Speaker 0 | 00:09.607
hold on i still think you’re still the professional so whatever works best i’m gonna you know i just want to let you know i already hit record so this is like really so that we just get as much reality of this as possible so i was being as we say and i can say this because i i know where you’re from i can say i was being a wicked stupid mother you Because you’re from Mass, or you’re at least in Mass. Is that correct or no?
Speaker 1 | 00:33.387
Oh, no, absolutely right.
Speaker 0 | 00:35.409
I grew up in Mass. I grew up outside of Worcester.
Speaker 1 | 00:39.372
My daughter just, well, quite a few years back now, graduated from Worcester State.
Speaker 0 | 00:44.236
Okay, nice. Yeah, you see, you know, there it is. And then Adam Sandler used to make fun of us with Welcome to Worcester. So, so beautiful. So, everyone, and is it Brant? Am I pronouncing that correctly?
Speaker 1 | 00:58.692
Yeah, my parents, I think they bought the D on Wheel of Fortune or something.
Speaker 0 | 01:08.198
So everyone, soft intro today. Everyone, welcome back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Talking with Brant Swanson today, Director of IT at Compass Medical. Outside of East Bridgewater, Mass guy. Because we got to say that. I don’t usually bring out my Mass accent, but if I have to, you know, I can do it. You know, are you a Red Sox fan?
Speaker 1 | 01:28.412
I’m a Red Sox fan, yeah,
Speaker 0 | 01:29.732
absolutely If you grew up here, you pretty much have to be If you really want If you really want to be like a bad Child or you really want to Just become a Yankees fan or something It’s like
Speaker 1 | 01:41.555
I know some My daughter’s dating one now Thanksgiving’s going to be interesting this year Oh my gosh
Speaker 0 | 01:52.818
That’s how serious we take this around here It’s not right, but it’s how it is. It’s how it is. Um, so, so anyways, uh, been in, in technology for over 25 years, not much has changed in 25 years. As far as technology goes, it’s all the same. Always has been the same, probably won’t change again. And, um, so what was it like, you know, 25 years ago, what was the first, what was the first iteration of a, I don’t know, computer or something that you, what were you doing in technology 25 years ago? Were we making, were we making sure like the dot matrix? printer was feeding paper correctly? What were we doing?
Speaker 1 | 02:28.708
Actually, don’t laugh. Yeah, that’s how I started out with dot matrix printers. But actually, when my career started, believe it or not, there were laser jet printers out at the time. And I actually did a little bit of software programming around getting laser printers to print things out. Back in the day, the fonts on the printers weren’t just assumed. They had to be actually programmed in, or you had to purchase an add-on cartridge to the printer. So…
Speaker 0 | 02:55.308
That’s good. I don’t think we ever talked about the add-on cartridge for the fonts. Like, where you had to pick a font on a printer. Just think about that. It’s mind-blowing. Now we just, like, click a little drop-down. Like, all these little things that we take for granted now are, I don’t know. They were just kind of a really cool thing back in the day. Like, look, I changed the font.
Speaker 1 | 03:21.532
Yeah. I just spent 16 hours writing code so that I’ll actually read that font.
Speaker 0 | 03:28.656
Dude, do you see the font on that thing? We just don’t, you know, we don’t have an appreciation for that type of stuff anymore. Let’s go. Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit more. Let’s go back in time a little bit more. What else happened back then? So what, what were some other cool things that my children will never know the pain and suffering of, or the joys, or I should probably say the joys of. you know, understanding what it was like to have, I don’t know, a CD-ROM drive that writes or a double CD-ROM drive or any of that type of stuff.
Speaker 1 | 03:59.370
Yeah, no, that was the flop. I kind of came around to the time when floppy drives were starting to be popular. Not the three and a half inch, you know, the five and a quarter. They were actually floppy. I think my first computer, it didn’t have a hard drive. or even a floppy drive. I had to store everything on a cassette tape.
Speaker 0 | 04:22.337
That’s amazing. Yeah. So, so UMass Dartmouth, um, 1989 to 1993, bachelor of science, computer science. What’d you study back then? Like what’d they, what’d you study in college back then?
Speaker 1 | 04:35.983
Well, freshman year of college was interesting because it was, I actually had the good luck, I guess, in high school to take some programming classes in high school. Uh-huh. The first semester, at least, of college was more of a review of that. So we were using Pascal. It had no business purpose at all. It was more educational. at the time and if you ask anyone if they know anything about it now they look at you like you’re crazy and they might be just looking at me like i’m crazy because i am but it’s a good thing we got you in health care of some sort then yeah it’s good uh it’s
Speaker 0 | 05:14.425
good the um okay so we did that in college and then when you graduated college um was there like was was i.t jobs like was that easy to get back then or you know what do you do what happened
Speaker 1 | 05:27.658
I was about seven years away from the Y2K boom where they were hiring kids out of college for starting out crazy money just to help them work their systems to be Y2K compatible. I kind of predated that a little bit. So it was a struggle. I graduated from college and three weeks after that, my wife and I got married and two weeks after that, I was doing a roofing job with my wife.
Speaker 0 | 05:52.272
That’s cool. So, um, I can add to that. I had a creative writing degree and now I’m in technology. And my first job was, everything that you ever say in life that you will never do will happen to you. At least it will happen to Phil Howard. If Phil Howard looks down upon anyone for anything, it’s going to happen to him. I’m never going to get married and have kids. Now I’m married to eight kids. I’m never going to work in fast food. First job out of college was, I had a headset on and I was working for, for fazoles, which was fast, casual Italian. And I was asking people if they wanted breadsticks with that through the drive-thru. So that was my first job after college. So, you know, there you go. So, um, if you think it’s hard to get a job with an actual really smart degree in computer stuff, how about creative writing poetry? You know, I should have been, I don’t know. I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 06:44.754
You should at least be able to get a date with that though, right?
Speaker 0 | 06:47.235
I got married. I was, except I didn’t have to wait till after the end of college to get married. So I got married like my senior year and And I think we had a kid maybe soon after that and was living in a low. So here’s my like rags to riches story. So yeah, I went to college, which I guess isn’t really much rags to riches, but I was living in a low income housing for a couple of years and we were managing that. So we would get rent for free and my entire monthly expenses were 90 bucks. So put that into perspective nowadays. So, and that wasn’t too long ago. Let’s see.
Speaker 1 | 07:19.568
I got on the gas now.
Speaker 0 | 07:21.429
Yeah. I graduate. Yeah, I can’t fill my van up for that. There’s no way. I’ve got a van. So we fill that up and most gas stations stop at $100. Like the tank just shuts off. So you have to like click, put the gas thing back in the thing, take your credit card back out, use a different card. You have to use a different card because they won’t let you use the same card most of the time twice in a row. So you got to use two cards to fill up the van with gas. So, you know, yeah. Not. Not too far off from that. I don’t know what we’re talking about. But anyways, dot matrix printers, tape drives, floppy disks got popular. So when was a roofing job, drive-through? What was the first technology job?
Speaker 1 | 08:06.506
About seven months after I graduated from UMass, I landed a job with a company called Meditech. So that kind of started me in my technology career as well as kind of the healthcare sector, I guess. And I haven’t really left since. I’ve never…
Speaker 0 | 08:22.582
uh in healthcare um i saw beth israel my sister worked at beth israel for a long time she’s an rn so a little different knife i always feel bad for the technology department too when i see all my my sister i come from a family of doctors and stuff my sister’s got like her iphone she’s like i’m trying to do this and then i gotta call the it department that’s how i’m starting to think of like wow there is a there’s and we had a security breach the other day um you know this then or anything so let’s fast forward what so What’s kind of the day-to-day job right now? How many end users do you have? What are we managing?
Speaker 1 | 08:55.275
Yeah, so right now we have about, around roughly 525 end users. That includes our providers, physicians, nurse practitioners. We have about seven locations now. So it’s, I mean, a pretty decent size organization. I came from a lifespan prior to this in Rhode Island and we had 15,000 employees. just to add a couple of zeros to everything. So a little easier to get your hands around things here than it was over there.
Speaker 0 | 09:27.160
Okay. So, and what about team of, do you have a team of other IT guys?
Speaker 1 | 09:32.902
Yep. We have, right now we have about 12 people in the department. We kind of, we take care of obviously the help desk, all our desktops. We run a lot of zero client devices. So. don’t have a whole lot of desktops, mostly laptops and the Xero clients. We do have a small engineering team that takes care of our network and our telecom and servers and application support team that supports our critical applications like our health record, EHR, and some of our other kind of ancillary systems that we have as well.
Speaker 0 | 10:13.422
Just curious, do you think, it’s a pretty serious IT team when it comes down to it, when it comes down to basically a multi-location, medical doctors, like you said, providers, nurse practitioners, et cetera. And I grew up in that space, so I know what it looks like. what the politics inside the office looks like. I can see people in my mind right now sitting in, you know, waiting for their appointment to come in, people answering the phone, billing questions, doctors know it’s files. Now we’ve got digital files. Do you think 15 years ago you would have had that same team there or would it have been like, you know, one little outsourced MSP guy coming in to make sure like the equipment works?
Speaker 1 | 10:55.751
So it’s funny. That’s a funny question because when I came on board, we had about, 21 people on the team, COVID and attrition and got a little bit of downsizing. We kind of reduced the footprint. I think the way that at least a healthcare organization this size is going to start going more toward a, let’s not focus on the technology. The technology is a consumable product now. It’s just like the electricity and the cable. So you’re not thinking about the servers and the network, you’re moving that stuff out to the cloud and you really focus more on data and workflows and processes within the organization. With the different payer contracts that are coming to light now and just some of that stuff just for an organization to survive in the healthcare world right now is challenging. So the value to the IT department now is really good. They’re going to be more around the business and really trying to get it. So we’re providing the data and the connection, keeping the lights on for them. But at the same time, what is it that we can do to kind of further the business and support that beside the technology, I guess?
Speaker 0 | 12:18.200
It’s actually quite mind-blowing when you think about the amount of data science and people that we need to know learning Python and various different things nowadays. But not only that, we need someone that can actually translate that language into these somewhat genius or doctors and people that have gone through years of schooling. There’s kind of this translation or a bridge or a language gap probably I’m imagining. And you tell me whether you see that or not between the doctors, the professionals, and then the data scientists and the IT side. Because there’s got to be… Obviously, a lot of data that’s very, very useful that an IT guy or data scientist can gather and provide information to doctors that can then utilize it. But the doctors might not necessarily know what questions to ask or, you know, does that make any sense?
Speaker 1 | 13:10.970
I mean, yeah, I guess it’s a matter of knowing what you don’t know, right? And IT really kind of being that person or that group in the middle that knows what you don’t know and can kind of translate. what your business needs are into the pulling the data out in a format that’s usable. So there’s definitely a lot of, especially with contract payers, Medicare, there’s a lot of stuff where you need to have everything kind of at the fingertips of the providers. And they’re going to really be, with some of the risk-based contract, they’re really going to be held to the fire to keep their patients healthier than ever before and keep them out of emergency rooms and out of the hospital. in order to kind of be incentivized to get the higher reimbursement rates. So that’s really where we kind of want to kind of shift some of the risk of having our data center in-house. And hey, we have an outage in our data center. We don’t have access to the patient data for a couple of days or whatever the outage is. How do we shift that risk to the cloud or to a third party? So we’re not. worried about that necessarily. We’re worried about delivering that data and the solutions to the providers. So yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s like, if you think about electricity coming into the, into your business, you don’t have a team that just supports your electrical connections or the electricity, you know what I mean? So that just is kind of expected to be available at all times. So that’s where we’re trying to get closer to that kind of high availability with our systems here at the…
Speaker 0 | 14:51.929
I actually wonder what an outage, an internet outage or connectivity cloud outage ability to connect to the cloud. I wonder what the correlation is between that and death. I wonder if there’s actually a correlation. For this many hours of outages, this many people’s life expectancy goes down, this goes down, just because we can’t make a decision on someone’s life or something like that. There’s got to be a correlation to that.
Speaker 1 | 15:18.556
Right. And I mean, you have the horror stories of hospitals losing power and a nurse had to spend four hours manually respirating a patient with a respirator manually. So that’s, yeah, I mean, I’m sure there’s some statistics out there. Fortunately, with our business, we’re mostly outpatients. We don’t have any critical care people on ventilators or on systems like that. But yeah, there’s definitely, you don’t want to miss things. We do monitor patients remotely with diabetes, and we watch their blood sugars remotely, or hypertensive patients that have blood pressure cuffs at their house that send those readings in, so we can monitor those patients. Oh, wow. So that kind of stuff is important for some of your patients. I mean, some of your sicker patients.
Speaker 0 | 16:10.318
So are you in charge of, like, so you guys hand out what? Like wireless devices that they need to hook up to wireless internet at their house, and then you guys monitor it?
Speaker 1 | 16:19.723
Yeah. We actually had an in-house team. We’ve actually outsourced a lot of that recently. But the data, again, it comes down to data. They’re kind of collecting data. If they have a patient that is starting to show high blood pressure, or the… providers alerted so they can reach out to that patient and really start a treatment. Hey, do we need to change your medication? You’re on the right dosage. You need to come in for a physical examination or we do a telehealth visit. We’ve just got to keep an eye on those patients. So then again, the whole idea is obviously to keep them healthy and alive, but also to keep them out of the hospital so they’re not checking in an emergency room somewhere to be seen. And then… and kind of go through the hassle of all that too so gotcha the when it comes to your your day-to-day um i mean obviously
Speaker 0 | 17:13.824
21 people to 12 people during the pandemic is a fairly significant hit was there anything that you did during that time period to be more efficient or was there anything that you changed that you had to change to automate something to make life easier Was there anything like that or was it just, no, we just weren’t as busy?
Speaker 1 | 17:36.756
Really, the first thing that comes to mind is one of the initial kind of objectives that was put on my team was to identify a telemedicine solution. Because we didn’t have a consistent telemedicine solution for all of our patients and providers to utilize. So within about three weeks, we were able to connect with the vendor, implement their solution. and have that rolled out to our providers. Unfortunately, at the time, at the onset of the kind of lockdown, Medicare didn’t accept telemedicine or didn’t reimburse for telemedicine. But shortly after that, they did kind of change that and did start to provide reimbursement. So really, it came down to it was really a way to bring revenue in while we were locked down and couldn’t see patients. And that was really kind of the first thing that we did.
Speaker 0 | 18:31.407
define define uh telemedicine to you in that in that aspect is it is it really just ability to have a video conferencing call with a doctor or is there more to it as far as apis into medical records and being able to schedule and being able to do all these things so like to you is there is there a certain level or is it hey we just needed a video conferencing platform to roll out real quick yeah
Speaker 1 | 18:57.141
i mean it could be video it could be just voice i mean it really we We’ve done patient visits that are just really voice calls. Sometimes patients don’t want to have their camera turned on. A lot of times providers prefer it because, obviously, they get more of a face-to-face interaction with their patient. They can read the mood and the health of the patient. Bill, the next, you know.
Speaker 0 | 19:28.403
There’s like a I’m supposed to break up this show supposed to break up the show because I’m told don’t just talk for 45 minutes Without any breaking up the show. So we’re gonna move on to this section that I like to call What did you do prior to the internet for fun? So as a child, for example nowadays Kids might sit inside in front of an Xbox all day long and interact with people. And then they meet up with their group of friends that they’ve never met up with before in this weird neither world of space. And then I was in jujitsu and I had a group of guys that were like, yeah, I finally met my… I don’t even know, can’t even remember what game it was they were playing. But like, hey, we finally got together after like, you know, three years. I’m like, what do you mean you finally got together? Yeah, like we all flew in from different states and like we met face to face. And like, like they were like best friends. So where did you do in Massachusetts prior to the internet for fun?
Speaker 1 | 20:26.055
Oh, that’s easy. I, from the time I was probably seven years old until I was probably senior in high school. I think I. Played baseball every single day. Anytime there was, you could see the grass. I had a really good friend, and that’s what we did all day long. Batting practice, fly balls, pep or whatever it was, we had a batter of all kinds.
Speaker 0 | 20:50.934
How far away were you from a telephone or a home or anyone knowing where you were?
Speaker 1 | 20:56.415
We were usually in the backyard. Once in a while, we’d jump on our bikes right down to a Little League field and be maybe a 20-minute bike ride away from the house. Yeah, the whole concept of being in constant contact with your parents or whatever was foreign back then.
Speaker 0 | 21:12.358
It’s weird when I think back and it’s not like it was that long ago. It really wasn’t. You just ride out of the house and disappear. Now, people would freak out.
Speaker 1 | 21:21.663
Yeah, and it’s funny because even for myself, I leave the house and I leave my phone behind and say, what am I going to do? How am I going to get from point A to point B?
Speaker 0 | 21:31.728
Anxiety sets in. I remember with my friend, literally, I can remember in the summertime riding down with a blow-up raft and riding down to a river and going down a river and going down to the ocean and getting smashed by waves. Nowadays, I would think, my kids could drown, something could happen, whatever. But no, we just did whatever craziness. Camping in the woods.
Speaker 1 | 21:54.098
Yeah, I joke with my wife. We always say, when we were kids and we got in trouble, they sent us in the house. We got in the house.
Speaker 0 | 22:05.527
Our kids are having trouble. Get out of the house. Get outside. That’s so true. Get out. Leave the house. Yeah, go outside. Wow. Wow, that’s sad. That’s sad. I remember camping with my friend in second grade. Not even deep in the woods in a tent, light in a fire, cooking with the SpaghettiOs in a can with a stick over a fire in the middle of the woods. Coyotes you could hear at night. you know and uh just thinking back to that now i’m like wow we were crazy there could have been like an axe murderer or something you know they uh they uh have you ever been for everyone out there listening this little massachusetts facts there’s a ski mountain called mount wachusett you ever been there by any chance yeah i remember half day when i was in high school half days we’d uh in the winter time we would um go to school for half a day have the car all loaded up with skis yeah like friday or whatever yeah i lived i lived a mile and a half down that down the street from there that’s where i get it
Speaker 1 | 22:58.534
Yeah, we were about an hour away. And I remember one day, a friend and I jumped in the car. We were determined we weren’t even going to go into the lodge. We were going to buy a lift ticket, get up on the lifts and ski until they closed down. Yeah. So we stuck sandwiches in our jacket pockets. And halfway through the night, we decided to have our dinner and a sandwich with a frozen salad.
Speaker 0 | 23:20.626
Yeah, because they had night skiing. Because you could ski. Because they had night skiing. It was, yeah, man. That’s so… That concludes this section of what did you do before the internet? How much control do the doctors, is there like, how do you guys run your kind of like bureaucracy over there? Is it like a bunch of doctors that vote on things? Is it providers? Is it run by healthcare organization, larger hospital? Is it, because my father’s a retired, my dad’s 87, retired urologist. And.
Speaker 1 | 23:56.958
back in the day it was the old school way like him and a couple partners owned the business went golfing on wednesday and friday and that was it yeah yeah so so compass medical is actually um owned by uh providers there’s uh about about 45 or 50 providers that are shareholders that own the company um a subset of that um shareholder group is is uh makes up the board or and then obviously our ceo and some of our members of the board as well you So, yeah, so the doctors definitely have some pull because they are our bosses because they do own the company. So it can.
Speaker 0 | 24:35.326
And the reason why I bring that up is other industries are different. There’s like a president, a CEO, there’s a board, there’s a roundtable that you sit around. In yours, I’m imagining it’s probably hard to get a bunch of ridiculously busy doctors that. If you just, if anyone that’s ever worked in medical and you know doctors and you know how they are, it’s probably hard to get a bunch of doctors in a room at one time to make a decision on anything. Is that a fair statement?
Speaker 1 | 25:04.198
Yeah, yeah, I think that’s fair. And we do, we actually do kind of have that executive leadership as well. That’s, that’s, I mean, for the most part is non-physicians. Okay. Non-shareholders. We do have a CEO. We have a COO.
Speaker 0 | 25:18.747
So IT is able, are you able to make, I guess, are you able to make fairly significant decisions as far as a digital roadmap is concerned without, like, how are decisions made there?
Speaker 1 | 25:32.437
So. Just recently, actually, I worked with the COO and a couple of others on the executive team to form a strategic committee and also a finance committee. So when I first came on board, I’ve been here for about two and a half years. When I first came on board, we had like an IT subcommittee that would kind of meet and kind of review some of the budgetary items and approve those to be paid and move forward. But. really didn’t have that governance around our project intake and kind of make its own project to stay on track um and and at the same time uh watch the budget as well so um we kind of formed these i mean it’s within the last month or so that we’ve started uh having these uh is budget meetings um finance committee meetings and um yeah it’s been it’s worked out pretty well because uh we’re starting to get a better handle on our project roadmap and it kind of how we can get these things kind of off the ground and have some, some executive leadership and champions of some of the projects that kind of tend to take a little longer. So, so yeah, so it’s kind of given some visibility to that. So I’m actually pretty excited about continuing with that going forward with the group now. So.
Speaker 0 | 26:52.608
Okay, cool. The, and the reason why I bring that up is obviously one of the show, you know, common themes of this show. should be obvious by now, I hope. We’ve done 150 episodes or so or more. The IT of the past was the guys that changed the font on the printer and hid in the server closet and we slid pizzas under the door to them. Aaron Siemens, I have to give him credit for that because it was great. IT used to just be the guys that hid in the server room and slid pizzas under the door. It’s awesome. Yeah. To now actually having to have some sort of business leadership because in reality, nothing gets done really that great without IT involved. In other words, IT touches every aspect of the business. So the IT geeks of sorts that used to be glorified AV guys now have to learn to speak the language of business. And you just said that you’re great. We’re excited about that. Is there anything that you have to add to that? Like, was there any, like, at what point did you realize, I need to learn this business terminology? Or at what point did you realize this? And do you have any advice to other people out there that might not, that might be something out of their comfort zone?
Speaker 1 | 28:16.856
Yeah, no. And I think I early on learned to really focus on, hey, be customer centric. Speak the language of the department you’re working with or the leaders that you’re working with. The one thing that really kind of brought things to light, I came on board here at Compass in December of 2019. Took a look. There was definitely a lot of work to be done around technology. Our data centers needed a complete overhaul. It was just a lot of stuff. So my first thing was I started putting a five-year plan together. Like year one, we’re going to get to this point, year two, year three. And wanted to end the worst way to present that to our senior leadership and our senior managers. and found that every time I went to a meeting with that group, they were talking about this virus that they’ve been dealing with or they’re hearing about over in China, and it’s coming this way. And that consumed everything for the next 12 months. So that plan kind of, although it was kind of happening in the background, I couldn’t really get it in front of anyone and really talk about it. And I realized then that maybe it isn’t. I don’t need to talk to them. Maybe I just need to sit back and listen to them. What are their needs? How is this work that we’re doing going to benefit the organization? So that’s kind of, we kind of use that as more of a, kind of our center of everything we do, I guess, at this point.
Speaker 0 | 29:42.463
So in a very keep it simple, keep it simple, stupid repetition, listen to people. Repeat back what they need and feed IT into that. Basically, mold your ask around what their current needs are. So you probably could take the same five-year plan and say, this is how we’re going to beat, that didn’t change at all. This is how we’re going to beat COVID. And say before, this is how we’re going to do a digital transformation. No, no, no, no. Hey, by the way, I’ve got this great plan for COVID. Here it is. We need to move the data centers. We need to do all this. Obviously joking a little. So curious out of COVID, what became your biggest, most hated thing? or most hated silo. Was there any silos or things that you realized were completely antiquated and worthless and we needed to kick them to the curb?
Speaker 1 | 30:37.353
Well, one of the things was really the absolute fear that people had when we started saying, hey, we’re going to be locked down. We can’t have people in the office anymore. Oh my God, what are we going to do? How are we going to work? And not really having that, like they’ve never done this before. But at the same time, we have all the tools in place. We have remote connections. people with personal devices at home, laptops we could hand out to them to take home. Everything was in place. It just had never been kind of tested. So it was a huge learning curve for the entire organization, really. And I think it was kind of, I mean, I see it with education as well. It’s just this fear that, like, what are we going to do remotely? What if I can’t connect? What if my Zoom meeting doesn’t work? What if I can’t log into my email from home? What are these devices you speak of? So, and obviously there was some issues with supply and demand around that time too. There was really no devices to be found. But we had all the infrastructure in place for it. It’s just never been utilized. So now roll forward, what, two years later, we’re starting to see that it’s almost commonplace that people work remote. I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw my full staff in the office. They’re just, whether I’m working remote or they’re working remote, it’s just what kind of ships passing in the night sometimes. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, it’s a different way of managing staff because obviously they’re in front of you to see what they’re doing all day. But at the same time, when we’re pressed into doing that, the ability to do it was there.
Speaker 0 | 32:24.908
Are you guys a Microsoft shop?
Speaker 1 | 32:27.729
Yes.
Speaker 0 | 32:29.070
Okay, so do people communicate on Teams? Do you guys do that and that type of thing internally?
Speaker 1 | 32:35.293
Yeah, internally, my team is on Teams. We use that almost exclusively for meetings and just instant messaging.
Speaker 0 | 32:43.057
And that was there prior to COVID?
Speaker 1 | 32:47.640
That was there, yep. We did have that in place. It wasn’t really deployed fully, but the IT team did have it. and was using it since then we have rolled it out to a couple of smaller departments but it hasn’t really taken on because it is a little it has for us anyways it’s been a little buggy with sometimes it works sometimes your audio is not doesn’t come in sometimes the phone calls don’t work oh yeah from a voice standpoint yeah there’s some latency issues and things right so we kind of standardized we we don’t do a lot of um like all all hands on deck type of meetings across the whole organization but there are some pretty big group meetings that we do Typically we’ll use Zoom at this point for those type of meetings. But we are actually in the process now of replacing our legacy phone system, our phone and call center system. And the new system we’re implementing will give us the ability to have kind of Zoom-like or Teams meeting calls and voice and video calls.
Speaker 0 | 33:46.744
Where are you going, RingCentral?
Speaker 1 | 33:48.806
Close, Dialpad. Okay,
Speaker 0 | 33:51.187
cool. Know them well. Work with Dial-a-Plad closely, RingCentral, all of them, 8×8, go down the list, all the usual suspects. So super good. And they’re in like a web RTC platform, so that should work pretty easily everywhere. Excellent. What, as being in the medical field, IT, what is your single biggest frustration? problem or concern, would you say?
Speaker 1 | 34:25.418
I think maybe the biggest concern is really around security and where obviously healthcare is being targeted pretty heavily with cyber attacks and whatnot. We have employed a third party to kind of help us sleep a little bit. So we have people watching the network 24-7 where myself and one or two other people get beyond viewing logs and watching for… for breaches so um so that’s helped out quite a bit um i think this for us is a little bit of a change in landscape with with pairs and it does bring uh kind of planning and forecasting your technology a little more felt because who knows what the budget’s going to look like from here
Speaker 0 | 35:09.560
Yep.
Speaker 1 | 35:10.420
So we’re kind of in that phase. I mean, the focus for me has been, obviously, bring the technology up to speed, but at the same time, don’t put us in bankruptcy from doing it. So we have been able to make some pretty significant savings. We’ve actually been able to upgrade a lot of stuff, newer technology, modern interfaces, whatever, and save a ton of money over what some of the legacy stuff was costing us to run. So sometimes it seems like it’s almost impossible to do, but it has actually worked out pretty well for us. So most of the stuff that we’ve actually upgraded has come in cheaper than what we were paying previously for it.
Speaker 0 | 35:53.701
Excellent. As far as the security piece, is that like outsourced MSP work or you have any great vendors that you would like?
Speaker 1 | 36:01.705
Yeah, if we could plug, we work with Arctic Wolf.
Speaker 0 | 36:04.946
Arctic Wolf, okay, yeah.
Speaker 1 | 36:06.127
Yeah, and those guys are awesome. They end up giving you a couple of concierge staff members from that team. So they’re kind of your liaison with their team and SOC. So we came up with them in January, and it’s really been great.
Speaker 0 | 36:27.456
We’re going to plug them for $5,000 to pay to dissecting. 18 nerds. No, no. No, it’s great. Arctic Wolf. Arctic Wolf. Dialpad. Let’s see. Who’s your guy over at Dialpad? I’m just curious. I wonder if it’s the same guy. Well, anyways, don’t tell them. I’m going to call them up to them like, hey, we’re plugging YouTube for $5,000. So there we go. There you go. We just made dissecting popular IT nerds some money. You got to figure out some way. Do you have a, the, what would you say is the, give me a term, give me a geek fact. We’ll end with this geek fact of the show. Give me some sort of terminology that the typical end user doesn’t know, but they can say to their IT guy to create rapport and look really cool. Just think family. You say something at the family and they’re like, I have no clue what that means, dad. Like, for example, my wife, we had this. I said, if you can come up with what the capital letters NAP stands for. I’m going to give you $5,000 towards the new kitchen. I said, you have three tries. She actually got network access point, and I was quite upset that she figured it out on the third try. Anyways, she got it.
Speaker 1 | 37:46.780
I guess it could be a couple of things, but one that sticks out to me is when you have somebody that comes in and says, my NIC card is bad. So what does NIC stand for? Well, it’s the network interface card. I said, so why do you have to put the word card at the end of it?
Speaker 0 | 38:03.676
Yeah, it’s like chai tea
Speaker 1 | 38:05.397
It’s just the Nick
Speaker 0 | 38:07.157
It’s chai tea Chai is That’s the word for tea Chai tea Yo, guy My Nick card ain’t working
Speaker 1 | 38:20.201
Wicked bastard
Speaker 0 | 38:25.142
What? Man, my Nick card ain’t working Can you get me one? It’s just the Nick Okay, it’s good Thank you We will end with that. It has been an absolute pleasure. Do you have any last piece of words of, of sage advice that you would like to give to any IT directors out there listening to the show?
Speaker 1 | 38:41.397
Sage advice. Well, that’s hard. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 38:47.720
Going to roofing first.
Speaker 1 | 38:49.601
Yeah. I try roofing first. You know what you’ll appreciate the best job.
Speaker 0 | 38:55.284
Anything for anything really. I mean, honestly, did you ever have any mentors or anything, anything, anyone ever say anything to you that really stuck?
Speaker 1 | 39:01.616
I mean, believe it or not, I always go back to one of the mentors was my foreman doing roofing. Let me tell you, when you’re climbing up 10 stories, you’re not going to go up empty-handed, you’re not coming down empty-handed because you don’t want to make two trips. One thing I learned from that job, and that was the foreman was really a system guy. So everything was a system. You have your job, you do your job, he’s going to do his job, and he’s going to do his job. Don’t do any of their jobs. They’re not going to do yours. And no one’s going to fall off the roof.
Speaker 0 | 39:32.641
Systems. So true. If you’ve ever seen someone do a roof the wrong way, and I’ve done a few roofs, and my son-in-law just did his roof too. If you’ve ever seen a really good roofer, boom, that thing is done in one day. Yeah. It comes in there like a machine. Everyone takes lunch, I swear, at the same time. It’s like they come in, they show up, the dumpster’s there, boom, this, running the magnets over the ground at the end so I don’t pop my tire, all that stuff. So,
Speaker 1 | 40:03.864
Brent,
Speaker 0 | 40:05.745
it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popularity Nerds.
