Speaker 0 | 00:09.607
Hi nerds, it’s Michael Moore and I’m here with Andre Strukoff, CIO of Countbox US and IT Operations Manager at Lumen Property Management. Welcome to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Andre, you were on the podcast before.
Speaker 1 | 00:25.480
Yes, I was with Phil.
Speaker 0 | 00:27.101
We didn’t scare you away.
Speaker 1 | 00:29.764
No, no, it was actually a pretty awesome experience. We ended up making the main topic of what will happen if I unplug this? You’re ready for disaster pretty much any moment of the time.
Speaker 0 | 00:44.870
I think we’ve all been there before. What would happen if I just yank this cord? I’m going to start off. As the audience is probably aware, Now, we start off with a quick icebreaker segment called Random Access Memories. I ask a question, you respond back with an answer. The first one that pops in your head first, right? So I’m going to start off with which internet service do you miss the most?
Speaker 1 | 01:18.604
Oh, probably back from the late 90s when it all started because it was true.
Speaker 0 | 01:26.708
free internet yeah there was no like nothing just as a prohibited topic like every person was talking about anything they could on like freedom of speech so did you use the uh did you go to the store and just buy um magazines and just pop open whatever the uh current cd was of free internet usage and uh and just uh use
Speaker 1 | 01:53.265
that no i actually had the
Speaker 0 | 01:56.308
friend of mine who worked at the ISP of that time and he was giving us trials trials which is pretty awesome all right well that’s what see you you had the uh the in i needed to know you back then is what i needed to know um have you ever taken apart a hard disk drive uh just because you were low on magnets
Speaker 1 | 02:25.268
No, but I was using it for something else.
Speaker 0 | 02:29.992
Was it like an art project?
Speaker 1 | 02:33.935
Oh, well, it was a plenty different project. It was an art project, which you remind me, if you remember there was a floppy disk, which I used to see, like, you know, the sun, and when the moon covers the sun and you see the shade, it’s the best.
Speaker 0 | 02:54.304
thing i was found that you can use as a floppy drive to allow you to see that uh a sound shade covered by the moon oh that’s actually pretty that’s actually pretty interesting i had never thought to use it like that but you know listen uh uh floppy disks uh whether it’s a uh three three and a half or five and a quarter floppy disk are pretty much obsolete nowadays so it’s good to know there’s another use for them yeah we actually had the joke like one uh person when
Speaker 1 | 03:23.680
A few years ago when you saw the trend, when a lot of laptops just start dropping off the CD in them, like you literally cannot buy a laptop with CD in there. But we had one of the IT employees who insisted, hey, I need a new laptop, and this laptop got to have a CD-ROM or DVD drive in it. I was joking, like, why don’t you worry when we…
Speaker 0 | 03:50.161
block a drive and he was like no no you don’t understand i need i need my dvds um the last one i have is uh what is the funniest error message you’ve ever seen oh uh press any key and the users say hey like i don’t see any key in my keyboard i’m gonna you know i should create a keyboard that hasn’t any key and just you know and just sell it out to people so that they don’t have any issues. Oh, yeah, I’ll just keep hitting this key. And it’d just be a universal key just to hit. Sit there for hours. Click, click, click, click, click. All right. Awesome. Great answers. Absolutely great answers. We’re going to get this show on the road here. I was browsing your LinkedIn profile. You were a certified pilot?
Speaker 1 | 04:43.553
Did I get that right? I am.
Speaker 0 | 04:45.615
When did that happen?
Speaker 1 | 04:48.842
A year ago, actually a little bit over a year ago. And the story of this is actually pretty funny. And in my… practice sometimes you need to get some certifications just like i don’t know maybe you’re learning new technology or new tools and things like that and i i got my itl certification because it’s just essential for it manager or it um executive to have one just understand how they we’re going to talk about itl uh in just a in just a little bit so yes long long long story short then we we touch specifically uh real estate part of uh my IT operations or my IT experience. And there was a need, which first started as marketing videos, which just need to be shot for some real estate assets. But all of a sudden, we realized that there’s actually even more opportunities, such as the last year in Chicago, in August 2021, there was pretty bad storms and tornadoes, and a few of the roofs got damaged. So this is actually presented a very awesome opportunity for real estate company to expand their operations beyond just the marketing needs of the drone footage to inspections where you can do roof inspections or structural inspections or any other kind of inspections you can think of. We also use drones to do wireless surveys for point-to-points because a lot of our buildings in proximity or it’s a complex where… we just finished building a very awesome project where you have about 100 ip cameras uh running over point to point create a very large network over uh wireless bridges and that way we were saving out tons of money of bringing isps individually to each of the town homes yeah so anyways that need was very obvious even before we started doing this and to fly drone legally commercially you need to have a license And I just happened to be the most experienced person in drones in my company. So this was just an obvious choice. Okay, I’m going to go get that certificate. And then I just established that IT operations, which was drone operations in a real estate company.
Speaker 0 | 07:17.793
Wow. So now do you exclusively fly drones or do you also actually fly aircraft?
Speaker 1 | 07:26.918
I don’t have an aircraft license yet, but I’m working toward it.
Speaker 0 | 07:32.680
I knew it. So I just love it. It’s like you’re like an aerial IT guy now. You’ve got drones at the moment, but you’re headed towards being able to do IT while you fly over the top of our heads.
Speaker 1 | 07:53.228
Well, I actually will take this even. further, I always was a forward thinker and visionary person in all the companies I worked in in terms of technology. And I always strive or try to push the companies go a little bit beyond in terms of technology, which is now this case when you think like pushing it’s actually when company froze in their technological evolution, they are actually in danger. to be outpaced by the competitors. So this is me pushing here now to the edge, by the time when it gets implemented, you’re right there at the nice adoption curve place. Where the technology gets the adoption, the performance, and all the sweet spot of the technology adoption. So this is why it’s better to start early and bring the different technologies you can to the company, so by the time when you will be actually adopted and up. operationalize the technology, it will be right at the right spot.
Speaker 0 | 08:59.152
I love it. I love it. You are big into digital transformation. Actually, I’ll start there for a minute, but I looked at your profile and we have so much we could talk about. We could be here for days. But I wanted to hone in, start off with digital transformation. On the surface, it’s Seems easy, right? But it affects people, processes, systems, highly disruptive to an organization if it’s not done correctly. What is a digital transformation mean to you? Because I know that there’s plenty of people that, you know, have different, you know, adaptations and things about digital transformation. But I want to hear from you specifically. When you go into a company or you’re working in a company and you are looking at their people, processes, and systems, right? How do you say to them, you know, we want to digitally transform your company? And what does that mean when you do that? And this is for our audience here so we can get a good definition before we get going about the subject. Well,
Speaker 1 | 10:21.163
to me, it always means that digital transformation actually has to be somehow implanted into people’s minds or employees’ minds. Because without… Without them realizing this, it’s going to be super hard. You will face all sorts of riots, sabotage, and poor adoption rate of the new technology. And all tools will be just sitting there unused. And it will take enormous efforts from supervisors to polish that, to make sure people are in compliance of using your tools. and things like that. So to me, it always starts with people. It has to start with people. And sometimes it even sadly means replacing certain people or employees in the company if they don’t want to adapt or transform. Because these days, it’s a matter of do or die or matter of survival. If company will fail to transform, it will be easily outpaced by the competitors. And it’s it’s not the question. Like if it’s when question and if uh in it team or in it department you need to work with a lot of other business leaders and department heads and supervisors to kind of evangelize them and be um you know that uh the apostle bringing that message hey look here’s the new opportunity we can change form, the things how you operate. And it takes a great deal to compound that knowledge from these people then when they realize, oh, this new technology brings those benefits, then they are taking your side and then working through entire organization to all down to all people who do the hardest job right there on the ground to make that change. It’s very hard. Yeah, all changes are super hard.
Speaker 0 | 12:32.638
You had mentioned people and adoption rate. And and those are some of the most challenging items. Right. So when we look at trying to first get people excited about change, you know, I have you can’t really see it in here, but I have a it’s like right up the top there. It’s a little saying and it says. don’t be afraid of change. Be afraid of not changing. Right? It’s kind of just what you said. You know, essentially.
Speaker 1 | 13:11.123
Fortunately for people, it’s opposite. They would like to stick with where they’re at, just come to work and do the things they know how to do every time they come and push the same buttons, fill out the same forms. Yeah, the changes… probably the hardest part in technology. And believe me, I drove a lot of initiatives through the entire organizations. Think about this, real estate business is one of the most conservative businesses you can find. So essentially they do the same things for decades. So you’re buying apartments or buildings, turn them into the the units which you can lease and then just lease them out right and then do maintenance like what what what changing here it actually there are a lot of changes and it started from property management software all the way to vendor management all the way how people operate in efficiencies and um especially especially efficiency gains in the value you can bring to the company uh do more with less and it’s just not possible to achieve with so Lumen Property Management, it’s a third party property management firm. So we taking over the property management or properties, which is have been managed with the technologically old and Asian companies who was still running off the notepads or Excel spreadsheets or like even paper notes. And then when we do this takeover, we start running to the things such as the ledger. We sometimes have to reconcile. All the leases have been paid, for example. And owners who trust a property management company that their asset will generate the value for them in profit, they definitely value the Lumen Property Management. Because of our efficiencies and the processes and technology, we’re able to drive more profits for the property owners. And if you want to say that’s our secret sauce.
Speaker 0 | 15:34.689
Yeah, you know, you had mentioned earlier about digital transformation and why it was so important for companies to take this seriously and also help drive change. Digital transformation is most successful when it’s tied to the company’s strategic goals, right? And to get those company’s strategic goals, you need to interact with the… business leaders to get that information. Do you ever find that sometimes you have competing interests from different business leaders within the same organization? And if you do, how do you handle that? So for instance, the CEO and the CFO may not, while the strategy or overall for the company might be the same, the CEO and the CFO, to name an example, may have different ideologies and how they want to get there. And it could be different. I named two examples. It could be a COO. It could be different people within the company that have an interest into what’s going on.
Speaker 1 | 16:54.830
Actually, in my experience, and again, my… data set is very limited to my exposure, my friends, my network. I have thousands of friends on LinkedIn, and I speak with a lot of them on a regular basis, especially now when a lot of conferences are in person, opening up, so we have a chance to chat. Like, how, guys, you made the last two years? Oh, my gosh, don’t even ask. But in my experience, and again, my humble opinion, the more challenges you’re actually facing with siloing between departments and maybe market siloing. Like, for example, some market can say, hey, we operate different because you don’t know how we operate. We have different authorities. We have slightly different rules, codes and things like that. So don’t mess with our business. We do things differently. Even if it’s the same property management process, let’s say. just the different markets, right? And then when you touch different departments, they totally silent from each other. So to the point that sometimes left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. And the biggest challenge is actually to make entire company realize that we all in the same boat. And if one person is slacking and not pulling the pedal, then the whole ship is slowing down. And this is one of the main challenges when we discuss the digital transformation, when it pretty much starts with people, it comes down to people. To push your entire organization through this change, it’s really people. Here, styling is one of the biggest threats to the company in not competing interest from C4 or CEO. Because usually those people are they are pretty on the same page through the different discussions in the board meetings and other strategy meetings and things like that. So they may have some disagreement on specific details, but largely they are usually on the same page in my experience.
Speaker 0 | 19:17.306
All right. So you mentioned siloing and I actually want to explore this topic a little bit because I know we have a lot of listeners that are IT professionals, but we also have listeners that are business leaders, right? And I know that business leaders listen to this podcast to better understand their IT departments, better understand how to harness their IT departments, and how to improve their IT strategy towards their company. And when we talk about siloing, you have just kind of mentioned something that the business leaders are going to be very, very interested in. How do if I’m a business leader, let’s say I’m a let’s say, for instance, I’m a CEO at a company. How do I identify siloing within my own company? And then once I identify it, how do I start to fix it?
Speaker 1 | 20:18.694
I might have a part of the answer. Because this is such a hard issue to deal with that there is no universal. cure or magic kill, which will allow you to solve the problem. But there are a few things you can do. And let me dive into a few examples. A few years back, when our company started growing explosively and effectively all the people who was in the same room, you can yell at John, hey, look, we got here’s the problem or some other issues. You can jump in this class when. something happening in almost real time and then deliver and make decision right almost immediately right so your time to from the crisis to the solution of the crisis is pretty minimal while when you grown big and all those uh uh people who you have used to seeing the same office now they are maybe in different market maybe in different office different uh floor uh and it’s not as easy to talk to them. And then at the same time, some maybe not or less experienced supervisors or managers who really was not supervisors and managers, but they just grew there because of the seniority they have been put in those positions. They have that little fear inside of them when they actually think about their job security. And one of their defense strategies is, hey, look, I mind your business. Let me just do my thing. You guys know how to do IT, so do IT. And I know how to do my thing. I will do my thing. So don’t mess with me. Don’t go to my department, things like that. So it’s obviously a sign. When this happens, it’s not a good sign. It’s not a healthy sign.
Speaker 0 | 22:23.531
Wait, let me stop there for a minute because you made a great point, and I want to make sure business leaders caught on to that. One of the ways to identify siloing is to identify this ultra-protective behavior around certain departments and processes and the way that it gets done. Not just ultra-protective, but also, hey, don’t worry, we’re getting it done. You don’t have to look into this. That should be a flag that a business leader should look into it. Correct? Is that what you’re saying? Correct.
Speaker 1 | 22:58.568
Yes, yes. And again, this is in my humble opinion and based on what I’ve seen in the organizations which I operate within. Of course, the other organizations may have different challenges, but this is how it was happening in my organizations. So based on that experience, how do you break those silos and how you make those inter-department communication to flow? It’s again, no magic pill here. There’s multiple things you can do. One of the examples, I can provide you a few examples of which I’ve done, and I implemented those solutions in the organizations. One is we implemented company-wide corporate chat system with open support channel. It started as simple as just IT live chat where anyone in the company can reach out and say hey look i’m new to the company i have no clue how this thing works can you help me right and then suddenly we um and again it was my plan but i was planting the seed in the minds of the business leaders and department heads that this is actually a great tool for uh communicate as entire company and i i will start using i started using some of the use cases to show them where we can bring more value through this uh open support channel we start kind of marketing this or making pr around that channel as a concierge service to all company employees and here’s the important part now realize that in this corporate chat There are people from different functions, operations, accounting, property management, leasing agents. call center or contact center operations and all sorts of people are there and we are uh not always we was getting uh uh requests there which is it related it can be processed related some uh new property manager might have a question how do i add uh uh my roommate to the lease or something like that you know like which is process related and if we are uh we are i mean it department if we saw that this question have been unanswered for a while we was tapping on the shoulder some people who were relevant to this issue which is what jumping and helping right away and suddenly uh we saw that business leaders they realized the value they realized that the very fast path to resolution of the problems which is previously it could be tickets sent out via a support portal then someone may say oh that’s not the nit issue you need to talk to your supervisor otherwise it might be not trained well as well because obviously this is why those people have those questions because they maybe somewhere uh a training is not uh fully covering all the use cases people see and there is always going to be something in the business when you operate something happening which is you never seen before and now using that concierge service you are pretty sure will get very quick response or at the release the business uh or executives will be made aware that this issue is happening so that’s one of the things um second thing is um we are and again when i say we it department was pioneering creating cross-functional teams like we partnered with accounting or operations or marketing or the finance teams all other teams and we create cross-functional teams which is attacking specific problems. And examples can be like we discussed in the previous podcast, which was featuring me, we were discussing how the intercoms example can be very harmful to the company. And there are multiple parties involved here. You think about AT&T, Copper Landlines, you think about the maintenance crew, you think about property managers, accounting. operations, IT, everyone involved here. But in the end of the day, the solution might be not, the issue might not be resolved even a month later because of different parties involved here. Some people think it’s not my business technically, like I should not be doing this. Why am I even involved here? So to transform that mindset in the company, in department, business leaders. even people’s and employees had in showcasing that we are all together we all in the same boat we need to communicate we need to uh discuss the problems we need to actually uh and i always always go out there in the field and talk to all people like janitors and maintenance people who do the other job and i i sometimes interview them like how are you feeling how are you doing like hey listen did you hear about this uh concierge service which is we just implemented like uh a couple years ago they know i know you got to use this what kind of challenges you have oh my um direct report just started yesterday and he forgot his password we need to reset his password open ticket it took like uh us a little while now with concierge service it takes a quick uh chat message hey like uh my password reset and it gets resolved almost and in no time all problems suddenly became more visible to the business And some of the easiest to solve problems, they are the time to resolution was cut like a thousandth percent if you measure that time before and after.
Speaker 0 | 29:08.302
You know, there’s so much in that answer, and I’m going to summarize that a little bit. And you tell me if I miss anything, but to attack the problem of trying to make sure you don’t have these silos and you don’t have these. folks that will reject change and stuff. The way to help start to break that down is basically to start bringing people together. The great thing about this IT concierge service that you talked about is not only, or sorry, really, you know, really it’s kind of a general problem, concierge service really, and then it becomes IT if it needs to be. But what happens is it creates this culture. where you’re doing a few things. You’re starting to get people to think by understanding other people’s jobs a little bit, right? Hey, these are what’s going on. Other people can chime in and say, hey, this is how we’re doing it, how you guys doing it, and they can decide upon the best way to move forward. You get the culture kind of moving in the right direction. You get the natural discussions about change and the way processes should be run and stuff kind of moving. It reduces that silo like we talked about because it’s starting to get people together. The cross-functional teams are great because it improves the visibility of the project, the visibility of the issues that are presented to the company, the challenges that are presented to the company. There’s a lot in there that’s a great way to attract that issue. And one of the things I really liked is putting the business leaders in there as well. so that they could see what was going on and they understood the challenges. I mean, you mentioned something that I did quite a lot and still do virtually now that I work remotely, which is talk to people, right? Go out there and chat and have conversations. Ask them what’s going on. That’s how I learned about the business from an IT perspective. I know you know that this is such a big deal. You have to understand the business to be able to affect any type of change. and come up with ideas. And, you know, in talking with you, you can tell you’re very forward thinking, very good at coming up with creative decisions. This is great. This is a really good solution. And I’m summarizing it for the business leaders. Did I miss anything?
Speaker 1 | 31:51.402
No, you didn’t miss anything. So you got the idea right. It’s almost like a building next generation community within. the organization or company to help actually people help each other and believe it or not this is makes the entire organization more efficient because the questions get resolved almost immediately and this is also showcases uh to corporate coaches uh the issues might be uh needs to be added to the corporate trainings so th dimensions you look into this, it’s all super beneficial IT service. And this is one of the examples of digital transformation. You don’t have to be on the cutting edge of the technology, but implementation, it was hard. Believe it or not, with all the benefits we’re discussing, this has become so obvious to everyone who will hear about this, how you will speed up all the resolution and make the communication break the silos. It took me… over a year to push this into the actual production. Yeah. Even with existing Slack system, like, I’m sorry, we use Slack, but like with existing corporate chat system, which is you already have in place, it’s already implemented, everyone is using this. Even with this, just kind of jump through all the hoops and make the compound of this knowledge in . the heads of the leaders or the business leaders to realize the potential of this, it took me a year to talk to them, convince them, explain to them how to. I got one person on my side and the second. It’s a long process.
Speaker 0 | 33:42.523
You had mentioned something and you’re talking about how long this takes, but you also mentioned something about talking to people. When you’re talking to people, also, kind of, kind of saying, hey, you should check out this channel that we’ve created. You know, you see the service that we’ve done and, you know, marketing, internal marketing as an IT professional is such an important piece of being an IT professional and getting projects completed. This ability to go out and explain. and sell the ideas that you have to make the company be successful, you know, is a huge deal. I’m glad you brought that up because it is one of those things that I think a lot of IT professionals would benefit from taking some marketing courses, taking some, even some how to sell, you know, solutions on there and being able to understand how to navigate this.
Speaker 1 | 34:52.204
We’ve got some corners here. We’re a partner with the marketing department and they do all our IT PR. So think about this. When you’re an IT professional, how many of those, I don’t know, meat and snow you need to send or something being rolled out or some flyers needs to be handed out because something new or change is coming to services, right? So the marketing department is one of the best partners because they know how to, they know the time to send this out. like the wording, the phrasing. Yeah, and it was the best decision ever to partner with marketing department on those communications and PR, which is coming from IT. And even if it’s something simple and the IT sends this out, we sometimes pick up the brain from marketing department and say, hey, this looks good. Yeah, thumbs up. Shout out.
Speaker 0 | 35:42.810
I think that’s great. I mean, hey, I’m glad you brought that up too because I’ve had… I’ve been fortunate enough to have some great marketing departments, you know, and one of the things I usually do when I come in is actually rebrand the IT department, you know, and put a brand new face on it and then use that every time I want to, you know, send out a message or whatnot. And that way people understand that, oh, it’s coming from this, right? It’s coming from this, right? That’s also a good way, if we’re talking about cybersecurity, which I know is another one of your pieces here. to let people understand the difference uh you know between a fake email that comes in or or a um you know a message that came from your i.t department uh is having a you know an actual uh actual logo and an actual you know slogan and and they know it’s coming from you and uh i mean we had one recently where we had a um you know somebody tried to send in something from the i.t department you know i.t at whatever the at the company And people knew it was fake because it didn’t have the logo. It didn’t have the pieces on it. So, no, I think that’s great. The marketing department is such a great partner to do. And that was such great advice for the IT professionals listening. Go to your IT department. Go to your marketing department. IT and marketing need to shake hands and be buddies because it is a worthwhile partnership. I completely agree with that. Now, you know, we spoke a little bit about ITIL, right? I wanted to follow up on this a bit because, you know, many people think they think ITIL and they think tickets, right? They think a ticketing system, they think we’re going to, you know, it’s going to slow me down. Oh, no, I got to implement change management, all this stuff. But I want your take, you know, because I don’t think this is the case. I have seen ITIL. implemented and the performance, sorry, the gains on it that you get from productivity far exceed any type of slowdown you get and also the reduction in errors. What’s your thought on this?
Speaker 1 | 38:03.956
Pretty much like any strong medicine, you got to take it wisely. And of course, you cannot implement… orthodox 100% ITIL framework in your organization because all organizations are different.
Speaker 0 | 38:19.216
Oh, it’s a framework,
Speaker 1 | 38:21.017
right? It’s a framework. Yeah. It kind of supplies you with tools, with the knowledge and the methods to achieve goals, which is in our case in the IT world is to support our organization with mission and objectives. So, ITIL is a great deal. for, I absolutely recommend for any IT professional who want to grow more in management role or executive role to learn this because it will not answer all your questions, but at the very least you will understand a lot of the dynamics behind the different processes and practices and methods, which is a very useful toolkit for you as an IT professional. growing into the management or executive role, uh, that it’s must have.
Speaker 0 | 39:18.324
Very nice. Very nice. Um, uh, I was thinking, I’m going to try something out with you, which is a new segment that I’m looking to implement. Right. And, uh, I, I, and I got the idea just looking at your, looking at your, you know, what you post and what you like and everything. Um, cause you’re, you’re kind of, uh, um, kind of a futurist almost. You kind of look to the future, come up with these ideas and these things of what possibly may happen and how you can kind of tackle it. Have I hit you on the nose a little bit?
Speaker 1 | 39:52.446
Yes. And I actually was lucky enough that in my team, I always had someone who can serve as a brakes. So if I fly too high or run too fast or even do some crazy ideas, I have always a person on my team who can kind of bring me back to the ground. Hey, look, this is going to be tough to implement. This is going to be like kind of bringing back to the real world.
Speaker 0 | 40:22.382
I love it. Well, and so why I’m doing this segment and the segment is going to be called IT Crystal Ball. OK, and what I want to do is I want to give folks like yourself, experts in the field, a little bit of a platform to give us a the best you possibly can on where things may be headed. So that. our IT professionals and our business leaders out there can understand where they need to move the needle, so to speak, to meet the future. So these don’t have to be right on the nose. They don’t have to be specific, but let’s do a little fun little experiment here. IT crystal ball, right? Digital transformation, because we’ve talked about that forever. Let’s talk about the… future of digital transformation in what you see coming down the plane?
Speaker 1 | 41:26.845
Specifically to technologies. I mean,
Speaker 0 | 41:30.306
you can go, yeah, you can go do whatever your heart desires on this one.
Speaker 1 | 41:35.549
I strongly believe that AI will be taking over more and more place in our life, in our work environment, in professions. in everywhere pretty much where you touch.
Speaker 0 | 41:50.275
And so how, in AI, and sorry to jump in here, but I want to help kind of move that answer. AI being a big piece of the future and tied into a lot of the process and stuff, how does a business leader and an IT professional, how do they meet that? How do they connect in that? Like, what should they be prepared for?
Speaker 1 | 42:18.778
So that’s a very generic question because to answer your generic question, if we think generally, the business leaders, they need to understand how to operate in a volatile, uncertain and changing world, right? So if they are good at this, they will be able to identify new opportunities which AI brings or are threatened. poses specific to their businesses. And it brings both good and bad. And being able to navigate what does this mean to your business specifically, that’s the only right answer.
Speaker 0 | 43:02.344
I love it. Okay. So the idea here, right? I mean, you’re right. AI is a, I mean, we could spend a whole hour on AI and still not even cover all of the possibilities that it could do, right? Um, but you know, it is a, uh, interesting thought process to start. If you’re an, if you’re an IT professional or you’re a business leader to start thinking, let’s understand this and let’s, let’s try to figure out what our company, uh, and our setup and our systems and people in process, how that relates to AI and how we can fit it in. uh it if it makes sense and how we can uh use it as a strategic lever to kind of uh push our business to the next level and compete uh uh you know you know create a competition basically um there’s a great that’s a great answer right there um uh what
Speaker 1 | 44:02.784
about the future of drones because i i know you i know you love it yes uh drones will be taken uh well there are two things which is um I see happening. The initial hype, which was around the drones will be delivering things left and right here and there, you will get the pizza delivered tomorrow by drones. It actually did run into real world challenges. However, this means that the drones will be taking over more and more different business processes, operations, and helping us to close the last mile in the supply chain and deliveries. That’s very promising. There’s a lot of opportunities out there. However, there are non-delivery drone applications. If you are a sci-fi movie fan, you will be envisioning all kinds of drones which are flying around and policing people, doing things, or trying to predict if you’re going to do the crime and all those things. I believe this thing is quite far away, but yes, it’s promising, but at the same time, it’s scary. So this means we as IT professionals need to take over and control how the drone industry is being developed in the world and making sure we apply ethical standards to how this industry progresses.
Speaker 0 | 45:50.808
You know, I think that there are IT folks here now that are thinking after listening to this podcast, they’re probably thinking at three in the morning when I’m stuck at work trying to finish some type of an upgrade. It would be really awesome if a drone could drop off some pizza. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 46:13.908
And those… Those things actually in large metropolitan areas are commercially viable ideas. But when you think about how efficient it is to deliver by drone the pizza somewhere in a far, far, far away farm, it’s probably not going to be super efficient.
Speaker 0 | 46:36.677
Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 46:37.617
I agree.
Speaker 0 | 46:39.997
But that brings us to a great point, right? Because obviously a little bit of a joke with the pizza delivery drone. But but. leads us into an important myth, which is you’ve got a piece of technology that has a lot of promise. But, and this is the challenge I had with the question, right? There’s so many different ways you can use that technology. It’s so hard to predict how people are going to use it. I mean, even in speaking with you and some of the stuff that you’ve come up with, right? It’s difficult because you come up with stuff that hasn’t. and hasn’t come up with before, right? It’s a brand new world. So the amount of things you could do with drones, the amount of things you could do with AI are phenomenal. And because you don’t know every business, it’s almost impossible to be able to predict it. But just naming the technology and saying that we should put our thought towards it is great because I think I heard you mention… Not only should we be thinking about its applications, but also thinking about governance and practical implementation and all the different pieces that you normally would do with digital transformation and applying those things that we’ve learned on how to be successful with implementation to that towards the new technology. What’s your thoughts on that?
Speaker 1 | 48:11.988
So my thoughts are quite in line with your statement. And I strongly believe that we are, as IT professionals, need to definitely think about the governance of the technology, actually any technology, not specifically to drones. And I want to go back to one thing, which is when we were discussing cross-functional teams. The best use cases, and this can apply to specifically drone technology, is actually all the… best ideas and the brightest ideas actually being born in the crossing different sciences or expertise or skills or knowledge and examples can be robotics in biology you think about the different implants you just can replace your arm or leg and being truly now is your almost your your natural arm or or lag, but the breakthrough in those technologies only was able to happen when the biology people and biologists, the scientists, were able to talk to the people who were in robotics, right? If I would be in robotics, I would not speak with the scientists from the biology. I would never be able to achieve the great new horizons in that specific use case. And the same thing is about the drones. So if you think about… Yeah, I’m a farmer. What’s my use case? Oh, I can think how drones can help me in that way. I’m a law enforcement officer or I’m a first responder. How I can help to rescue people? How I can save people? How I can deliver medicine or blood to somewhere, the catastrophic site and things like that. And of course, we as people, we want those things happening soon while there are organizations such as FAA. They care about it. that drones just not start pulling on the people from the skies. So they’re doing their job. So it has to be like a balance, but at the same time, the knowledge, the demand, the technologies, all this will be compounding into the awesome and interesting use cases in the future.
Speaker 0 | 50:37.308
I absolutely love how you brought us back to our original discussion about… understanding jobs, understanding the business, right? And using that information to help create a successful strategy and navigating technology and the implementation. That was fantastic. Thank you very much, folks. Again, it’s Michael Moore. And this has been Andre Strukow, CIO of Countbox US. and IT Operations Manager at Lumen Property Management. A pleasure having you on. Please come on again. Make another shot at it because we could talk forever. Thank you so much, Andre. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 | 51:26.330
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
