Speaker 0 | 00:09.544

Hi, nerds. I’m Michael Moore, hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popularity Nerds. I’m here with Doug Stark, Director of Information Technology at the City of Grand Rapids. Doug, how’s it going today?

Speaker 1 | 00:20.350

Good. How are you, Michael? Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 0 | 00:22.071

Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, I like to start these podcasts off with a segment we call Random Access Memories, a little icebreaker segment. Very easy. I ask you a question and you kind of respond back with the first thing that comes to your head first. Your first question is, what is your least favorite thing to do on a computer?

Speaker 1 | 00:43.417

Least favorite thing to do on a computer. Least favorite thing to do on a computer. Honestly, booking any hotel room. You know what I mean? It’s just… It’s just constant. Like, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 00:54.813

I’m with you on that. I’m with you on that. I thought you were maybe going to go for like paying bills, right? I actually prefer it.

Speaker 1 | 01:01.977

I actually, well,

Speaker 0 | 01:02.577

there you go. So

Speaker 1 | 01:04.698

I haven’t written a paper check in years. So, I mean, I actually prefer doing that, but it’s just the constant barrage of, you know, I always seem to miss a field and you got to go back. It was just, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 01:14.164

It doesn’t, it doesn’t auto fill correctly. You know, you get to the end, the change, the rate on you. And then you’re like, well, I was promised this rate and now I can’t go back.

Speaker 1 | 01:25.030

And there’s no one to talk to because it’s all right. Right. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 01:27.951

Yeah. You know, I, I booked one, one time and I got there and, and they’re like, yeah, we don’t have that reservation. And I was like, but I have this booking. I’m like, I don’t know what to tell you. Right. So I got the refund, but I was like, I, without a hotel.

Speaker 1 | 01:44.800

Thanks for the refund, but now what am I supposed to do?

Speaker 0 | 01:48.001

I’m in a strange place. I don’t have a hotel. What to do? Your second question is, what do you miss most about the internet prior to modern search engines?

Speaker 1 | 02:01.647

Prior to modern search engines. Well, I miss that little dial tone that it used to make when you connected to AOL.

Speaker 0 | 02:07.149

Oh, that was a good dial tone. It was so satisfying because you knew it was going to connect. or not in the middle of the, that dial tone.

Speaker 1 | 02:15.305

Right.

Speaker 0 | 02:16.426

Right. You would get to that and then it would get, and you got the little, I don’t know, uh, you know, for a while I did, I always kind of rotated, uh, my stuff. I don’t know if I told this before on this podcast, but I got kicked off of AOL when I was a kid. Uh, um, so I had to keep rotating, uh, um, you know, different free discs. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 02:36.257

You get the free disc.

Speaker 0 | 02:36.978

You just get them in the magazines. You get them in the magazines. Right. And so I was like, but so every time I was on AOL, I, you know, I just watched the guy running and, uh, and I got sad because it would stop in the middle and the guy would, the guy wouldn’t stop running again. So you wouldn’t,

Speaker 1 | 02:53.685

it would get almost to the end and you were like hoping you’re going to get out of it. Like your mom would pick up the phone and like just break the connection or, you know, it’s like, Oh, I got to go back through it again. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 03:03.229

Um, uh, uh, what’s the, what’s the strangest project you’ve ever worked on? IT related, right?

Speaker 1 | 03:11.308

So the strangest,

Speaker 0 | 03:14.830

strangest IT project that you’ve ever had the fun chance of working on.

Speaker 1 | 03:24.296

Boy, that’s a tough one. Honestly, I can’t think of a strange, I mean, it’s, it’s been normal, you know, normal stuff. I mean, outside of, you know, I’ve been doing IT for, you know, 20, 20 some years. And I’ve done everything from, you know, climbing around the ceilings of elementary schools in the middle of summer, pulling cable and sweating it out. But yeah, nothing that I would say would be strange.

Speaker 0 | 03:49.411

Well, you know, I’ll take that answer because I don’t like attics. You know, every time I get up into an attic, I have this fear that I’m going to fall through. Right. I’m going to hit the wrong board and just go right through. And they always have the tacks up at the top. So. And I don’t know if you’ve ever kind of gone up there and gotten hit in your head and just get attacked. And you’re like, oh, do I need to go update my shot? Like, what’s going on? Right.

Speaker 1 | 04:18.008

Well, let me tell you what, if you’ve never had the pleasure, pulling cables in a two-story brick school building on a 95-degree day is a joy you should experience at least once in your life.

Speaker 0 | 04:29.372

Well, so I’ll take that as an answer because I don’t want to do that. And that is certainly strange. I don’t like doing it. And And I’m glad I don’t have to.

Speaker 1 | 04:40.527

I got out of there and I had sweat so much that some of my other team members were like, are you okay?

Speaker 0 | 04:49.836

Well, speaking of schools, right, you’ve worked for schools, right? Yep. Tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 1 | 04:59.322

Yeah. So, I mean, I, you know, I guess if you look at my college education, I was a teacher. So I went to school. I graduated with a bachelor’s in business education with a history minor. And so, yeah, went into teaching, you know, business education at the time in high schools was really more around like those basic office applications kind of a thing. Yeah. So, yeah, I got a job with Grand Haven schools and started in the classroom teaching, you know, Word, PowerPoint, yada, yada, yada. But I was only an 80 percent teacher. Right. So I was I was only getting paid, you know, a, you know, 80 percent of a salary because I didn’t have a schedule. Right. So, you know, what’s the best way to get to 100 is come up with some class ideas. So I taught myself computer programming. I taught myself web design. I taught myself a plus certification, you know, hard. Nice.

Speaker 0 | 05:52.577

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 05:53.957

So, um. And started doing that and became a full-time teacher. And then the director of technology at the time, we had kind of connected over redoing some websites and maybe looking at Moodle, right, for before the whole thing.

Speaker 0 | 06:09.559

Learning management.

Speaker 1 | 06:11.220

Exactly. So I started working actually in the tech department half-time. I split between the two. This is probably seven years into my teaching career and then eventually wound up going over to the tech department full-time. And then became eventually became the director of instructional technology. So, you know,

Speaker 0 | 06:27.099

that’s you know, what fascinates me about this story is that when I was when I was, you know, just leaving college and I was about, you know, I was like deciding whether or not where I was going to go. And it was right about the same time where we had that, you know, the tech bubble had burst. There were no I.T. jobs. And so I applied. and actually got a job to be a teacher for business technology.

Speaker 1 | 06:57.617

There you go.

Speaker 0 | 06:58.257

But at the same time, I also got another offer to work on a help desk in a healthcare company, and I went with that one instead. So it’s like looking in the mirror of what could have been if I had gone the other way, right? So that’s so impressive. I mean, it’s amazing to kind of see that. So you worked your way up through the school being a teacher, and then… basically morph your way into the IT department.

Speaker 1 | 07:23.091

Yeah. Yeah. I was a, I was a technology coordinator. I handed all of our web stuff. So again, took those web design skills, um, you know, taught myself, you know, how to run a Moodle platform, how to install it, troubleshoot it. I rolled out some of our first virtual classrooms that I actually used, um, just as a learning platform within, we weren’t doing remote learning at the time. We’re going back to 2000, right?

Speaker 0 | 07:44.339

So correct. Yep. Yep.

Speaker 1 | 07:45.780

Um, and then, yeah, it kind of went from there. Any opportunity I had, any, I would, I would volunteer to go, to go learn. So, um, eventually I started learning how to manage windows servers and would learn from some of the other techs and I would go take some, some courses. And then, um, you know, it came time to, to look at virtualization. So I went and got, um, you know, got trained in VMware and did our first, uh, you know, P to Vs and virtualized all of our, all of our environment and things like that. And then we would come into summertime. And so it was time to, you know, we’d had passed a bond issue, a 10-year bond for technology. And so we were putting interactive whiteboards in the classroom. So wiring those up, you know, learning all the different, all the different connections, wiring, you know, at the time we were, we were reconstructing our, or renovating our HVAC in our building. So all the ceilings were exposed. So it was like, this is a great time to clear out the old wires. We were actually pulling token ring out, token ring.

Speaker 0 | 08:39.644

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 | 08:40.364

Oh my gosh. Yeah, I know, right? Because as you go and, you know, as you go and fix stuff, it’s like, you just cut it, leave it up in the ceiling, who cares? And you move on. So it was a good idea, a good opportunity. But I actually punched down patch panels and all that kind of stuff and all the ports. And so I taught myself how to punch down. And so, yeah, it was really, I used to, I used to do a tour for this community college. They would bring in their, their folks who were getting associates and different and networking, computer science, things like that. And I’d always get asked. So what, you know, what kind of certifications do I need? And I said, I used to tell them, honestly, get as much exposure as you can. You know, if you’re going to be a network tech, you have to understand how the end points are going to interact. You’re going to have to understand what are those issues are going to come into the help desk, how to troubleshoot. So any opportunity you get, go get the certifications you like. But any opportunity you have to work on something, if it’s outside of your area, jump in and give it a go. It’ll only broaden you. So, yeah, that’s kind of how I learned IT.

Speaker 0 | 09:40.646

That’s great advice, too, because I get asked sometimes, you know, speak for certain colleges and stuff like that, just small little pieces. And I get asked all the time from folks, you know, that are. that are going through these programs, how do I go and, you know, uh, get a job and how do I, you know, how do I transfer and get to, I want to be this and that. And I tell them, I mean, I mean, do, do the work, get the experience. I mean, that’s, and it’s, and I know it’s, it’s hard, but like grab a, get your foot in the door and get somewhere and just start working. And, and, uh, um, And I thought the greatest part about this, they were asking people, how do I get to the field? Well, the great news is, is if you get your foot in the door and you start working and where you’re where you’re at, you actually might find that you might like something else or and you might transition to that spot. That’s why I absolutely love your story, because you got in as the teacher and then you picked up some extra jobs doing extra classroom stuff with the tech. And you morphed your way basically into that department by doing that. on your own. And that is, I mean, that’s commendable. It’s exactly what, and you can still do that today. It’s exactly what a lot of folks did in the back in the day, even having IT degrees and stuff like that. They still had that, but they still got, you know, kind of fell into it. In this case, you bored your way into it, you know?

Speaker 1 | 11:10.336

Yeah, I did. I kind of dug my way, dug my way, but yeah, it’s, I mean, yeah, you’re, I mean, your career is a journey. It’s not, It’s not where you started nor what you intended when I was walking around Western Michigan University’s campus in 2000, right? You find these little niches and you find things you don’t like and you find things you do like. People ask me all the time, do you miss being in the classroom? And I say, you know, certain aspects, yeah. I mean, for a long time, even after I left the classroom, I coached all of my kids’sports teams and helped out and did all that kind of stuff because I love interacting with kids that way, right? We’re both passionate about the same thing. uh do i miss the day-to-day grind or the paper grading and think no not you know not no do i miss the late nights and not not necessarily but um yeah it’s it’s not it’s not harder work it’s just different work right right right now you but no matter what the you know no matter what your opportunity or who you’re with whether it’s good or bad you’re going to learn something from it so it’s up to you right to be able to take from it what you want you can say this sucks and it can suck um or you can say this sucks but I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m going to do this and learn from it and move on.

Speaker 0 | 12:15.687

So that’s a, you know, two words never spoken. I agree with you on that. Even bad experience is, is experience and you can learn from it. You know, looking at, looking at your stuff here, I was, it was like, you worked for, you worked for schools and, and then also I saw that you were currently working for the city of Grand Rapids. This is one of the things that just amazes me because I don’t know a lot about government and how government does IT. And not just the local governments and how the cities and stuff do their IT. I have so many questions for you. I want to start with this. The governments have to… put together local governments have to put together their budgets just like anyone else right and and and do that and they have to but and you know funding is limited to certain spots how do you work through that how do you uh uh convince and talk to people and say i need this you know you got to increase your cyber security here you got to modernize this section you got to uh do this and then what other pieces of it and this is this is a big question right you After we get through the budgeting one, the next one I want to know is what other pieces of IT do we not know about that local government does that we should know about?

Speaker 1 | 13:49.924

You know, so government’s different. It was a unique opportunity to move into the role of IT manager. And I had a great mentor in Paul Klimas, who was the director before. So government’s a little bit different. I went from, you know, the job in government attracted me because I was still able to give. that kind of core of what education is about, right? It’s about making people better, community better. And I was able to take that kind of civic mindedness and move into a larger operation. So there’s a lot going on in the government. And depending on the size, you know, the city of Grand Rapids has got 30 distinct business units. And when I say that, I’m not just talking departments that may have one function. I’m talking about complete lines of business that are separate and distinct from each other. So part of my learning was, so how do you manage that? And you have to figure out what is core to IT. So when you look at my IT operation, I run enterprise IT. It’s no different than most IT operations. We handle the connectivity, the endpoints, the application, and telecommunication, right? So, I mean, those are kind of the core. And then we use a federated model, right? So federated autonomy, our departments can engage in technologies that will help further their business, right? Yep. So, you know, if the water department has got things that are specific to water or to sewer or to income tax, they can they can engage in those solutions and have departmental resources. But we provide the core enterprise support for the operations. So part of that is, is you have to give up some control.

Speaker 0 | 15:32.205

Yeah, that’s just a wow.

Speaker 1 | 15:34.387

Yeah. To say I.T., anything that has a plug I.T. is in charge of, which means our smart fridges, our microwaves, our smoke detector. Everything connects to a computer. So that logic’s out the window nowadays. And I think a lot of places are finding that is that IT can’t do it all or IT is going to become a roadblock because there’s only so many resources to go around. But yeah, we do a lot of planning around the enterprise. We’re full cost allocation chargebacks to the department. Really, we put value judgments around things. So if departments value it, they can engage in it and we charge them for it year over year. Certain things they have to do, certain things they can do. But it’s trying to narrow that kind of scope down. So that’s one big step in the budgeting process. And two, like you said, as an IT leader, I have to be able to communicate the need of IT as a role, as a function of business. Right. So, I mean, if I was in the income tax department, if I was in the marketing department, if I was I would have to go explain why this is so important. I would have to provide the ROI. I had to provide the total cost of ownership, how we’re going to how we’re going to support it and what that looks like for us going forward if we if we don’t proceed. So, you know, we made a significant investment three years ago and kind of I don’t say right sizing, but but improving our cybersecurity as everyone did as we watched, you know. Government after government, we were easy targets because we didn’t have the investment. And call it divine guidance, whatever it is, I’ve been fortunate to be involved in two organizations that truly value IT as a business driver. And so the city of Grand Rapids has made significant investments in IT and expected their departments to use technology for automation, for customer service experience. So it’s really fortunate that I’m in that spot, that I’m not having to claw up the ramp every time we go to budget time, right? People know that IT is important and they expect good things. And so we were able to deliver on that. So a lot of intentional planning, a lot of collaborative work with departments.

Speaker 0 | 17:53.060

Before you move forward to the next topic, you know, looking into this, it’s pretty interesting, too, because… If you compare non-government IT and government IT, basing it on how you described it, it’s the same problem, right? Because you have, it’s essentially shadow IT is what you’re referring to, which is folks going ahead and just doing what they need to do to get their job done. And SaaS has made it really easy for this to be a thing, right? Because people can just go, oh, I need a… I need to do this thing. So I’m just going to use this app that’s right on there. And so you get this, the SAS sprawl that we’re multiple applications and stuff. And what always I thought was interesting is, and I, and I wanted to take a minute because now I have you and you’re, we’re having this budget discussion and we’ll figure out how to how this integrates into the government, local government. What. I usually do is when I get into an organization, I will look and work with the finance department pretty closely and figure out, okay, send me all the invoices of things and I will go through them and I will find out who’s using what, right? Because ultimately, if you’re going to do a SaaS app, you got to pay. So that’s where it goes, right? That’s the core. That’s where you’re going to find it. Someone’s going to be paying something, whether it’s through their company credit card or something. whether it’s through the actual invoicing and stuff, it’s all going to be recorded. But in this case, you’re saying, well, some of that is actually, you know, we encourage that because, you know, if they can do their own thing, it’s not like we have every resource in the book. So that’s OK, as long as they’re following the guidelines of the normal IT. So the question I ask is. How do you control, if it is controlled, spending when people are just going and doing things? Because you know that maybe multiple departments or multiple business entities or governmental entities, I don’t know the word for it, are going to be having applications that if they just kind of join forces, it would reduce the cost.

Speaker 1 | 20:11.867

So that’s a great question. Right. So, I mean, who could ever really control it? And I would love to say just going through invoices, I’d be able to find it all. But people put it on their P cards. It gets mislabeled. I mean, you name it. And then we have the people who are in search of free. Nothing’s free.

Speaker 0 | 20:31.322

You’re always giving up something.

Speaker 1 | 20:32.883

There’s a cost coming, and it’s coming down the road. But no, so it is kind of shadow IT. And so in government, we do what government does best. We put governance around it. And so there are, there are, you know, in order to take forward and make procurements, they have to come through commission. They have to come through our finance department, our purchasing department. And they are the gatekeepers. So, yes, I absolutely align with fiscal. I always say follow the money, right? Invite them out for beers, bring them over for a potluck, you know, have, but yes, stick with it. But, but we have, we have like, we haven’t. an IT leadership group that represents our main branches, public services, public safety, executive leadership, things like that, that talk through what things need to be on the roadmap, where we need to be making investments. And then we also have a technology coordination group with our purchasing department. Any investments that the city is going to make in technology has to come through that group for approval before it can go on to a commission agenda. And so that’s our opportunity to say, what are you doing? What does this do? Explain it to us. Explain to us total cost of ownership. You know, what is what is the return on investment? I get a lot of looks like, what do you mean? Like, OK, go Google it and then come back. But they have to come. They have to bring that business case forward. And then that’s our opportunity to say, well, you know, water’s doing something similar with mobile, you know, with with mobile GR. Go talk to them and see if that is going to be a fit for you. And then maybe we’ll consider this. So we do have some controls and governance there. And we do have policies that say, you know, again, departments cannot procure their own internet or email services because we have to have retention. We have to be able to provide for FOIA. So there are some policy things that guide people into the enterprise apps, telecommunications, you can’t do your own. So there are certain ones you have to come on board with us. And then if there if there’s an exception, then we can escalate it up to executive leadership and they can make that call. So we do a government does best and we use red tape.

Speaker 0 | 22:43.425

Well, that’s that’s actually I mean, they don’t listen. They call it governance for a reason. Right. And and actually, that’s actually a fantastic way to control it as well. I mean, you know, putting a governance body and saying, hey, this is you need to do stuff. But that’s great because you’re. you’re forcing people to really think about the solutions that they have rather than just go out and grab a solution and keep working. Right.

Speaker 1 | 23:06.380

Really, you know, really not just what is, you know, what is the next cool solution I want to grab, but have you thought all the way through it? You know, what is the support model? If you’re going to have users on it, who’s, who’s, who’s resetting passwords? You can’t just procure it, throw it at me and say, good luck and walk away. Cause that’s coming back at you. Yeah. But I mean, that’s when we can engage as I’ve spent a long time over the last three years in this role changing IT to the department of yes, if. We can’t be the department of yes because it’s not always going to fit. But I can say, yes, we can do this if you can do X, Y, and Z or if you can show me X, Y, and Z. And so if you’re going to engage in cloud and SaaS, is it in a GovCloud? Are we meeting FedRAMP? Hey, we’ve got single sign-on. Will it work with Azure AD? And then we can control passwords. and make your user experience better. So a lot of departments appreciate that because there are things that they would never even think about asking. And so we help them through that process. So we try to pull up alongside of them as more of a strategic partner than, you know, the IT department telling you no all the time.

Speaker 0 | 24:14.818

The department of yes, if. Yes, if. I guarantee you, you know, we’ll pull clips from this. And I guarantee you that’s probably going to be the clip that they pull is the department. Yes, if. I love that. That’s fantastic.

Speaker 1 | 24:30.744

I stole it. I stole it. It’s not mine. I took a leadership course with ICMA, which is a city management organization. And so it was around IT. And that was one of their, that was one quote that was like, yes, that’s what I’m looking for. Yes. You could do whatever it is that empowers your department if. And then here’s our ifs. You have to meet the security.

Speaker 0 | 24:52.457

That’s a great, but it’s a great. it’s a great way to describe it, you know, and it’s I was I was pulled in. I’d taken over a help desk as a, you know, I was managing a help desk and and they were having lots of problems. And the IT director pulled me aside at the time and and this while back and he said, he goes, you know what this help desk is right now? And he writes the help desk on the whiteboard and he puts no in front of it. He goes, it’s the no help desk. That’s what people think. And he goes, this is what I need you to change. You know, and it just stuck, right? Because it was like, yeah, if you call up and every time the answer is no, no, no, no, no, then people are going to stop coming to you, right? I love the yes if because it’s yes under some conditions, right?

Speaker 1 | 25:43.211

Yeah, I mean, we had, you know, we have, you know. Now that we’ve done a big migration into cloud with Microsoft. And so we get a lot of app requests to connect different apps to our O365 environment, right? And so we had someone make a request and it was this app. Anyway, there was a whole cost, a hidden cost structure to it, right? That if I went down this road, I wouldn’t be able to predict the costs and it would be open and available and somehow I would get stuck with it. So I said, no, but here is an app in O365 that does… all the exact same stuff. I did screenshot, showed it to them. So it wasn’t necessarily saying no, or in, in that user, it was more about how I said, no, it was more, no, we can’t use that one, but here’s one that gets you your needs. So it’s trying to understand the business need and then bringing it alongside of it. That’s always been kind of my niche.

Speaker 0 | 26:35.218

That, that is, that’s the way to do it because you got to understand what process. what the processes are, what they’re trying to do, you know, where, where does the information going? And then once you do that, you can layer the, the technology on top of that. And, you know, and if you try to do it the other way around, you end up trying to, you know, create odd processes to fit a solution that doesn’t work for you. So, yeah, no, I think that that that’s the right way to, that’s the right way to do that, Doug. I, I, I’m, I’m a hundred percent on board on that. Um, Yeah, so I guess we answered a lot of pieces, actually, to that question on there. And what a great tangent. I absolutely loved it. So it sounds to me, and you’re kind of opening my eyes to this government IT, which is, you know, you’ve got the central core of IT that can got a predefined amount of resources and can and handles the core infrastructure. And I say infrastructure with a little asterisk now because infrastructure is a little bit different. It’s not a physical thing now sometimes. Right. It’s it’s. It can be in the cloud. It can be parts of, it’s actually controlling the, it’s actually, honestly, to use your term, controlling the governance of IT in itself, right? It’s, you know, we’re going to be the central identity. We’re going to connect in. And if you’re going to plug into us virtually, this is how you do it, right? So, yeah, you know, I think that that’s a good way to look at it. And… And actually, if you look at that from a model of departments and internal IT and businesses, it’s the same kind of concept. You know, it’s just that it sounds to me like they’re, you know, they do what they do well, which is bureaucracy. But yeah,

Speaker 1 | 28:27.105

it is for a good purpose. I mean, yeah, you look at you look at my role. I’m basically building a playground for the rest of the city to play on. And that’s my role is to maintain the equipment. Right. But you get down into the department level and you see some amazing things going on. And you get down to engineering and you think about, I mean, Grand Rapids is a medium-sized city. You know, we always say that, you know, Grand Rapids is the second largest city in Michigan. But there’s a big gap between one and two, right? So we’re a mid-sized business. But how do you keep track of road conditions and linear assets? And, I mean, there’s some amazing things going on in our departments, a lot of really good work. People have learned to use. not just our tools, but integrate their tools into ours. And we’ve got some just, I mean, some really cool stuff that some of our departments are doing. Mobile GR is engaging in autonomous vehicle pilots and scooter shares and ride shares. And I mean, all this kind of stuff. And we’re getting into data analytics, right? Everyone needs data analytics. And so we’re trying to, again, build that playground around. data lakes and data warehouses and things like that so there’s some really cool stuff in the actual departments and that’s our job is to play the offensive line you’ll never know we’re there but we 100 had everything to do with every touchdown you score um kind of a thing so we we we drift in the background i also talk a lot in in analogies i apologize all right listen i do too uh that’s

Speaker 0 | 29:52.841

how much they work sometimes they don’t but you know but no i think it’s the best way to it’s the best way to uh take a very complex problem, a complex idea, and break it down into something that’s a little bit more palatable, right? And you’re not the only one that does this. I mean, you know, on my off time, I, you know, watch YouTube videos about quantum mechanics because I’m a nerd. Right.

Speaker 1 | 30:21.311

And I like to do my downtime. You know,

Speaker 0 | 30:24.292

what do you do? I’m sorry. My wife goes, what science thing are we going to watch now? Right. So. But no, it’s, you know, in there. in every science type video and stuff like that, that they do, they’re always, let me explain this really hard to get concept in a fun little, uh, you know, uh, analogy and it, and does work. It does, you know, build that model does work. It does simplify it a bit. You have to make sure that, um, you’re like simplified, this is it, but it’s a lot more detailed. Um, I love, uh, you know, um, I love that you, first of all, are in grand Rapids. And that you’re talking about data lakes because aren’t you guys like got you guys got a ton of lakes up there, right?

Speaker 1 | 31:13.303

Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, we’re I mean, actually, I live in Grand Haven, which is about 30 miles outside of Grand Rapids. But I’m two miles from Lake Michigan. We’ve got an inland ocean, you know, freshwater ocean.

Speaker 0 | 31:24.732

Obviously not the same thing. But why why miss the opportunity to point out the Great Lakes there and and then talk about data lakes? Because. I don’t think I’ve talked about data lakes on the show. I know we’ve talked a little bit about data analytics and pieces and stuff like that. But there is so much involved in taking disparate information from multiple systems and funneling it into a system where people can report on it. And I don’t know if you want to take some time here to dive in, dive into the lakes.

Speaker 1 | 32:04.216

yeah i mean i mean right now i mean we’re just doing some pilots and things like that but yeah we’ve got all of these departments have got these these sources of data and some some tied together some would work well together and some may provide those insights that you’ve got to really tease out um but how do you get all those things together right so we have a couple departments that are going down the road of doing some data analytics for dashboarding and and some public information you And so we’re using that maybe as an opportunity to build an unstructured data lake in Azure using Power BI. Again, trying to use COTS tools. You start getting off, you’re getting niche, and suddenly you can’t find support and things like that. Because we’re only an IT department of two people. We use contractors for everything else. And so sticking to those COTS solutions and finding ways to work them. is is really kind of a big thing but yeah so again just trying to tease some of that out and and finding those those those resources honestly finding the resources is the hard part i mean they’re it’s it’s it’s they are in short supply and they’re not cheap no no yeah can we get a couple college kids no you can’t no you can’t but it’s going to be real ugly but you know But, you know, Grand Rapids is got a, I mean, it’s kind of a small tech hub that we are surrounded by some really good IT providers. And so that’s why we went down this road, right, is we went to an IT as a service model to leverage all this great talent around us, right? I mean, we were getting posted up and right. And when your turnover rate’s 35, 40%, you’re constantly in onboarding and innovation. So we decided to ride the tide, you know, and. and use all this great talent around us. And so that’s helped us get to some of these problems that I don’t think we would have ever gotten to. Um, so I’m, I’m very curious to see where this goes. It’s kind of in that nebulous, like the pilots going well, but how will it, how will it scale? Yeah. So, yeah, so we, we, we’ve got a couple of cool opportunities out there, um, to see where, where it can go.

Speaker 0 | 34:15.694

Well, it’s amazing too, because, um, you know, you, you put together, uh, uh, a you know, a data warehouse, a data lake, you know, and you start to take this disparate information and put it and put it together. And you have to remember that it’s not a it’s not a destination you get to. Right. Because once you get it working and and then you get it to a point where people can actually use it, that’s when it becomes more fun. Right. Because now they’re starting to use it and they’re going, oh, wait a second. This data doesn’t. to match up with this data and wait i’m getting wrong information over here and then you’re starting to correct that data and then people can introduce brand new data and they need to integrate that with it so it is a uh constant evolution and a and you’ve now created a thing that you need to keep going uh and and that’s the that’s the one thing and when people say you know what’s data like cost and all that type of stuff it’s like well it’s an investment continual investment, right? Because you’re going to be, once you get it rolling, you’re going to get a return out of it because now you got a whole bunch of data, you’ll be able to see a bunch of things and everything, and people are going to love that and they’re going to use it more. So not only is it going to stress out the resources, people are going to want to go, oh, can you add this in there too so I can get this? And then it becomes more complex and stuff. So it’s one of those things that if you get it, if you’re successful, it becomes more work.

Speaker 1 | 35:44.440

Yeah, right. But I mean, that’s, but I mean, that’s the good thing, right? And, you know, our model has empowered our department. So we’ve got one department leading the charge, but actually it could scale outside of their department and into the enterprise.

Speaker 0 | 35:56.730

Correct.

Speaker 1 | 35:57.590

You know, we have, we have a value, we have city values. One of those is around collaboration. So, you know, you look at maybe water department data, but then we’ve got some partners that are working with consumers energy. And so, and even outside data sources coming in and taking a look at how some of that might work towards. driving efficiency or planning investments or where maybe there’s some disparate outcomes, you know, based on socioeconomic data that we can pull in. So, yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s super cool, but right now it’s kind of like the lost highway. We don’t know where it’s going quite yet, but we’ve got, we’ve, we’ve got some good energy behind it. So I’m, you know, I’m looking forward to that being kind of the next. Oh, I’m excited. So, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 36:39.280

I’m excited for it. It’s a great project to work on. And it’s challenging and amazing. Once you get it working, it’s going to be fantastic. And it’s going to be like kids looking at one kid that has a candy bar and being like, I want that candy bar too. And they’re going to be itching to get into that data lake and get that information. Oh, they got this? I need this too. I mean, that’s what’s eventually, you know, that’s my guess. That’s my vision of what’s going to happen. And I think it’s going to make you busy. which is good which is fantastic yeah it’s just another fun little challenge that’s awesome i know i i don’t think we’ve actually spoke about uh um you know that kind of in the depth about data on here but it’s so big i mean uh um i know so many people uh that their data is the gold of their uh um organizations and certainly the government um and and having that having the ability to report on it in multiple different ways. And, um, I mean, a spreadsheet can go so far, right. You know, uh, there’s only so many times you can, uh, you can stress out a, a V, a V lookup or, or, or a pivot table right before you’re like, I need something else. And, uh, and this is that, that’s, that’s pretty impressive. And, and I, I think that trying to get that to work is, is, uh, and getting it to work is going to be a great thing for you. That’s amazing.

Speaker 1 | 38:07.159

Yeah. And you know, The tech is, I mean, I don’t want to say the tech is easy, right? Because we’ve got, we’ve got some great partners that can help us put it together. But I think our big, our big step forward is going to be, how do you ask the questions, right? So, I mean, it’s not just, Ooh, I want my, you know, I want to, I want to look at data. Well, what are the, what are the questions you want to answer? Yeah. I’m not, I’m not sure. Okay. Go away. Think about that and come back when you have a question. Cause that, that, I mean, everything else in between in the, in the data analytics model, you know, between, um, Where are your data sources and what are the questions you want to answer? And then finally at the end, what are you going to do with the outcomes that you’ve announced? Everything else in between can be commoditized. But those are those key things organizations got to wrap their head around. So I think it’s going to be an interesting thought exercise. We’ve got some great people in our departments that have different perspectives. I think it’s going to be really cool.

Speaker 0 | 39:05.486

Well, I hope. you come back and give us an update on that eventually when that happens. You know, sticking into this thing, you mentioned that you helped lead the transformation to basically infrastructure as a service, right? And I LinkedIn you. I went and LinkedIn and got some stuff. And it says on here that, you know, you… You’ve helped lead the transformation to infrastructure as a service and the migration to the Microsoft Government Cloud. I’m so interested. Can you speak to this?

Speaker 1 | 39:47.555

Yeah. So, I mean, infrastructure as a service we use. I mean, we have an on-premise data center, but we began looking at private cloud first, looking at backups, running some small environments. Take a look at what was… what was possible and what the you know what what speeds might be like and you know what are those hurdles we’d have to overcome um and we’ve got a great partner in grand rapids um But we’ve got, we have one department, the police department that went down doing electronic records. And so that was a huge data dump. I mean, a huge data dump. And so how do you scale effectively without overscaling when you have an unpredictable monthly growth? I mean, we’re talking terabytes a month. Wow. With retention rates of forever. So it’s like this line that goes up. And so you’re either in constant procurement mode doing capital procurements, right? Or you move it from CapEx and you move to OpEx. And you have a department that is able to scale because they have a customer base that needs them to scale, right? So similar to why we went to IT as a service, we went to vendors who have motivation for their staff to be certified, top of their game. and professionals because it’s a commodity for them. Similar motion here. And kind of went down that road of moving that data over just to be able to give them that scalability of, hey, I need another 10 terabytes, another 20 terabytes. And I need it replicated and I need it sent off-site somewhere else in the country. And so we were able to partner with someone that had a great network. We’re able to store things all over the state. So it kind of gave us that kind of flavor. Now we’ve kind of transitioned into the Microsoft GovCloud. We’ve always been O365. But now we’re starting to use workloads in the cloud, in the Azure cloud. First, it was around COVID, around resiliency. So as COVID was hitting, of course, it’s always the double tap, right? So we’ve got a crisis. Here comes bad actors. So what happens if they ransom? Well, no big deal because we can just survive off O365. And I said, if you can log in, right? But all of our domain controllers were in that data center. So you can’t log in.

Speaker 0 | 42:22.899

Can’t do that.

Speaker 1 | 42:26.240

And so we started looking at cloud as a resiliency tool. And now we’re starting to move workloads and testing out. What does that look like for maybe blob storage? How do we get to immutability? and things like that.

Speaker 0 | 42:40.824

So that’s, so this, okay. So this is some great things that you’re throwing out here. So let’s, let’s break it down a little bit. So, you know, first of all, let’s, let’s address the fun little storage in the cloud, right? So we all know storage in the cloud is extremely expensive, right? And so you, so to, to move storage into the cloud, usually people have to identify what type of storage, the retention in this case, zero, you’re, we’re going to retain it forever. that you know there’s not any uh um we’re not gonna it’s not gonna be seven years or whatever it’s this is forever retention so now what you’re saying is we’ve got some data that’s gonna go on there but you got some data that’s old that’s probably not going to be accessed as much as the newer fresh data so how are you handling that how are you reducing that storage cost and getting it uh um getting like the fresh data in one spot and maybe the uh the data that is not so fresh but still needs to be retained and could be accessed but not accessed a lot in another spot.

Speaker 1 | 43:43.081

Honestly, that’s where we are. So yeah, we’ve I mean, we have a we have a private cloud. So it’s not in the Azure Gov cloud. It’s in our private cloud. So we don’t have the cost of up and down. We just have the cost of overall storage. But with that came options, right? So we’ve got we’ve got gold, you know, gold level storage for production data. We’ve got archival storage that it’s running slow spinning disks. We’ve got offsite backup type storage that that’s, so we’ve got these different pots that we could move things into, but you’re asking the exact same question. We’ve got, we’ve got data that we’re predicting in the next you know, the next five or six years, we could be, we, we could broach the petabyte level and we’re, we’re small, we’re a midsize government, but. But so to your point, so what is the stuff that hasn’t been touched in the last seven years? What is the stuff that we just have to retain just to retain for compliance? And what is the stuff that has to? And so, yeah, we’re starting to get into that. So what are our data classifications and how are we moving that around? That’s exactly where we are right now because it does. You start to watch that bill go up and you’re like, man, I’m doing an Excel spreadsheet. That’s a scary number. And they at the end of two years. Right.

Speaker 0 | 44:59.274

So it really is. And that’s and that’s what seems to. When people move to the cloud, it’s a great piece, but you’ve got to have that strategy behind it if you’re going to see that growth. If you’re going to see that exponential growth and you’ve got to put together retention, you’ve got to put together, okay, where do we archive this, move this off and everything? It sounds like you’re already on top of it, which is fantastic. We’re not there yet.

Speaker 1 | 45:25.212

We’re trying to get there.

Speaker 0 | 45:26.493

Well, you understand. You already identified, you did a, you did a big thing. You already identified, you got a spreadsheet together and said, Oh, this is going really high. Right? So we need to get in front of it. And, and you’ve already had those discussions in that talk and, and, and it sounds like that’s, you’re going the right way. It is a natural progression. You move stuff up in the cloud, and then you watch your storage go through the roof, and then you’re like, oh, wait a second. And the cloud’s like that, too. It’s not static. It’s like you could, for on-premise infrastructure, you get a beefy server with a lot of storage in it, and you go, all right, put this on here. Oh, we need more storage? All right, tack on a NAS, right? Oh, we’re really hitting the storage? Okay, give me a good SAN. Pop that stuff. And you just keep. bigger and bigger. But in cloud, it’s not the same, right? Because you’re not doing that on premise infrastructure. So you have to kind of plan where you’re moving these items and where you’re going to store them. And so you’re already getting there. So you get it. And that’s actually commendable to be able to go, okay, I already identified where we could be. And now we need to put together a strategy to do that. That’s great. And it’s data classification anyway, too. So not only does it, it serves two purposes. One, you get There’s a cost. You can reduce cost by doing it. And you can also get your data classified and set up correctly. And then you’ve killed a compliance requirement. Right. So it’s like two birds with one stone.

Speaker 1 | 46:56.779

You can get there with compliance. But yeah, I mean, so, yeah, you force you force the decision point. Right. So in our in our in our budgetary model, if if a department says, well, I want every computer to have this program. Not a problem, but there’s a cost you have to evaluate. So again, here, if you’re going to put data up into the data lake, you’ve got to assess the cost of what that data is.

Speaker 0 | 47:21.038

But yeah,

Speaker 1 | 47:23.599

understand the nuances of, well, if it’s cloud to cloud moving, it’s not going to cost you anything. But if it’s cloud to ground or if it’s ground, you know, now it’s going to cost you something to bring it down.

Speaker 0 | 47:32.603

How many reads, how many writes?

Speaker 1 | 47:34.123

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I’m sure that there’s some magical, like,

Speaker 0 | 47:39.002

calculator you can do and it’s going to get it could give you your cost but anyone that’s been in the heat of the battle knows it’s never going to be precise no it won’t be but you just have to kind of get it get it close enough uh to make that that uh that estimate it doesn’t have to be precise it just needs to be in the ballpark uh and then if it’s in the ballpark you you know okay i gotta take this stuff and move it somewhere else uh so i have it and you and you’ll get there um Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting that this move to cloud is interesting for a whole bunch of organizations and not just government, because you’ve got small businesses doing it. And then as they grow, they grow really quickly. And then they realize, oh, I need to put together a storage. I need to put together a storage piece or I, you know, I move stuff to the cloud and I’ve got solutions that need to integrate with it. And now I need to figure out how to plug those in as well securely. Right. And that’s why I loved that you mentioned that you had the SSO running, because that’s a big deal right off the bat. How are you well, it’s probably the answer is probably SSO, but is that how you’re also enforcing, like, MFA requirements and such?

Speaker 1 | 48:49.463

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 48:50.584

Okay, good.

Speaker 1 | 48:50.964

Yeah, so, yeah, we’ve put those things behind there. And, again, it was more of a it was more advantageous for departments to have not a thousand different passwords to remember or logins or, so here’s the advantage. But in order to do that, you’ve got to do MFA. Right. So, and by the end, you know, so we were able to pull off MFA in like 60 days. It was, it was ruthless compliance. If I can quote a guy used to quote Dave’s nursing, ruthless compliance. So, you know, people were like, well, I don’t want to do MFA. Sounds good, man. Here’s a paper and pencil, go work, go, go sit at your desk and work, you know, whatever you gotta do. But,

Speaker 0 | 49:30.150

MFA is required now. I mean, that’s a requirement. If you’re not on MFA, you are. And this is a disclaimer for all the business folks that are listening to this. I know the IT folks know it, but the business owners, the business folks that are trying to understand how to better their business through IT, MFA is a requirement. It’s no longer an option. If you’re not on MFA, hackers are targeting you. I don’t know. They’re there.

Speaker 1 | 50:00.070

Yeah, if you’re not doing two-factor and if you’re not doing, you know, we’re rolling out MDM now, so I get trying to enhance policies. But, yeah, if you don’t have a patching cadence and if you don’t have 2FA in place, I mean, yeah, you’re literally sitting out there hoping someone comes at you.

Speaker 0 | 50:21.816

When you’re doing the well, actually, I want to take a quick little deviation here. One of the things you mentioned, and I really liked it because you mentioned it earlier on that. Yeah. That when you were a teacher, you were doing the coaching. Right. And then when I looked on your LinkedIn and sorry for the by the way, for the program piece. Sorry for the quick jump over to this, but I really want to cover it. I, but the, uh, you also mentioned LinkedIn that you, one of your skill sets was coaching and mentoring, right? Uh, near and dear to my heart. I absolutely love passing on knowledge and, um, uh, you know, I’m, I’m not one to, to hold onto it. As soon as I learned something, I teach as many people as I can so that we can grow. Uh, and, uh, um, one of the reasons why I do this podcast is so that I can help educate. Um, So let’s talk about coaching and mentoring and what that means to you.

Speaker 1 | 51:23.895

I mean, honestly, I’m sitting here today doing the things that I do, doing the things I love, because people took time out of their day. I mean, I am a result of people putting time and investment into me, right? Not just professionally. I mean, coming up, I mean, I played sports. I was in Boy Scouts. It was, you know, I was raised by a community. And that… And that’s time. That’s time away from, you know, a lot of these coaches that I had coming through school and, you know, even coaches that I’m watching coach my kids now. That’s time with my kid away from their kid. I mean, that’s an investment. But honestly, without that, I don’t know who I would be, truthfully. And so I think it’s important to give back. And so I oftentimes feel like I might be running a little bit at the mouth if someone has questions. Because, again, I want to give that knowledge back. And people will tell you, I mean, one of my, it’s a corny line that we did. I shouldn’t say it’s corny. It’s just to make it sound bad.

Speaker 0 | 52:26.517

Yeah, corny is my favorite.

Speaker 1 | 52:29.519

We did a program called Capturing Kids’Hearts, right? So it was this whole thing around, you know, how do you get kids to understand that you care about them? Because, you know, they’ll never learn until they know how much you care. Um, and so there was this like tagline, it was my goal is your success. And I still use that today. Um, because at the end of the day, we are all in the people business. I don’t care. I don’t care if you’re, if you’re, we’re running a help desk. I don’t care if you’re in a server room. We are all in a business of being about relationships, how we interact with our coworkers, our customers, our executives, the people around us, the people in the parking lot. And so it’s important to give back to those relationships. And so, um, Yeah, any way I can, I do try to give back volunteering with my kids teams or in classrooms or, you know, like I said, I used to give tours and work with community college kids, you know, and then if there are people within our organization now, I meet with people, you know, at different times. I just want to sit down and chat IT and, well, you know, what’s the experience or, you know, this is what I got going on. You know, do you have any advice? And I always, always will make time for that because, like I said, someone did it for me. And, you know. to the point where I’ve had a couple mentors that believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. And that’s a hugely powerful statement. And so that’s something that I’m looking to give back. And I hope someday someone says that about me. But yeah,

Speaker 0 | 53:55.973

I think we can all-That’s fantastic, Doug. It really is. And growing up, I was in martial arts and also in long distance running. And I had- the, um, you know, the pleasure of, uh, of, of working with some great coaches and great mentors and, and, and both in, in all those organizations. And they do make a difference. They really do. And, uh, to anybody that’s doing that out there and, and mentoring and coaching and whether it be, you know, anything, it, it, it makes a difference. Uh, it might not seem like so at the time, uh, but, uh, these kids will grow up and they will remember, uh, you know, uh, um, you know, the investment in time that you spend on them. And, and if you’re in a business and you, and you see folks that are up and coming, take the time and, and help them out as well. Because I, I think Doug, I think that that’s an amazing point to make on this.

Speaker 1 | 54:51.800

You know, and I think a lot of us in, in IT, I mean, a lot of us, a lot of us are back, back of the house folks, right? We’ve got front of the house folks, we got back of the house folks. But I mean, the same thing applies. Everyone wants to feel valued. It doesn’t matter what I don’t care if you’re pumping gas. I don’t care what you’re doing. Everyone wants to feel valued. So taking that moment to recognize the efforts, you can get people to run through a wall for you, even as adults. So if you want to have a highly effective team, if you’re going to be a highly effective leader, take IT out of it, right? Highly effective leader, you have to have those interpersonal skills to understand what’s driving your team, right? Not everybody’s going to be a go-getter like you. Not everyone is going to be. Some people just want to show up and do a really good job and get a pat on the back. Some people don’t want any appreciation. That’s me. I really don’t care about Lucite and things like that. But some people may not value a salary increase. They just want more time off to spend with their family. Some people really do value that financial bump. So understanding where those people are at, you can meet them there. They’ll run through a wall for you. You’ll get that extra productivity out of people, no doubt.

Speaker 0 | 55:59.012

You’ve hit the head on the nose. Why can’t I get that right? You’ve hit the nail on the head. Thank you. You’ve hit the nail on the head. Look it, Doug. Thank you very much. I appreciate you helping me out there. I could not get that out. And I was like thinking, my brain was like, what is it? What is it? Nail on the head. No, you did. And you hit the nail on the head with that. That was absolutely remarkable. You have to custom. Not everybody is the same. Everyone’s going through different things. Everyone has different challenges. Everyone has everything that means different things to them. And you have to, you have to connect with people, you know, in, in, in this day and age, it’s a little hard. People are knee deep in phones and, and, and their, and their computers and they don’t, and they don’t see it. Take time, connect with people and, and make that actual emotional connection. Um, uh, no, thank you for sharing that. That was, that was great. Uh, I, I do. We’re getting close to kind of the end of this piece. Brent, I have to have you back because you’re just fantastic. But I do want to finish kind of with the IT crystal ball because it is what we do here, right? And I want to specific, I’m going to narrow you down a bit. Sure. What is the future of IT for and you can either say school or government. right? Local government. I want to go that route because you have this unique kind of niche where you’ve operated in these two spots that not everybody’s in, right? And it’s a niche environment where you have to learn to do things, as you described today, different than you would in regular business. So if you could tell us, you know, from a crystal ball standpoint, IT crystal ball, what is the future?

Speaker 1 | 57:52.772

Honestly, I think we’re going to see a lot of growth. Again, we’ve got the core of IT, but it’s all about experience. So whether that be in government and how you interact with government services and whether that becomes more personal but yet automated. So as we see chat GPT, I know you said we don’t want to talk AI. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 58:16.005

you can reference it.

Speaker 1 | 58:17.426

But I mean, to that point we just talked about. Everybody, we’ve got a city of 200,000 people that all have different needs. So how do we get that experience to meet their needs? And the same thing with kids. I mean, honestly, technology is a leveler when it comes to education, right? It goes back to when the wealthy and the churches controlled libraries. They controlled knowledge. And now the knowledge is there. But how do we get them off the tickety ticks, I call it? And actually utilizing that knowledge instead of just staring at a doom scroll. So what is that experience and how do we keep it personal? Because, I mean, honestly, the IT crystal ball, if I would love to see it, is that we get out of our devices. I mean, what we’re doing here and what everyone does now, everything’s a virtual meeting. Like people don’t get together and you miss all the sidebars, you miss all these different things. So we have to find a way for IT to get personal. and be able to provide some of those things. And I think some of the things that we’re seeing can, can help in that way. You know, I, I, I think augmented reality is going to be a big thing. And I’m really excited about that. And, and how, how devices can, can interact to maybe bring that, that experience, right. Where you and I can still stay personal, but I can still be getting the questions answered that I have running through my head or, or whatever those things.

Speaker 0 | 59:44.051

I can’t wait. I, you know, I, I have these glasses. They’re not smart glasses, but when they come out, you know, they’re going to be on my head and then I can just kind of read and look forward to read my notes and look forward. You know, I love that you said that and keep it personal and and and connect. And and when I started, you know, folks listening to this, they don’t they don’t see there’s a little bit of prep that goes on prior to prior to the podcast. Not a lot. Not a lot. There’s just a little bit. um i just want to make sure i get his name right and all this stuff right so um but uh um there’s a little bit of prep and uh during the prep i always kind of talk and i say hey um just so you know i’m going to leave my camera on so that you can at least see me you don’t have to keep yours on but yeah doug i appreciate you did um and the reason why i do that is so that um we you and i can have a casual conversation actually look at each other and talk to each other and read our facial expressions and have that kind of that personal connection. So it’s good for you to actually, you know, kind of take that and see that piece. And I know that all this is going to get turned into an audio podcast, right? But I like to see the I like to see the expressions and I like to read the expressions and work that way. And I feel like it makes it for a better conversation. And I know I was I was talking the other day to a group of folks where I work. And, you know, like, you know, 10 people had their all their videos off and there was like three people with video on. And I said, I guess the guys listen, I get people are camera shy and right. But imagine walking in. to your place of work in a box with like a little hole where you would communicate with people and nobody could see you just put maybe put a little picture of you on top right and maybe we’re through that hole i go is that how like you you interact with people on a daily basis it’s not right so i get that you’re camera shy but why if you’re walking in somewhere you’re going to show your face and you’re going to talk to somebody live anyway right so you’re you know, this is what you’re doing when you don’t turn your camera on, you know, uh, you know, is that you’re, you’re giving the feel of, no, I don’t, I want to be a behind the corner and not, and not talk to people. And, and that’s, and that’s, that’s not how we’ve done this over the course of generations. People don’t hide behind rocks and talk to people. So,

Speaker 1 | 62:13.616

I mean, it’s the same thing if you go into a meeting and everyone’s got their laptops open and they’re not, they’re not engaged, they’re not present. So if you’re not present, go away.

Speaker 0 | 62:21.744

Yeah, that’s a good, that’s a great point.

Speaker 1 | 62:24.006

I’ve been guilty of it too. I sit and fidget with my phone and just inadvertently I pick it up and look at it. Like I tell myself, stop, put it down and focus on and be, be present with the people around you. Cause if you were the one presenting, you would hate that. You would absolutely hate that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. I get it. I get it.

Speaker 0 | 62:40.539

No, that’s a great, it’s, it’s a great, a great way. And I agree. A personal connection. I hope that is the future that, and I haven’t had that by the way, in the ITO crystal ball. So you get a. You can think that personal connection, that to me would be the best possible outcome for the future. Let’s hope for that.

Speaker 1 | 62:59.559

An enhanced personal connection, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 63:03.943

Liz, thank you for coming on. Nerds, this has been Michael Moore hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And I’ve been here with Doug Stark, Director of Information Technology at the City of Grand Rapids. Doug, thank you so much. Please come again and let us know how that data like goes.

Speaker 1 | 63:22.839

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on Mike. Appreciate it.

Speaker 0 | 63:24.461

Absolutely.