Speaker 0 | 00:09.602

All right, I’m just going to get started. Hey, everybody. My name is Scott Smeester. I’m the CEO slash CTO of CIO Mastermind. I’ll give you a little bit of a, well, you probably heard a little bit of my spiel before, but I’m here with Tim. Jackson. Your whole full name on LinkedIn is Timothy Laudel Jackson. I like the whole name, man. Tell me about yourself, Tim.

Speaker 1 | 00:40.523

So I’m originally from Chicago. I grew up, I’m a native. I’ve been here though on the Gulf Coast for almost 22 years now. Brief stop in New Orleans for about four years. That’s where I met my wife and we started our family in New Orleans. And I moved the family here to Houston to become a GIS consultant, full-time consultant. A little bit about my middle name. That’s my dad’s name. So very proud to carry his name, as well as my son, as well as my nephew and my great uncle.

Speaker 0 | 01:22.676

I’m the same thing. I carry my father’s name as my middle name. One of my sons has it as well as his middle name. And well, so does a number of my cousins and nephews and stuff. So cool. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 01:41.060

So a little bit more about myself. I started out as a COBOL programmer coming out of college, attended SIU University. I did some grad school in the last five years, but because of the jobs that situation, family circumstances. I discontinued the MBA program. Maybe one day I’ll get back into it. But once I became promoted to CIO, there was little time to do that second job, which I’m sure a lot of your audience may understand going through an MBA program is no joke. So I joined Diamond Offshore back in 2015, right at the start. of the downturn in oil and gas. And my immediate role was director of global infrastructure. And so I was immediately tasked with two things, to bring together the infrastructure group, which was two separate groups under the CIO, and to create a change management process for infrastructure. But because we were in the downturn, my very first assignment was to lay off. Unfortunately, some people on my staff only being there three months, I was still getting to know names and jobs on my team. So largely for Diamond Offshore and the offshore drilling market, we’ve been in this downturn and we just are now starting to see the light of day. So asking for IT investments was, if not difficult, difficult. almost impossible over the last seven and a half years.

Speaker 0 | 03:30.899

And the reason for that is, is it because of the oil industry? Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 03:38.283

Yeah. So for offshore drilling, many people may not know we get paid a day rate by our customers like BP, Chevron, Total. Those are our customers. And when you’re paying a day rate for a drilling rig. Anytime that rig is not drilling, there is a problem with the rig or the BOP, what we call the blowout preventer, that stops the whale from blowing up the rig. You’ve got to pull that BOP from the seafloor, do maintenance on it. And so that is our game. But what further complicated things in 2020 was the OPEC and OPEC Plus wars. meaning the Saudis and the Russians started to have price wars amongst themselves. Then we got hit with COVID. And so a lot of companies had to basically lay off staff because the Chevrons and the BPs of the world stopped coming, saying, we’re going to stop our offshore drilling. We’re going to focus on onshore. So that dried up revenue for us.

Speaker 0 | 04:48.411

Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay, so that totally makes sense. And if I missed that, originally, my apologies on that, but now it makes sense. So how are things now? I mean, I’ve been reading that. There’s record profits at the oil companies, at Shell, at whatever. And I know that you got to take that with a grain of salt. But how does that boil down to you and your company at Diamond Offshore?

Speaker 1 | 05:17.048

So it’s, we love seeing the increased price per barrel. But what I tell friends and vendors and even my own staff at times, just because you’re watching the price of oil per barrel. barrel go up, there’s a delayed effect for offshore drilling, meaning the shales of the world who are making record profits now, they will come to us and say, we’re bidding out a contract to start drilling off the coast of Nigeria in 2024. So where the day rates for offshore drilling has been over the last seven… seven years, has been in the mid $200,000 a day. You’re now starting to see, and this is not necessarily Diamond, but I’m talking overall in the market, you’re starting to see bids being awarded for the $350,000 and $400,000 a day again. So that’s very favorable to the market. to not only diamond our competitors and you’re starting to see longer contracts. When I started in offshore drilling, we had a contract once for $400,000 a day, seven years. That’s a lot of backlog. That’s a lot of money. But during the downturn, you started to see, well, we just need maybe a 12 well program. So that’s about a year’s worth of work. And you saw day rates again in the mid 200s. So again, when you have these larger contracts that we are starting to see the market going up, that trickles down to IT. Now you can start to have more IT investments because now the business is saying, OK, we’re not we’re no longer in IT rationalization mode or overall efficiency saving. We’re looking at. doing more investments to create efficiencies or capitalizing technology like AI, which companies like us started, but then had to shelf.

Speaker 0 | 07:40.639

Gotcha. Gotcha. So you’re coming out of this right now, is that right? Loosening up, the ice is breaking up a little bit.

Speaker 1 | 07:48.503

Yeah, we’re starting to see, again, more and more what we call tenders coming out from these oil companies. that we’re responding to as well as our competitors, which is a good sign. Right. Which is a good sign.

Speaker 0 | 08:03.871

Okay. So help me understand maybe what the opportunity is in the industry. Now, this is more of a CIO question, but the people out there in dissecting popular IT nerds still should be looking on the horizon. This is how business is done. This is how. you as you move up in your gigs should be concerned about. From a business standpoint, what kind of things can IT do to separate maybe competitively? I guess here’s a better question. What are some initiatives that you want to see in the future, in the next year, two, three, that you undertake, maybe even if it’s a long-term thing, to really separate out your company?

Speaker 1 | 08:56.608

So one thing, you know, this is going a little bit backwards in terms of efficiency. But one thing we want to be able to untap is the data that we have in order for management, rig management to make better decisions. So if you have a dashboard like with Power BI on top of Snowflake or Azure, then you’re able to do some analytics with it. with the data opposed to reporting straight line transactional data. And now we can start to compare, okay, the rig spend for this vessel with a sister vessel in the Gulf of Mexico. Why are they spending more on supplies and repairs than the other ones? And you can start to make intelligent decisions on. what you’re spending, but then taking it into the future preventive maintenance. How do we start to know when that latch on the rig or that mud pump is going to start to go out ahead of time? If you’ve got IoT connected to these devices, you can start reporting on how many hours of service has that mud pump on the rig been in service. The vendor knows that they start to get calls, and I’m just making this up.

Speaker 0 | 10:28.867

Does the vendor have and manage and support? support IoT devices on that? Okay, so they have the data. It’s not like you have to go and connect it, but you can get it from them, right?

Speaker 1 | 10:41.554

Yes. But now they’re saying, if you send us real-time data, we can start to send you alerts ahead of time that, hey, you’re in that 10% window where your mud pump is going to go out of service. Now, it’s a little bit self-serving of them. because they can proactively now say, hey, we’re going to now sell you a new mud pump. But if you think about it from our standpoint, any critical spare or any, excuse me, any critical device on a rig that stops us, as we say, that drill bit from turning to the right means we’re not making money. So our objective is to keep that blowout preventer and that drill bit on the rig floor as. much as possible because we drill 24 by 7, 365 days a year. And if we have NPT, what we call non-productive time to do maintenance or unplanned maintenance, again, we’re not getting paid. So it works both ways.

Speaker 0 | 11:46.782

So have you, well, I’m assuming that the support for what you’ve wanted to do on that initiative because of the, you know, the… the stronghold on the costs of oil and what you’ve had to endure. You guys have had to make cutbacks and things like that. What kind of support are you getting now on those initiatives? How do you, and how do you explain them to, to the, to your stakeholders? Who are your stakeholders for you? Who do you report to?

Speaker 1 | 12:20.128

So I report to the CEO. And my stakeholders are his direct reports. While I’m not considered a member of the executive staff, meaning a true officer of the company, I am a department head with all of my customers being the ELT, the executive leadership team. So sometimes they’re coming to me saying, hey, we need IT to enable this. technology. Great example, we had an initiative where dropping our rescue boats, you have to do that from a regulatory standpoint almost quarterly to test how to detach a rescue boat from your rig in case there’s an emergency. To do that in the North Sea in the wintertime, It’s very dangerous. And there have been companies who have had fatalities doing that. Just testing? Yeah, just testing. Because you have to do that real time. We worked with our marine department on a technology that has the AI glasses, or almost the Google glasses, and you sit on the rig and you actually sit. there in front of a computer with these glasses on and you’re launching a lifeboat, simulating launching a lifeboat. And that satisfied the regulatory bodies around the world that asked us to do that. We’re able to do it in a safe environment.

Speaker 0 | 14:10.239

Did you develop that or is there a vendor out there that does it? Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 14:16.422

I wish. I wish. I would be a CEO like you. making a money hand over fist.

Speaker 0 | 14:24.024

Oh yeah. Right, right, right, right. That’s funny. Okay. Wow. Interesting. So, so tell me then let’s go back in time for you, Tim. How did, what was it like for you? You know, this is, we’re talking to popular it nerds. Most people that come from the ranks that are listening to this show. grew up around technology, grew up loving it, passionate about it. Tell me a little bit about your background. What was your love about technology? How did you get to where you are?

Speaker 1 | 15:04.007

So, you know, I was… a self-professed geek myself. I had a first cousin who was given a Commodore VIC-20 for Christmas. And that’s starting to tell how old I am.

Speaker 0 | 15:22.233

But- Was that before the 64?

Speaker 1 | 15:25.736

Yes. That was the first one. Nice. He’s a single child. He got upgraded to the Commodore 64. I got my little cousins hand me down. And I started playing and I got quickly bored with the games and I discovered they had basic programming that you could do on that VIC-20. And so I started developing my own rudimentary games and programs using BASIC. And I will tell you what I really wanted to do was to become a radio personality. when I was younger. And my father said, you really have to know people to get into that business. And so ironically, that year I had to do an occupational outlook report on what I wanted to be. And this is like eighth grade. And I picked up one of those books from the library. I don’t know if you remember those occupational outlook handbooks. And it said, they’re going to be hiring programmers through the 90s. which I thought, great, that’s right around the time I should be graduating from college. So I played the numbers game. And at the same time, I was getting into this basic programming. Then I ended up taking classes or elective classes at my high school to do data processing and data programming and all of that. And I decided at that point, when it was time to enroll in college, that’s what I wanted to do.

Speaker 0 | 17:04.125

Okay. And then what happened? What did you do then?

Speaker 1 | 17:07.864

So, funny story. I’ll tell this story anyway, a little embarrassing. The college counselor looked at my transcripts from high school and said, yeah, I see you’ve got C’s in math classes and trigonometry and college algebra. What she didn’t know was. That was my eight o’clock class in the morning. And I was habitually late for that class. And there was a cute girl that sat in the front that distracted me.

Speaker 0 | 17:45.114

Now we know the real motivation here.

Speaker 1 | 17:49.197

So they actually tried to dissuade me from even getting into computer science. And actually at Southern Illinois, I graduated with a degree in. data process data information processing which is slightly different the computer science was teaching people how to build compilers the data processing was teaching us how to write programs on inventory and solve business needs and i thought yeah that’s what i really wanted to do so i got involved in dpma data management processing association at the organization I became a member, got an intern with McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis and was offered a job. But I really love Chicago. So I waited out and ended up getting an offer from an insurance company in Chicago. And I took that job and I just started doing the best I could in every assignment that was given to me. Scott, I mean, sometimes I would. come in on a Saturday. Nobody would ask me to, but I’d come in with a little black and white TV, the antennas, put it on my desk, and I’d be watching a Cubs game or a White Sox game, and I’d be programming on a Saturday. And I was recognized for that type of initiative. So I’ll say this. I never met a lot of CIOs that came out of the technical branch of IT. They were always coming from supply chain. They were coming from other parts of the business to run IT, which at the time I thought was strange. As I grew up in IT, I started to realize IT is not always about technology. It’s about business outcomes and somebody who can talk. the language of the executive boardroom is much more effective. did meet one or two CIOs who were like us, geeks, programmers, technical people. And they are still the exception. But I will say this, it’s changing. It’s changing. The boardroom needs more technical CIOs to help lead these discussions. In fact, when our new CEO came on board, he sat down and… just like you asked me, who are you? What’s your background? And he said, do you come from the business side or the technical side? And I kind of embarrassed, I kind of apologetically said, I come from the technical side. And he said, good, that’s the CIO that I need running our department here.

Speaker 0 | 20:59.285

Interesting.

Speaker 1 | 21:00.425

So it’s changing.

Speaker 0 | 21:02.386

I find that interesting because I’ve been I talk about that, think about that a lot. I think about, well, because our company, CIO Mastermind, serves people, and I’m a self-professed geek with executive tendencies. That’s a funny way of saying it, but that’s who we serve too. And so often when I get on phone, when I get on calls for prospective members of our organization, the first thing I do is I go look back in their history because I want to see if They’re coming from finance or like you say, supply chain, other various, maybe they’re, you know, connected because they went to some Ivy League school or something like that. And you could see them go up to the chain, not programming, not running systems and not doing anything like that. Those are generally not the fit for us. So I’ve been asking a lot lately. I’ve been trying, I’ve been, you know, looking at are these, is this person from that? Because it’s generally not a fit. And then I started wondering, well, is that trend going to change or continue to be strengthened? What I’m hearing you say is it’s continuing to be strengthened and that we continually do need more leadership with technical capabilities. That’s the stronger of the, is that correct?

Speaker 1 | 22:24.427

That’s absolutely correct because technology is changing so fast, as you know, Scott. So who better? to keep on top of that than us self-professed geeks or us that came from that classical IT background. In fact, the last class I learned in college, the last class I took in college was called technical careers, where they basically taught everybody from our particular college how to interview, how to write a resume, and how to be successful in your… career once you leave college. And I never forget the professor, one of the last things he said, he said, always be open to learn. Always stay on top of the latest articles because, and this is 1990, he says, because the careers change so fast and the technology is going to be moving so fast that you will probably have eight jobs before you… before you retire. I think it’s even more, it’s probably more than that. I haven’t done any studies on that, but that just, it proves his point that, yeah, we can’t stand still. And a person out of finance, supply chain, I would argue has to work harder to stay on top of it than somebody.

Speaker 0 | 23:56.149

I think that they don’t, you know, the biggest problem is that they don’t have a feel for when costs are too high or too low. And I mean, it’s not based on costs, but you can, that’s one of the things, the level of service, what kind of service are you going to get? Things, when you’ve been doing technology for so long, you know how vendors work, you know how support works. If you haven’t been around that your whole career, always calling up support, dealing with support, buying. and managing various software platforms. After a while, you get to know. So I just tend to believe that you’re going to be a more efficient executive at the CIO level if you know technology because you inherently have a feel for it.

Speaker 1 | 24:50.949

I could not agree more. Our company proactively filed Chapter 11 in 2020. And, um… I tell everybody, tell colleagues of mine, CIOs, I said, if your company ever files for Chapter 11, run, whether it’s proactive or not, because it brings a whole different level of stress on you. And one of the Chapter 11 advisors asked me, why are you paying software maintenance all up front? I don’t understand why you would do that. And those of us… from the IT community already know that’s how software maintenance works. It’s almost like an insurance policy to ensure that you’re going to be able to call up their tech support. You’re going to get security patches 12 months from now. So yeah, there was some interesting conversations during Chapter 11 to educate the executive staff on how IT actually works behind the scenes.

Speaker 0 | 25:58.815

There it is right there. Let’s talk real quick. I wanted to ask you, okay, so younger IT nerds out there who also have executive tendencies might be looking at maybe CIO or just moving up. Everyone’s kind of wanting to move up a little bit. What do you think would be important for them to be learning, knowing, studying, practicing?

Speaker 1 | 26:32.760

I would say, obviously, understanding the technology and how it’s evolving, changing, that’s the easy answer. But here’s the real trick to being able to become effective. It’s to be able to understand the business and where it’s at in its evolution. And what I mean by that is I have a young lead. He’s not quite a manager, and we’re preparing for budget season. And he said to me, as we’re going through the spreadsheet of all the things he wants to do next year, he says, it’s important for me to let them know the end-of-life servers and the switches and et cetera. And I looked at the bottom line number and I said, if you submit that to your managing directors out there, it’s not going to be good for your career. I said, you need to show that you’ve given this some thought. You’re not just blanketly taking what the infrastructure guys are giving you and telling you you need to replace. You need to be creative. If we’re not cash flow positive. Or if you have some rigs that are not going to be working in 2023, why would you recommend replacing all the switches on that rig? You’ve got to show some forethought and some intelligence and have that business acumen to understand where we are in our business life. So for young CIOs or upcoming managers and directors that want to make it to that next level, I would say the most important thing is understanding where your business is in the marketplace. Now, how do you do that? Thank you. I was fortunate enough to have a mentor. He was not assigned by HR. It was just something that kind of grew organically as I became the interim CIO. He basically said to me, you need to hang around the fourth floor more where all the executives are. Yeah, I want you to be comfortable coming up here. I want people to be comfortable with you being up here. So why don’t you attend my weekly meeting with the other directors and managers and operations? You don’t have to contribute. You don’t have to feel necessary to give an IT update, but just sit there and listen and learn. And I was so thankful he did that before he retired because his predecessor extended that, which I extended to a couple of my directors and said, hey, can we be a part of these conversations to listen and learn what’s going on in the business?

Speaker 0 | 29:44.015

This is great.

Speaker 1 | 29:45.636

And that’s really the key.

Speaker 0 | 29:49.218

Yeah, that’s actually amazing. Really good, good input. So you associate yourself, just be around the executives. Thinking you’ll just, you know, spend a certain amount of time, dedicate a certain amount of time to be around that, to understand the business. You’re already around it all the time and technical. But if you really want to improve your value, you would also be around that so that the thinking starts rubbing off on you.

Speaker 1 | 30:20.893

Yeah. You know, Scott, we the organization I inherited and this is more not. to my predecessors, but to the life of IT in an offshore drilling company. We’re the geek squad. They call us when they can’t connect. They call us when their keyboard is broken, but they never call us when they’re thinking about an AI project. They never call us when they’re thinking about an operational dashboard. But now that I’m part of those everyday conversations, They’re saying, hey, Tim, we think IT should be included in this conversation. We’re going to have a meeting next week with this vendor. And so even from a cybersecurity standpoint, I’m saying I need, not me necessarily, but my team, my CISO, we need to be involved in those conversations up front if you’re thinking about a cloud technology, because we want to make sure it’s safe and it’s appropriate for company use. not just say, here it is, Tim, please go install it.

Speaker 0 | 31:32.331

Yeah. Tell me about though, AI, you know, this is just going off into a different direction here. This is how I often am, right audience? What I do, right? Okay. I always like to talk about AI. I like to talk about fringe technology, things that are coming about and who’s actually using them, using them the way they’re developed and designed to use. What kind of things are you doing with AI or machine learning?

Speaker 1 | 32:01.520

So I wish, Scott, I could provide more on this topic. I can tell you what we started and what we will probably go back to at some point. But it gets back to that preventative maintenance where if you have what we call the industrial control network, the mod bus systems on a rig. If. Those now have IP addresses. Then now we can start to collect data. We can now understand what we call tripping in and tripping out of a hole, meaning when we sometimes have to raise that drill bit to put more fluid in so that we can drill even faster or deeper, or to avoid damaging the drill bit. if there’s not enough fluid in a wellbore. That tripping speed, if we can start to track how quickly we can trip in and trip out of a hole, a wellbore, we can start to understand how can we become even more efficient at this. And again, share that data with other rigs across the fleet. Now, every formation is going to be different. Some of it may be more porous. Some of it may be less porous and allow you to drill at a certain rate. But here again, you start to collect that kind of data. It becomes very valuable to the fleet. So, you know, there’s a great book. I don’t have it handy. That talks about the economics of. artificial intelligence. And it really talks to how it’s becoming cheaper and cheaper to do. One of the great examples they give is the lights. When Thomas Edison first created the light bulb, not a lot of people had it. The poor communities still needed to use candles. But as that technology evolved, it became cheaper and it became… more and more widely used. Same thing this author is predicting with AI. As it becomes more and more widely used, the cost becomes down, and more and more people will be able to utilize it. So the only other insight I can tell you on AI, it’s a lot of people are afraid of it. They talk about how machines are going to… take over with AI.

Speaker 0 | 34:52.461

Yeah. Well,

Speaker 1 | 34:54.124

what AI really is at the end of the day, is collecting a lot of massive and massive amounts of data. And by the way, the technology, the reason it’s becoming cheaper is because we can now hold and store more and more data in the cloud and collect more and more data opposed to an on-prem solution where you have to keep adding disk trays and adding disk arrays to hold that. Now, with cloud storage being cheaper, You can hold more and more data and compute power is increasing. So now you can churn through all of that data and make better decisions. So when you have statistical analysis models that takes that data and you can now predict different outcomes, AI can’t tell you exactly, again, going back to the mud pump, when it’s going. to fail, it’s really giving you data over several hours and hours and comparing that with other manufacturers and saying, we predict that this mud pump is going to fail. It’s not going to tell you it’s going to fail on August 3rd at 10 o’clock, but probability tells us there is a greater chance.

Speaker 0 | 36:25.222

So obviously for much of AI to work, you need a lot of data. That’s probably most. Is there any AI systems that wouldn’t? Like, I’m thinking of these ones that do art, you know, like they create these artistic renditions based on, they obviously would already have a lot of data, tons of other pictures. Okay. Yeah. So that makes sense. Now my technical mind, my geek mind is kicking in here. You’re at the point as a company where you’re implementing these data collection devices in various places. Is that where you’re finding where to put these devices maybe to monitor the pump, so to speak, to monitor your drilling rigs, whatever it is? the trip in and the trip out. And literally, that’s the start of it. You got to collect a lot of data first. Is that right?

Speaker 1 | 37:30.333

That’s correct. Now, let me go back and tell you what I’m doing for onshore and the ERP markets where we already have the data. We have all these disparate systems where data exists, but we haven’t tapped into it. And we haven’t created in the data warehouse yet. terminology, a star schema to collect and amass all this data so that my financial system over here now can make sense of the asset management data by the IBM system. So Oracle and IBM, again, two disparate systems. But if you collect that data, send it up to a data lake and you put that into a form of a star schema, now you can start to correlate and say, okay, this asset, to repair it, we can go back and look at the AP data for invoices or services and start to correlate how that piece of equipment is transacted. in a financial world, which at the management level is very powerful. Again, at the lower levels, a person on a rig is just blindly ordering mud pumps. But financially, that might not make sense when somebody’s looking at it and saying, okay, we spent over half a million dollars on mud pumps from this vendor. across the fleet. And the time it’s been in service is not very long. We might need to look at another vendor. So again, that’s kind of my take on where technology can help enable the business. And AI, excuse me, can help enable the business.

Speaker 0 | 39:39.350

Okay. So what other than technologies fringe technologies, other things that are coming about. You already mentioned AR, which is unique for me. I always bring up of virtual reality and AR. I believe it’s still awaiting. technology. What else do you see out there on the horizon that’s going to really help the business, the industry out?

Speaker 1 | 40:06.484

Well, you know, that virtual reality, I’ll just go back in time, is already at play, but it’s still evolving. But we did have a situation during the pandemic. where it was enormously expensive to fly a technician and to get them in and out of country because we were drilling in Myanmar at the time of all that unrest. So very problematic to get somebody in. We used this technology, Google Glass, with a proprietary software the vendor had, enabled that with our Wi-Fi network. systems. And now you have somebody in Houston, an engineer, guiding and troubleshooting a problem on the rig. And so it’s out there, but it’s still evolving. So I think as that evolves even more, that enables experts all over the world to help troubleshoot and help correct or enhance certain systems. You know, on the defensive side of IT, cybersecurity is more and more technology evolves in that area in terms of monitoring, in terms of scanning vulnerabilities. There’s already great tools out there like Tenable that do that. But I think as that evolves even more, we go from being defensive. Well, we increase our defensive posture. I’ll let the government play offense. There are times, though, at a phishing attack that I have thought, let’s go on the offense. Let’s do a DDoS attack on that IP. But you can’t always do that.

Speaker 0 | 42:24.430

You know, on that note, if you can talk to it, what’s been one of your biggest or scariest moments when it’s come to security?

Speaker 1 | 42:37.895

Well, I won’t go into anything that we consider proprietary. I’m a little bit closed on that subject. But I will tell you just the things that happen in the news. when you hear about the SolarWinds attack. We weren’t impacted, but that kept me up at night until I knew we weren’t. The conflict in Russia and Ukraine that’s going on, being in the energy sector, and when you start to hear reports that, yeah, Russia’s going to attack the U.S. energy sector. You stay awake at night wondering, and my team is great about giving me situational reports, understanding the different attacks that are coming out that are hitting other nation states. And we keep our security posture up to date. But those are the things that have certainly scared me, Scott, and kept me up at night.

Speaker 0 | 43:52.890

What’s the worst thing that’s happened to one of your peers or peer organizations?

Speaker 1 | 44:00.712

There was an insurance company that got hit with ransomware. And it’s in the news, but it was $75 million they had to pay out. And so… I was associated with that insurance company through a network of other CIOs. So I really felt for them because we would often collaborate and talk about different topics in IT altogether. So that was once I found out a colleague. their company. They couldn’t talk to me about it. I just literally read it in the news. But when it happened to them at the time. And so thinking, wow, if it can happen to them, yeah, certainly it could happen to us.

Speaker 0 | 45:09.181

Okay. Let me ask you, how do you handle the talent gap? How are you handling the talent gap? Maybe since because the oil industry took a hit, maybe you haven’t even been thinking about hiring, but when I think everyone has a high turnover rates, you have to be thinking about. replacing people, even if they’ve left during a downturn. How do you handle that? How have you been handling that?

Speaker 1 | 45:34.732

So great question. Because that’s one of the great indicators that things are starting to turn around for us. Because again, we have, we did have some open positions and we filled it. I will tell you one of them took almost six months to fill. And that was a high demand job. So how did we handle it? We typically go to our outsource provider, excuse me, our in-source recruiter. And once we post the job and we get some resumes that are less than attractive, I’ll just say it that way, then I turn to an outsourcing company that specializes in that, especially IT recruitment. So that’s how we handled it. Luckily, I was also able to rehire one or two people in my, that I unfortunately had to lay off. So that was fortunate. So we’re adding slowly back. We’re not bringing everybody back all at once or opening up, you know, 10, 20 positions. But it’s been a challenge. I will tell you, talking to my peers, it’s definitely been a challenge recruiting and finding that staff. Now, I’ll also say this, Scott. One of my peers here in Dallas hired a systems architect in Dallas. And I said, wow, how are you going to manage that remote worker? And they said, Tim, think about it. We’ve been working remotely for the last almost at the time, a year. So bring them down once a month down to Houston and we’ll go from there. So attracting people remotely. Now, I don’t I don’t particularly have that option, but push comes to shove, then absolutely. absolutely what I hire.

Speaker 0 | 47:57.010

So you said that that was, it’s a good indicator of whether our industry is rebounding or not. What is it that was a good indicator that you are able to hire, that you have open positions? Is that what you mean?

Speaker 1 | 48:10.694

That I was able to hire.

Speaker 0 | 48:12.354

Okay. That you got directives to hire, to expand, you got budget for that, that kind of thing. Okay. So let me ask you this then. Well, okay. While While we got everyone on the line, who are you, who would you like to apply for you right now? What are some of the gaps? Just because they’re, they might be listening. Say, you guys got to talk to Tim, Timothy Laudel Jackson, because that’s what it says on it. Because if I just said Tim Jackson, well, they might go find somebody who’s not you. We don’t want that. We want you. We want you to get the program. Who are you looking for?

Speaker 1 | 48:50.052

So, unfortunately. I just recently filled the last opening I had. It was a situation where there was a performance issue and I went out and I had to, let’s say, upgrade in that position. So I currently don’t have any openings.

Speaker 0 | 49:15.753

Okay.

Speaker 1 | 49:15.933

Forget it then,

Speaker 0 | 49:17.874

people.

Speaker 1 | 49:19.196

No, no. So wait a minute. So hypothetically.

Speaker 0 | 49:21.898

There will be coming up. I know there you’ve got like what’s going to be coming up. That’s your opportunity here.

Speaker 1 | 49:28.724

Yeah. So so unlimited budget things start to turn around drastically. My first hire would be a PMO project management office, somebody to lead the projects and that dual role I had before. talk to the auditors. So… That would be my first hire. The second would be to further enhance my cybersecurity team. I probably would invest more in bringing on in-house. We have some great external providers, managed services, but there’s nothing like boots on the ground, right? That would be my second. My third, as we increase our fleet, when I first came to Diamond, we had a fleet of 45 rigs, 17 in Brazil. Rigs scattered all throughout the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Australia and in the North Sea. As I have more rigs, I need more support staff, help desk people. We have a… a outsource help desk. But here again, you’ve got a lot of people that need help in the office. And sometimes I have to fly those people to my offshore rigs to assist. So that’s kind of my one, two, three. I hope my CEO is listening to this podcast. We’re going to send it to him, by the way. So he gets a heads up as to what I’m going to ask him for.

Speaker 0 | 51:21.785

All right. And well, then, then, and then why, why the, well, I guess you probably went into a little bit of why on those, but if you’re approaching your CEO, how are you going to form it? How, what, why, why does the CEO want it? You know what I’m saying? Those folks.

Speaker 1 | 51:39.178

Yeah. So here again, we get back to business outcomes. Um, some of these projects that hit my desk are coming from his direct reports or. one of the department heads throughout the company. And I say, okay, that’s great. They want a COVID tracking software, or they want to automate employee change statuses. And it’s done on paper now. Okay, great. I need DocuSign. But now I need to make sure that project… gets pulled off correctly, efficiently, on time, on budget. If I don’t have a project manager to lead these bigger efforts, then I can guarantee you the department heads left to their own devices and the vendor, there’s going to be cost overruns. It’s going to be delayed. And I’ve seen it time and time again throughout my career, nothing specific to Diamond. But companies that don’t have strong project management, those projects are always going to end up lagging behind.

Speaker 0 | 53:02.540

And the cost increase on that in the big way.

Speaker 1 | 53:05.881

Yes. Yeah. Okay. So that’s my voice. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Cost avoidance and speed to market. You know, people don’t talk about speed to market. Sometimes the timing of when a project needs to be implemented. From a regulatory standpoint, it has to be done by January 1st or it has to be done by quarter end. And so to keep a multi-departmental, cross-departmental project with multiple vendors going, you literally need to have strong project management to keep everybody on point and up to date and on task.

Speaker 0 | 53:49.765

Gotcha. Okay, so let’s say the CEO is listening right now. I’m going to test you, put you on the spot here a little bit. What do you think your CEO is, or is it he?

Speaker 1 | 54:05.362

He. He?

Speaker 0 | 54:07.604

What do you think his biggest initiative is right now? What is he wanting to happen right now most?

Speaker 1 | 54:16.592

I can tell you.

Speaker 0 | 54:18.834

I like that. That’s a great way right there, unequivocally. You know, I did. All right.

Speaker 1 | 54:25.737

He wants, before we launch any technology project, and this is, again, a lesson for upcoming CIOs and new CIOs, he wants to understand the problem. He wants the IT person, his CIO, to understand the problem, meaning, Tim. Go talk to the director of supply chain. Find out his issues with inventory management. You know, we’re not AWS. We have a different way to manage our inventory than Amazon does. Find out his problems, his concerns, his issues, and finance. Talk to them. Talk to safety. Talk to operations and find out what problems are they. having now so that when we are ready to spend, we know that we can apply technology to their needs. Now, I’ll qualify that and say, as a Six Sigma black belt, I’ve always found that sometimes the technology they have can work better if they simply improve their processes. So I always tell people, I can go and spend a million, two million dollars on new technology. But if we apply new technology on top of bad processes, you’re not going to solve your problem.

Speaker 0 | 56:05.819

Yeah. Magnify it, if anything.

Speaker 1 | 56:08.721

Exactly. And it’s going to just cause more and more frustration. And they’re going to come to IT and say, you didn’t solve my problem or your new technology sucks. Well. If you have bad processes, no matter what technology, you know, Power BI, Excel, you’re still going to have your same problem. Tableau, you’re still going to have the same underlying problem. Your data is not right or the way you’re collecting data is not right. So getting back to understanding the business outcomes and the business problems before you talk technology. helps you talk the language of the executive staff.

Speaker 0 | 56:51.160

All right. We have, while we’re closing in, probably on an hour, in fact, we’ve already gone over an hour just about now. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you that you were thinking about maybe during our whole conversation here that you might want to end with? And by the way, before I end with you, just hang on with me just a minute after we end up. But tell me. Is there anything else that you’d like to close with?

Speaker 1 | 57:18.615

Yeah, this is a passion of mine. Coming from the south side of Chicago, I didn’t see, have an opportunity to network with a lot of CIOs in my sphere of influence. And so it doesn’t matter what your background is. where you came from, your ethnicity. I would say programs like What You’re Doing, Scott, to help people get to that next level, or things like what I’m doing. I do mentoring where I give mock interviews to an organization I’ll call out by name here in Houston. Actually, nationwide, Genesis Works. They take high school students, they teach them how to dress, they teach them how to interview. They teach them how to interact and then companies do an internship with them, bring them on and teach them how to operate in corporate America. So I work with that organization both professionally when I have projects. I try to bring interns on, but I also volunteer where I sit on Zoom calls and I interview some of the students and show them how. a real life interview is going to be. And I also want to call out another program I’m passionate about.

Speaker 0 | 58:45.535

What was the first one though?

Speaker 1 | 58:47.295

Genesis works.

Speaker 0 | 58:48.836

Genesis works. Okay. And another one. And by the way, I’m going to give a little shout out to activate work. That’s a nonprofit here in Denver, Colorado. And they, they really specialize in bringing in the underserved communities to do. And then they, they take them through boot. camps for like cybersecurity and they’re placed with a coach and then um all a lot of apprentice type of work amazing one here’s activate work in denver i highly recommend checking out and you have one as well what’s another one uh one

Speaker 1 | 59:27.176

i became associated with through the pandemic was in power in new york same organization as the ones we’re talking about here the one difference with you in power is they not only take students that either didn’t go to college, can’t afford to go to college. Now, let me back up. Genesis Works gears you. One of the deliverables out of that program, you have to apply to five different colleges before you graduate from there. And you’re all doing this while you’re in high school. Empower takes people from communities who either stopped going to college, couldn’t afford to go to college, but want to get into IT. But even more importantly, another passion of mine is veterans. Veterans who have gotten out of the military. And now they want to get into IT. And so we coach them. We mentor them. We do mock interviews. Great. And so it’s really some days when I’m having a bad day and I see, oh, at four o’clock, Tim, you have to join in this big Zoom call and breakout session. And, dude, my whole day turns around.

Speaker 0 | 60:43.621

That’s awesome. Wow. What a great way to end an interview. So I mentioned Activate Work. You mentioned Empower and Genesis.

Speaker 1 | 60:54.400

And Genesis Works.

Speaker 0 | 60:55.941

Excellent. Genesis Works. Okay. Well, let’s end on that. Folks, thanks for tuning in. Tim, I just want to thank you so much. This has been a pleasure chatting with you, my friend.

Speaker 1 | 61:06.664

Same here. Thank you, Scott, for having me.

Speaker 0 | 61:09.104

All right. Thanks, everyone. We’ll talk to you next time. Thank you.