Speaker 0 | 00:00.420
If we’re not involved in this leadership, then we can’t be prepared to bring what you need to have to support what your initiatives are.
Speaker 1 | 00:18.572
Everyone out there listening, you’re listening to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we are talking with Randy Kellum. Yes. I have this correct. Director of Information Technology for… Maker of airbags.
Speaker 0 | 00:31.889
That’s right.
Speaker 1 | 00:32.809
Airbags. We’re saving lives.
Speaker 0 | 00:35.531
Yes, airbag inflators. We manufacture an inflator.
Speaker 1 | 00:39.333
How many airbag inflators are there out there in the world? Manufacturers of airbag inflators?
Speaker 0 | 00:44.716
Manufacturers, as far as the largest, we would be a second one, the second largest. So there’s two of us that are the primary. I’ll leave and are to the primary. How many exactly? I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 00:59.424
The point is, there’s not many. So if you guys, so if the data center goes down, we’re going to have some problems with airbags. This is excellent, excellent. So Director of Information Technology, how many at, and the company is ARC, or do we say A-R-C? I want to get this right.
Speaker 0 | 01:17.336
Yeah, our employee base is about 1,500.
Speaker 1 | 01:20.878
Beautiful. Are you guys a Microsoft shop?
Speaker 0 | 01:23.360
We are a Microsoft shop. Predominantly, we do have a number of Linux platforms, so we run…
Speaker 1 | 01:28.732
oracle databases across all our plant sites and they’re all linux based systems but otherwise they’re primarily microsoft excellent you never know if someone goes people go google every now and then people do g suite the i’ve known some very very massive organizations that just said no we’re just going to go g suite just because microsoft stuck it to us a week ago you know what i mean that’s i hear you that’s right but i love you microsoft i’m not not saying anything it’s a love it’s a love love love hate maybe a little bit relationship so so talk to me give me let’s do this the old school way what was your first computer it was probably an ibm pc 8086 system we
Speaker 0 | 02:11.120
pick it up where did i get that no i got it from ibm i think my dad brought it home i don’t really remember exactly
Speaker 1 | 02:17.528
where it came from he picked it up i believe it’s back back in the day no one knew they would be in computers for life they did computers for fun did you did you have any idea you’re gonna you know do this for like that like you know something to do with computers would actually become like a real job and living no i didn’t i in college i was i studied physics so my
Speaker 0 | 02:36.921
intent was to be a physicist and i started out that way when i was in college i vowed that i wouldn’t do it work for a living i took a four train course my junior year of Fortran programming course, and I hated it. And I just said, I won’t do this for a living. But then of course, now I’ve done it for over 30 years. But I got into it initially working for Naval Intelligence after college, and I had to get into some programming there to help with my research. And that’s how I got started.
Speaker 1 | 03:05.751
It’s amazing we did anything back in the day without technology or primitive. We sent people to the moon, supposedly. Supposedly, there’s some people out there that believe we didn’t go to the moon. But we sent people to the moon without the internet. I mean, it might have been, maybe we should call it intranet back then. I don’t know. There might have been, but I mean, for the most part, we sent people to the moon while working on floppy disks.
Speaker 0 | 03:36.142
Yeah, you’re right, which is amazing.
Speaker 1 | 03:38.543
I just find that quite, yeah. quite you know and i’m only saying that from uh you know you know if you studied physics and you know i remember i remember physics and memorizing equations and it was probably one of my weaker one of my weaker points in time but yeah yeah you know trajectories and and in orbits and stuff like that you know math slide rules i wonder someone probably used a slide rule somewhere along that somewhere along that line my son-in-law is a engineer i asked him the other day i was like do you know what a slide rule is he’s like no i had to google it and
Speaker 0 | 04:10.316
show him a picture of what a slide rule is like it was some archaic thing so i just i think about the programs being a stack of cards you know and it’s that uh card stack and you feed those through the card reader uh to execute the program you know you get a card out of sequence you know trying to figure that one out where that the card was out of the sequence it seems next impossible to figure out so and
Speaker 1 | 04:32.525
we can’t it’s amazing we complain about speed nowadays but right you know you and i know what real speed issues were So, as a director of information technology, how big a team, what do you guys have? Let’s start off maybe with, I don’t know, what do you think, what’s some of your biggest challenges nowadays?
Speaker 0 | 04:50.117
Of course, this past couple of years, working on balancing the remote work was a challenge. We had not been a remote workforce. Supporting that was a huge challenge. And still we have some that are working remote, but we’re primarily back in the office. But, you know, implementing that infrastructure or having prepared that groundwork for something like that ahead of time was a big plus. That’s one of the things, you know, keeping our systems databases up and running or getting the information into the appropriate person’s hands. Looking at analytics, that’s huge. We’re implementing analytics now to really try to improve. improve that visibility to our leadership team, to our quality group, to engineers, as to what’s really going on in the factory, where our problem areas are, what we can do to change things, to make it with those processes of product. That’s what we’re looking at. So we’re in the process of implementing a large analytics platform now. It lives with some of our key challenges.
Speaker 1 | 05:48.632
As far as the analytics goes, where do you guys begin with that? And is there any kind of like… AI or data scientist type people we need to bring in for that type of thing? Or is this something you guys are getting just from like, let’s just observe and measure?
Speaker 0 | 06:05.839
Right now, it’s internal. Our staff is going through training with our product that we acquired. Engineers are involved. Our quality group is going to be the largest users, at least out of the box here. And then I have some IT people that are going through the training to help support. support that. The data loads or any kind of questions that we might get from the end user, we need to support that. But right now it’s mostly our quality staff. So the initial plan is to generate, you know, provide that data in a reader format, a mini format to help shed some light on where our constraints are in the factory process, manufacturing process, but ultimately integrate that with machinery. to where we may shut down an operation or shut down a line if something begins to you know show us getting out of spec or maybe even predictably so take a look at the you’re shutting down an operation of the statistics of showing that hey you’re going to have a problem in the next hour or two so that’s where we’re headed with it have you guys found any inefficiencies yet or is this just the beginning it’s just beginning so we’ve just completed our first training cycle So we’re looking right now, probably May, June timeframe before we start to implement looking at the inefficiency side. So it’ll be a couple of months out yet, but you know, we have a lot of high expectation. I think with this, you know, the product that we have researched spent about six months with a research evaluation of various products. So we have some pretty high expectation with the one that was selected.
Speaker 1 | 07:42.302
And. to maybe just be a little more granular in what sense from a sense of labor productivity from a sense of staffing appropriately when on the manufacturing floor to changing processes and improvements or time to i
Speaker 0 | 08:01.631
don’t know make an airbag i would say it’s you know what we’re looking for is is to improve the quality so less and less create less parts you know that have a problem so you know they’ve got to pass the quality checks So you want to lessen your scrap, reduce the scrap basically is what we’re after here.
Speaker 1 | 08:20.632
So, and I meant not airbags, airbag pumps, correct? Inflators, yeah. Inflators, I’m sorry, inflation. Just out of curiosity, how does that work? Are we talking like some sort of like canister filled with gas that inflates a bag real quick? How does it work?
Speaker 0 | 08:35.300
Yeah, it’s an energetic that we have an energetic that does inflate, create a high, I guess, temperature, a high temperature that inflates the bag.
Speaker 1 | 08:44.453
rapidly and that’s the that’s the thing is they’re inflated instantly so yeah that’s that that’s achieved with something that i call an energetic okay rewinding back to physics in college and saying that you were never going to do this for a living did something get exciting about this job or did you just say no i’m just stuck here and i just i’ve been doing this forever so that’s why i’m in it yeah i mean for me i i came from software uh development i love software development uh
Speaker 0 | 09:12.849
and that’s what really got me into it so initially i wasn’t too jacked up about it but you know i went back after some time with naval intelligence i went to graduate school and while i was in graduate school i got a job working in the business office as a programmer so it was there that i really started getting excited about developing the software solving problems that type of thing and so from there to just kind of say you know the different companies different situations but i’ve always been very excited about software development so that’s where i’ve managed the bulk of my career it’s in the software side then we go moving into senior roles as a director taking on not only you know the business system side of it but also the infrastructure side so i enjoy the infrastructure side because the planning out for the future strategically so putting uh infrastructure in place that can support new business initiatives down the road so i also enjoy that i enjoy coming to work every day i mean i get excited about this this work so making a difference for our businesses ultimately a lot
Speaker 1 | 10:14.812
of one one of the common themes that comes up a lot on the show is i.t technical software minded engineering minded people not necessarily enjoying talking with, working with, understand people and users to begin with. I have a show that I recorded the other day that was just quite hilarious where he said, no, don’t ever put me in front of the people. I hate talking with people. And it was kind of ironic because I thought we were recording a podcast. He’s like, no, we’re supposed to be talking about a Microsoft Teams migration. I was like, oh, well, can we just turn this into a show also at the same time? Because it’s just so funny that you… Literally said everything that is like the stereotype of an IT director. You know what I mean? So you went from software, which is probably the most stereotypical, like sit in a closet, you know, in a dark room in front of a screen coding, to C-suite and stakeholder presentations and understanding the language of business and percent and, you know. presenting, presenting all of that. Where did you get that experience and or courage or ability to be able to do that? Because, and I, once you’ve been doing it long enough, you don’t really think of it as like a courageous thing anymore. You don’t think of it, but I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there that have anxiety when they go to present to C-suite or if they never have even the thought of maybe stepping out of their comfort zone and starting to do some of the things that. may not come firsthand.
Speaker 0 | 11:56.613
Right. Yeah. It’s, you know, I got more exposure for big pins and down in Florida. So that’s where I really grew. I think the most significantly amount. And so I moved in and I was a business manager of business systems for a number of years there before I moved into the director role and I’m reporting to the CEO, but prior to that, I didn’t really have a great deal of experience doing a C-suite meetings, presentations. What have you. So it was a learn as you go, basically experience. The company did invest in me in the sense that they sent me to some, you know, senior level leadership programs and that type of thing with centers for creative leadership, but beyond that, it was just, you know, getting in front of a CEO and you know, giving them the presentation. I, you know, and the companies and the CEOs are, I mean, they’re different, the expectations are different. I worked for it. Japanese automotive company earlier in my career. And there, when I did some presentation to our president, you know, it’s very brief, very scaled down one page. But then I-Dig into that.
Speaker 1 | 12:59.901
Let’s just dig into that real quick. When you say one page bullet points, like this is what we have. This is what we’re looking to do. This is how much it costs. Good, better, best, yes, no, or maybe.
Speaker 0 | 13:11.429
Yeah. So I would give a status report. So I would do whatever the project is. I’d show the project name. And then out to the side, it would be a circle, a delta, or an X. And that would tell them a circle meant that everything was going according to schedule, everything was according to plan. A delta means some problem. They want a little bit of an explanation. X means it’s not going well at all, and they want a lot of explanation. So that’s really about it. That was about it. It was a grid like that. And so, you know, as far as the budget type of stuff or money type of things, I would present a one-page document that would… just summarize the dollars you know how they’re being spent what they’re being spent on but very very little information not a lot of detail behind that and then i’ve given more of a brief verbal presentation last five minutes and it was a yes or no with the project it’s that quick so
Speaker 1 | 14:02.898
kind of like a temperature check kind of like a temperature check with all departments i’m assuming you do you have any examples of those old reports i don’t think i have any anymore no i don’t i haven’t i did not keep them i would just love to even even if it was just a napkin drawing example of that. Yeah, that’d be cool. I’d love to just see an example of that. Okay, so you have that. So you have the quick experience then. Okay, so what were some of the other examples, I guess?
Speaker 0 | 14:30.571
Yeah, well, when I left then, so I went to Vic. And so my first status meeting with my new boss, I asked him what kind of format do you want for your status meeting? And he said, why don’t you… just bring something to the meeting we’ll see we’ll do it your way so i brought that same format to the status meeting that i used uh with the japanese automotive company and he’s like what is this you know yeah where’s the details you know that now it went from very little to i had to have you know pages and pages of detail So it was a very different approach.
Speaker 1 | 15:06.533
Ages of detail?
Speaker 0 | 15:08.095
Yes, yes.
Speaker 1 | 15:09.536
Okay.
Speaker 0 | 15:10.357
And this is not the CEO at that time. That’s the director of IT I was reported to when I went to work for BIC. But yeah, he liked a lot of detail. So a meeting, a status meeting with him would go an hour and a half, and I would be going through a great deal of detail on a weekly basis.
Speaker 1 | 15:26.590
Was it useful from now that you’re in a director of IT role? What’s your preference if people come to give a report to you?
Speaker 0 | 15:33.235
Yeah, I’m in between. I like a little detail of the project. So we have something that I call an issues list.
Speaker 1 | 15:40.798
Can we say that again? What was it?
Speaker 0 | 15:43.539
An issue list.
Speaker 1 | 15:44.340
Oh, issue list. How appropriate. How appropriate in technology. What’s your issues list? Give it to me.
Speaker 0 | 15:53.484
That’s it. So it gives a summary, kind of like I did for the Japanese company. And then a section for a small details and just, you know, are we on target? Yes or no kind of thing. So it’s a little more than what we did. I did for the Japanese company, but not near the extent that I have as the power to give that big.
Speaker 1 | 16:13.188
So issues list.
Speaker 0 | 16:15.068
I like issues list.
Speaker 1 | 16:16.249
How many issues are allowed to be on the list? Do we have like a minimum of issues? Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 16:19.650
I don’t have a cap. I have whatever your open issues are, you know, and they actually stay on there. Either closed or open. uh forever so it becomes a good audit trail and a good summary for what you’ve done in the past the guys use it to kind of summarize their year when they’re doing their their annual reviews look at how many issues we resolved yeah issues the details of what we’re having yeah i have 500 issues and
Speaker 1 | 16:45.780
now that meant it’s not a good thing no are you guys doing that in some kind of shared document or anything or you check things off or like how are you managing that i’m just curious each staff member has their own document
Speaker 0 | 16:57.850
So they are, we have a shared folder, but I believe most of the guys is keeping it local to their, their own computer. And they tend to email me the documents, which I’m fine with it, but their own document, they just send it to me an email. Then when we meet, we just sit down and review it together.
Speaker 1 | 17:14.996
How are you? How many guys do you have?
Speaker 0 | 17:16.297
Here in Knoxville, it was just four of us right now. So we’ve really, we’ve scaled back the last couple of years. So we’re running really lean here in Knoxville. We, you know, we do have sites that we’re responsible, not directly. managing the other staffs indirectly. So other staffs at other sites, and we are responsible for managing some of the infrastructure and planning the infrastructure at some of our other site locations. So the big items, the big hitters, we’re responsible for out of here and network.
Speaker 1 | 17:46.533
Gotcha. And, and users, do you have direct contact or do they allow you to guys to talk with the people? Okay. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 17:53.158
we have direct contact with users. So here in Knoxville, I mean, we do a lot of. on site we’ll go you know face to face with the user so contact with the user via phone uh via teams what have you yeah yep gotcha the biggest change during the pandemic what was the biggest i don’t want to say showstopper but what was the biggest crap we need to do this now yeah it was when when we started working from home it was really trying to make making sure that we have enough equipment suddenly everybody needed a laptop And so we were in the process of moving our staff here at Knoxville to laptops, but we still had quite a number of desktops.
Speaker 1 | 18:35.240
So you’re going to every Best Buy and Target and buying up laptops and shipping them out?
Speaker 0 | 18:41.224
We did acquire a few laptops, and we also had some old laptops in there.
Speaker 1 | 18:44.966
I had one guy just saying, I just started calling every Best Buy. I said, okay, what do you got? All right, take them all off the shelf, put them there. That just sounds crazy to me. Okay, so it was getting people equipment. What about communications? Were you guys, I mean, how did you guys do your voice? Did you go to teams or what did we do or, you know?
Speaker 0 | 19:04.305
Yeah, the bulk of it was done through teams. You know, in the prior year, we had just implemented SD-WAN, really improved our interconnectivity among our facilities.
Speaker 1 | 19:14.029
Can I take a guess? Well, first of all, let me take a guess. Was it equipment-based or was it cloud-based SD-WAN?
Speaker 0 | 19:21.292
Well, it’s cloud. I mean, we do have some equipment on each of the sites, but they’re… the services that we we get the firewall services the security services that we get from them it’s all cloud-based kato networks kato kato that’s exactly right kato networks i got it on the first try you got it first time that
Speaker 1 | 19:42.781
was and it was only because you said the security piece too because a lot of the sdn providers are not fully baked yet not fully baked at kato’s great i love that um i’m under nda with this other big company that we just did a kato rollout but i use kato for a lot and then i have another company that’s a big manufacturing company with um manufacturing over in china and kato is really good at getting around the great wall of china That’s right. So that was, you know, if you’ve got VPNs that go down every time Chinese Congress goes into power, then Cato Networks. And give me a call. I’ll help you. I’ll make the introduction if you guys want. I’ve done plenty of Cato. For anyone out there listening, tons of Cato rollouts. I’m a VeloCloud fan, too. I definitely am. And a few others. But Cato is great for international backbone or anything global, like you’re doing global travel. And then as far as their whole security piece around the mobile device management, being able to, you know, have mobile devices securely. access to your network without worry and stuff. So cool. So that helped. So then we’re using teams for voice for making phone calls and stuff like that or what?
Speaker 0 | 20:44.559
Yeah, I had some there’s some of that our voice system is a Pantera network. So in a Pantera, you know, old school. Yeah, so it was a lot of that. So I used all the apps on the phone. Yep. Your cell phone, make calls from the office in that way.
Speaker 1 | 21:00.412
Cool. But I haven’t heard Pantera in a while. But yeah, still there. It’s like a gen band. It’s like when I hear gen band, if that comes up. You always notice, people still have some stuff. You can always tell by the, have you ever noticed you can always tell by the whole music? You’re like, oh, that’s gen band. But okay, excellent. So just curious, internally, what was the, when the pandemic hit and people were working from home, I’m assuming there was maybe some supply chain issues and other things that might have affected the business. But how about just in general, like the, how did IT? Was IT a calmer or was IT like, were you guys like the calm to the storm or was it more like everyone’s throwing all kinds of stuff at you and you’re like, we’re going to lose our mind?
Speaker 0 | 21:46.079
No, it really wasn’t that bad for us. And from a connectivity standpoint, I really, again, back to Cato, it’s the client. It was excellent.
Speaker 1 | 21:55.546
Oh, they were giving out free VPN connections. They were giving out, that was another thing that was awesome. They’re like, how many do you need? A couple hundred? Okay, here you go. That’s right. Yeah, yeah. That was, they were really, really cool with that. Awesome. Excellent. I don’t know where to go from there. That was just, that was, tell me, I guess, when you talk with your colleagues, I’m making this up off the top of my head. I’ve never asked this question, but when you talk with other IT folk, IT, do you have, you know? It’s kind of like you might be somewhere where people don’t really know. They can’t talk the jargon. They would have no clue what SD-WAN is. They would have no clue what all these acronyms we are. When you are with people that understand you, what’s your most passionate subject of choice? And it might not have anything to do with IT whatsoever. It might be, I don’t know, Bitcoin or something. Right.
Speaker 0 | 22:48.836
No, I guess, I mean, what I enjoy talking about the most in this IT would be more the lines of software development. I just, I get excited about it, even though I don’t do it so much anymore. I still do it. I still try to keep myself enough to do that. But it’s, I’m always interested in new techniques, new possibilities. You know, I’m always, I like to develop a new technique in software development, such as I take an approach like you’re making a part. You know, you’ve got to build a material. Can I develop software where I can essentially generate. components that are like a bill of material and I can assemble those components into a final assembly that’s a program. We’re taking a little bit of a design approach. I don’t know if that’ll work. Some things like that today, I know it’s object-oriented programming and such, but I’m interested in the development of software development technique or the software development approach.
Speaker 1 | 23:41.203
From a software or from a dev ops kind of perspective, there is this I see it as a problem. I see this kind of a typical problem. We’ll put this on the, what was it? What do we call it? The list again, the list that you have, the issues list. Okay. We’re going to throw this on the issues list. On my issue list, if I worked for you, on my issue list would be trouble finding a good software development team. How do we find good software developers for in-house software development? How do we find them? Right. How do we not find just some janky dude that says, a team that says, yeah, we can do this, this and this and, you know, whatever, throw it out to Upwork and offshore this and that. And we basically end up with a bunch of copy code and, you know, kind of stuff put together. And it’s like, you know, it’s like, hey, we got the job done, but no, we want like good software dev people. How do we find that?
Speaker 0 | 24:43.094
Yeah, it’s. One of the things that as an evaluation tool, and maybe considered old, I don’t know, but it’s, in the past when I’ve gone through interviews, there’s some testing involved, something to measure your skill level. And so I’ve always had to go through something like that, not only the face-to-face interview with individuals, maybe a technical interview with a team. of individuals but also sitting down and getting going through some sort of a test that tries to gauge your level of skill your skill level with the woods of software development so i want to know what that test is because what if we’re even throwing that test out to maybe
Speaker 1 | 25:25.662
we’re outsourcing some software development because we don’t have the in-house i don’t have the money to to hire we’re not netflix we’re not going to go cherry pick everybody and get the best software development guys in the world what do we what’s that test look like for you guys
Speaker 0 | 25:39.842
is it top secret no it’s not top secret i mean we’re just some basic so we look at some design you know asking some design questions how you would approach the problem so for example how i guess how you what kinds of questions you would ask in terms of gathering the information to begin the process of development so are you asking the right questions to the person that’s presenting a challenge to you to solve analysis side of it and the design side of things so we look at that there’s some basic questions along this line nothing nothing super deep but just some top level the kind of gauge that they have a good technique a solid technique in terms of how they approach software development and sometimes you ask specific technology questions so if you’re you’re hiring a c-sharp programmer you may you know put in some c-sharp questions and see how how well they you know at least a basic level of c-sharp even or kind of gauge your level of knowledge and c-sharp you may do some of that The best test I ever went through was a test that, you know, fired questions at you. And as you got more right, the complexity of questions that you’ve got, got higher and higher and higher, you know, tougher, tougher, tougher. And then as you miss questions, they would kind of scale it back. Okay, a little easier, a little easier to kind of really kind of gauge a level that way. That was, I don’t know who put that test together, but that was a pretty, pretty slick test to kind of gauge it.
Speaker 1 | 27:02.520
It’s pretty solid. methodology actually if we could do that if we’re gonna actually do that with vendors all vendors in general like hey yeah take this test real quick to see if you’re full of crap or not it would it would be you know it’d be great you know and and and these vendors rated this this this and that but it still begs the question is like how do you find the people to begin with it’s um in it right now from what i hear is there’s a well we’re in the midst of the what do they call it the the great resignation you And, you know, there’s a shortage of IT jobs and I’m trying to understand why. So there’s a lot of opportunity, I would think, out there for IT directors to grow, expand.
Speaker 0 | 27:45.229
And we haven’t used recruiters. Sometimes we use recruiters to kind of submit the, I guess, find candidates for us and submit a resume. But we’ve also used some of the online services, you know, such as Indeed or such as, I don’t know. I mean, some of the other services. uh that are out there we we’re kind of going going through those through our hr group in terms of sourcing resumes and that type of thing so i mean that’s that’s some of the things we’ve done i’ve i’ve found that it’s just been really tough to get good solid and you know at times with candidates and through some of that that approach so we you know we’ve had better success when we’ve sourced through recruiters are you hiring right now not for the i.t department we’re not i mean there are other areas of the business that are but we’re not
Speaker 1 | 28:32.098
Gotcha. Gotcha. For IT directors out there, what is the end game? What’s the end game? Do we, do we retire? Is there a 401k? What is it?
Speaker 0 | 28:42.025
Yeah. I mean, yeah, I want to work forever. I mean, I just, you know, it’s my plan is to work till 70 at least, but that’s yeah. I mean, from a retirement standpoint, I don’t know. I don’t, I hadn’t really thought about it. I guess the retirement piece of it. Yeah. There’s a 401k. There’s all of that, but I was thinking that the end game, when you ask the questions, what are we? What is our goal as IT directors to achieve as an end game for the IT for our business, you know, and that’s to show value in our business. So we, you know, we have to not only engage with your employees in our business, but also with the leadership in our business to understand what the top level needs are, what the main needs are in our business. But we have to show value by, you know, delivering on those needs. For example, if we stand back and we’re just the guys that keep the lights on and keep my computer running, that’s important, but that’s really not where the biggest value can be brought. And so we have to solve business problems through either through the implementation of new technology, whether it’s hardware, whether it’s software, but the end game is really to provide that business where we can improve our process to reduce our costs and improve our efficiencies. you know, to meet those overall needs of our business, where our business can be successful through the use of technology. That’s, to me, the end game. As far as what I see.
Speaker 1 | 30:03.971
So IT guy, there’s plenty of people out there sitting right now in a cost center. They’re sitting in the cost center right now. IT is keeping the blinking lights on in the business. They are not asked to necessarily really sit in and take part in very valuable business decisions. What does that IT leader need to do? What are the questions they need to ask? ask who do they need to cattle prod above them to get them to wake up? What do they need to say? What bravery, what brave step forward do they need to take?
Speaker 0 | 30:44.835
Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s really, again, there’s a very, I guess there is a myopic view of IT from some businesses where it’s a very narrow, you don’t have software developers, maybe you don’t have analysts, but you have infrastructure folks. So they are, you know. supported the business in a critical way, but can’t really bring maybe business software process changes. You need people to understand, be able to understand the business. So we have to sell that to the corporate leadership, the CEO, the CFO. I report to the CFO directly here. But we have to sell them on that idea. And part of that is to be able to step into projects, get involved in the projects. At my level, I kind of pushed my way into some projects and to show where we can add value. We need to be involved. We need to be able to see what’s going on. Because I don’t know that we don’t need to budget for 10 new servers or whatever. I don’t know. It’s just, if we’re not involved in this leadership, then we can’t be prepared to bring what you need to have to support what your initiatives are. So I have to sell that. And it’s on me to talk to the CEO, to talk to the CFO, to show them where we can bring that value. But we have to also be given that opportunity. And I have to force my way, push my way into it. the project.
Speaker 1 | 31:58.854
How are you doing that? I’m just curious. How are you forcing your way in? Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 32:02.497
So for example, we, you know, we have an ERP platform and it’s, you know, we’re looking to upgrade that. So, you know, I’m, I’m really trying to drive, drive that process to where we can bring ourselves up to a current release of that. That sounds like it’s not a big deal, but it’s been a while since we’ve upgraded it. I mean, upgrade is not cheap. So I’ve had to kind of push that with our leadership that, Hey, you know, we’re about to run out of compliance in the sense that I’m going to start having technology issues here. I’m going to have browsers that aren’t going to work with the product anymore. So we stand to lose our capabilities with the system. So I’m selling them on that idea because that’s the truth. That’s what’s going to happen if we don’t make a move. But other things like MRP, we want to roll out MRP, improve our inventory. I’m involved with that to show them how that can happen. Getting involved with some of the key players in that. that area not necessarily directly with the ceo but in the other area manages the key players said hey we got we can help here you know we can help you understand how this is going to work we can help uh you with the implementation process and we can help with testing and so on so we’ve kind of pushed our way into those areas of the business and we’re moving forward with some projects right now in that area the analytics is driven was initially driven by i.t as well so I led the team to go through an evaluation and selection. And, you know, we’ve got that product now. We’ve already purchased the product. We’ve got it in-house. We’re going through the training. But I drove all that initiative as far as getting that set up, getting it done, getting us through that process. So that’s an effort to show those areas of the business what we can do to help the business. And so we continue in that area. I have IT people going through training still to help there. All those we’ve had to push our way into to kind of get involved and show where we can bring that value.
Speaker 1 | 33:55.784
And I would imagine your job is a lot more fun and exciting when you do that.
Speaker 0 | 34:01.107
It is. I mean, because I mean, what I want to see us do here is broaden our IT to where we’re now bringing into development. We can do development. You have a request. There’s things that you need you don’t ask for because we don’t have maybe the skill sets or what have you. to do those things so as we get more involved in these things i want to see us bring on analysts and software folks and kind of broaden that i.t perspective across our whole business and so that you know we’ll be able to deliver improvements so whether it’s here in knoxville or whether it’s in uh china
Speaker 1 | 34:34.823
but we’ll be able to deliver input and what’s cool is you can say you’re blowing hot air right and we’re not just blowing hot air or we are you know like it really It fits nice. It fits nice into your business. Randy, I’ve been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much. Very insightful to basically jam IT down the throat of your CFO for the betterment of mankind and the company and making more money.
Speaker 0 | 35:01.108
Thank you. I appreciate it. I’ve enjoyed it.
Speaker 1 | 35:03.350
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