-law was like president and ceo of 21st century grants before that it was a con agra guy i don’t some crazy high up level in ConAgra and he makes grain sound exciting. Kind of like trying to make it sound exciting.
Speaker 1 | 22:57.856
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 22:58.557
But our number one value, our number one value under our values right below the mission actually for the podcast is intellectual curiosity and diversity of thought. So curious curiosity is I liked how you put it more of a, what’d you say?
Speaker 1 | 23:14.670
Relentless or relentlessly curious,
Speaker 0 | 23:17.352
relentlessly curious.
Speaker 1 | 23:18.493
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 23:19.630
So love it. The, okay. So number one, you, of the, of the top three telltale signs that no one has a clue that they’re a business partner or ever will be a business partner is you are unable to explain the business or in short, probably don’t know what gross margin is. Even if you don’t know how to calculate it, no big deal. What’s another one?
Speaker 1 | 23:40.138
Yeah. Another one is when they start showing me the sequel that they’re, they’re writing for some, you know, I don’t know, patch or something. uh there’s a there’s a we used to always use this term for them um we would call them patches um so if if they’re the ones that are having to write out the sequel codes or the you know the scripts and then that’s how it’s like again that doesn’t feel like the best use of the time for the cost of the minutiae still the top i.t person right And I’ll be honest with you, it’s been so long since I wrote anything. I would look at it and be like, okay, I’m sure that’s fine. But I have to say,
Speaker 0 | 24:24.224
actually, I asked you to check it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. And there could be any number of examples of that. Some, I don’t know. Yeah. Maybe a thing or something.
Speaker 1 | 24:33.832
Unfortunately, you’d be surprised how many times people have tried to show or share with me some code or script that they write. And I was like, yeah, you know what? Great. Let me give you. you know, whoever it is on my team that you should share that with. But I mean,
Speaker 0 | 24:49.405
I wonder if I doubt Zuckerberg still codes, even though I’m sure he probably.
Speaker 1 | 24:54.130
He might. I don’t know, but I would hope that he doesn’t.
Speaker 0 | 24:58.871
No, he’s busy with jujitsu. Yeah. Okay. We need a third one. Third telltale sign.
Speaker 1 | 25:04.932
Yeah. Third one.
Speaker 0 | 25:07.813
You should be our guy. That’s just like a sidekick that comes on. Like we should be like, okay, vote business partner or not. And we’re like,
Speaker 1 | 25:13.755
eh,
Speaker 0 | 25:13.975
like shark tank or something. I mean, this would be fun.
Speaker 1 | 25:16.636
Trying to think the other ones. And this one, this one’s a little bit tougher, but when, when every. comment coming out of their mouth because i see this one a lot is around just security which again isn’t a bad thing when when when all they’re really more a cso than a than a cio and that’s not a bad thing um uh but if you get you know hell bent into one specific area it’s really hard for you to be be good at supporting all the the rest of those areas and how do you balance that time now that one’s a tougher one because whoever that person’s working for, depending on the size of the org or whatever it is, security might be the thing they have to be, right? But I think at some point it will limit their upward mobility, whether it be within that company or branching out beyond that company.
Speaker 0 | 26:07.950
In other words, what you’re saying is it could just be their biggest challenge right now. And why, you know, I guess why I don’t tout them for that or something, you know what I mean? Because that just might be their biggest challenge. And that’s why they’re asking you, but the coding one’s a clear example. OK, so they talk about security more than they talk about being a generalist and a leader of sorts, I guess.
Speaker 1 | 26:28.202
Yeah. And like I like I said, you know, you talk you talk to them and understand a bit more about the size. And then you’re thinking and you try to kind of understand if you’re leading all of IT, why are you so focused in one area? And not that security is a bad place to be focused. No, don’t mishear me. But. But that would be the other one that I see a lot where I’m like, okay, this person is really more of a CISO. And, you know, I need some really smart people that are really good in that space. I mean, honestly, there are times when I’m like, I should maybe try to recruit this person to come and work in our security group because they have such passion behind it.
Speaker 0 | 27:14.460
The. Well, you brought up another point, upscaling and finding good talent and keeping good talent. Is that we find here after the data shows that that is a problem.
Speaker 1 | 27:27.532
Oh, it’s definitely a problem. You know, I think there’s a couple of things. One of them is we rob each other instead of trying to figure out the best way to build a talent base. I think the other one is, and there’s a program that we’re implementing at Arden Mills, we call it Arden Learn. But the idea and the concept behind it is kind of shifting this paradigm that says there are more jobs in technology, IT in particular, that do not actually require a college degree than there are that require college degrees. And so how do you break this paradigm that says, you know, maybe people that can’t afford to go to college. go to college or quite frankly what i find is you know some of the best developers don’t have the patience for college and so how do you help them flourish learn grow and build a you know i’ll call a larger base um the pandemic helped us in this space because it allowed us to you know we’ve kind of embraced hybrid and remote um work uh so back when we had to have everybody in denver it was much harder because you were just robbing from each other Right. I mean, you know, anytime you were filling a role, you were taking it from and we had a bit of a close community in Denver and with the tech leaders. And so you’re kind of robbing from your buddies in some way, shape or form. And so we were really trying to kind of build the talent base up. Being able to work remote has expanded our reach. But I still think one of the biggest gap areas here is helping people understand that technology is in everything. And no matter what job you’re going to be, you have to be a technologist, right? I mean, like I talked about with our mills, even in our mills, folks that are working the production lines in our mills have to understand technology.
Speaker 0 | 29:18.953
So is there something about the team dynamic then that no matter what you become, how do you become unrobable?
Speaker 1 | 29:24.397
Yeah, I think that’s about culture. So that’s about how you help to, you know, have people be heard. You listen when you’ve got these folks that are, you know, what we talked, we started earlier on the agile zealot. so to speak, and you listen and you try to help them and you make them think through a little bit more of the why, you know, we need to blend this a bit. You need to make them feel and understand why. uh what they’re doing every day matters and how it drives to the bottom line when i first got to ardent seven years ago we do a like at most companies we do an employee survey and one of the questions on the employee survey was what you know what impact do i have on the customer experience and my i.t group basically said we have zero impact on the on the experience i was like well that couldn’t be farther from the truth and you know we so we walked through A few examples to your point, when we went live in Dynamics, we had a big impact on the customer experience for a while. You know, like most ERP implementations, right? They’re not easy because they span across every function and every process. And so helping them to kind of bring a little bit more of focus and vision and mission to what they do every day to the broader good. And, you know, I’ve worked in agriculture and food production for 29 years now. And what I love is when I get to go out and talk to folks like you and others, you know, and they ask me kind of what we do. My answer is always I get to help feed the world. And there’s no bigger, you know, in my mind anyway. There’s very few bigger missions than that. And we think about kind of our world and where we’re at and what we need to do to continue to progress and make sure that nobody’s hungry, that there’s enough food. How do we how do we manufacture and do that the right way? And so how do you help IT people connect what they’re doing every day to that broader mission? That’s how you try to become, you know, quote unquote, unrobable. And we’ve done a good job of that. You know, our attrition rates are pretty low. And so, you know, that that’s a long, that’s a long winded answer to your question. But that to me, it’s really the culture keeps manager and the culture keeps people. But you’ve got to have a way to get the right talent in and not put barriers around it. And. and really barriers that don’t mean that much. Finding the right people is the most important thing. Attitude, aptitude. Those are the two things. Everything else, if you’ve got the right attitude and you’ve got the right aptitude, the rest of it, we can bring you along and make you really great at what you do.
Speaker 0 | 31:59.906
Two more things. How do we, how do we, how do we, it’s not convince, but how do we sell, since you brought up. Selling, which I think is important. And that might be a, maybe the question is more, what’s the attitude or the thing that we don’t know or the paradigm shift that a curious IT-minded person has? What’s the biggest, I guess, what’s the biggest paradigm shift? What’s the biggest paradigm shift in thinking that in technology-minded person? needs to make in order to become a business partner?
Speaker 1 | 32:43.589
Ooh, that’s a really good question. Cause I’ll be honest with you. I, I’m not convinced every person in technology needs to have a full and complete understanding. I think everybody should have a high level understanding of what they do in particular, what they’re doing every day that enables what we as a business, um, where I see people struggle the most is really this idea about being relentlessly curious. Um, in, in the, in the fact. that most people, you’ve been in technology for a while. I’ve been in technology for a while. If you’re in technology, it’s typically because you love technology. You love the advancements, the ideas. I’m sure there are things that are happening even today as we start thinking about AI and now DeepSeat coming in and potentially disrupting. But that tends to get a lot of IT tech folks really jazzed up. And that’s the stuff they really like. to continue to learn and then you start throwing in and some you know i had a couple people tell me the boring business stuff uh into that and it’s like yeah okay i i can understand why you might say it’s boring but the more you understand about it the better you can go out and find really cool technology to enable so to me the biggest hurdle to get over is this idea that the business stuff doesn’t matter as long as i get to do cool tech technology. And what I try to tell people is it’s understanding the business stuff that gives you the license to bring in the cool.
Speaker 0 | 34:15.236
Yeah. You may just be wasting time and blowing up the business with all your technology.
Speaker 1 | 34:19.759
Yeah. If all you want to do is bring technology in and you have no way to show the value it brings, why on earth would they do it? They shouldn’t do it.
Speaker 0 | 34:29.446
Do you see a, do you see a, how do we convince executive management that this new explosion in AI is not going to replace IT. Oh,
Speaker 1 | 34:44.281
I mean, we’re in the middle of that right now. And what I, you know, I continue to use, and again, I didn’t coin this phrase. I heard it somewhere else, but I liked it and I use it. Instead of artificial, I use augmented. So to me, AI is augmented intelligence, the ability to have information quicker so that people can make decisions. And what we continue to remind folks are is that in no way, shape or form has anything we’ve ever done been done to try to replace or get rid of people. Now, we work in an industry manufacturing in general has a shortage. So so we are we are forced. to implement some of this technology because we just, quite frankly, can’t recruit enough people to run our mill. And we’re not the only ones. It’s not just flour milling that’s struggling in this as we go. And so this concept of augmented intelligence allows you, so think about this today. And this is the example I use with our senior leadership team as we were talking about kind of the value that AI can bring. And so today, if you’re in our customer service organization and you have a customer call us. about status on an order or where it’s going. You potentially have to go into multiple systems to get a little bit of information about all of it. What AI allows us to do, and when you’re in a company like ours, because we explained orders at the beginning, part of it’s done in Salesforce, part of it’s done in our custom tool called Vault, part of it’s done in Dynamics, and you’re looking in reporting and some of the other areas. So what we’re working on right now, and the concepts are showing that it works really well, is having an agent for our customer service to say, give me all the relevant details on this order. And it goes out and it immediately brings that to them instead of them having to go out and do it. Now, I’m not placing anybody on the customer service team.
Speaker 0 | 36:36.699
Basically, an API call, screen pop from everything, or gather all the information, pop it in an screen versus three different screens with F1, F2, 4, 5, and all these other keys. times out of ten phil they gotta look at them and say hey let me go and look and i’ll get back to you how about even a third have taken even because i’ve seen some use cases where you’ve taken it even a step further i know it works really well in the medical industry but um really kind of finding out what are the majority of your calls about to begin with so like in the medical industry yeah you know it’s like 30 of the calls are um no offense to the elderly but you know what what’s the location of where my appointment is, right? So that’s something that AI can really quite knock out of the box right away. It can pull up a caller ID and say, are you calling about your appointment today at two o’clock, you know, and, and because in the, and where it’s located, you know, like that’s that immediately eliminated something like, you know, 30% of some odd calls in another place. Are you calling about the billing notice that you just received? You know, like, you know, like those are the type of things that. I don’t know if I’d really call it maybe AI or why is it automated? You know, you know,
Speaker 1 | 37:50.701
it’s got it’s got AI features to it. But I think you’re I mean, to me, you’re you’re spot on the what what particularly this generative AI capabilities and some of those can do is some of the mundane tasks that have to be done today that people don’t like to do. But they understand it’s part of their job. So how do you take some of those things so that because because I guarantee you go to. any person in any role, I could do it. You could do it. Anybody can do it. And you can list and say, what are the things that you, you know, you have to do, but it drives you crazy, but you have to do it. And because you have to do those, what are the things you’re not able to do that you would really like to do that you think would bring some, that to me is the value of AI.
Speaker 0 | 38:33.433
And when we blend it with security, which you said, we don’t want, need to be talking about that the only time, which brings us maybe to our final question or one of our final questions. And just because I. I want to put this information out there because to me, security is an ocean of vendors constantly in my LinkedIn inbox. Phil, Chris, someone so of whatever security team would love to be on your podcast. Yeah. No, just maybe. Well, maybe. Are you going to sponsor? Top five or top three, pick one, top three security vendors that are very useful to you. Like just, I want some vendors that are like, knock it out of the park for you. Or is there anything that’s just like, you know, I love this. I’ll never leave for at the moment until they blow up the company or sell to Broadcom or something.
Speaker 1 | 39:22.957
I don’t know. Great question. First one that pops in the value that we’ve gotten from this tool and capability has been astronomical compared to the cost. And I hate saying that on a podcast that they might see it. So then all of a sudden the cost will go up, but.
Speaker 0 | 39:41.132
No, we’re going to blank. We’re going to blank it out. We’re going to buy of this beep. You got to subscribe to the community to get, to get the answer.
Speaker 1 | 39:49.919
Exactly. It’s a little cool, um, called abnormal. And, um, I don’t know how little it is anymore. We, we, we’ve been on it for a while now and I, I came across it in a, uh, in an investor briefing where, uh, you know, there’s a group of folks in Denver that they would have these, um, these, uh, private equity companies come in and they have. you know a couple of their companies out of their portfolio present and they presented this abnormal And, you know, what I like about it is it runs behind the email gateway, but it’s constantly looking at in particular was looking at things like, hey, normally you when you’re interacting via email or others with Phil, he’s then I’m just going to make it up because I don’t know where you’re at in the US when you are in the US. But let’s just say Philadelphia normally is in Philadelphia. Now, all of a sudden, I’m getting emails from him from Morocco or, you know.
Speaker 0 | 40:43.340
And Phil doesn’t use these words,
Speaker 1 | 40:45.281
maybe. Well, even that, but it starts to let you know, hey, this person might be compromised. So, you know, and what really stood out to us is it was really, really cool that, you know, I talked to them. My team talked to them. They said, hey, we could plug in real quick and just do a 30-day trial. It doesn’t cost you anything. We’ll just show you we won’t filter anything.
Speaker 0 | 41:07.189
I’m a big proponent. I’m a big proponent of the POC.
Speaker 1 | 41:12.091
Yeah. And that’s exactly what it was. And the beauty of it was it showed us that our finance team was interacting with, I think, was three different partners that had been compromised. They did not know because they were smaller partners. We were able to tell them, hey, you guys have a problem here. And and, you know, abnormal picked it up. So abnormal. is at the top of the list.
Speaker 0 | 41:36.764
Now you’re a business partner for your other partners, not even just technology alone. So now you just helped other customers of yours. Interesting. Okay, next one, next one.
Speaker 1 | 41:47.170
So that one would always be at the top of the list. It has continued to just prove valuable over and over again. You know, I think, you know, we’ve Cisco and some of the new capabilities that they’re building into their routers and all that, they’ll allow firewalls and… and the separation between OT and your corporate networks and all that. They’ve been really good. And then we use a partner that’s really more for midsize. They do a lot of our security operations work. It’s called Pareto Cyber. Smaller company, but fits us perfectly. We’re not a company that can build out a huge cyber organization.
Speaker 0 | 42:26.766
Are they like a SOC service, like security as a…
Speaker 1 | 42:30.607
We pay them a little bit for kind of like a… fractional CISO work mainly to help us with the strategy on kind of what’s continuing to happen in the market and kind of what goes on there.
Speaker 0 | 42:41.943
So is it how do you spell that?
Speaker 1 | 42:44.344
P-E-R-E-T-O. Yeah, just like I said, a little bit more built for midsize companies. You know, they do a really good job for us. And then, you know, always by Microsoft reps will hear this always.
Speaker 0 | 43:01.300
always hate them i mean we got cisco but cisco is like saying like are you guys like is it is it like a maraqui shop or like is it higher end stuff through cisco or is it like the full yeah that’s a really good question um because i don’t know what the new stuff is that we’re buying i know we were with barack we had maraqui and yeah
Speaker 1 | 43:19.092
it’s a network guy you’re like the network guy is in charge of that exactly i i i couldn’t tell you but i know it’s allowed us to step away from some of our other firewall vendors because they are now have more robust tools to be able to do that. And then, you know, I don’t usually like giving Microsoft credit, but you know, I told you we’re a Microsoft shop. We have to obviously pay for a lot of their security capabilities and they are, they are absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 43:43.573
I think about a year or two years ago and doing a pretty darn good job. Yeah. A year or two years ago, it was kind of like we’re considering it now it’s strong and strong and better strong to quite strong. My Microsoft portfolio is strong to quite strong.
Speaker 1 | 43:59.185
I would agree. Mine is too.
Speaker 0 | 44:01.465
So, well, Chris Meyer, Peter, thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. It has been a pleasure. Any final words of wisdom or anything to send out to your peers?
Speaker 1 | 44:14.829
You know, the only other thing that I would say, and one, thank you. Thanks for the time. It’s great chatting with you. I really enjoyed it. I apologize for all the interruptions.
Speaker 0 | 44:23.651
No, no, this makes it more fun. It makes it more realistic, too. Every now and then, my internet goes out.
Speaker 1 | 44:30.258
It makes it definitely more real. The only other thing I would say for all of the great IT leaders that are out there is none of us would be where we’re at without the great teams of people that we have around. And making sure that we’re continuing to recognize those folks, being comfortable with ourselves and letting other people learn, grow, develop. I mean, that’s… That’s really, you know, to me, kind of what’s going to help to foster and build that kind of next generation of leaders. And I’m sure you have a bunch of them in your in your in your network and community here as well. But, you know, none of us would be where we are without great teams around.
Speaker 0 | 45:12.578
Well, a couple of questions. About around that, actually, since this community has only been open for a couple of weeks and I’ve only invited people that were on the podcast as alumni, so to speak, so that we can start to build the seed, this community or build the foundation of something that should be meaningful. And when we talk to people about expos that they’re a part of or the Norwex’s of the world or the Gartner Magic Quadrants of the world. or gardeners sorry of the world that all have various different models and everything there was four major frustrations that came out of it and that was when we get together and meet with people it’s a mixed bag of people so we can’t have discussions on a of a sophisticated level because a lot of times in the room it’s a mixed bag of people uh number two it’s typically sponsored by a vendor so it’s not that there’s like always a problem with that but typically a lot of these events are secret um uh, vendor events, or, so we don’t really get the, uh, the, the opportunity to connect with each other and have the conversations we want to have maybe behind closed doors. And the other one is maybe time and location neutral was a problem. And the fourth one was just a lot of times the participation is uneven. So it might be just one ego dominated guy that wants to get on and talk about how he coded something the entire time. So. I don’t know if that rings true with you. Do you have, do you, have you ever been a part of a community that’s really meaningful and what were the, the main aspects that you really loved about it?
Speaker 1 | 46:44.987
Yeah. And the one that stands out to me is the group, the group that, um, you know, we started through a different organization, but that organization became a little bit more commercialized than we wanted. And this was in Denver and we decided, cause we just got along so well that we were going to create our own group. And it was exactly what you just talked about. A place where we could be raw, share failures as much as we could share some of our successes, learn from each other. It was a great community. I hosted them in our offices in Denver a couple of times. They’re still getting, we still get together, but it is exactly what you said. We have no vendors there. People show up because they’re genuinely interested in the dialogue and the interactions that they have. And those to me are always the best. It’s why I love them. I always kind of joke around to your point about these events you go to. You get the Instagram version of people. And, you know, my kids taught me about the Finsta gram way back a long time ago. I don’t think Finsta is still, you know, is a thing. But, you know, and I remember asking them and they’re like, well, this is where we can be real. This is where we can share kind of our flaws and who we really are, not just the. everything’s perfect in my world and nothing’s ever bad. And, and those are to me, the more authentic communities that I’ve ever been a part of. And this one in Denver was phenomenal.
Speaker 0 | 48:12.373
If you don’t mind me asking, what was the, how often did you guys meet?
Speaker 1 | 48:17.998
Monthly.
Speaker 0 | 48:18.919
And what was the format usually? And who put the format together?
Speaker 1 | 48:23.482
Yeah, it was, we did have somebody that was kind of like the facilitator and they would go and ask, who wants to host and whoever the host was would typically talk about either a recent success they had that they were wanting to share with folks to kind of say hey look what we’ve done or talk about a challenge that they’re facing and say hey who else has faced this challenge like a hot seat type of thing exactly and so we’ve done we’ve done both of those so the two that i hosted one of them was sharing about that earn and learn program how you know how we’re thinking about it at Ardent Mills and, you know, how we would love for other companies in Denver to come along with us. We’re not perfect in it. We want to continue to evolve and learn. The other one that we did was around, I’ll call it kind of our bumpy and disjointed data journey. And some of that had to do with some decisions that Microsoft made about technology deprecation and some other stuff. But we, you know, in my mind, we were kind of bummed. lost in the wilderness a little bit, trying to kind of figure out the path to go. And so, you know, I wanted to share that with this group to kind of say, all right, who else has either gone through this or is going through this? And what are the ways in which you’re trying to help lead your team through it and beyond it? And just great dialogue. And we get so much good participation, to your point. We don’t have a single person that dominates the conversation. We hear from everybody. They’re fantastic people. And, you know, it’s again, that to me is the ideal community. How did you get at the door and you just dare to either learn or teach one of the two?
Speaker 0 | 50:06.087
The did you have we kind of want to take it even a step further. We kind of want to take some of these like success stories and even have people maybe turn it into worthwhile articles or even further presentations that could be turned into. potentially even an upskilling course or something like that or something that could actually be maybe monetized um there’s some other ideas as well um did you guys have like a dues like a yearly dues or anything like that we
Speaker 1 | 50:35.520
we we haven’t because we weren’t doing big events or anything along those lines um we weren’t like i said the facilitator was kind of just putting it together um uh i don’t think anybody was ever opposed to dues you But it was always around kind of what makes sense and why would we do it? Right. I’ve got another group that I’m a part of that does something similar. And it’s through Ag Gateway. It’s called Ag CIO. So it’s a bunch of agricultural IT leaders that get together. We do have dues. And the beauty of those those dues is we we use them to do two things. One, we bring college students to the Ag Gateway that want careers in agriculture and we sponsor them to the Ag Gateway conference, annual conference every year. so that they get access to other IT leaders and other business leaders in ag. And then the second thing we do is because a lot of our members there are in smaller shops, they don’t necessarily get what I’ll call kind of the white glove treatment from a Microsoft or an Amazon or whatever it is. You got a couple of bigger shops that do get that. And so we started putting together like we did one trip up to Seattle. We spent a day with Microsoft. We spent a day with Amazon and then went and toured. We did another one in Denver where I hosted them. And then we had Google come in because Google’s got a big office in Boulder. And then we brought in a couple of folks to talk about automation, RPA from some of our members. Those those two groups, the Denver CIO group and this ag CIO group, there are no vendors. There are no sales pitches. We we we curate. the content that they’re there to present. We’re trying to help drive that. That is, to me, a great use of those duties. It allows them as a member to pay into it. And then we typically will fly or we’ll cover their hotel costs at the spot. They just have to get there and it works out really well. And we get a lot of really good feedback from some of these small co-ops and small shops are like, hey, we don’t ever get that kind of audience with Microsoft. We’re just not big enough. But as a collective group, we are. And that’s, you know, obviously enticing to a Microsoft and Amazon and Google or Cisco. I mean, we can we can pick your big vendors and then we can kind of see what’s on the roadmaps and such. And I think that’s where they get a lot of value.
Speaker 0 | 52:59.421
Beautiful. If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the what’s the dues for that type of group?
Speaker 1 | 53:04.103
Yeah, I think for AgCIO, I think we pay two grand a year, something like that. Not much. OK,
Speaker 0 | 53:10.686
cool. Really appreciate the feedback, man. All right. So here’s what happens next. I take this. It gets curated by our production team. They cut it up, make a few shorts and one minute video. You get a web page on our website with a link to your LinkedIn. I don’t know how many podcasts are in the queue right now. We might have five or six in the queue, probably release in a week or two. It’ll go up on DPIT, Dissecting Popular IT Nerds.com or PopularIT.net and we’ll release it on the… on LinkedIn, of course, we’re kind of in the midst of, we never really got around to doing Instagram and YouTube that much because I don’t know. It’s, I mean, it is exciting, but I don’t know if it’s like YouTube exciting. It is a little bit, but the, but we’re working on that. So it will be part of that now. So you’ve been one of the first and any feedback or anything that you have for us, you’re in the community now. So we’ve got in Chris Roberts event will be coming up. I don’t know if you know, Chris Roberts, he’s in Boulder actually.
Speaker 1 | 54:13.412
I do not know.
Speaker 0 | 54:14.472
He’s a CISO with like a big, long kind of goatee Scottish dude that does a lot of talks. But he’s actually in Boulder. I went to CSU, so don’t hold that against me.
Speaker 1 | 54:26.535
I didn’t go to Boulder or CSU. I’m not from Denver originally, so I don’t have any affiliation.
Speaker 0 | 54:33.177
I’m a Massachusetts guy originally. So I really appreciate your time. It’s been a lot of fun. And I guess get back to the air conditioning dudes.
Speaker 1 | 54:41.460
Yeah, I appreciate it. Sorry about all the interruptions.
Speaker 0 | 54:43.923
It’s all good, man. Have a great day. We’ll be in touch soon.
Speaker 1 | 54:46.526
Sounds good. Take care.
Speaker 0 | 54:47.667
Yeah, bye.
