Speaker 0 | 00:09.440
And welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m one of the hosts. Phil Howard happened to be the founder also. But today, we are speaking with Neil Nicolaisen. Am I getting the…
Speaker 1 | 00:20.329
Nicolaisen.
Speaker 0 | 00:21.129
Nicolaisen. Okay. I quite often make a fool of myself, but that’s how…
Speaker 1 | 00:25.213
I’ll be honest with the name like Nicolaisen, I’ve heard every variant, so I don’t really pay that much attention.
Speaker 0 | 00:31.037
So before we started two seconds ago, you said you’ve winged everything in life. So I… I think I probably can relate with that to a certain degree. You know, I have eight kids. I didn’t think that would ever happen either. So I’ve been winging that as well. And, you know, that’s how fathering goes.
Speaker 1 | 00:50.209
What are you? You know, eight kids. You don’t look that beat up at this point in your life. They must be reason.
Speaker 0 | 00:55.792
I learned to digulate. Digulate. I can’t even speak. I’ve learned to delegate. Digulate is a new word. Yes. When you get to a certain number, you must delegate. And no, I don’t do anything.
Speaker 1 | 01:05.456
It’s what you do when you got a big hole to dig and you delegate it to your kids.
Speaker 0 | 01:10.478
I love it. So you came highly recommended. And like I told you,
Speaker 1 | 01:17.380
you need to hang out with better people.
Speaker 0 | 01:20.840
I already know. And I can already understand why. So this show, believe it or not, we like to talk about IT leadership. That has, I guess, recently become… thing, which sounds like it’s something that you might do or take part in from time to time. And, you know, there’s, you know, I guess really what is IT leadership? You put it as, you know, enable strategy through technology innovation. Okay, we got that. Deliver operational excellence. Okay. I think some tech guys can do that. But one thing that’s been interesting that I’d love to talk about for a few minutes is great workplace culture. And at what point do you… Um… How does a good IT leadership take part in that? Because I can’t tell you how many IT leaders that call me like, Phil, I’m just, I’m over here now. It’s so much better. It was just, you know, it was so toxic. It was horrible over where I was. So it made me think like, well, then you weren’t really taking part in that leadership or affecting the leadership. And sometimes you might not be able to. And it probably depends on the type of organization. I mean, you’re at a fairly large university, I’m assuming. And so you have the benefit of. It’s just a different atmosphere, I would imagine, when you’re at a university than when you’re at a, I don’t know, large manufacturer where it’s all about the bottom line. Not to say that it’s not about the bottom line in a university and that the landscape of education hasn’t changed over the last three years, which is a whole other topic in itself. It is. Maybe tell us a little bit about where you got started, what your first computer was, and how you learned to care about culture.
Speaker 1 | 02:54.530
Sure. So I’ll give you the quick and dirty, even though it’s rarely quick, but it’s certainly dirty. So 800 years ago, I got a degree in physics, of all things. I wanted to be a nuclear physicist. And so then I realized that while I may like modern physics, advanced physics, Oppenheimer was fascinating to me just because, you know, I lived my life in Heisenberg uncertainty principle. I wasn’t, it wasn’t what appealed to me.
Speaker 0 | 03:19.757
That’s super nerdy. Could you explain that real quick? Can you even explain that real quick?
Speaker 1 | 03:25.519
Sure. Let’s talk about the duality of. particles and how they’re both particles and waves. And because they’re particles inside of waves or waves that are inside of particles, you can never exactly position velocity. If you can exactly pinpoint velocity, you can’t pinpoint position and vice versa. That’s Heisenberg uncertainty, which means everything is uncertain. You can put it within a box of certainty, but inside that
Speaker 0 | 03:54.696
box everything is uncertain which sort of applies to life and i as an it leader because whatever we’re doing today is going to change how about our model universe just since we have a part of this show that’s called there’s a part of this show that i like to take a break and we’ll just take that break right now at the beginning of the show i guess it’s usually meant to cut up at the beginning of the show but it’s so appropriate right now um which is called um do you believe in or or take part in any of the uh modern day conspiracy theories but um you I guess what made me think of it was model of the universe. And do we have it right? Or is it just a theory?
Speaker 1 | 04:27.682
You know, it’s interesting because if you go back to the particle theory of life, and then the wave theory of life, and they seem to be, well, it’s either a wave or a particle. And then Einstein came along and said, it’s both. And so maybe our construct of our reality is based on what we experience. We experience particles, we experience waves. And then we project that model onto everything we experience. And so it’s just hard for us to grasp that maybe there’s a third alternative that is not what our perceptions tell us is real. And so I’m just really nerding out on the physics stuff. I it’s instructive to even as I think both forward and backward from this point in time, what I think is going to happen in the future is based on what happened in the past, but maybe not. So how can I be prepared? How can I be prepared for something different? Because every thought process we have, every pattern we have until you come to these people who are just wildly innovative because they came up with the third way of thinking. or the second way of thinking, or the fourth way, or the fifth way, and just say, no, these constraints that I put on myself, what if they’re not true? What would I do if these constraints are a construct and not constraints? And I think so in the sciences, we tend to believe in terms of the constraints we’ve invented. If you think about what, you know, Einstein. with the photoelectric effect where he said, light is not a particle. It’s not a wave. It’s light. And it blew people’s minds because they had a hard time grasping that it couldn’t be. It was an either or. Well, maybe it’s an either. And so how many times in our life do we confront these things? Do we question really what we believe are constraints? And I think sometimes we don’t question those constraints enough. And instead of treating them, we treat them as constraints when they’re really constructs that we, humankind, or me personally have invented. And I think it’s true even about myself. As we get into leadership, talk about how my approach to leadership has changed because my constructs, what I thought the constraints of my role as a leader turned out to be self-imposed constructs that I could change, that I could blow through. And when I changed those and changed my thinking patterns, my success was significantly better. My outcomes were significantly better, but it really required me
Speaker 0 | 06:57.428
What were some of those examples? What was an example of one of those constructs that you blew away?
Speaker 1 | 07:01.209
So, you know, we haven’t gotten much into my history. I started my career from physics. I got more into project management and engineering management. I’ve got a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from a very, you know, well-respected, well-known university. Turned out I was a terrible engineer, but I was a good systems engineer.
Speaker 0 | 07:23.552
Why do so many engineers want to go into project management?
Speaker 1 | 07:26.313
Because in my case, it was because I was a lousy engineer. It’s like the next best option. But it turned out I had an aptitude for process improvement. So I became a lean manufacturing person. And so again, fairly early in my career, I did a career diversion and I became a VP of operations for a relatively large organization, managing supply chains, manufacturing, distribution, all that stuff.
Speaker 0 | 07:50.049
What do we call it again? Lean process?
Speaker 1 | 07:53.348
Yeah, I was a process improvement person. I used lean principles, but I was really good at, let’s look at the process. Let’s identify what the root cause of the issues are. Let’s solve the root cause. Let’s make the process better. But a decent portion of my time every day was complaining about how bad the organization’s IT was. And so one day, just to shut me up about complaining, the CEO, out of spite, mind you. said, okay, smart guy, if you think IT is so bad, let’s see what happens when you run it. So I went from IT critic to CIO in a five-minute conversation. And then since then, I’ve done a series of IT transformations of some degree magnitude, different organizations. So I’ve been at Utah State University for a year. Prior to that, I’d done these eight fairly interesting transformations. Now, let me try and finally answer your question.
Speaker 0 | 08:49.312
What’s cool, though, is that were you able to say, see, I couldn’t do it better after all of that? Or were you like, no?
Speaker 1 | 08:54.514
Yeah, but I tell people the brilliant thing about my career is if you follow a substandard IT leader, you actually don’t have to be that good. You just have to be better. So if you set your career thresholds and hurdles low enough, you always look good. So you’ve got to be selective when you take on a transformation. Because you got to take over for somebody who’s a total abject failure, because then I can be a marginal failure still by comparison of good.
Speaker 0 | 09:22.089
Low hanging fruit. Yes, exactly. I’ve always told people, like, why did you pick that job? Yeah. I mean, it’s like when you go pick a job and where you go work, go pick somewhere where you can be successful. Like, don’t just take a job. Like, come on.
Speaker 1 | 09:35.461
Yeah. I’ve learned so much, because you can imagine coming from up to that point in my career, a career where I had not. I tell people, you know, yes, I’d written a line of code, but it was a long time before. And so suddenly now I’m leading this enterprise IT organization that had some challenges. And the organization had some challenges with how its IT operated. And even I’ve found in doing these IT turnarounds and transformations that. IT, the organization’s perception is that IT is broken. But the real problem is IT is just a manifestation of how broken the organization is. And so you’ve got to change the way the organization operates as well. And that’s sort of my leadership evolution has been, I would call it this, tyrannical micromanagement.
Speaker 0 | 10:28.358
Love it.
Speaker 1 | 10:28.778
To a focus on, and this leads into the culture that accompanies both, a focus on trust. ownership and influence.
Speaker 0 | 10:36.975
And then somewhere in between was a meritocrity, probably somewhere in there.
Speaker 1 | 10:42.660
Yeah. And as part of it was driven by this construct I’d created for myself or the constraint, which is IT’s broken. The people are incompetent and ineffective. How can I possibly turn this IT organization around? I must browbeat. these IT people into doing things the quote unquote right way. And I was just a tyrannical micromanager. And I had a very, the turning point in my leadership life was, so the organization where I’m suddenly now the CIO, all their systems were sort of homegrown or highly customized. And that was one of the problems I had as the VP of operations. As we changed our process, we improved our processes, I’d always bump up against the constraints of our, well, our systems can’t support that. Well,
Speaker 0 | 11:31.202
then maybe we should throw our siloed old technology of some kind.
Speaker 1 | 11:35.405
It’s just, you know,
Speaker 0 | 11:36.465
we use Lotus Notes. Okay.
Speaker 1 | 11:38.027
We use Lotus Notes. Yeah. It’s like that. And so I’m dealing with these. And so one of my first projects was I convinced the board of directors, I convinced the company to give me a boatload of money and a boatload of people. And let’s replace all of our current systems with a lovely integrated ERP. You know, it’s going to solve all our problems. The CRP thing is going to solve all our problems. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 12:03.223
no.
Speaker 1 | 12:03.703
And I learned a bunch of lessons on that. The first one is I tell people I don’t do system replications. I do system replacements because we spent a whole bunch of that money they gave me and a whole bunch of the effort of the people they gave me to make the new system just look like just the old system that we wanted to replace. I’m like, I don’t do replications. If you want to replicate your system, go somewhere else. I don’t do replications. Good point. So I was able to pick from across the company because I’d already been there as the VP of operations for a number of years. I knew how I wanted on this business transformation project. We’re going to clean up all the badness, all the bad process we’re going to fix. We’re going to do this. It’s going to be an elegant implementation of an ERP system. And it mattered so much to me personally, because I felt the weight of the massive amount of money the company had trusted me with to pull this off. It was a 14-month project. We did it the old way, the old waterfall way, gather binders and binders of requirements, do months and months of configuration and development, then test and then turn it on. And everybody would be so thrilled with it. And we did that. And then we turned it on. People said, that’s not what I want. So that was my first lesson. Waterfall doesn’t work. So we could come back to that or not. But this mattered to me so much that these 10 people that I trusted so much that I hand picked them to be the leadership team of this effort. I was just a terrible micromanage. I, in effect, said, turn your brain off and do whatever I tell you to do. And I actually thought it was the right way to do things. I guess it was based on arrogance. I didn’t think I was arrogant, but apparently I was. Our only chance for being successful is to do things my way. I know what to do. I know how to do it. Just don’t think, don’t talk, just act. And we delivered that project on time, on budget, on scopes debatable. But anyway, that’s a separate topic about whether Waterfall or Agile is better. And I thought in the early days of ERP, nobody delivered on time on budget. So I felt like this was my crowning achievement as a professional. And once we declared victory, had the celebration party, then before my project team disbanded, before these 10 people went back to where they came from in the organization, they individually, which makes me wonder, I don’t think it was a coordinated effort, which kind of hurt too. It would have been better if it had been coordinated. They individually came to me and said, Neil, thanks for the experience, but I never want to work with you again. And I was shocked. I was stunned. I was like, no, you should be naming your children after me because I made this happen. But then I started thinking, I picked these people because they’re so good and so smart and so talented. Why would they say that if they’re smart, good, and talented? Maybe it’s true. Maybe I need to change the way I do things.
Speaker 0 | 14:50.133
And then you go home and cry for five days.
Speaker 1 | 14:52.670
I didn’t, but I started analyzing myself. I got to change. And I started questioning myself. And so really what that triggered was ever since then, years of what I call a healthy dissatisfaction. Now that to me, a healthy dissatisfaction is better than an unhealthy dissatisfaction. Unhealthy dissatisfaction leads to, I’m a terrible human being. I’m a terrible leader. But the healthy dissatisfaction was, I can do better.
Speaker 0 | 15:19.029
I’m outstanding.
Speaker 1 | 15:20.229
I’m outstanding.
Speaker 0 | 15:21.249
As Zig Ziglar used to say, outstanding but improving.
Speaker 1 | 15:24.250
I may suck, but I can get better.
Speaker 0 | 15:27.411
I can suck less.
Speaker 1 | 15:28.952
I can suck less. And so I started actually, and because I felt like I may have not been, I may have lacked the self-awareness, certainly with those 10 people I did. So I started creating channels of feedback for myself. Maybe I’m Maybe I lack self-awareness. Maybe that’s just something I don’t have. So maybe I’m being a tyrannical macro manager, but don’t realize it. Maybe I’m treating people poorly. Maybe I’m not collaborating like I should. Maybe I’m not giving people opportunities that I should. How can I create some feedback channels? And that led me to more towards, okay, what is the culture where people feel safe in telling me, Neil, you’re an idiot? Yeah. Because I never felt like I took things personally. But I felt like maybe I’d created a culture where people thought I would so they wouldn’t talk to me and tell me what they really felt.
Speaker 0 | 16:21.359
Or they might think there’s like a repercussion. Or you’re going to view them a certain way. Or then things might change or it might jeopardize their position or blah, bitty, blah.
Speaker 1 | 16:32.842
Yeah. And so that started sort of by my leadership self-discovery, which continues. But this focus on culture. What, and I started thinking about it, and I’d actually, after my experience implementing this ERP and replicating the legacy system rather than replacing it, part of my analysis, self-analysis is also, how did I let that happen? And how do I stop that from happening in the future? So I developed a couple of models that I’ve used ever since. One is called purpose alignment. So I became the world’s only practitioner of purpose alignment because I was the only person who ever used it. The purpose alignment looks at every activity in the organization in two dimensions. To what extent does this create market differentiation? And to what extent is it mission critical? If I look at things in those two dimensions, I’ve got activities that are both mission critical and market differentiating. These are the reasons people choose me over all the alternatives. These are the stuff I get to do better than anybody else. This is the stuff that deserves my organizational and individual creativity and innovation. These are the things I invent. Because it’s why people choose me. This is the stuff I got to do better than anybody else. Very few things. I can’t be better than everybody else at everything. So almost everything I do in the organization falls into the next category, which is mission critical, but will never create market differentiation. I call these the parity activities. We need to do these as well as the market leaders. In order to do that, I just need to adopt and embrace what the market leaders are doing. I don’t need to invent a thing. The market leaders, it’s differentiating for them. For me, it’s parity. I just need to do it well. So I started preaching this and writing about it and talking about it because I look back at our big ERP implementation and we spent a lot of the organization’s time and money treating parity activities as if they were differentiating. Let me give you an example. The legacy order management system were replaced. The sequence of data entry in order management in the homegrown order management system was first customer name, then telephone, then address. Out of the box, the new ERP system asked for name, address, telephone. That’s pretty standard, name, address, telephone. We were actually required to customize the ERP to ask for telephone second. Now, in the context of this purpose alignment model, does asking for address second create market differentiation? Does the company have customers who say, I’m going to do business with you because you asked for my telephone number second? No, they don’t care. They don’t know. It’s irrelevant to them. Yet we’d invested even a minimal customization. I just, we did massive changes we shouldn’t have to make the new system look like the old system. But that’s just a simple example where a simple question would be, why do we need to do this customization? Will it make any difference in the market? Will it make any difference in our organization’s life? Will it make any difference in our customers’lives? No, it won’t. Then why are we doing it? Good enough is good enough. Address second is good enough. It’s not how, it’s not why people choose. So anyway, so, and I also, based on my waterfall experience, started using Agile, even though I never heard the word Agile. I started saying, okay, every time I do a system project, I think the binders of system requirements we built when we did our ERP project were a complete waste of time because we delivered at the end of those 14 months, a system that exactly matched those system requirements. And people said, that’s not what I asked for. And I said, yes, it is. It’s right here on this page here on page 78. I said, you want this? The system does that. And I realized my epiphany was no one knows what they want until they see it. Instead of writing requirements, why don’t I give them an early visual prototype so they can see it? Nope.
Speaker 0 | 20:13.804
Do that.
Speaker 1 | 20:14.724
What’s that?
Speaker 0 | 20:15.285
Yeah. Change this. Do that. Yeah. I do have to ask you a question because we’ve got a lot. You fed me a lot here. I must know when people came to you and said, I never want to work to you again. What were some of those channels of feedback that you invented and created?
Speaker 1 | 20:31.678
My most effective one? Culture. I think culture matters, meaning I’m very vocal about the culture I want to create. Here are the characteristics of the culture. Now, you won’t know this until you try this. Some of you are going to have to go out on a limb. I’m telling you, if you think I’m not abiding by the culture myself, call me on it. Now, some brave soul is going to do it at one point, and then you’re going to see how I react. And if I react and say, and there are repercussions, then you’ll know I don’t mean it. But if I’re actually saying, yeah, you’re right, I’ll do better. What else do I need to change? Then you’ll know I’m serious about it. So just articulating the expectations for myself as part of our culture. I’ve also, especially when I was early in my journey, when I’m like, this is not a skill I have now, I may be able to develop that skill and I think I’ve gotten better at it. But I would actually ask people on my team to be my feedback loop. The way I describe it is I have one person on my team for years. I actually took her from job to job. Her name is Amy. I said, Amy, your job is this. In addition to whatever else you do, because she was amazing. Amy is amazing. One of the best people I’ve ever worked with in my life. And I said, Amy, your job is to tell me all the things everybody knows about me, but me. And you can tell me. And I will never, ever doubt you, question you, or punish you for telling me all the things everybody knows about me, but me.
Speaker 0 | 21:54.482
Terrible.
Speaker 1 | 21:55.142
And Amy was good at it.
Speaker 0 | 21:58.423
I did. Have you read First Break All the Rules?
Speaker 1 | 22:01.544
No.
Speaker 0 | 22:02.805
I think you’d enjoy it a lot. So I had a similar experience back in my first leader. I think every first leader kind of goes through the tyrannical dictatorship. Like mode? Yeah. Unless they’re like just really good. I mean, I think a lot of people go through that pain and then they realize everyone thinks they can be the leader better until they’re the leader. You know, so one exercise that I did, this came from first break all the rules, is to provide a feedback form to every member of your team. You give the feedback form to an Amy, basically. So Amy runs the meeting. You go ahead and have a private meeting. You can’t be anywhere within five square miles of wherever this place. You give everybody the form. It’s like, you know. whatever. How is Phil when it comes to providing feedback? Do you feel comfortable? Blah, blah, whatever the open-ended questions are. If there’s anything that you could provide, what would the feedback you would be to give to him? All this stuff, right? They write it all down. They fill out this whole form. Then they just have an open discussion about you without you there. Then your Amy takes all that feedback, types it up anonymously so you have no clue, and then delivers you this packet of death. which you read and quickly become very very you become humbled very very fast but oh yeah it becomes one of the your team all of a sudden you’re like why are you guys so much brighter like why are you smiling right you’re like why are you smiling you know like no uh um you know it’s like it worked wonders and um it it’s definitely a very humbling experience but you learn quickly how to i guess that’s just a very good It reminded me of kind of that feedback loop, like you were saying, tell me everything you know about me that I don’t know about myself. It’s powerful.
Speaker 1 | 23:53.740
Yeah. And I think it’s, I hate to stereotype, but I think we technical engineering types tend to be a little less sensitive to those cues,
Speaker 0 | 24:02.627
those social cues.
Speaker 1 | 24:05.029
Yes. You wonder, it’s kind of a chicken and egg thing. Did we become engineers because we’re immune or did becoming engineers make us immune to social cues? I’m not sure which is which, but I think it’s just generally true. I have to make a conscious, so I realized I had to make a conscious effort to see myself as others, or at least be open to the feedback of how others saw me or perceived me.
Speaker 0 | 24:26.424
Yes. And now moving on to the other treasure trove of info that you have given me, the agile versus waterfall and doing it without kind of seeing it. I think I was doing it without noticing it as well because maybe it’s because I’m kind of like ADD and trying to do a bunch of things at once all the time.
Speaker 1 | 24:44.674
right but we always said it was like no you must work things in parallel you must work things in parallel with the other things versus you know step a to step b how could waterfall ever work in that you know and like oh yeah you know and it’s just interesting it goes back to that talking about the physics and you know we we believed there was a methodology that we had to follow that was waterfall and i you know i when i talk about the differences between traditional project management and agile methods. I say, I think part of that waterfall methodology was designed for engineering with hard physical constraints. I’m going to build a bridge. The bridge must have this span. It must carry this load. I have hard physical constraints. So I can design. I really don’t have a lot of wiggle room in my design, in my requirements. So why not design those requirements up front and let it go? Because it’s, you know, but once we got into technology. There are no physical constraints. We can do whatever someone imagines they want to do. And so we had this misfit. We had this misfit because we’re treating these projects as if we can define everything properly up front. Even though once we start doing the work. People’s minds start to expand or they change their minds. And we didn’t really have a method to deal with that other than punish people. What I mean by that is, okay, we’ve defined in Waterfall, we’ve defined the requirements up front. Now we’re going to do the design and development. And then if somebody proposes any changes, I’m going to form a rigid change review board where people have to come and beg for us to adopt their asked for change. And usually if I really want to punish them, I’m going to. the chair of the change review board is the CEO, because they’re going to be nervous asking the CEO to change the project plan. And so we would punish people for changes. And I just thought that those physical constraints are gone. So let’s let them go. And along with that, the methodology that forces people into, I’m going to know everything before I start. And once I’ve started, I cannot change anything.
Speaker 0 | 26:52.747
And that makes end users hate IT anyways, because The whole goal of real good IT leadership is to have end users not make shadow IT decisions because you wouldn’t listen to them. To create open communication between you and end users, to get them to open up tickets and care and do things the right way and not go around and say, IT is terrible around here.
Speaker 1 | 27:16.866
That’s right. Yeah. Rigid. They’re rigid. They won’t listen. Yeah. They’re unresponsive. They’re customer service skills. Yeah, my whole approach. approach to IT leadership has changed significantly over the years.
Speaker 0 | 27:30.077
What about the other way around? What about an IT leader in an organization where he has an IT leadership title, but he doesn’t really have a seat at the executive roundtable, so to speak, and he doesn’t really have an effect on the company culture and he hates really being the IT non-leader with the leadership title? You know what I mean? What do you say to that guy? Like, what can he do?
Speaker 1 | 27:51.694
You know, I don’t know. That’s a tough one. Fortunately, I’ve never been in that position. But I think that’s where you focus on what can I do to exert influence in the organization? Now, I’ve got some things I do to exert influence on the organization. First is, and that’s where it ties into some of the things you started with when you gave the introduction to my approach to life. First thing, I and my team have to have incredible credibility. So focus on operational excellence, meaning we’re going to get really good at delivery. We’re going to get good at agile. We’re going to get good at lean. We’re going to get good at ITIL best practices. We’re going to get good at production change, service catalog management. We’re going to get really good at this stuff because I don’t know how many times I’ve talked to organizational leaders and when I asked them to describe their IT, they could describe it as a black hole. Projects go in and never come out. Okay, let’s get really good at delivery. Let’s get really good at delivery.
Speaker 0 | 28:48.447
I would like to know what project they’re talking about.
Speaker 1 | 28:53.170
Every one of them. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 28:54.451
Like, I mean, no, but what’s a good example? Can you think of a good, what’s the most common black hole? I mean, I’m sure the ERP or some sort of SAP thing is going to be a black hole, but I mean.
Speaker 1 | 29:03.379
But I think even we have a hard time even with custom development projects because they, and there’s sort of a conflict because the organization wants us to define everything including timelines and budgets up front, even though we don’t know what we’re doing yet. I tell people, when’s the worst time to make a commitment on time and budget? It’s at the beginning. Why? Because we know the least. So anyway, but
Speaker 0 | 29:25.975
I think it’s just-We’ll tell you right when we’re getting ready to release it.
Speaker 1 | 29:28.936
Yeah. I’ll tell you the day before. How’s that? No, I’m just kidding. You want to keep them informed. That’s part of the customer management. But it’s hard as an organization, as an IT organization to be credible if we have a poor track record. So let’s change the track record. I’ll give you an example. Got hired to turn around the IT transformation at a large- organization. IT was in such disrepute that they had nine months before started working on a complete redo of all the client-facing technology. And no one from IT was allowed to work on that project. That’s how bad it was. For example, they had some of the worst system downtime I’d ever experienced.
Speaker 0 | 30:11.987
Give me an example of worst system downtime. I got it now.
Speaker 1 | 30:15.348
They did two production releases a week, 90% of the time on either Tuesday or Thursday, It resulted in system downtime that would last anywhere from minutes to hours. So I said, okay, this is easy. What do you mean, Neil? This is easy. I said, if you look at the data, if you look at the evidence, I would say we’re not very good at production change deployment. I got a crazy idea. Why don’t we make sure that we don’t release a change to production unless we’ve executed a valid test and it passed the test? Let’s just start with that. So for about two weeks, we didn’t do any production changes because no one had yet tested. their production changes. So it took a while to do some testing. After that, after we got good at production change, we never had self-inflicted downtime. Suddenly, IT goes from the game that can’t shoot straight to, hey, these guys actually do what they say. We focus on agile. I’d inherited this raft of projects, the new client experience projects that were all done outside of IT. I’d inherited those, even though IT wasn’t supposed to be involved.
Speaker 0 | 31:11.436
What’s an example of something that someone could do?
Speaker 1 | 31:13.618
actually be doing without it involved this is insane uh they had they had assigned people from the business from the non-it side and they had outsourced the development of a bunch of uh software projects basically like to an msp to do the rollout everything and then hand it over okay yep hand it over our job was to support it once it was created but all the projects where they’re all behind time all behind schedule all over budget they hadn’t seen anything been going no alignment no output yeah And so I inherited these. So the first thing I looked at was, hey, I applied this purpose alignment thought process. I said, okay, let’s look at this portfolio of projects. One was customer profile. I said, why are we building a customer profile? It seems like those exist. I’m going to go out on a limb and say, it’s unlikely that we create competitive advantage because we’ve got the world’s greatest customer profile. What are some patterns? I’m just going to go look and see who’s really good at customer profile. Here’s some samples. Okay, let’s build this. So we changed the rules. This thing was already, they’d been working on it for nine months. When I inherited the project, the team said, we need nine more months. Wow. So I said, okay, let’s change the approach. Let’s base it on, even if we don’t buy a student profile tool or a customer profile tool, why don’t we just at least design it based on that pattern and let’s do it. We’re going to, this is also going to be our, our entree into agile methods. Let’s do it in a series of two-week sprints. And we got it done in three sprints. Six weeks later, it’s done. So the organization sees a project that was supposed to take a few months and nine months, say they need nine months more. So an 18-month project that suddenly now is done in six weeks. And they say, hey, these guys may kind of have it together. And so we built credibility. We built that capital. And then that changed the relationship. So suddenly I’m getting invited to the staff meetings of the other. functional parts of the organization. Hey, Neil, could you come? We’re having our kind of our planning for next year. Could you come and talk, be with us and kind of give us some insight onto where we could possibly use technology to make life better? And so suddenly, and then it was, then it extended beyond me to people on my team. Then it’s all of IT. And that’s one where when I got there, you talked about shadow IT. There was more shadow IT than IT in this organization. And the CEO, when I joined, he said, hey, if you want me to mandate that the shadow IT become, I said, no, I never like a push. I prefer a pull. So we focused on operational excellence. We focused on let’s listen to our customers. Let’s not dictate or mandate what they do. Let’s be understanding and come back with solutions, but not just a solution, options for solutions. I understand what you’re asking for. We’ve got a couple of ways we can do this. Which would you prefer we do? So it becomes a collaboration rather than an order giver. And the other thing we focused on a lot of time and effort was culture. The CTO that I replaced was like Neil of old. He was a tyrannical micromanager. It was so bad. The marker for his tyrannical nature was if he ever left his office, even to go to the men’s room, he would lock his office. So I’d heard these stories about him. And so the first time I got the whole group together, I’d been there for about a week. just trying to catch up, get everything onboarded. So I got the whole group, the IT, IT, IT team, not the shadow IT. And I said, I want you to understand, I want to focus a lot on culture. And this is the thing, give me feedback if I’m not living this. And I told him, I said, just so you know, I want to create a culture of trust and ownership, which means I can never be suspicious of you. For example, my office, I know we’re short of meeting space. I’ve been here a week. I already know I’m not going to spend a lot of time in my office. Just check my schedule. If you need a meeting room, use my office. It’s a nice office. You got whiteboards and a nice table. If you need my office, use it. But just do me a favor. The lower right-hand drawer of my desk has got some personnel files in it. I’m not going to lock my door. I’m not going to lock my desk. Just don’t ever dig into those personnel files. Would you do me that favor, please? And I left it at that. Now, I have no idea if anybody ever rifled through those personnel files. I don’t know. I don’t care because I couldn’t be suspicious. And to me, yeah. an indicator that I was very different from the previous CTO was I wasn’t going to lock my desk.
Speaker 0 | 35:33.852
That’s a, that’s a, you got to give trust to get trust.
Speaker 1 | 35:36.614
Exactly. And so that’s it anyway. So, so looking at, so operational excellence, getting really good at delivery, living the lives of my customers. So they trusted us, but those two are interdependent. They wouldn’t trust me until we were operationally excellent and good at delivery and then changing the culture, the shadow IT melted away because the The IT people, the route side of IT saw an IT organization that did what it said it was going to do, did it well, and seemed to have a lot of fun while doing it. And so they would then opt in. They came to me and said, hey, we really like what you’re doing. It feels like our career path would be better with you than over in marketing. I said, you really need to talk to Pat, the CMO. I’m not going to pull you in unless Pat’s okay with it. And so then they were asked, they were petitioning to become part of central IT. Because I’ve always felt like shadow IT is an indictment of me and my culture. And so I’m not going to mandate that. I’m going to solve the problem of me and my leadership and my culture.
Speaker 0 | 36:40.010
Yes, yes. Perfect. Okay, so this is where we take a break. And I ask you, what did you do in high school or your teenage years prior to the invention of the internet?
Speaker 1 | 36:53.976
I can barely remember that.
Speaker 0 | 36:55.378
That was so long ago. I mean, I’m looking at your history. You went to MIT for a couple of years. Let’s see. You graduated with a physics degree in 83. So I was a whole seven. years old i was entering first grade yeah yeah phil thank you thank you for reminding me that that’s okay if i asked my if we talked to my wife i was like as my kids like to ask like mom was in diapers when you were in like yeah but um sorry fine what did you do for fun uh without the internet you know i mean it’s just it’s so interesting when i It’s mind-boggling to me that we have children that didn’t grow up before the invention of the cell phone or microwave oven or something like this. It’s so amazing how far we’ve come.
Speaker 1 | 37:42.573
Yeah. If I really want to frighten my children, I say, when I grew up, there were four TV stations, CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS. And they’re like, they get, ah, I can’t believe you survived that, father. I have no respect for you.
Speaker 0 | 37:55.880
We pulled a knob out of the TV and waited for it.
Speaker 1 | 37:59.001
We had to walk up to change the channel. They’re like, no, wow. I said, we were healthier people because we had to walk across the living room to change the channel. I read a lot. I still read a lot. I spend a lot more time in libraries than I do now. I read a lot. I read newspapers. I read magazines. Sometimes I remember what a nightmare it was. It would sometimes take you two weeks to schedule a meeting before Outlook, an office meeting. I need 12 people. I mean, I got to go find 12 people and ask them and coordinate these schedules because I would have to coordinate a meeting just to get them together for two minutes to schedule the meeting. So it’s just round robin. Well, Thursday at two work. Well, I go to that Thursday at two won’t work, but Wednesday at one will work. So then I got to go cycle through it again. Communication was a nightmare. Schedule was a nightmare. It was a lot more work to get work. done pre-technology.
Speaker 0 | 38:53.173
That’s pretty amazing. Yeah. When you think about that, that’s just scheduling alone.
Speaker 1 | 38:58.437
Yeah. Things moved much more.
Speaker 0 | 39:01.200
Call them on the rotary dial.
Speaker 1 | 39:03.001
We could, or I got really, I remastered the notion of a, once the tech, the telephone technology got to the point where I could have telephone distribution lists so I could record a message and send it off to the 12 people. But then I still had to, on a piece of paper, write down the responses. Okay. Phil can make Thursday at 2, but Matt can’t. Mary can do Wednesday at 2, but not, you know, it was just, it was hard. It was a lot of work to get work done.
Speaker 0 | 39:29.802
That’s, yes, a major reason probably for the trajectory. You could probably map that out. You being a physicist and math guy, we could map those statistics.
Speaker 1 | 39:41.970
Yeah, and I was having this conversation with somebody this morning. As I think about the future. of IT, of the future of technology in the organization. And I start to wonder, longer term, this will be well after I’m retired and gone, what is the role of an IT leader when technology has become so democratized that you don’t need a dedicated IT organization, except for things like, I don’t know what you need them for in the future, because we’ve democratized, you know, low code, no code. Now with generative AI, what other citizen type democratized? business roles can I create?
Speaker 0 | 40:21.376
It might reverse back. It might revert back to like the IT guys, the data center guy plugging in now. It might just be more like the electrician. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 40:29.959
And maybe there are certain value streams that we manage in an IT organization, but maybe some of the traditional roles we’ve had go away because what if I can, what if I’ve got generative AI embedded into my ERP or my CRM and I can tell the generative AI, Go change this workflow. Go change this transaction flow.
Speaker 0 | 40:52.283
So that brings up kind of a transition question, which is security. How do you feel about that in alignment with your purpose alignment differentiation and just copying what everyone else does? Because that’s good because that ain’t going to work. And how does that match up with your culture? Because there’s obviously security and culture is a big one, right? Because if your culture is bad, forget, you might as well just forget, scared. Yeah. throw that away.
Speaker 1 | 41:19.574
That’s a good question. And security has always been one of those grayers. But again, the question I ask is, it kind of goes back to the lean manufacturing definition of value, value versus waste. And then there’s value added waste, meaning, but the value definition in lean manufacturing is if a customer knew you were doing this, would they gladly pay for it? But that doesn’t, if it’s valuable, it doesn’t necessarily mean I need to do it in an innovative way. Do I need to invent zero trust network architectures? Or do I partner with somebody who is the invention innovative leader of Zero Trust Network architectures and just deploy what they’re inventing? Do my customers expect me to be better at security than the inventor or the innovator of Zero Trust Network? Does that make sense?
Speaker 0 | 42:05.710
That is a great question. And that needs to be highlighted. So, Greg, my producer. This is your mark right now when you listen to this and transcribe and do all kinds of stuff. This is crazy important. Okay? So, and the reason why is because it comes back to all those people that are going to be stuck in the arrogant dictatorship role or engineering-minded thing. And they may actually think, yes, I do have to invent it. No, you don’t.
Speaker 1 | 42:37.114
No,
Speaker 0 | 42:37.314
you don’t. It’s okay. You might hate that sales rep from… dark trace calling you every day, but he’s got a good product.
Speaker 1 | 42:46.800
So the way I think of it is I’ve got my parity activities. Remember, they’re mission critical. They are not unimportant. These are not things I can do poorly. At the same time, I don’t need to do them better than they have to be done. So there’s this sweet spot. Well, parity is also not static. It changes all the time. Look at security, how it changes all the time. So it’s dynamic. So the best choice, I’ve got two things I need to do when it comes to security. One is I’m going to treat it as a parody activity. I don’t need to invent it. Because other people, that is their differentiator. I’m going to partner with, meaning I’m going to use the products and the innovation that comes out from the market leaders. So I’m going to inherit their inventions just by being their customer. But secondly, because especially in security, and I think that same is going to be true in generative AI, the landscape changes so dramatically. So IDC, I’m adjunct faculty at IDC. They were tracking three years ago, like 14, 15, 1800 security vendors. Today it’s over 4,000. So the landscape changes so quickly. The other thing I’ve got to think about is how do I loosely couple my decisions to keep my switching costs low? So I’m going to do business with whoever the market leader is today, but I’m going to hedge and say two years from now, they may not be the market leader. How difficult would it be for me to switch? So I want to loosely couple whatever I can. in order to deal with uncertainty and rapid change.
Speaker 0 | 44:09.346
Life cycle management is what I call it. I mean,
Speaker 1 | 44:13.007
I’ve intentionally shortened my contract periods in areas where I’m dealing with providers where we’re in very rapidly changing, uncertain technologies, where the technology is evolving quickly or in the case security threats are evolving quickly. I know they want a three-year contract. How much more would I pay and is it worth it to get that down to a two-year contract?
Speaker 0 | 44:36.614
And if we’re talking software and applications, then it should be completely reasonable. I’m still pained, pained, pained by the people that I see stuck on five-year agreements with some MPLS, some crazy MPLS network.
Speaker 1 | 44:51.838
It requires a buyout clause if they change.
Speaker 0 | 44:54.439
We’re stuck at three meg throughput or five meg throughput for the next two years, Phil, and then we can have a gig.
Speaker 1 | 45:03.934
Because the other lesson I’ve learned through all of this is technology changes so quickly. I want everything I do has one of my architectural design goals is loose coupling and low switching costs.
Speaker 0 | 45:15.923
Loose coupling. Explain that.
Speaker 1 | 45:17.385
It’s supposed to tight coupling. So if I’ve got so loose coupling, for example, I’m going to deploy a new endpoint detection and response system.
Speaker 0 | 45:28.273
Right.
Speaker 1 | 45:30.162
It’s going to, I’m going to have data feeds from that into, for example, my seam. But other than that, I’m not going to make any hard or direct connections to anything with that. Because if so, I just made some tight coupling where I don’t need any. Because I want to make it easy to replace. I can pull it out and replace it in a day. And so that loose coupling. And so even if you look inside, one of the big transformations I did was replatforming all the client-facing technology for a company. large monolithic applications, large monolithic systems, and we broke them into, people call it a microservices architecture. Well, some of our services were macro. Like I’ve got an ERP system that is a by itself service, but how do I communicate? How does the rest of my platform communicate with that service only through an API or an event handling layer? I don’t want to do any direct connections between those systems because that creates tight coupling. which I might need to unwind, should I ever need to tear those things apart? So it’s just that for me, the architectural principles are endurability. I want things to last, but at the same time, replaceability. I want to be able to replace things quickly if I need to.
Speaker 0 | 46:43.331
I’m thinking, I just, oh gosh, my brain just went dead, but I was just thinking of old.
Speaker 1 | 46:49.233
You’re a little young for that, but you have a day like every two minutes.
Speaker 0 | 46:52.874
IBM mainframe servers that might be, people are stuck on them, AS400s, things like that where we’re trying to replicate to the cloud. Well, I know one vendor in upstate New York.
Speaker 1 | 47:07.602
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 47:08.262
That’s a true story. It is. It’s a true story. And they’re very good at doing it. And well, that’s what we’re going to do.
Speaker 1 | 47:13.965
Like I had a call a couple months ago. I mean,
Speaker 0 | 47:15.246
testimony to IBM. But I mean, like, hey, testimony to IBM. You made something that lasted and worked and is solid and great.
Speaker 1 | 47:22.210
And that was okay when things didn’t change quickly. But now that they change quickly, your approach has to be change ready. Because whoever the market leader is today may not be in the future. So how do I make things more interchangeable and replaceable?
Speaker 0 | 47:37.521
Oh, I miss the Bez servers.
Speaker 1 | 47:39.563
It was 30 years ago or 20 years ago. Things are much more dynamic than they were five years ago.
Speaker 0 | 47:45.167
Absolutely. I was just saying I miss the Bez servers. yeah you know that was solid yeah it was uh hillary liked it uh someone will get that someone will get that one yeah some old timer like us yes what’s the best how do you even spell baz you’re not what’s
Speaker 1 | 48:05.857
a punch card what’s a punch oh that don’t that that’ll send me to post-traumatic stress i tell people when they say okay Neil, what’s your program? So I’ve been the CTO, CIL. Okay, so I’ve got these large software teams and they’re trying to kind of humiliate me. Okay, Neil, tell me, where’s your programming expertise? I say, I’m amazing at Fortran. And they start to laugh. I say, no, no, no, don’t laugh. Remember, it’s on Fortran. We sent a man to the moon and back. You’ll notice that since we stopped using Fortran, we haven’t been there and back. So just keep that in mind. Oh,
Speaker 0 | 48:40.403
yeah.
Speaker 1 | 48:40.603
You just opened up again for us. And your grails and your rubies and your reacts. Just remember, would it get a man to the moon and back? No, but Fortran did.
Speaker 0 | 48:48.828
Did it?
Speaker 1 | 48:49.809
I don’t know, but it sounds good.
Speaker 0 | 48:51.050
It did. I mean,
Speaker 1 | 48:53.011
it ties back to the conspiracies. That’s right. This ties back.
Speaker 0 | 48:55.813
I love talking about it. I’ll be honest with you. I have been reading in depth. What happened, you know what killed it for me was I saw a picture of President Nixon making a phone call to the moon, phone call to the moon. I’ve been in telecom for a long time. And I was just. you know that’s a long copper line and i thought you know i just made me think like yeah how the hell did they do that you know like no for real like just one simple aspect of you know a massive the largest event that’s happened in the 20th century or whatever it is right so i started doing a little research at&t switched it to houston yeah so reach out and reach out and someone you know at&t is all They switched to Houston, and then somehow Houston beamed it to the little umbrella on the 240,000 miles away on the rover. I think I’m like, how? I mean, what was the latency, the round trip? Was there any? No, it wasn’t because they probably used whatever radio wave frequency, and it’s pretty insane. And that’s just one of those.
Speaker 1 | 49:54.476
That could have been a bit of a delay.
Speaker 0 | 49:56.516
I think it was 2.5 seconds. Not to mention the… re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere at 36 000 miles per hour and whatever you know thousands of degrees and slowing that down at that speed there’s a lot to the moon landing that’s um there’s a lot that i’ve been reading and how do we erase all the files and everything you know i mean i’m not saying there isn’t a lot of science behind it i’m not saying there isn’t a lot of real research and hundreds of thousands of people that were paid but did it actually did we actually do it is what i want to know or was it you know anyways um you That is an insane. Why haven’t we gone back to the moon? For real.
Speaker 1 | 50:31.970
Seems like our technology is better today.
Speaker 0 | 50:34.051
You’d think, you’d think. I mean, I remember as a kid thinking how amazing would it be to have like a mini TV. And we have iPhones now and stuff, you know. Crazy.
Speaker 1 | 50:44.654
It’s absolutely crazy.
Speaker 0 | 50:46.474
Yeah. We used to plug in the phone with the four prong, little prongs into the wall and have a cord that was all wrapped up and tangled to like, you know, walk around the corner.
Speaker 1 | 50:55.797
And if I look at, think about what’s happened over the last. 20, 15, 10, 5 years, what does the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years look like?
Speaker 0 | 51:03.339
I have data science friends that are thinking it’s the end of the world. I have others that are like, no, this is the greatest time ever in the history of the world. No, we’re all going to die. Well, this has been outstanding and very, very…
Speaker 1 | 51:19.504
You can see how seriously I take myself.
Speaker 0 | 51:22.744
Well, I think it’s very important not to take yourself seriously. I do, too. a whole run in the other day with like someone that took my LinkedIn invite, like way too seriously, which was, you know, obviously I’m not a genius. I said, you know, I knew you were looking for a bearded genius. So here I am. And I was like, how dare you? That’s so sexist. I was like, what? And it was, you know, it was completely out of, you know, I was like, I was like, look, the, the world is take everybody else, uh, make everybody else the most important person in the world. Every time you’re talking with someone, imagine that, you know, they’re the most important, they’re the most important person in the world. And you’re just Just don’t take yourself seriously.
Speaker 1 | 51:57.830
um and you’ll just have a lot of fun and i agree i’ve had a wonderful the best thing in my life well no i got married that was a good thing the birth of my seed three sons and raising that was a good thing but besides that that that five minute conversation that got me into an i.t career the best thing to have my life i’ve enjoyed i’ve enjoyed every minute yeah i’ve enjoyed the entire journey nice i mean just think about it you could have been an engineer i’m gonna be an engineer I could have been a plant manager somewhere. How boring would that be?
Speaker 0 | 52:29.004
You never know. If it was in a data center, it might be cool. The data center guys really seem to love their job. Something about racking and stacking and compute power.
Speaker 1 | 52:38.729
I call it the guys who love the blinking lights. Just never been a blinking lights guy.
Speaker 0 | 52:43.832
Super good. Any final words of wisdom? So it’s, I usually ask like one of two questions. What’s your end game? And should there be an end game? And, or, I mean, just think about the people that are getting into technology nowadays. They don’t have the benefit of punch cards, you know? So it’s kind of like, what do you do?
Speaker 1 | 53:02.705
My advice is particularly for the thing I love at this point in my career that I enjoy is I call it CIO whispering, helping other IT leaders be successful, learning from the experiences because I tell people most of my, most of my good stuff came as a result of my recovering from a trend wreck. Maybe that’s the best way to learn is to pause a train wreck, then have to recover from it.
Speaker 0 | 53:28.626
Fail forward mistakes. I was like, guys, I am just a conglomerate of mistakes.
Speaker 1 | 53:33.090
At the level at which technology is now completely intertwined with organizational activities requires an IT leader who is forward looking, focuses on culture because you’ve got to unleash talent. And that really, the model, what I tell other leaders is your job is to build. an entire team of IT leaders. Even people on the service desk need to understand influential leadership. Because then when they’re working on one-on-one with somebody who’s struggling with technology, this is an opportunity to change how they interact with technology. That requires influence. And influence is the core tenet of leadership.
Speaker 0 | 54:12.294
Besides, what happens if Phil dies? Tell me that all the time. Seriously. What happens if I die? I can’t just come to a grinding halt. You know, everything.
Speaker 1 | 54:19.997
My arrogance says, Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everybody liked me? No, I don’t want that. But I do want people that can get stuff done and do the right things. I tell people we’ve got to focus on two things. Do the right things and do them the right way. And then I guess the third thing is treat people well. Because there’s never a downside to treating people well. There’s a lot of downside to treating people poorly. I’ve never had a bad experience when I treated somebody well.
Speaker 0 | 54:42.952
So profound and simple. So simple. What about Bob? I’m a simple man. It’s so simple. Do things right. Do them the right way. treat people well wow go figure amazing uh thank you sir so much for being on dissecting population it’s been nice to meet with you and talk with you it’s been outstanding
