Speaker 0 | 00:09.882
All right. You know, I always like to just get to know you a little bit. Tell me, first of all, where are you calling in from? You said it’s afternoon there. It’s only morning here.
Speaker 1 | 00:19.865
Oh, great. Yeah, I’m calling in just north of Atlanta. Alpharetta, Georgia is office location today.
Speaker 0 | 00:26.907
Oh, okay. Excellent. Fantastic. And what’s your position? What kind of things do you do?
Speaker 1 | 00:35.689
So I’m the Senior Director of Information Technology with Electrocom. I manage the IT group at the organization, try to keep us aligned to the business and heading in a positive direction.
Speaker 0 | 00:49.773
Okay. All right. And what does, what was the name of the company?
Speaker 1 | 00:53.914
Electrocom.
Speaker 0 | 00:55.795
What does Electrocom do?
Speaker 1 | 00:58.208
So we are a utility infrastructure company. We are working with telecommunications and power and, you know, putting power in the ground, putting fiber in the ground and aerial where needed. So basically, we’re trying to connect America to broadband and power as needed.
Speaker 0 | 01:20.780
I got you. OK, what’s some what’s some initiatives? I’m curious what. I’d like to just understand the business. What kind of initiatives are you guys working on right now that’s involving much of your mind share?
Speaker 1 | 01:36.131
Yeah, I like to think of the, if you think about information technology and then in the utility space here, we do have this kind of the traditional IT, which is really more like the back office, the ERP. the care and feeding of what happens for processing of data, getting people paid, the accounting, HR, those types of things. But then there’s also an angle where we’re looking at fleet management. We’re looking at equipment in the field, what it’s doing, how we’re keeping up with it. And then also what I call production data capture, which is things happening on a job site, all of the data that gets collected related to that job. and then how that’s put in for processing so that our guys get paid and we’re able to collect for services that we provide.
Speaker 0 | 02:31.171
Okay. What would be the coolest thing that would happen in that? Like what would be the holy grail that you could deliver technology-wise?
Speaker 1 | 02:43.602
Oh, wow. So the holy grail would probably be the ability for a job foreman. to be able to electronically record what his crew has done on a given day and to that for that data to sort of flow seamlessly back up through our tech stack so that again we know what he did we can report on it we can get the crew paid we can invoice the customer kind of minimizing the steps along the way But that’s what we do to turn that into cash so that everybody’s happy.
Speaker 0 | 03:27.520
Gotcha. Gotcha. So then that’s the holy grail of having that done. Are you talking about having that automated somehow, reducing steps that it’s currently taking? Or would the holy grail be like… Maybe like having all their mobile devices, all the people that are working on the project, doing something and having the mobile devices record what’s recording somehow what’s going on. Like, see what I’m getting at? Like, what would be some cool things that you would love to see implemented on that to do that?
Speaker 1 | 04:03.959
Yeah, it’s a little bit of both. I mean, if I look at today or like what’s been done traditionally, there are manual pieces of that process. Whether it’s. somebody’s recording something in a checklist or on a piece of paper or perhaps typing it into a spreadsheet but then getting that into the processing funnel into the corporate systems if you will and how do we do that you know is that an import is there an etl process is it entered directly into an interface that our systems use how does that look how can we make that more efficient how can we reduce the steps and sometimes scott i think it’s it’s how do we keep it simple uh for the guys because a lot of these guys you know their their skill set is They understand the business and how we get cable in the ground, how we get cable in the air, the equipment that’s used to do that. But they may not necessarily have that mindset for I’ve got this system with all this field of data and I’ve got to go key this data here and this here. And what does this mean and which system do I use for what and that type of thing? So how do I keep it simple for them?
Speaker 0 | 05:23.035
Okay, gotcha. How long have you been doing? What you’re doing?
Speaker 1 | 05:28.703
I’ve been in the construction industry here with Electro-Com for a year. It’s relatively new for me. Prior to that, I was in a completely different industry, commercial print and warehousing.
Speaker 0 | 05:42.593
And were you in, I’m assuming that you came up through the ranks of IT and technology there as well?
Speaker 1 | 05:50.638
That’s correct. Almost 30 years now, I’ve been in and around IT. I guess if you… if you count the internships that I did during college, I’d be 30 years plus.
Speaker 0 | 06:02.844
So how did you get your start then going with those starting back at the beginning of chapter one, not of your life, but of maybe technology. What was it? Why’d you get in it?
Speaker 1 | 06:18.608
I would say it originally junior year high school. I thought I was going to be a veterinarian.
Speaker 0 | 06:27.196
Interesting.
Speaker 1 | 06:27.936
And when I started that college search and kind of going around and looking at colleges, I remember I attended a some type of like a seminar type of thing at a local university. And they were talking about the vet school and they they put up some slides and talked about the program. And I saw some of the pictures of what it would take to be a vet. And it was like that moment of. Yeah, I don’t think I can handle that. So I started thinking about, well, what interested me. I got interested in the technology program at the time. I mean, this was late 80s. A very limited offering in the high school setting. So I took every class that had anything to do with technology that was offered. Ended up going to college, majoring in computer science. that way ever since. I mean, I’ve just always been in technology since that time.
Speaker 0 | 07:27.607
More along the software, like were you developing or more maybe on the hardware side of things?
Speaker 1 | 07:33.929
Not really. In college as an undergraduate with computer science, obviously it was a heavy workload of development and writing programs. That’s what a lot of the coursework was. But as I came out and through some of my co-op program, I got more involved on the networking side. doing land administration, keeping up with networks and that type of thing. And so when I originally came out, that’s what I was. I was more of a, I guess you would call it the infrastructure engineer.
Speaker 0 | 08:05.369
Okay. I’m going to take a stab at this one just because you, I think you and I are very similar in age. And if you said that you were a junior-ish in the late 80s, then I’m saying that, yeah, you were kind of along the same lines. In college, were you programming at Fortran?
Speaker 1 | 08:27.237
We had a little bit of Fortran. The curriculum that I went through, I think they exposed us to probably seven or eight different languages. One of the things that I really enjoyed about that program was they were very specific as to say, we’re not teaching you to code in a language. We are here to teach you constructs. how to think, and how to program. So I think they were very intentional about swapping the languages around quite a bit, and then they would focus on different things with different languages.
Speaker 0 | 09:02.398
Okay. All right.
Speaker 1 | 09:03.498
Yeah. Yeah, we had a kind of a, it was an interesting project. A freshman year, we had to write a compiler, and it was a basic compiler, and the language was called Fartran. Because it was a simplified version of Fortran. So it wasn’t a compiler for full language, but it was more of a smaller set of constructs within the language. And so we called it the Fortran compiler. Gotcha. You know, it was freshman year, right? And it was kind of like, I think that was sort of the weed out class. It was, we’re going to throw you in deep because we’re going to have you do something fairly complicated. Yeah. But we’re going to put some boundaries around it.
Speaker 0 | 09:48.254
That’s a terrible way. That’s a terrible thing to have to have somebody create. I would think. Compilers suck just having to deal with compilers.
Speaker 1 | 09:58.586
That’s right. I don’t remember a whole lot of details about it other than it was an eye opener. You know, it was certainly something different than I had ever done before. But at the time, I was also just sort of absorbing knowledge about computer science to begin with.
Speaker 0 | 10:13.599
Right. All right. Going a little bit different direction here. What is what would you consider is one of your biggest fails in your career at this point?
Speaker 1 | 10:29.182
I remember a program, this was fairly early in my career, and I had transitioned into more of a software product manager. And we had come up with this program that effectively would talk to the mainframe and it would spit out a pricey, we called it a price card. Okay. The price card vary depending upon the customer. So the template was more or less the same, but then the pricing would vary by customer based on their program, based on their contract that they had with our company. So it was a web-based program. It was, I think it was written in Java and it would go and there was like a PDF behind it with the template and then it would just fill the variables. And so… What we had hoped is that we’d be able to take the program and actually give it to financial institutions. It was banks and credit unions and for them to be able to access it for self-service. Right. This was early days of the Internet. People were kind of seeing this. Oh, we can put something out there and they can just come and grab it themselves instead of having to call us. OK. And so we had this presentation. with the executive at the time. He wasn’t sold on it. I think maybe he had some, he just was nervous about trying to do something that we had not done before and kind of staking our reputation to it. And he looked at me in the meeting and he said, are you willing to bet your paycheck that it will succeed? Well, yeah, I mean, well, first I just didn’t expect that question. But two, here I am, like, you know, mid to late 20s as far as age, got a young family, and what was I going to say? Like, okay, yeah, I’m all in. I’m going to risk it all here on this thing. And so I just sort of, I don’t think I even responded, and then he moved on. And so it ended up being we did use the program, but it was used internally. It wasn’t open to the customers at that point in time. It wasn’t ready for it. I considered that a failure. It wasn’t the main objective that I was after.
Speaker 0 | 12:59.999
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 13:01.520
And in hindsight, I probably, the approach I took was more of trying to sell the features of it. Like, hey, here’s this new shiny tool. Look what it does versus trying to focus on the customer experience, the customer relationships, and how we might approach that better. So I think my approach to the business case was wrong.
Speaker 0 | 13:27.438
So what would have happened if you would have, you know, staked your paycheck? Well, you didn’t go very far, but let’s play that out a little bit.
Speaker 1 | 13:40.448
I think we’ll never know. Sometimes I thought about that, you know, as I kind of. did a retrospective, if you will, and went back and thought through, hey, how could I have ended that different? But I’ll never know. And even if I had taken maybe a more broader approach to value, would it have made a difference? Because in the context at the time, at the end of the day, it was still something very new. It was something the company had not done before. And the company really wasn’t. on the bleeding edge of taking risks, you know, it’s much more conservative, especially when you’re dealing with banks and credit unions. You just don’t want to rock that relationship.
Speaker 0 | 14:26.078
Right.
Speaker 1 | 14:26.839
Okay.
Speaker 0 | 14:28.700
So then what would be the biggest win then that you can recall in your career?
Speaker 1 | 14:37.528
I like to think of the wins more in terms of rather than something that we… that I’ve done with technology, maybe it’s more of the relationship side. And when you go into a new job and you’re able to establish relationships and get a good rapport with both your colleagues. and your manager, and they see the value that you bring to the table from what you’re contributing, and you get that feedback. So I’ve had that feedback before from a couple of managers, and I think that’s a big win.
Speaker 0 | 15:16.204
Okay. What’s the reporting structure at your company for you?
Speaker 1 | 15:22.468
Now? Yeah. So now I report to the president of the company.
Speaker 0 | 15:30.669
Good. Not everyone’s in your position. That’s a good spot to be in.
Speaker 1 | 15:36.311
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 15:37.591
Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 15:38.412
It really is because it provides an opportunity to, you could, you know, what’s the proverbial, have a seat at the table. But if you will, you know, I get to talk directly to kind of portray what I’m seeing, what my vision is, what I think the roadmap should be. and kind of getting direct input on that, whether it’s move forward or whether it’s, hey, think about this a little bit differently, or have you thought about this? Yeah. Or even there are things happening in the industry or the company that you may not know about. And so that’s good input as I try to plan out a roadmap.
Speaker 0 | 16:18.647
Right. What, you know, I’m curious then, and now that you’ve been there a year, what you consider to be kind of the biggest bottleneck? From a technology standpoint, industry standpoint, not your own industry, but the technology industry standpoint, where we’re at right now?
Speaker 1 | 16:41.679
From a bottleneck perspective, I think it’s always, and really probably every place I’ve ever worked, it’s always inefficient processes where there’s manual labor, there’s double peeing. There’s re-teeing, and it’s trying to move data between disparate systems. It’s sort of the classic thing in IT. And I often say, well, we’re like plumbing, right? We’re trying to move ones and zeros in between systems so that the data is there for processing and things that the company needs to survive.
Speaker 0 | 17:23.373
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 17:25.595
And sometimes it’s like, well, how hard can it be? you’re going to take this file and you’re going to move it over. And then when you get in the weeds, it suddenly gets a little bit more complicated than what everyone first thought.
Speaker 0 | 17:36.879
Yeah. And what’s, and what kind of problems does that lead to?
Speaker 1 | 17:43.181
And why? Data’s not the same. You know, you have to do, you have to transform the data. You have to, in one place, it’s stored as a number and another place it’s stored as a text or. In one place, it’s the same name for some type of widget or whatever. In the other place, they’ve got a different way that they name it or there’s a prefix on it. You’re having to do the data that way or you get into simple – well, I say simple things, but a classic example is like names and addresses. And then you get dirty data, right? And it’s like, well, what’s this doing in this field? This isn’t supposed to be here. So you have to go and clean the data before you can even start to work with it. And it’s just, you kind of get down in the muck of trying to make the data pristine so that you can push it around. You can push it and pull it. Right.
Speaker 0 | 18:41.997
So the first question then would be, so here’s what I’m hearing you say, because you said inefficient processes, really, literally disparate data, different systems, trying to move this data. How much inefficiency does… guessing, do you think that’s contributing to your company?
Speaker 1 | 19:05.416
I think that’s a hard question because oftentimes, and you’ve probably experienced this, where you come upon something and you didn’t even know it was happening, right? Some group is doing something where they’re pulling. I’ll give you an example. Maybe they’re pulling time card data from employees and they want to get it into payroll and they’re re-keying it. Or, you know, you just kind of stumble upon some things that you may just not have known. And so it’s kind of hard to quantify. Yeah. What is the level of inefficiency? You know, it’s out there. And the best that you can do then is you start to develop these relationships with the department heads. and you ask that question what is it in your day-to-day workflow that’s causing you headaches what’s causing you error what’s causing you rework and then that’s how you start to uncover some
Speaker 0 | 20:16.298
of these inefficiencies right i am i ask that question because i believe it’s a pretty high number and if we answer it honestly Because the fact is, is that a lot of people in their jobs right now are moving data. Like most of their job is moving data. That potentially that’s not, I don’t think the systems are there yet, but pretend we had the magic RPA, robotic process automation tool that was easy to just plug and play. Here you go. Now you don’t have to do all that stuff. John or Jan or whoever you are in the front office, you know, I would be a little concerned about how much that would take away from their actual responsibilities at this point.
Speaker 1 | 21:13.410
The need for moving data is increasing as companies increase their tech stack because they’re. oh well now we’re subscribing to this cloud service or and we’ve got data over here and oh but we just created a new contract and we’ve got this cloud provider and that data’s over here so again the number of disparate systems it’s hard to contain yeah based upon what’s happening in in some of the prior companies i worked at that complication came from legacy systems that were acquired via acquisition. Yep. Right? So, oh, we merged with this company five years ago, but their ERP is still running. So we’ve got two ERPs running. And at some point, you know, one kind of becomes that primary area, but the other stuff has to feed into it. There’s all these complications about why we can’t move the customers off the old ERP system to get them over, right? So you’re living and maintaining. those disparate systems and having to click and pull data.
Speaker 0 | 22:26.217
Yeah. Well, that’s really interesting and big, big problem. What do you think is one of the more promising things in technology that’s going to help with the biggest problems, some of the biggest problems in technology, shadow IT, project backlog, talent gap?
Speaker 1 | 22:52.050
Shadow IT, everybody’s probably got an opinion on that. I think part of what contributed to that historically was when IT became unapproachable, right? So, oh, IT, they’re busy or they’re too difficult to do business with. So I’m going to go out and I’ve been approached by… those savvy guys you know the sales guy reached out to me he’s got this solution that’s going to solve all my needs and i’ll just i’ll just go take care of and get it done because it’s too busy for me or it’s got their own opinions and it’s just too much of a hassle they’re not easy to do business with but i think also over time as technology you know i think back across my career and and you know it used to just be well the i.t department they handle all these technology and business. Well, that’s not the way it is anymore. Every department is dealing with technology and you have to be versed on it. So over time, as sales and marketing or whatever, they became much more comfortable with how do I keep up with my list of data? How do I do my forecasting on a technology platform? So of course, they’re going to go and look at their own solutions. And so I think there’s two things that have sort of contributed to that. I try to, I don’t know if confront is the right word here, but I try to minimize that by being the best partner I can be. So that when departments are thinking about, hey, I need a solution to help me do this business process, they’ll come to IT and say, will you come with me on that journey? Cause I want your input.
Speaker 0 | 24:54.204
Okay. Gotcha. So Nail, give me an example of what you think is some of the best technology that’s happening right now. Platform, maybe it’s a philosophy, maybe it’s a thought process. The most promising.
Speaker 1 | 25:17.317
I’ll tell you, recently, I went through a course because I was looking at the Power Automate platform. It’s part of the Microsoft suite. And I’ve seen platforms kind of like it, but the idea is you have all these connectors to these various pieces and you connect them together visually and move your data. It’s exactly what we’ve been talking about here on this call, right?
Speaker 0 | 25:45.701
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 25:45.921
But what was fascinating to me, having the computer science background and kind of the programming background was I could see the programming constructs in the visualization of how they portrayed it. And so it’s like, this is a, it’s a programming language, but they’ve, they’ve done it visual.
Speaker 0 | 26:05.069
Right.
Speaker 1 | 26:06.110
Right. And so to me, like the whole thing just made sense. And it was, I just see all kinds of, of opportunity in that and being able to connect things.
Speaker 0 | 26:19.858
What I’m hearing you say, or what the term I’ve been using on that is low code, no code.
Speaker 1 | 26:29.258
Okay. And yeah, because if someone, so that’s another angle on that is this, you don’t, you’re not a programmer. You don’t have the background where you’ve been through a formal program, but you can see these visuals and you can say, okay, yeah, I know I’ve got data over here in Excel or SQL, some SQL server. And I know I want to move it. over and create an email or trigger some email when this happens, or I want to move stuff into a SharePoint site or, you know, what have you. And suddenly it’s all laid out graphically. You can see that because it’s almost like a wizard, right? I’m just entering the prompt on the screen.
Speaker 0 | 27:12.133
Yep.
Speaker 1 | 27:12.873
What’s your, what’s the username or what’s the description, what’s the data field, and you’re filling in those prompts and suddenly you’ve got a program.
Speaker 0 | 27:22.337
Right. Well, I think that’s powerful. I think what’s even more powerful, you know, I’m stating my opinion here. One of the most promising things I’ve seen recently is literally the concept of citizen development and the way that PMI does it. Project Management Institute. Have you done have you seen what they’re doing with citizen development?
Speaker 1 | 27:49.637
I have not.
Speaker 0 | 27:51.414
Yeah, I highly recommend looking at. So they’ve now built out and they’re all in on citizen development. And PMI, you know, a vendor-free type of environment and organization, they’ve really kind of expanded and built a system around that. You remember when you were introduced to Agile?
Speaker 1 | 28:18.121
I do.
Speaker 0 | 28:19.861
Tell me your… thoughts and reactions back when you remembered really understanding Agile?
Speaker 1 | 28:29.852
I remember when I first saw the concept and it was laid out, it came at a time when I know I had some frustration with waterfall methods. And at the time, I was a product manager in software. So the waterfall method and big process for getting approval and getting through an executive board to get funding to do a software project, it was frustrating, right? And in many cases, you do a bunch of work and then nothing would happen. And so when Agile came along and you look at that, you’re like, hey, this is a great idea. Yeah, I think this has got legs, right? This has got potential. You’ve got to work this, but you’ve got to obviously sell this within an organization that doesn’t understand it. Because it was one thing for the technology team to understand it, and how do you move that into that front part of your process, your intake, if you will, for software development, so that it’s there and it has impact on, your decisioning for the software that you’re going to work on.
Speaker 0 | 29:49.484
Right. Exactly.
Speaker 1 | 29:52.065
And I think what ended up happening, at least in my case, I suspect this is probably what happened in a lot of places was The intake process stayed very formal, but the execution, we started using more agile techniques, agile approaches. I won’t say that I ever got to a point with a team where we were fully agile because we just, you know, at that time we had too much waterfall in us. So we started taking pieces at the time and trying to slowly move towards it.
Speaker 0 | 30:28.929
Yeah. At the time I was introduced, I was running an internet, I built an internet development company here in Denver, Colorado. I started it in about 97 and I built it to about 10 employees. We’re doing cold fusion database driven websites and we had been using the waterfall method. Literally, I mean, forget what the waterfall method is. Here’s how we did business. We would get a client. on board and they would tell us everything they wanted in their web application, right? Here’s how we want it. And they would give us a big amount of money to go and build it. And we would come back several months later and not have it right ever, right? And then they would want all these changes and has to do this and has to do that now, blah, blah, blah. And it was always a battle. It was always a battle between us and our client. It was never good at the end of a project. I remember when my friend, Peter Provost, who ended up going to work for Microsoft and becoming very well-renowned in that company, told me, well, here’s what Agile looks like. Agile takes this butting heads situation that you’re currently in with your clients all the time where you’re trying to do change requests and they’re trying to… get their, they’re just trying to get the thing done where it is. And you, and you’re just butting heads instead. You just, all it was agile to me was just, I remember saying, instead of doing a three or six month project, just do two week deliverables, just agree on smaller things and just stay in tune. And instead of going away for a month or two and coming back with something, Talk every couple of weeks and get, and, and also don’t, don’t, don’t get into this big, gigantic amounts of money and projects do smaller ones. Then you’re working together. You’re not like this. Now you’re working together. You’re working in tandem. And I’m like, aha, that was the aha for me. Right.
Speaker 1 | 32:48.831
And did you, in that process, did you end up increasing the velocity with your output?
Speaker 0 | 33:00.034
Well, so I would also say that along with the same with you, even though we didn’t just make that transition, but eventually, yes. Maybe not the volume initially, but the relationship certainly was better and you could get done more, meaning the whole overall project became efficient. So the volume was better. The volume was moving through with less friction.
Speaker 1 | 33:29.218
And did it open up doors? So as you did the release, and let’s say you had something like, here’s what we’ve got right now. We’re going to release it. And I’m going to create that feedback loop with my customer. Did that increase the, I don’t know if you want to call it the stickiness, the value of the relationship? Was the relationship in a better place because you were showing more? consistent output, even though it wasn’t all completely 100% what the customer wanted.
Speaker 0 | 34:03.134
Yeah, absolutely. They felt there, you know, and it’s just so much of it is they felt so much more in control too. It just was a better way of doing it. So I asked that to you because I’ve been diving into the citizen development thing. And Being, and you’ll be along with it, I just have this basic belief that it’s already been written. Most software has already been written out there. The code already exists for most stuff, right? Especially when it comes to most of the things that the actual worker is doing. They spin up a spreadsheet because they need that spreadsheet to help them manage and monitor some type of a process internally in their department, right? Those are the people that I’m talking about with citizen development. I think that we should enable them, give them the tools that already exist. Like you were saying, these drag and drop programs, instead of using spreadsheets, train them on how to use applications out of these drag and drop, give them a little bit more education. And we’re not talking about average person in the department who. will never learn this stuff. We’re talking about some of the people who have some of the skill sets, some of the desire to know this. They’re already creating the spreadsheets and doing some pretty creative things with those. And then with the right tools, technology and IT can actually, you know, have guardrails around that. That’s what I’ve been finding. And I’m excited about it as much as I was with Agile.
Speaker 1 | 35:45.869
It’s becoming more and more. commonplace again because everybody’s using a tool for something and so those who are moving quickly through it are kind of finding those advanced features or finding ways to whether it’s pull their own report or write their own type of macro type program for automation yeah you know i hadn’t i had that happen a few weeks ago i was talking with someone in finance and They pulled up a spreadsheet and start showing me how they had created a VLOOKUP routine to go through and extract some data and find some stuff very quickly. And it was nice to see. I mean, it was it was impressive. Almost almost offered her a job right on the spot. I’m like, you’re going to have to come join our team.
Speaker 0 | 36:39.483
That’s awesome. Awesome. What what are some of the things that you’re seeing? Well, I don’t know if that’s what you’re seeing, but what are some of the things that. could be improved at the executive level from a technology, you know, like be it directors or VPs or even CIOs. Where do you think that, where do you think the IT executive is missing it with the rest of the C-suite?
Speaker 1 | 37:07.497
Well, the IT executives that can stay humble, that can stay with a, an approach of, I’m here to listen first. In my mind, those are the ones that succeed the best. Yeah. Right. Don’t go with the approach of, I already know all the answers. I know the best technology. I know how to solve your problems. Because the reality is most IT leaders know less about the business than they think they do. So I always like to think of it as listen first. Go understand the problem. Listen to what’s happening. And then approach it with I’ve got some options or potential solutions. Does this work for you? How can it work within the business? So it’s a different mentality, I think, as you approach it. And it’s one that says I’m here to be part of the team. I’m not here to try to tell you that I have all the answers and I know exactly what needs to be done to fix all the problems. I want to, but it’s more of I’m part of the team. I want to work with the team to find the solutions to the problem.
Speaker 0 | 38:35.679
That’s great advice right there. That’s fantastic. Anything else you can think of on that?
Speaker 1 | 38:44.508
As far as the IT guy, well, you know, one of the other things I thought about is today’s darling technology is always tomorrow’s legacy platform. And so it’s kind of like don’t get attached to any one platform. You know, don’t sell yourself on that. It’s just at the end of the day, it’s a technology platform. But what you’re really trying to do is solve business problems.
Speaker 0 | 39:12.919
Gotcha. Gotcha. So personally, what would you think, you know, then as far as I want to actually get kind of back into the technology here, what are you geeking out on with technology these days? Heck, you could just tell me it’s a video game that you’ve been geeking out on or something.
Speaker 1 | 39:36.952
Yeah. So I spend a lot of time looking at, you know, the world of security. has just gone nuts. And so, you know, what are the latest offerings in the security space, whether it’s endpoint management or whether it’s… showing me my vulnerabilities that I’ve got on systems and how to aggregate that data, how to make it easy to understand so that I’m not just overwhelmed with a clear volume of reporting, tell me what to focus on. Because I’m new, as we said earlier in the call, because I’m new with the construction industry, I’m looking at some things there with fleet technologies or how do I do red lines and markups on engineering print that I’ve never had to do before? So that may not be necessarily something new technology wise from what’s out there, but it’s a little new to me because I’ve not had to focus on it before.
Speaker 0 | 40:37.537
Okay. All right. You bring up something that I definitely want to get to the security as well. What have you been finding lately then?
Speaker 1 | 40:49.664
that that’s really important what’s the new aha lately that you’ve gotten i don’t scott i don’t think i would say that there’s a new aha i mean at the end of the day it continues to be our weakest link is is our people okay right we can we can build up all these fortifications to our systems and all these rules and the things that try to make it hard to get in build up the fence right but then but then it’s our people right and it’s oh so-and-so got a text message that’s got some interesting stuff in it or the email came through right the great the great crojan horse of our time email yeah um and so it’s through and so that continues to be the number one thing about just be relentless in educating employees i mean i know Just in the last five or six years, the change I’ve seen in people, and they’re now starting to recognize fixing attempts. They’re now starting to question things that don’t look right. And that’s great, right? Because I see that the education is starting to work.
Speaker 0 | 42:07.947
Yep, definitely. That’s important. Have you delved into AI or anything along those lines with that?
Speaker 1 | 42:17.855
No. No, have not yet. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 42:23.819
So what haven’t I asked you yet? I know. I’d like to know why you did this podcast.
Speaker 1 | 42:34.004
It’s interesting. I had listened to this podcast prior to being contacted. Oh, God. So I was already very familiar with it. And I do have podcasts. that I’ll listen to when I’m exercising or taking a walk or sometimes even just working in the yard. And I remember, gosh, I don’t know, it’s been a year or two back and I was looking for some new ones and this one popped up. I don’t remember if it was a keyword search or if it was a recommendation from the search engine or whatever, but I had grabbed it and listened to it. It’s always interesting to get the perspective of other IT leaders in different industries. And a lot of times you’ll find, yeah, we’re all facing the same challenges. We’re all facing the same stuff. And sometimes you can hear things about, well, how are they approaching it? Or what do they think? Or what do they see as up and coming? What’s important to them? I like the angle of this podcast towards, hey, I see, yeah, you’ve got your technology and you’ve got your blinky lights and your gear and all that stuff, right, that you can geek out on. But then if you’re going to survive in the business world, what’s your relationship like with the C-suite? And that was one of the things that really attracted me to the content of the podcast.
Speaker 0 | 43:59.777
Gotcha. So what’s one question that I haven’t asked you that you’ve heard on previous podcasts that you hope I’m asking you today?
Speaker 1 | 44:12.343
Well, you didn’t ask me what my first computer was.
Speaker 0 | 44:15.724
I didn’t, did I? That’s up there. But all right. What was it?
Speaker 1 | 44:20.866
So I had to prep for this. I had to think back a little bit. And even I remember visually what the thing looked like. But I’m like, I don’t know the model number of that thing. So I went back. It was an Atari 400. It had a flat keyboard. And there was a spot at the top where you could put like a. cartridge and you could buy cartridges for various things. But I just, I remember that it was hooked up to a TV and they had like the basic programming language was built in. Yeah. So I would do a little simple programs and basic. So there’s an Atari 400 and then an Atari 600 XL.
Speaker 0 | 45:07.284
Were those probably about the time of the Commodore 64 and stuff like that?
Speaker 1 | 45:11.726
Yeah, this would have been late 70s, early 80s.
Speaker 0 | 45:17.849
And no operating system type of… Well, there obviously is an operating system, but not like a Windows thing, right?
Speaker 1 | 45:26.733
No, no, no, no. This was all tech space. It was, I guess, a DOS type system. But, you know, Atari had their own little version of BASIC so that it would fit within the constraints of that device. And you could do some basic things.
Speaker 0 | 45:45.964
All right. Yeah. Besides listening to this podcast and getting lots of good leadership and C-suite level information, what other things do you do to sharpen your sword?
Speaker 1 | 45:59.610
So one of the things that I’ve done over time is blogging. I started blogging was late 2000s. And at the time I had gone back to school and enrolled in MBA. So I was getting lots of new knowledge around business concepts and business classes that I never took as an undergraduate being in the computer science program. And I just started writing stuff down then because I started analyzing things, trying to with this new lens of hey, I’m looking at it from the MBA perspective. And so created a blog and really wasn’t more I would say I was not necessarily trying to gain an audience through it. I just wanted a place to put my thoughts down on paper and think through things.
Speaker 0 | 46:53.517
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 46:54.538
So, you know, sometimes it might be an article that I read. Oftentimes it was stuff that would happen at work during the course of a week. And then I would have thoughts about it like, oh, okay, well, there was a process. This was inefficient. Let me kind of put my thoughts about this particular concept or how I’d make this. more efficient and just started writing it down. I think that’s been good for me personally. Again, not so much to gain an audience from it. Occasionally people would comment or might ask a question, but it was really more for introspection and thought and trying to grow that way.
Speaker 0 | 47:32.620
Right. Right. And why don’t you share that though? I think people would probably like to, which, where is it at? How can they find it?
Speaker 1 | 47:40.905
Yeah. So it’s MerchantStand. Merchantstand.com. Merchantstand, S-T-A-N-D. That’s right. Yeah, merchantstand.com. I picked that name at the time in my career. I did a three or four years. I moved out of IT into marketing, but it was marketing technologies that was the name of our group. So I would still, I was more instead of the… kind of the product manager of a e-commerce suite within IT. I was the product marketing manager in the marketing group. I was just aligned constantly with marketing, but still providing input to content of our websites, working pre-sales presentations with our sales guys, got a little bit involved with Ladd’s spend during that time and how things laid out on a website. Yeah. And so Yeah. I think that’s about the same time that I also had to pick a name. I had to go get a domain and go through all that. And I, and I picked this merchant stand cause I wanted it to have that business plant to it. In addition to being technology focused.
Speaker 0 | 48:56.555
So, um, it’s say the name one more time. Technology stand. I’m sorry.
Speaker 1 | 49:03.459
Merchant stand.
Speaker 0 | 49:04.500
Merchant. Sorry.
Speaker 1 | 49:06.321
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 49:08.383
I can actually write that down. Uh, and, uh, I think I missed it because I was trying to write this down. The topic again, or maybe you have like a description of it.
Speaker 1 | 49:22.976
I think at one time I put a tagline up there that it’s the cross section between business and technology. And I changed that now. If you look at it, it’ll say a business technology place. So again, it’s sort of that intersection of business and technology and how it comes together. So there’s a lot of, you know, it’s not a… It’s not a blog for programming and how do I program this and do constructs, but it’s more about processes, features, efficiencies, relationships in a technology setting within a business environment.
Speaker 0 | 50:10.578
Okay. Now, I didn’t know if you know this or not, but did you know that this is my very first interview of this podcast? You must, because you’re a longtime listener. You’ve never heard me on there before.
Speaker 1 | 50:29.721
Well, I wasn’t told that specifically. I didn’t pick up on it. Yes.
Speaker 0 | 50:34.403
You picked up on it, huh?
Speaker 1 | 50:36.464
I figured it out and picked up on it. So, yeah, congratulations.
Speaker 0 | 50:40.606
Well, thanks. How’d you pick up on it? Where am I screwing up?
Speaker 1 | 50:45.488
Well, just from listening before and knowing that Phil typically is the host. I wasn’t sure if it might be a panel section today, but between the two of you, or if you guys were going to start load sharing or how that might work. But as you’re the host today, I figured it out midstream.
Speaker 0 | 51:04.906
Okay. It wasn’t because I was screwing up. It was because Phil wasn’t on it.
Speaker 1 | 51:09.029
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 51:09.830
Okay. Well, thank you, sir. And for you and maybe the audience, my name is… Scott Smeester and I started a company four and a half years ago called CIO Mastermind. What we do is we serve, quote unquote, geeks with executive tendencies, help them be more effective in the C-suite as well, help them be more effective CIOs, CTOs, whatever the leadership position is. It doesn’t really matter the title as much as it matters if you’re reporting into the C-suite, CFO, president, that kind of thing. So, um… I am looking forward to looking at merchantstand.com. And I’ll just throw out there for the audience, for you as well, Bob, check out my blog, if you wouldn’t mind sometime, ciumastermind.com. I write kind of the intersection between technology leadership and the rest of the business as well. So not as much technology, but more about leadership. concepts, things, you know, I think that the CIO position is changing kind of rapidly. And so anyway, on that note, do you see yourself being CIO someday? Are you are you working toward that?
Speaker 1 | 52:37.312
For me, it’s never I’ve never really set goals around titles.
Speaker 0 | 52:41.334
Yep. Good.
Speaker 1 | 52:42.615
I guess it’s just never been a thing for me. I. I want to feel like I’m contributing at work to the overall betterment of the environment, helping the company be successful, helping people feel like this is a place where I want to work because I’m on a team that I want to be a part of. So yeah, I don’t get wrapped up in the titles. It’s more about, am I contributing? Am I enjoying the work?
Speaker 0 | 53:15.200
That’s fair enough. Yeah, good. the right answer for sure. Then let me ask you this, then what’s the CIO title? Not that you’re getting wrapped up in it, but what does a CIO do that maybe you’re not yet doing?
Speaker 1 | 53:36.775
Well, in the CIO position, you’ve got a mind towards what’s my tech stack, what’s my tech spend. how’s my team relating to the business are we enabling the business or are we an impediment right so you’re you’re looking at that vision for the future you’re you’re creating the roadmap but then from an operational perspective you’ve got to be able to go and create an environment that can execute on that roadmap. And yeah, I mean, I’d like to think that those are the things I’m doing today that I’m operating towards that. Again, titles are titles, right? At the end of the day, folks in an organization, they know who you are and the value that you bring and they see that and you’re involved and that’s what you’re really after.
Speaker 0 | 54:44.858
Gotcha. So we got just a few minutes left. One of the challenges that a lot of technology leaders are facing or have been facing lately is the talent gap. How have you dealt with it and what’s happening in the near future with it?
Speaker 1 | 55:14.749
Well, it is, I like to say. And I think about, again, kind of going back to that environment of do people want to work here or wherever you are? You know, do people want to work? Are they are they happy? Are they contributing? And so some of it is there’s always need and evolving needs for skill set. And can you create a place where people have the opportunity to learn and grow their skill set? Some of that skill set could be just your technology, right? It’s a new product. It’s a new platform. I need to go through the training. You know, do you make that available to them? In some cases, too, though, it could be changing roles to a new spot in the business so that you’re learning a different spot in the business, right? So you may be taking up a report analyst and moving them into a… software development position because they’ve got the aptitude to increase that and learn the constructs that they need to go over to a different platform. And so do you make that available to them? When you mentioned GAAP though, so I’m thinking internally about how do you almost like retention and how do you retain employees, but then there’s a sense of recruitment as well. And, you know, now you read and there’s a kind of this growing trend of, well, you don’t have to have folks that are 20 minutes from the office anymore. Right. So you should be able to recruit nationally and have remote employees and work from home. And I get that because I’ve done it. I’ve been a remote employee. My personal feeling is that you try to find a balance because, yeah, there’s pros and cons. And we see it every day. You know, there’s boards and people, some boards, people almost shouting at each other like, oh, you know, don’t. I’m always going to be work from home now because I don’t lose time with my family. I don’t have to commute and I don’t have to do this, that and the other. And then the other side is like, man, we sure miss the collaboration of having people in a room and being able to knock through problems.
Speaker 0 | 57:40.438
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 57:40.958
And get it out and the challenges of everybody being on Zoom and who’s got their camera on and who doesn’t. it just gets in the way. I think there’s a balance there that you can find where you try to pull the best out of both worlds for that. So from a talent gap perspective, I think my approach is be flexible enough to recognize that, yeah, you can recruit. I can’t like I’m sitting outside of Atlanta, Georgia, but if I need to recruit somebody in Denver, Colorado, I can go and do that. The technology exists today where I could do that and they could contribute to the team. But then also consider, but what does that mean if they are physically separated from us for extended periods of time? What are the implications of that?
Speaker 0 | 58:35.296
So then we’ll just end on that with one more question, though. The audience is listening. What if there were somebody that. you would love to see come into your organization, what kind of skill set, what kind of talents, what kind of person are you looking for?
Speaker 1 | 58:55.712
So my organization today, we’re pretty small and pretty lean. And we are one where people wear multiple hats. I like to think of it as not so much a skill set, but a mentality that’s required to be successful. And so your look, I… The most recent position that I hired, I looked for an individual that if I bring you in and I ask you to do something that I didn’t explicitly spell out on that job description, that’s okay. And that’s actually going to be engaging and they’re going to go after that like, yeah, I want that. I need somebody with that, just that can-do attitude. And I can go learn that or I can go make that or I can figure it out. versus, hey, that’s not, you had the job description, you wrote this little box around it, and what you’ve asked me to do is not in that job description, so I’m out of here. That’s, when you’re a smaller team, that doesn’t work.
Speaker 0 | 60:08.231
Yeah, you need somebody who’s got some initiative.
Speaker 1 | 60:11.952
That’s right, right. So it’s more of an attitude, and it’s more of self-starting, because… For me, at the end of the day, if you’re really a technologist and you’re in it, you can learn technology. We can go sit through training classes on anything and learn it. But do you have the attitude, do you have the approach, people approach to be successful with relationships and to be able to bridge gaps with our technology to solve problems?
Speaker 0 | 60:48.202
I think that’s a great way to just end this conversation here. What do you say?
Speaker 1 | 60:53.103
Sounds like a good one. I appreciate you having me on. It’s been enjoyable.
Speaker 0 | 60:56.564
I’m going to ask you to hang on just for a second, Bob, but for everyone else, I just want to thank Bob for just being on the show, opening up, answering questions, sometimes not easy, just fantastic answers too. Just, I personally learned a lot and I thank you, Bob. Appreciate that.
Speaker 1 | 61:16.709
Yep. Thank you.
