Speaker 0 | 00:01.020
Hello, sir.
Speaker 1 | 00:11.149
Hey, Roman. How are you?
Speaker 0 | 00:13.270
Nice to meet you.
Speaker 1 | 00:14.632
You too. How are you today?
Speaker 0 | 00:16.953
Good.
Speaker 1 | 00:18.054
Good. How did this come about?
Speaker 0 | 00:21.978
Actually, one of your guys had hit me on LinkedIn. Okay. And he’s like, well, do you want to talk to us? It’d be interesting, but I don’t know what subject we could talk about. Although I’ve got 30 years in, I’ve got a million different certifications, and it’s like, pick a subject, I’ll talk. And then we started just kind of trading a couple of ideas. I said, let’s just decide what works.
Speaker 1 | 00:45.855
All right.
Speaker 0 | 00:47.496
Well,
Speaker 1 | 00:47.756
good. What are you doing? Just give me a little.
Speaker 0 | 00:51.499
Sure.
Speaker 1 | 00:53.300
Idle and slow first.
Speaker 0 | 00:54.721
I am a CIO. I’m the CIO at… human, which if you watch TV, you see the Super Beats product. Yep. So we are the manufacturer of Super Beats. And we have the Super Grapes, and we now have the Tart Jerry. And so we’re sold D2C. We’re sold Amazon. We’re sold Walmart. We’re sold GNC. We’re number one superfood at GNC. Okay. So we’re kind of everywhere.
Speaker 1 | 01:24.475
Okay. Okay. So we’re not. recording yet or at least officially. I wanted to get into that. What are you comfortable with talking about with what you do in your job? Are you cool with that talking about?
Speaker 0 | 01:38.786
I’m actually very comfortable. I’m very comfortable with obviously not sharing secrets.
Speaker 1 | 01:46.031
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 01:47.052
But at the same time, I’m very comfortable with sharing the fact that, and it’s kind of an interesting story is I came into the business. And I’ve been in a lot of businesses where I’ve walked in and the technology part of the business was either not where it needed to be or we’ve gone through. And I’ll be careful how I share it, but I used to be part of Cellucor, which is C4 energy drinks and all of that. And essentially, I walked in the door, there were two servers. And they’re like, here’s technology. Who is it? Well, it’s one guy and he can barely fix the copier. And then all of a sudden it’s create our technology world. And so I am very experienced at walking into a business and bringing it forward quickly. I’ve been here since February. And so, and again, we’re off the record. So I’ve been here since February and essentially I walked in in the first week. I said, okay. One, we have to restructure the organization because you guys have people all over the place and nobody talks to each other. Number two, I need to hire eight people and I need that immediately. And number three, I need to break this into three teams. I need a data team, an ERP team. I need an e-commerce team. I need this working with this and all this. We essentially built that in the past four months. And for me, I think it’s all about change management, leadership. and simplification.
Speaker 1 | 03:29.207
See, I don’t want any of that to be off the record. Let’s get started. How about we just get started? Is that cool with you?
Speaker 0 | 03:36.792
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 | 03:41.135
By the way, I don’t know if you know anything about me at all. We are coming together about… You know what? It’s going to be a surprise. It’s going to be fun.
Speaker 0 | 03:52.723
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 03:53.484
All right. So ding, ding, ding. Here we go. Hey, everyone. This is Scott Smeester. This is like my third podcast and I’m with Roman Bolkovich. Am I pronouncing that right?
Speaker 0 | 04:06.567
Bolkovich is fine. Bolkovich?
Speaker 1 | 04:08.368
Okay. So to let the audience in know what’s happening. So Roman and I haven’t met yet today, but we have a ton to talk about because he just told me that he’s a CIO of a company. And the people who are listening might know that I am the founding member and CEO of CIO Mastermind is the name of the company. And we serve CIOs, CTOs, whatever the title is, if they’re in the C-suite. We work with geeks with executive tendencies to help them become more effective in what they do, deliver better with less friction. So that’s my commercial. But we’re here for Dissecting IT Nerds. I’m sure Roman is, because I think you told me about, you started to go into some of the details, but all right. So we’re going to start. Roman, tell us about you and your company and what you do. I gave it away though a little bit. You’re a CIO, but anyway.
Speaker 0 | 05:18.323
So yes, I’m a CIO. I jokingly sometimes say C-level executives are people who go from meeting to meeting and sometimes wonder why they’re there.
Speaker 1 | 05:28.792
And.
Speaker 0 | 05:29.933
It’s, I came from tech. I’ve been in tech my entire life and I am the nerd who made it into the C-suite. So I’m just as comfortable being the guy on the keyboard programming something or running a worldwide network or chasing packets around the network as I am the guy who’s sitting in the C-suite. So for me, I run a team. I have… a data team, I have an ERP team, I have an e-commerce team, I’ve put together A players. And the idea is, to me, everything we do lives around two things, execution and quality. And that’s it. Did I execute and did I deliver quality? Because if I didn’t do one of those two things, essentially I have failed.
Speaker 1 | 06:23.430
Right.
Speaker 0 | 06:25.171
So that is… Yeah. At my core, I believe the C-level is a world where you have to simplify things as you explain them and try to communicate to the other C-level something that’s highly technical and overly confusing sometimes. But at the same time, how do I put that in the language you understand?
Speaker 1 | 06:48.624
And how do you do that?
Speaker 0 | 06:51.217
I use a lot of, and people laugh and I’ve heard them called Romanisms and I’ve heard them called a lot of things, but I try to relate it back to everyone understands certain things, right? Just recently, I was having a conversation with one of the VPs and I was trying to explain to her, you know, hey, we’re doing this process right now. As long as we’re doing this process, let’s touch a few other things up while we’re there. And she’s looking at me like, what are you speaking of? And so I came at her with, Hey, I got the car in the shop right now. We’re changing the oil. I want to add a couple of spark plugs while I’m there. And that’s that simplification, right? I try not to talk in technical terms when I’m talking to, and I use the term levelingly, but the business, I try not to use technical terms and I try to bring it into a level they’ll understand.
Speaker 1 | 07:45.717
Okay, why?
Speaker 0 | 07:47.819
Because I think… whether it be change management, whether it be just daily interactions, right?
Speaker 1 | 07:56.041
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 07:57.442
If you don’t understand what I’m saying, number one, you’re not listening. And number two, I walk away and I effectively have done nothing by telling you what I told you. So how do I translate it into a language that you understand? And so I jokingly say this all the time, but it’s very true. I was… God gave me two gifts. One was humor and one was sarcasm. And I try to use both of them daily. And so using the joke or the sarcasm to get you there puts people at ease. When a person’s put at ease, then they tend to communicate better.
Speaker 1 | 08:38.171
Gotcha. Gotcha. What has been, so you’ve been doing this as CIO, right? For since February?
Speaker 0 | 08:48.665
I started here in February, yes. And prior to this, I’ve always been either in the VP suite or the C suite for many years.
Speaker 1 | 08:58.667
What’s one person that you’re thinking of off the top of your head that’s really important to you as a CIO from your team?
Speaker 0 | 09:08.130
As far as delivery or…
Speaker 1 | 09:11.371
Delivery, you know, who’s helping you kind of… Be the CEO. Who are you looking for, I should say? What kind of gap are you looking to fill? Let’s just go that direction.
Speaker 0 | 09:27.738
So I think this holds true in almost all of the C-suite, right? You’re always going to have that one person that’s your go-to person. And depending on what you’re doing, we tend to handle a million requests coming at the same time, right? Any person who’s in a CIO position can… easily attest to. I bring up my Jira board and I’ve got 400 tickets sitting there. So To me, we brought in project management recently, and I specifically brought in project management and added it to the technology team, but not as a go run my scrum board, as a chase the rest of the company and help me coordinate with their schedules, their understanding. And so it’s a slightly different version of project management. It’s more of a… communications platform, I guess. It’s a little spin on it. And then the other person you reach for all the time is business systems analysts, because there’s always a question. It always has to be answered and you need A players.
Speaker 1 | 10:36.203
Okay. What are you excited about from technology? What are you excited about being able to deliver soon or someday?
Speaker 0 | 10:50.853
Okay, so I actually, this is something I’ve done personally, and I’m not sure how many other people do it, but this is the pro tip, right? Everyone talks about KPIs, which is great, but to me, I call it KPIs of KPIs. And what that is, is I’m your math teacher, show me your work. If you want to calculate what your stick rate is, if you want to calculate your AOV, if you want to calculate… Pfft. inventory, it doesn’t matter what you’re going to calculate, right? It’s built off of calculations. The problem is, is if you think about your data streams and having, probably have 30 separate channels coming in, right? How do I look for the needle in the haystack that’s the problem or the error that I’m not seeing in log files don’t always pick it up. So what you wind up doing is I build. a million different queries that then become the equivalent of a knock dashboard that I can literally look at and say, if it breaks the tolerance here, it becomes a red number. And immediately I can look, there’s a hundred numbers on the screen. Three are green or three are red and the rest are green. I go, there’s your problem. It’s right there. Let’s go look at it. And before even the business knows something happened, I’ve delivered on fixing it. And so to me, that’s as proactive as I can possibly be.
Speaker 1 | 12:25.820
Okay.
Speaker 0 | 12:27.360
So what am I excited about in that? I’m excited by the fact that I don’t want to be the guy, let’s face it, nobody ever calls tech support and says, my computer works great. They call you because there’s a problem. So I’m always trying to be ahead of the problem. And then I’m building quite the modern data stack right now. everything from segment to snowflake to really getting into how is a modern data stack laid out? How do I dimensionally model things so that almost any question that can be asked of me by the business, I can deliver on. And then if you take the KPIs of KPIs and add that on top, I can not only do that, but I can tell you at this point in time, I’m at 99.6% data integrity. So that I can report both, believe me, and here’s your answer.
Speaker 1 | 13:27.687
Gotcha. Okay. Do you have the same type of thing? I’m just curious if you have the same type of thing for your CEO.
Speaker 0 | 13:35.169
I do. I have executive dashboards. And actually, my KPIs of KPIs is something that I have shared with him and asked him to just look at it and say, as you can tell, we’re monitoring things.
Speaker 1 | 13:47.572
Right. Okay. So how did you, you know, I’m kind of curious your background. Did you come from software? Did you come from network? Did you come from some other, well, sales? Where’s your background?
Speaker 0 | 14:07.302
My background is yes. Okay. I left, and this is the 32nd view of my life, right? But I left high school, went directly to the Marine Corps. And in the Marine Corps, I was aircraft firefighting and rescue. So I had nothing to do with computer. Went from there into my family told me I had to be a machinist because that’s what my family was. And I did that. And computers were my hobby. And this is late 80s. So as a hobby, it was a bunch of a hobby back then. Anyways, I… I started to really get interested in them. So I actually… At one point, I opened my own business. At one point, I was writing interactive voice response. My own business was retail sales of computers to home users. I was an internet provider in the early 90s. And then I am an obsessive learner. I want to know everything. So I went out and did everything from CCNA to MCSEs to went down to Red Hat, got training down there. interactive voice response, AT&T, old telephone systems, Nortel, and then went into programming at .NET and ASP and built, I built an entire ERP system and we started with a blank piece of paper. And then I got interested in, so then I went to GDPR training and now I’m a CISSP and I did Cisco training. And it’s, to me, it’s not… I don’t think you can be a programmer unless you understand the network. So if you don’t know the OSI model, I teach my programmers the OSI model.
Speaker 1 | 15:58.842
OSI means?
Speaker 0 | 16:02.123
You’re going to ask me that, right? OSI model.
Speaker 1 | 16:04.644
OSI, man.
Speaker 0 | 16:06.284
Seriously?
Speaker 1 | 16:07.385
Yeah. No. Well, I’m not a CIO anymore. And at best, no, I was at CTO, more like it. So I have not heard of OSI.
Speaker 0 | 16:18.664
Okay, so this is something that I’ve, yeah, it’s been around forever. Open systems interconnection model. Okay, it’s a conceptual framework. When you talk about layer one, that is, I call tech support and say, and they say, is it plugged in? That’s literally layer one.
Speaker 1 | 16:37.951
Okay.
Speaker 0 | 16:38.472
And then you ever hear of layer two routing, layer three routing? What they’re talking about is the seven layers of the model. And the funny part is, is. if you’re a programmer, you’re making the assumption that everything around you is working and you’re forgetting that sometimes it doesn’t. So there has to be a little bit of a network guy located in the programmer and there has to be a little bit of a programmer located in the network guy. Otherwise, are you really being effective in developing what you’re doing?
Speaker 1 | 17:10.262
So you know what comes into my head here is you’re by far the most technical CIO I’ve talked to ever.
Speaker 0 | 17:20.746
It sounds like you’ve talked to three.
Speaker 1 | 17:25.049
Well, the point is that they come from programming but they didn’t dive that deep. And I’m a geek with executive tendencies. That’s what I call myself. And I have a degree in civil engineering. I’ve been programming since I was a kid. I started with the Commodore 64. But So here’s what I know about, but here’s what’s happened. I’ve come along, I’ve come along and gone into, well, likewise, lots of small businesses around the internet, in technology, selling to B2B space. I had to learn how to grow a business, how to grow a B2B tech business, selling into mid-market companies, working with a lot of CEOs. I always sell to CEOs and CFOs anyway. Uh, where was I going with that? I don’t know. Other than the fact that no, yes, I do. Um, the CIO that I know now, the people that I talk to now would say, well, gosh, you sound a little bit more into you too, into the, uh, the, the, the weeds when it comes to, you know, you’re being, you should be more of a CIO. You know what I’m saying?
Speaker 0 | 18:39.505
Okay. So now, but I’ll answer that with, I agree with you. Yes, I can go down in the weeds. Do I do it every day? No, but I have a foundation.
Speaker 1 | 18:51.501
Yes.
Speaker 0 | 18:53.121
And I think what it is, is just I’ve attended many board meetings. I do board presentations. I do all the C-suite things that I am supposed to do. But I feel like what makes me successful is I have a passion for what I do. I go home and I want to read about the latest thing that’s going on. And while I apply that in my business and I try to also be that resource that if somebody needs help, they can come to me. And I do think that brings with it some credibility when I’m talking to a CEO or I’m talking to another CIO. It brings with credibility that I can go both directions. You want to go into a PowerPoint presentation and let’s discuss the nuances of the budget and where we’re going to classify things in the GL. I’m perfectly fine with doing that.
Speaker 1 | 19:54.409
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 0 | 19:55.558
But at the same time, if you ask me a question, I don’t have to pick up the phone and call a gardener or someone else to get advice on it. I can actually analyze that myself. Okay. So it’s a unique world. And part of it is, I told you, I’m a geek that went to the C-suite. I literally am a geek who I love. And I don’t get enough keyboard time sometimes. I really want my keyboard time. And I don’t really get that. I do find myself looking at what other people did. And I think the hardest thing in my life was trusting the people I hired because I keep in the back of my head saying, but I could go do it this way. And I have to say, no, I can’t do that. My job is to lead. My job is to encourage. And honestly, my team, the team I have here especially, I had one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever had in my life. And it happened over the past couple of years. couple of months. I walked in here. We said we needed to hire a number of people. I picked up the phone and called people who I’ve worked with at my previous couple of companies, said, I need you. And I was looking to hire eight people. Five of those people were people I used to work with. I picked up the phone and called them. They quit their jobs immediately and came to work. And I’m telling you, we did this within two weeks. And they literally said, I’ve been at my job for 30 days. I said, I need you. They said, okay. And they dropped what they were doing and came.
Speaker 1 | 21:26.995
Why do you suppose they did that? How did you get to that point, Roman?
Speaker 0 | 21:33.116
I think as a leader, I think there’s some important principles that are taught. And I lean back to the Marine Corps. There’s Marine Corps leadership principles. But think of it as servant leadership generally last, right? As a leader, my job is to support you and to… So many people are all about their own position and they forget that if I hire really smart people and I teach them to be leaders, I become successful. And it’s not threatening my job. What it’s doing is helping me to perform at a new level.
Speaker 1 | 22:14.226
Okay.
Speaker 0 | 22:15.767
And so I try to empower. and grow the people around me, teach them. And part of my technical background, right? I said, I teach all my programmers the OSI model because they never learned it in school. I think it’s important. It’s something I teach along the way. Doesn’t mean that they’re, it gives them a different perspective on what they’re doing.
Speaker 1 | 22:39.063
Okay. So what I’m hearing you say in all of this, or what you might want to be saying to the people listening who are non-CIOs, CTOs is, hey, you can be a leader and still have technology as your passion.
Speaker 0 | 22:58.345
Yeah. And I also believe that leadership doesn’t go from me to the person below me. I, first of all, never refer to them as working for me. I always refer to them as my team. Right.
Speaker 1 | 23:14.630
Well, I’m talking about other people and other guys. No,
Speaker 0 | 23:18.752
but I’m saying the same guy who’s sitting here, who’s an IT manager right now and wants to be a director, leadership goes both directions. You have to lead up also. And that is something people forget. So the communication, that’s how you get there. If you want to get to that higher level, number one, be the top performer, be the right hand man that they go to. And number two, show them you’re capable of that leadership first, and then they will entrust you with more, which will bring you to that next level.
Speaker 1 | 23:55.960
Okay. So expand a little bit on that. Tell me then. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 24:03.764
So I have met very few leaders in my life, and I guess there’s two classifications, right? There’s a boss and there’s a leader. I think those are two different things. but I’ve met very few leaders in my life or no leaders in my life that are not open to, hey, here’s a problem. Here’s my suggestion for the solution. Now, does that mean that you’re going to do what I’ve asked you to do? No. It just means that I’m showing you I’m capable of walking in the door. Don’t ever bring me a problem without bringing me a solution, right? You may not be right. I’m not. I’m not right. I walk in the door and I tell my CEO I want to do this and he may turn around and say, no, I have to accept that he has a different view of the business than I do. So at that point, maybe. I might push back a little bit, but at the same time, I have to do my job. The general says do it, I do it. But lead your leaders. Teach your leaders. And work with them so they understand, I don’t have the same view as the programmer. He’s worried about doing a for-each loop. He’s worried about how do I make this appear on the screen. And I don’t see that. I may be asking him to do something he physically can’t do. So don’t walk up and just say, I can’t do it. Instead, walk up and say, hey, I can’t do it. This is why. Here’s a suggestion of how we can do something that would come with the same outcome.
Speaker 1 | 25:37.828
Okay.
Speaker 0 | 25:38.869
And I think that helps. I think that’ll help people a lot to sort of get there. I worked my way up. I, you know, I guess if you asked me, how did I get there? I think I’d tell you the same answer I’d tell you if you asked me, how do you ride a motorcycle? It’s like you develop these small habits. I never walk in without a solution. You develop all these little things. Eventually, you absolutely forget that you’re balancing a bike and you’re moving the handlebars and you’re doing all these things. It just becomes part of how you do things, right?
Speaker 1 | 26:15.766
Gotcha. Gotcha. So, Dan, let’s switch it up. a little bit and talk let’s go down the technology side of things what if you could be getting your hands dirty in something new programming whatever geek it’s got to be geek what would it be what would you be doing this afternoon if you had
Speaker 0 | 26:44.983
I am so intrigued by two things right now and both of which I am completely learning. I understand the concepts, but don’t necessarily, I can log into one of them and I don’t know how to use it yet. And we’re using a product, and I’m not endorsing products, right? But we’re using a product called Segment, which is a customer data. Essentially think of it as a huge log file that logs every possible thing that happens with that customer. We all know iOS update hit and sort of crashed half the world. And if it didn’t crash half the world, it’s the way we blame everything that crashed in half the world. Yeah, yeah. So this gets around it because now I’m getting away from that bookie and all the other things, and I’m getting into that first-party data and following that person through. And now I’m starting to look at, well, okay, if I have this log file about the person, how do I… bring that back through a machine learning AI platform and then bring it together with other data sources and identify that person so that I can then bring that person off to whatever the website or a quiz or whatever we’re going to be doing at the time and know who the person is and personalize their experience. I think internet sales, e-commerce in general is Essentially, you have a shopping mall out there, right? There’s 500 million stores. They all sell the same thing you do. And now you have to be unique. The key to the internet commerce side of it is speaking to the customer in the voice that they’re looking to be spoken to at the time they show up. And that’s, I think, the magic nut that has to happen. And so as I learn more about you, I kind of can… profile you into, let’s say, a profile of what I believe that person’s going to be, statistically, that tells me what are the things you’re going to like. If I know that, I can even go as subtle as, I used to work for a company that had a product that was for men, and women essentially couldn’t use it. And so when I detected you were a woman on my website, I would then refer to it as your partner. And I would change copy and text. Right. So, I mean, that’s simple stuff. Everybody’s doing it, right? But do you really think about what you have behind it that’s doing it? That just intrigues me. If I could play with something right now, I would take that to the maximum limit.
Speaker 1 | 29:36.071
So, I know what you’re talking about, this holy grail thing of… It sounds manipulative, though. And there’s a lot of pushback on that, you know? But I get it.
Speaker 0 | 29:53.327
Is it really manipulative, though? Because, number one, I consider it manipulative if I take your data and I sell it to somebody. If I’m only trying to present you a good experience on a website, your option is you don’t have to go to the website. If I’m not using your data for any other company, which I don’t do, I don’t sell data, I don’t trade data, I don’t do that. If I’m only trying to provide you a better experience…
Speaker 1 | 30:20.763
Yeah, no, that makes sense.
Speaker 0 | 30:22.584
That, to me, is okay. And… I am doing it in trying to service you. Now, if I was doing that to get your information and say, Scott, I, I, okay, I know you do a podcast. I’m going to go sell you to every podcast service out there. That’s a whole different world. You’re right. I agree. And, and I, my private data is my private data. I don’t want to share it with them. But then I also think there’s some responsibility, even on your part. or my part, that I always kind of joke with people and say, don’t put it on the internet unless you’d want your grandmother to see it.
Speaker 1 | 31:06.028
Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it doesn’t sound like there’s any, you know, conflicts being, you know, crossed or anything like that. It doesn’t, maybe it’s not manipulative. Maybe that’s not the word I’m thinking of, but some people might say it’s a little bit creepy, you know, because you go to… websites, or you mention a bird feeder, you know, you mention it, you talk about it with your wife, and then all of a sudden on social media, you’re seeing ads for bird feeders.
Speaker 0 | 31:39.573
Yeah. Now that stuff’s creepy because what you’re doing is I’m talking about, I’m talking a different scenario of a company trying to service a customer. When you start getting into your crossing across platforms and That’s that data sale. And that, to be honest, unless you place an order with me and I have your information from the order, which legitimately and legal I have a right to have that information, but I don’t use it. You’re an anonymous ID string to me. And that’s all you are. I just know that your string came back. I don’t really care as much who you are. I’m trying to produce you a better experience. Now, when you take it to the next level and you’re trying to really figure out my entire life, I think that’s a different story. I think there’s an ethical way to collect data and use it. And I think there’s people who get into that gray area, right? And that’s where I think it gets kind of weird.
Speaker 1 | 32:46.572
Okay. What concerns you with technology?
Speaker 0 | 32:55.986
To be honest, it’s actually, I think my biggest concerns in technology live in the fact that there is non-ethical people out there that are doing some of the things that you just mentioned. I think my other concern in technology is sometimes I think we’re always looking for something new. And sometimes there’s a difference between I want my company to be at the leading edge. And I don’t want my company to be at the bleeding edge. So I tend to be that person that does research, looks at things, understands them. And I try not to jump too far into the, hey, this is the new thing that just came out. Think about years ago, we had cell phones. They would last for quite a long time, right? We even had interchangeable batteries on them. Now, it’s once every six to eight months or a year, they’re like eligible for a new phone, want to buy it. But my other phone’s still working. But you need this. Why do I need that? I guess that’s kind of the side of technology that while you’re developing new things, are we really developing anything that new?
Speaker 1 | 34:16.456
That’s a good question.
Speaker 0 | 34:19.058
I have a saying I tell people a lot of times that I keep saying there are zeros and there are ones until somebody invents a 0.5. I’m pretty sure we haven’t had anything new in computers.
Speaker 1 | 34:29.145
Yeah, indeed. Indeed. So, OK, so what’s that new then? I want to know what’s that new for like. All right. Let’s go 10 years ahead. Are we still tight? Are we still got people in offices typing, typing away? Moving data over here to invoice somebody over here. They’re taking this email that was approved by a CEO over here, typing crap in.
Speaker 0 | 35:06.296
Do you ever really think that business process would go away? I’m unsure that it would. Even if we, let’s pretend we just built the perfect AI system, right? And we are now sitting in offices with robots.
Speaker 1 | 35:20.824
Well, do you ever read Bill Gates’ book? business at the speed of thought.
Speaker 0 | 35:27.766
I may have.
Speaker 1 | 35:28.907
I was back in the 90s and literally, well, I couldn’t read the whole thing. I don’t know why, but I got the point, business at the speed of thought. Literally, he was foreshadowing. This was way back, man. He’s like, yeah, someday the ultimate way of doing this is just, you’re going to be able to just think of something and have it done. Like, for me, what I’d like to do is just be able to say, send, no, it’d even be better. I’d be like, tell the, I’d like my CIOs to understand that they should do this or that, or members or clients. And that’s it. And I don’t have to go compose an email. I don’t have to create a video. I don’t have to do all that. And I don’t have to worry about distribution, you know? It’ll be seen.
Speaker 0 | 36:26.003
If you said I was creepy.
Speaker 1 | 36:29.785
But that’s where it is going.
Speaker 0 | 36:31.986
Right. The thing is, so at some point, right, this magic machine we’re going to create that’s going to do the things Scott just said, doesn’t that scare you to death that that could… So for… for everything that becomes that powerful, there’s an evil side to it. Oh, sure.
Speaker 1 | 36:57.682
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 36:59.243
And so I’m unsure if humans will allow that to happen at that point. We are inherently lazy, so we don’t want to type the email. We want to use the voice chat. Think about it. Years ago, we used to sit and type to each other. Now we have a tendency to hit the little microphone and talk into our phone. But I’m unsure that we’d ever get to the point where everything would sort of happen on its own. And if thought control is available, while I think that’s a cool thing, I’d be worried about the fact…
Speaker 1 | 37:35.893
Thought control. We’re not talking thought control. We’re talking about information.
Speaker 0 | 37:40.915
It is thought control. You’re thinking it and the computer’s doing it, right?
Speaker 1 | 37:46.736
Oh, well, yeah, if you go that far. I was talking really about verbal commands. I don’t even see that be done, but no, but, but, but thoughts are right thereafter. In fact, I’d rather have incoming messages done that way through my thoughts, like, you know, have like a, a queue of things. Okay. You can handle, you can process so much more information if it was coming into your mind in that fashion, in a queue, as opposed to go from email to. TV to monitor to freaking this device, that device, every other stinking device, you know, through neural, neural programming.
Speaker 0 | 38:31.858
And what time do you have? And at what point in that time do you have scalp time where in neural programming?
Speaker 1 | 38:39.764
Well, when do you have it anyway? You really don’t. I mean,
Speaker 0 | 38:43.046
I go cut my grass.
Speaker 1 | 38:44.827
Well, yeah, that’s what I’m saying. It still would be like that. Well, I heck. While you’re cutting your grass, instead of cutting your grass, maybe you take care of that one message you got to send out. But now that you’re doing neural, it’s so fast. And you’re back to your own. You’re back to cutting your grass. You don’t have to think about it. You’re thinking about, buy that Porsche for me.
Speaker 0 | 39:09.619
Hey, Alexis, send me a Porsche. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 39:12.902
I don’t have to do anything anymore. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 39:16.906
You know,
Speaker 1 | 39:17.246
I look at it. I think it’s funny because it’d be so funny. Like if we were to really go back in time and you video in this, imagine you got, we brought our phone back and we go back in time into the eighties. We’re like in the future, your job, literally you’re going to get paid a ton of money to push buttons.
Speaker 0 | 39:43.880
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 39:44.921
That’s all you do. You push buttons. People will be like, sign me up, man. I want that. Now everything is pushing buttons and we’re complaining about it.
Speaker 0 | 39:55.790
Yeah, I guess I see that, at least in my own head and in my own belief, I see there’s a line somewhere, right? And that line lives, and it’s different for every person, right? But there’s a certain line. I’m a technology guy. I’m an absolute geek. I am a nerd, right? Yeah. I do not have. and Alexa at my house. And I don’t have a voice control at my house. And part of this is because I know so much about it that it actually scares me to put it in. But at the same time, it excites me, the technology behind it. And so it’s this weird, and I guess I’m kind of weird in that, but I have this weird kind of, I have certain time, I have certain places in my life that I don’t want technology. I ride a Harley Davidson that has A air-cooled engine, I know it has chips in it, but it isn’t nearly as sophisticated as a lot of the things that exist. And to me, those are my, I’m shutting off the technology world time and I’m doing this, the cutting my grass. And so I think where do we go in 10 years? If you ask that question 10 years ago and you looked at… day, how much has really changed?
Speaker 1 | 41:28.164
That’s a great question. That’s for sure.
Speaker 0 | 41:30.406
You had a Toyota Prius at the time, right? Which was a hybrid. You have a Tesla now. We’ve improved it, but have we really changed anything? So I don’t know that we’ve changed that much. We had a BlackBerry. I remember my first color BlackBerry. I thought it was the greatest thing ever, right? But that was… more than 10 years ago. Now I have a smartphone. It’s faster. It does a little more, but have we changed? So in 10 years from now, how much will we have changed? Is it called Moore’s law where you talk about how computers exponentially grow? I wonder how far they’ll exponentially grow unless you get into things like quantum computing. Well, essentially what’s coming? quantum computing. It’s nothing more than zeros or ones who are going significantly faster now. So it allows you to do more. But did we really change? I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 42:36.553
I think that there’s two things that are being overlooked that still has big, big days ahead. VR, somewhere along the line. I don’t know. And the other one is blockchain. And I know crypto is huge, obviously, but I mean, using blockchain really the way it was meant to be used.
Speaker 0 | 43:04.623
Yeah, blockchain, I’m on board with you because I think that right there is unlocking a different version. It’s still essentially data, right? But it’s a different version of it. It’s allowing us to… put more information together in a different format and that right there unlocks additional things in the same way that we talk about you know 10 years ago we had a toyota prius and it was an engine that essentially generated for a thing or for an electric motor and a battery and now you’ve got like a tesla which is sort of the battery technology has moved so far that we were able to do it Blockchain isn’t terribly different. It’s a different storage. It’s a different way of doing it. It’s a dispersed pattern versus the storage model, I guess. Maybe I’m not explaining it right.
Speaker 1 | 44:04.240
What would be interesting is upload your DNA to the blockchain, and then someday they’ll be able to recreate you. Because the blockchains just keep going and going and going.
Speaker 0 | 44:21.977
Yeah. Question is, would you really want to be recreated? In my luck, what they do is they’d actually recreate me with my 18-year-old income at 50 years old. Oh, that’s good. Be like, oh, glitch.
Speaker 1 | 44:36.547
Yeah, yeah. All right. So what haven’t I asked you yet, Roman?
Speaker 0 | 44:44.392
I don’t know. I think. I think you’re dealing with a lot of people who want to get into the C-suite, right? And I’m sorry,
Speaker 1 | 44:55.548
because literally I’m with CIO mastermind and we work with CIOs. OK. Yeah. Geeks, geeks with executive tendencies like me. You could say the same about you. That’s for sure. Yeah. And so we do. But actually, I mean, we serve non C. You know, the title doesn’t really matter that much. It depends. It has to be done in the C-suite. Work has to you know, you have to be working in technology in the C-suite.
Speaker 0 | 45:23.399
So I guess. To me, I believe you can’t forget where you came from. And you have to help the people around you. And so I very much believe in the empowerment of the employees, the working with the employees, making sure that they succeed in their career. Because then… That helps me succeed in my career, right? Because if you’re a CIO sitting in an office doing some wonderful things on your whiteboard, but if your team is the people who come in and work eight hours a day and go home, right?
Speaker 1 | 46:09.700
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 46:10.640
You are not going to be successful. You just won’t be because you don’t have the team behind you. We live in a 24-hour environment. We are the 7-Eleven of executives. Right? Yeah. You can’t tell me there’s not a CIO out there that hasn’t been called at 10 o’clock at night because there’s an emergency. The difference between now and when we were down farther in the chain is the phone call doesn’t happen very often. But it still happens from time to time.
Speaker 1 | 46:39.041
Right, right.
Speaker 0 | 46:40.522
And so having the team that is, we had an issue, actually not terribly long ago, we had an issue and we used Teams, right? We literally had the entire team clicked video phone call on Teams. And within a matter of a couple of minutes, the entire team was lit up at like 10 o’clock at night.
Speaker 1 | 47:03.835
Gotcha.
Speaker 0 | 47:04.535
Myself included. Wow. Because those are dedicated people who if I guess I live my life, I believe in three levels of priority. And I hold this true in a lot of projects that we do. Number one, if the customer can see it, it’s an emergency, period. Right. Okay. There is no two ways about it. If the customer can see it, it is top priority. I don’t care what else I’m doing. Number two, does it affect revenue? If it affects revenue, but the customer can’t see it, it’s still a priority, but it’s not blazing emergency.
Speaker 1 | 47:39.732
Yeah, that’s good.
Speaker 0 | 47:41.613
And then the third one is, and this happens all the time, right? The I want something to do my job button. I want to have this. I need that. I want this fancy piece of software for this. I want to do this. That’s always that third priority. If I have something affecting my customer or my revenue, you can bring me that.
Speaker 1 | 48:02.723
Yeah. But how do you prioritize? And I want to correct something here real quick. We are on Dissecting IT Nerds podcast. So most of the listeners are. Not necessarily CIOs, a lot of IT directors and things like that. I thought you were asking me about my… No,
Speaker 0 | 48:28.008
I was just meaning in general when you’re talking to the audience, right? Because if I was a guy who was a director right now, I’d be watching this because I’d want to learn about it.
Speaker 1 | 48:38.492
Yeah, right.
Speaker 0 | 48:39.232
That wasn’t a paid plug, by the way.
Speaker 1 | 48:43.474
Yeah, no, well, no, exactly. So as you were saying… Keep expanding on what you were just saying, man.
Speaker 0 | 48:52.182
Okay, so essentially, prioritization is everything in IT because you’re dealing with a lot of things coming at you at the same time. And so what you have to do is you have to deal with prioritization and you have to deal with simplification. Somebody brings you a problem. My first question almost every time is going to be, does this affect the customer? Because if it does… Oh, yeah. We need to move.
Speaker 1 | 49:20.820
Of course, of course.
Speaker 0 | 49:22.261
Is it affecting the revenue?
Speaker 1 | 49:23.982
And the revenue, another high priority thing,
Speaker 0 | 49:26.523
obviously.
Speaker 1 | 49:27.703
How do you prioritize the other things that I want?
Speaker 0 | 49:31.925
Well, that’s where the simplification comes in, right? So I want sometimes is affecting the customer and you’re not thinking through it. And so let’s talk about, you know, I don’t know, maybe it’s a customer service problem. And in fact. Effectively, the customer service agent might be on the phone with the person for five minutes instead of two. I’m affecting the customer. And then the other thing is, how do I bring that return on investment to the business? Does it make sense for me to spend? $20,000 to build Axe when essentially it’s only costing me $500 a month? Sometimes the answer is no. There’s no return on investment for this. And sometimes that’s a hard pill to swallow because you’re doing it every day. So you believe that’s something that has to happen. And sometimes you just have to say no. But explaining it in a… bigger picture so the person understands it. I’m a big advocate for steering committees. I love the fact that you can build a steering committee. I do this. I’ve done this a number of times where I’ll bring all the stakeholders in and then let’s talk about the project. And this guy’s going, well, this is critical. Maybe he’s in operations. And the guy over in finance goes, and I actually just had this happen recently. The guy was screaming how critical this project was, and it was 300 hours, and it was a lot of money. And the finance guy looked at him and said, but essentially, I fixed that in a general ledger in two hours a month. And the other guy just go, but, but, but. And we’re like, so return on investment’s a long time on that one. And then he realized that what he was complaining about, although it seemed important to him, it wasn’t for the rest of the business. And we had to agree, but. Being in a steering committee, you can do that. Everybody can agree that, yeah, we understand that we’re going to put that on the back burner. Maybe we’re going to adjust a couple pieces around it, but we’re not going to do the whole thing. And it’s understanding and it’s communication, right? If your customer, and I refer to customers as being internal people or external people, but if my customer is operations and they don’t understand. why I’m doing something, then I’ve failed at my job.
Speaker 1 | 51:59.512
Okay. How do you think industry is going to change then in the future? If technology doesn’t change in the next 10 years, how will industry, how will jobs change in the next 10 years?
Speaker 0 | 52:11.699
I think we have to adapt to it, right? Hybrid work environment, obviously. I don’t think, I think COVID took what was the… Work at home was starting to come into, it was beyond its infancy, but it was starting to come about. And I think what COVID did was hyper-focus it the wrong direction. And maybe wrong is the wrong word, but hyper-focus it in the direction of everybody has to work from home now, right? Literally, there was a study out there that people bought less pants during COVID. Why? Because nobody saw them. And so… I think it hyper-focused it in that direction. But let’s face it, nowadays, yes, I have a very diverse company. I have a very diverse team. I have remote workers and I have on-site workers. There are things you can’t overcome in remote work. Like, over here, somebody talks about something and I walk over and all of a sudden you find out, wait a minute, there’s a problem over here. So there’s certain things that are hard to overcome. I think the workforce will be in more of a hybrid environment. Okay. So work a couple days a week in the office and then the rest at home. I think businesses have to adapt to people like Amazon who showed up and said, yeah, I know you want it. Guess what? You can have it in 45 minutes. And so how do we handle that? Because traditional business model says you order it. I send it to the warehouse, the warehouse ships it. How do you handle that and handle that need for instant gratification? And then the other thing is, is I do think our thinking has changed. We’ve gotten away from, I buy a product because it is of use to me. I’ve now started to buy a product because I believe in it. And the belief in it, how many people advertise now? Well, we are net neutral. Or we, you know, we’re kind of neutral. I’ve seen that develop in marketing and I’m not a marketing guy. Okay. Probably very far from one as far as creative goes. But have you noticed that, that, that people have stopped, they stopped advertising. Hey, this is our product and this is the benefit and this is why you want to buy this product. And they’ve gone to, this is our product. This is the benefit. And this is why you believe in us. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 54:50.691
That’s important, isn’t it? It’s a brand. That’s brand.
Speaker 0 | 54:54.816
Right. Right. But it’s become… emphasized more. So if you talk about how does business develop, how does technology develop, how does the workplace develop? I would argue that right now, and I had this conversation with somebody just recently, I would argue right now that marketing people have become data people. They always were marketing, but now they’re becoming more data people. They’re so… data focused. Think about your number one customer is almost always going to be marketing now. And marketing came from, I want to report once in a while to I live my life looking at this. And so we are the enablers that makes the business function. We’re the oil in the engine. If you don’t have us, you have a problem. And that brings with it such a responsibility because You know, does it cost you $50,000 an hour if your website goes down? What does it cost you if technology has a problem? Right. Okay. And so we have to be cognizant of that, not only in the fact that we have to have backup systems and, you know, standard DR and all the other stuff. But essentially, I’m trusting and I’m making up numbers, right? But I’m trusting a sales guy with selling, I don’t know, a million dollars a month. I’m trusting Scott, who’s my CIO, with my entire company revenue, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Because if Scott doesn’t exist and his team falls apart, the reality is the company doesn’t exist anymore. So it’s a big responsibility that we have. And sometimes people forget it. We think we’re just tapping numbers on a keyboard. One tap on a keyboard, that’s wrong. And you could essentially put a company out of business.
Speaker 1 | 56:54.427
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 56:56.036
True,
Speaker 1 | 56:56.936
true that. But hopefully you got systems in place though, backup and now all that.
Speaker 0 | 57:02.819
Right. But don’t forget, I guess, don’t forget the importance that they’ve put in you. Don’t forget the responsibility you have. How many of us have backup systems and we say, yeah, we test them. And I have met so many people that say that and they don’t. where they test them. Yeah, I didn’t have time this month. I’m going to do it next month. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, what happens between now and next month? And Katrina hits you and takes out your entire factory. Does that happen to me? And luckily I had tested everything, but literally lost an entire factory in New Orleans on the night of Katrina. And luckily for me, had backup systems in place, literally were back up and running in four hours. Now, we weren’t manufacturing, obviously, because there wasn’t anyone there.
Speaker 1 | 57:55.992
Yes, right. Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, we got a few minutes left. What do you want to talk about? To the up-and-coming IT executives, maybe you want to say something to a CEO out there. Nah, that doesn’t really apply here.
Speaker 0 | 58:17.830
So, you know what I think? You know what I think? is the key to this whole entire game that we’re playing, right? Trying to succeed.
Speaker 1 | 58:25.933
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 58:27.513
You probably, you’ve been around for a while. I’ve been doing this for a very long time. You and I had the advantage, and I’m not trying to age you, but you and I had the advantage of there were people around doing it when we did it. So we were sort of the guys that everyone looked at and said, you’re weird. Right. Saying, oh, it’s. It’s weird because it’s become the cool thing to do now. You hear people saying, I’m leaving my career and I’m going into IT. Okay, well, let me not be Debbie Downer for you, but let me let you in on a little insight, right? If everybody wants to do it, it’s not as easy to do. So how do you excel above the people around you? I come from a family of Polish immigrants and my grandfather said, work harder than the guy next to you. And guess what? I’m a CIO. I work harder than the guy next to me. And I do that because I have a work ethic. And in a lot of ways, I’m not in this for the money. I’m in this because I enjoy it. So I would say find… Computers are like being a doctor, right? If you refer to a doctor, what are you? Are you a neurosurgeon? Are you a brain surgeon? Are you a flip? surgeon. There’s specialties within computers, so find what it is you like and what drives your passion. And I have said this for many years, and anyone who’s a geek will understand exactly what I’m saying. You know it’s your passion when you won’t get up and go to the bathroom because you have to finish what you’re doing. Yeah. You sit there and go, I got to do this and find that passion. Because if you’re passionate about what you do, you don’t ever work a day in your life. And I don’t work. I come to work. because I come because these guys happen to pay me for doing what I like.
Speaker 1 | 60:31.808
Right. So let that be a lesson to all the listeners out there. We’re going to wrap on that right there. But what an incredible, incredible session here. Appreciate it, Roman.
Speaker 0 | 60:45.658
Yes, sir.
Speaker 1 | 60:46.399
All right. Thank
