Speaker 0 | 00:09.122
sometimes you know you miss you just miss the best discussion sometimes and laser backgrounds in the uh well what have been the 80s for you or in the early
Speaker 1 | 00:18.110
90s you know middle school school would have been like the late 80s and early
Speaker 0 | 00:21.833
90s yes middle school pictures by the way i started um i started reading in 1984 i never read it Because I was kind of a bum in school. I was like, you know, like, Ds get degrees. I shouldn’t be admitting this online because I’m in a highly technical industry now where you actually have to.
Speaker 1 | 00:39.855
That was me through school, too. Like, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 00:42.977
You have to be somewhat intelligent in our industry, I think. You know, not rocket science, but, well, that’s a lie as well, in my opinion. But, you know, what are you going to do? So, Douglas Kamen. Is it Kamen?
Speaker 1 | 00:55.542
Kameen.
Speaker 0 | 00:56.442
Kameen. You know, I’m like, I’m like, I probably. I’m a C student on these as well. Again, I’m batting at like 70% of this. I mean, Douglas, I mean, C-I-T-O. C-I-T-O. Yes. Okay. So C, I’m done today. C-I-T-O. Please just explain what you do and why you’re so important. And I’ll let you talk because I have had many cups of coffee and have not too many meetings in a row before I got to you. And I was late to this one.
Speaker 1 | 01:25.842
I’m multiple meetings in today too. It’s a… Although I’m on West Coast time right now, I’m in San Diego. This is the hotel I’m staying in at the moment for the night.
Speaker 0 | 01:36.117
I was going to say it looked very hotel-esque. Are you near the ocean?
Speaker 1 | 01:38.478
It is very hotel-esque.
Speaker 0 | 01:40.820
Are you near the ocean?
Speaker 1 | 01:42.081
I’m sorry?
Speaker 0 | 01:42.801
Are you near the ocean?
Speaker 1 | 01:44.042
Yeah. So you can’t see it because it’s blown out from the sunlight, but it’s on the bay in San Diego. So it’s like the Coronado Bay Resort. Um, so it sits on one of the islands that, that. encloses san diego bay so it’s a particularly it’s picturesque there’s a bunch of uh if you look off in the distance uh when you can see it uh there’s you know the skyline of this downtown san diego and then like all the navy yards and stuff so like you can see these aircraft carriers and big destroyers and stuff like that i’m a surfer so i i only care about surfing is there surfing there are there any waves or anything i mean i’m sure that there is on the other side you know so like if you go to the other side of the hotel then there’s the you’re at the pacific so you know so yeah i’m sure there’s people out there surfing.
Speaker 0 | 02:28.288
We need to stereotype anyone that’s in California and anyone that lives in California as a surfer. Of course, that’s just typical, typical, you know, stereotypical things that we do in the show. So grew up, let’s go back in time. I love going back in time first, since we were talking about laser backgrounds and the right pictures that you have to have in the back when you get a school picture taken. And there’s so much going on in the world. The technology is involved in it. It makes such a, just such a difference now. I was visiting my father over the weekend. He’s 87. And he was talking about all the wars and growing up in wars and stuff. And I was just thinking, dad, how do you know what was going on? Because we’re constantly bombarded with all kinds of, um, all kinds of things now via social media, via every angle, every angle, something’s coming at you. Absolutely. There’s construction going on in my. my office right now, by the way. So I’m hope I have no clue how loud this drilling is and stuff in the background will probably come out really great on this microphone.
Speaker 1 | 03:29.094
Zoom is blocking it out. I can’t hear it.
Speaker 0 | 03:30.955
Excellent. So Zoom, you did something. Excellent. Heck of a job, Panty. I like bashing Zoom, even though I’m a paying customer. I’m a paying customer. I’m allowed to bash you. You’re no longer allowed to use us. It’s going to happen. So he’s like, yeah, we listen to the radio. We listened to the radio. That’s how we got all of our updates. I was like, that’s crazy. You know, because that was probably like really easy to control propaganda and stuff. And I’m not saying that there’s propaganda. I am actually saying there is propaganda at the same time. But what I’m saying is it was only the radio. I think probably you went to the movies and there was probably some like short before you saw a movie that was, you know, where we are on the front of this and that and everything. But that’s just, it was radio. So anyways. Back to our back to our neck of the world. What was your first taste of technology? What got you really excited about? Let’s just be nostalgic for a second.
Speaker 1 | 04:23.102
Well, I mean, for me, like I grew up in a family that had, you know, people in it from the time I was, you know, when I was born, my parents worked for IBM, you know,
Speaker 0 | 04:34.485
family of nerds.
Speaker 1 | 04:35.665
Yeah, my dad, my dad worked in manufacturing and IBM and my grandfather was a an engineer, you know, both an electrical and mechanical engineer. who worked at IBM for 30 plus years. So kind of like, I guess you’d call it like DNA in some ways. I was… routed into technological stuff in the 80s and i grew up in austin texas uh so it was at the time that was the up-and-coming period of austin as the hub of things you know the 1980s was you know there was idm and motorola and and
Speaker 0 | 05:09.182
3m and stuff like that like you know who even hears of these companies anymore right well my brother was in like like glue and paper so manufacturing of glue and paper so 3m is like you know that’s like all you talk about is 3m and sandpaper and sticky notes yeah sand remember when the three the three m the sticky note like we were around we were we were alive when the the sticky note was invented i think when did the three-time sticky note come out it’s a good it might have been a little before our time but it was it became popular certainly in
Speaker 1 | 05:40.528
the in the 80s i think but if i was thinking about it i was thinking it became popular in the 80s but you know i was like i was like five so i guess it was maybe it was i mean like whoever
Speaker 0 | 05:49.696
I’m Googling this right now. Cause you have to be a good Googler. Um, 1977, I was one year old. So I was alive during the time of the three. I’m sticking out. Not you. Yeah. You were not, you were not alive. Close enough. Close enough. Close enough. So this show is believe it or not about technology. um i don’t well anyways keep going so you came from a family of like manufacturers so you could actually say that someone worked for ibm and was a manufacturer back then which is kind of interesting now because how much manufacturing goes on technology there’s a lot there’s um you know whatever silicone and chips and stuff like that there is there is a lot of manufacturing that still happens um i actually wonder what that bell curve looks like but anyways what so what happened this would be like oh you know
Speaker 1 | 06:39.084
I’ll call it like old school circuit board manufacturer. I remember getting like a tour of my dad’s, the factory floor that they worked on at IBM in Austin, you know, and you could see like these little circuit boards, you know, and they’d have the drills that would drill the circuit boards and stuff. But nowadays, like the stuff is so, it’s so small, you know, it’s been, it’s been miniaturized so much like that, that type of stuff doesn’t happen anymore. Like you can’t see it in the same way for the, for the, the complex stuff, you know, like that’s, um so so yeah it was cool i mean i remember like uh we had a ti-99 4a computer to program on i was just talking to somebody about this yesterday here at the conference that i’m cartridges cartridges cartridges and i i was sent to classes to program logo it’s like the little logo turtle who could probably found yep yep whereas
Speaker 0 | 07:28.882
i just messed around and was like right 90 or 45 times like 1000 and make a bunch of lines across the screen and then you got more advanced and changed colors and did different things probably smart kids like you actually did something that was amazing i didn’t do something particularly inventive that’s for sure just made me think of like craziest logo program ever made i wonder what that looks like i mean we need to look that up everyone google logo that does not know what we’re talking about and crazy but hopefully most people that are listening to the show actually do know what we’re talking about okay so you got into programming uh ti i had a ti that was our first computer um advertised by um who was their spokesperson what’s wrong with me oh i don’t remember ti spokesperson oh there was texas instruments right texas instruments right bill cosby it was bill cosby sting bill look up bill cosby and texas instruments and it will pop up the home computer and that weird little like voice thing that you plug in the side remember that oh yeah totally totally had that yeah it was basically a glorified atari it was an atari with a keyboard
Speaker 1 | 08:33.252
Yeah. But we can put games on it. We had a whole set of cartridges with games on it and everything else too.
Speaker 0 | 08:36.534
I wish we had never thrown that away. I wish we had never not. Cause now I want to start like a little like museum in my house of old computers and stuff. So anyways, you grew up and you went to high school. What was your high school computer?
Speaker 1 | 08:48.540
Oh, let’s see. I remember getting on the internet the first time. So it was in, it was right before my, my, my dad is like, we need a computer that got this internet thing. And we, I, ibm ps1 and it had a 2400 baud modem and we signed up for america online baud yeah i don’t even know if you could i don’t even you could sign up for america online then this was before they sent out the free cd-rom oh they started by the hour at the time it was so expensive it was insane how expensive it was like you had to meter your time on it uh you know because they would charge you it was it was like like i don’t know 295 an hour or something
Speaker 0 | 09:30.504
some crazy so such a big deal i lived in virginia for a while and the old aol building is there and everything and people made so much money selling aol it was like i’ve met people in the washington dc beltway there was like so how’d you make all your money oh aol that is it i’ve known people who are aol like millionaires too like it’s crazy yeah they’re like oh i worked at aol in like 1997 Totally done now. It’s a totally washed up thing. I imagine this smoking, dusty server in the background. My dad’s email is still capangel. Should I really advertise? Capangel at AOL. Everyone send my dad an email. If my show becomes this popular, I’ll help them. He can’t log into it anymore anyway. Everyone, if you want to flood capangel at AOL.com, maybe we could sell that. now that we’ve advertised it uh but i imagine this old spiderweb you know server probably who knows it’s got to be what’s running aol now it’s a good question let’s find the aol guy i think it’s all just a bunch of websites like the deal with the deal with a company like aol once everybody moved to cable modems there was still this whole group of people that were willing to pay you like
Speaker 1 | 10:42.842
20 bucks a month for dial-up which sounds insane but like like they didn’t unsubscribe so the business became this thing you could ride like somebody would buy it and just ride it down you know to to the end um but it made money because all the all the investment was already done like you know there’s no new modem technology so you already own it you’re done there’s i just it’s a good statistic how many people still have active aol domain
Speaker 0 | 11:09.620
email addresses there’s just got to be so many um someone’s running that that’s pointing that some mx records somewhere doing something i have no clue how that works probably sounding dumb right now
Speaker 1 | 11:20.934
um excellent so yeah how did i i mean i came so yeah i was kind of like ordained that i became uh a technologist you know through from childhood up it was just kind of assumed that you know oh doug’s good at computers he’ll do computer stuff um you know i went to college to be uh
Speaker 0 | 11:37.501
you know what to do essentially computer program i got a computer science degree from binghamton university so you’re not like you’re not like screaming inside like i always wanted to be a fireman but i’m forced okay see like in my family it was all doctors it’s all medical i left i it was a dying breed i just it can’t be it can’t go on forever and to be a doctor it’s so much work i’m not saying that i’m not saying that what you do isn’t as much work but it probably isn’t let’s be honest being a doctor is insane how many years when did you get out of college oh
Speaker 1 | 12:07.322
i i’ve i did a bachelor’s degree and that was it so i have four years i have a couple of associates degrees too so i have a couple extra years of like being in school but I like, I didn’t have to go for a PhD and then a residency and all the other stuff that a doctor has to go through.
Speaker 0 | 12:22.523
Yeah. It’s insane. So somewhere along the line, you, you, so you, so Doug’s gonna be the computer guy. So you went and you did the computer stuff. And when you got out of college, what was your first job?
Speaker 1 | 12:35.754
My first, so my first job in the field, um, was, was I was working for a company that, um, a couple of companies who I worked part-time for in college and I, I would help them out with some of their computer stuff. So, you know, they had an it person and they’d be like, Hey, you know, maybe you could help me do some things and things.
Speaker 0 | 12:55.324
So common. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 12:57.425
So I would, you know, I would help out fixing, you know, fixing stuff or doing updates. I remember, uh, um, one of them was right around 2000. So like I helped him do the updates for Y2K stuff on computers. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 0 | 13:11.809
Y2K. That way. Yeah. that was like a proven if there’s any proven um conspiracy theory it’s y2k there’s this big conspiracy around y2k and that the world’s going to come to an end and all this type of stuff and no it wasn’t it was a farce although
Speaker 1 | 13:30.035
if we hadn’t done all the things we did to prep to prep for y2k do you think something would have happened i feel like there was definitely some things that would have you know like i mean you bank ledgers bank ledgers getting screwed up or something i mean i like right before that i was in you know my i was starting to get my degree in the late 90s and my first um my first classes were in in cobalt so like i learned how to program cobalt first you know so that’s like financial account or find you know the the programming language of financial systems if you will and um yeah i mean there was definitely y2k issues there like if if it hadn’t been corrected over time it would have uh it would have definitely caused some problems in there we’re on year zero yeah year zero year one yeah but i mean like you know all the it’s i think it spiraled out to where there was a lot of things that people were like we have to correct this but it ultimately may not have all really resulted in a problem if it wasn’t corrected it just it just kind of got done but but yeah i think there was certainly some some things that would have been problematic if they weren’t corrected one it’s so much fun So, you know, it’s like, it’s like one of those things that we get credit for not driving off the cliff. Right. You know, like,
Speaker 0 | 14:43.286
yeah, there’s, well, I immediately think security every time someone says something like that, like, you know, the most unforgiving, the most unforgiving position in the company. Right. Nothing happened today. Next day. Nothing happened today. No one stood up. No one said, where’s the security guy? Congratulations. Standing ovation. Nothing happened today. Then, hey, we got hacked. You’re fired. Where’s the next guy? Where’s the next guy? So many security guys probably just get so mad when I say stuff like that. But you do have cybersecurity as a bullet point on your things that you do. So there’s… This is an IT leadership show, believe it or not. And we’re going to start breaking this up into different… What I want to start doing is the visionary of this person that started this whole madness. And we do have other hosts and everything. We want to start doing some IT spotlights. So I just want your advice for a second. If we were to do IT spotlights on various different levels of leadership, we could do how to manage your help desk and how to deal with… I don’t know. just impossible end users or how do you train all different if you’ve got all these different end users how do you train them it could be uh the it security spotlight um governance and and other things there’s all kinds of things what are what is something that you’ve learned over time in it from a leadership standpoint what is something that you do that is very unique to you that you would say this should be in my book in my book man you know it’s like every now and there’s things that people do that are like i don’t know it’s like for me it’s like i don’t know talking and uh i’m just a good talker i don’t know i’m gonna i’m gonna take i’m gonna teach people how to talk and how to do this because back in the day i was walked through high school with my head down and was scared of my own shadow and and i would never in the life of me ever think that i would do some i don’t know talk show or radio show or something like that right so it would be how do you i don’t know talk to end users or how do you give a, how do you, you know, there’s gotta be something that, that you do that is unique. And I would say when you’re speaking to a group of people, public speaking, you know, from it leadership standpoint, when you’re, when you’re public speaking, there’s nothing to be afraid of because you should put all the fear on them, make everyone in the audience be afraid that you’re going to call on them. This is like one of the best techniques, right? Like you get up there. and immediately ask, okay, who in the audience knows what an IP address is? And if no one puts their hand up, I am going to call that randomly on anyone in this audience right now. You know, then all of a sudden people are like, oh, uh, start looking the other way or something like that. So now all of a sudden you’re in control. I’m just kidding. I’m not going to ask you what an IP address is. I’m going to ask you all about who clicked on what phishing email. Anyways, what would be in your book or what do you do? That’s very helpful that you would say, hey, you’re coaching someone underneath you. This is it.
Speaker 1 | 17:41.555
Yeah. For me, I think that the biggest thing that I do, and maybe I’ll split that into the answer into a couple of different like segments, but like, I think about the work that I do with staff in general. So, so like, how do you, how do you interface with and reach out to and connect with your staff and stuff like that? And so many people just aren’t quite frankly, they aren’t, they aren’t that friendly. You know, like we have this like reputation and like, no, you can’t do that.
Speaker 0 | 18:09.898
don’t click on that don’t do these things don’t do this you know in in in not panicking like that now when you say staff when you say staff that that can mean a lot of things to other people is that end users and but we don’t mean to call them end losers or numbers on a screen or anything is customers always customer it’s customer our customers when you say staff do you mean it staff or do you mean or
Speaker 1 | 18:34.252
do you mean means the staff of the company in general so like like a bucket my coworkers in the organization that I’m working with. So like,
Speaker 0 | 18:40.916
you know,
Speaker 1 | 18:42.096
I’m responsible for being the leader, the, the, the technological leader for them, you know, and, and this, so like, like the biggest thing that I do, it, this is probably the very singular biggest thing that I do is don’t panic.
Speaker 0 | 18:55.284
And that’s,
Speaker 1 | 18:58.426
and that’s sort of like my MO that I’m at is I don’t, you know, I’d make it a point to not freak out. you know to not panic to not look like i’m panicking if something if something bad happens the worst thing that you can do is like look like you’re the one who’s the crazy one like oh my god like oh oh oh crap this this thing went went sideways uh
Speaker 0 | 19:20.582
and it’s really good advice to be honest with you yeah well nobody wants to be laughing because of myself that huge fire i’m laughing because i just think of my life as a father just as a father of you numerous children and I was the guy that was never going to have children. And you’re like, you know, don’t panic. But when you’ve been a father for so long, sometimes I think you kind of give up on the old, when you’re first kids, you’re like, you know, really, I don’t know, methodical about things and think things out and goal planning and goal setting. But, um, I ended up having eight kids of which I never thought I would ever do. And, you know, by the time you get just older and you’ve had numerous kids i think the don’t panic number the don’t panic is uh it makes sense from just so many it’s i would say to my daughter because i’m a grandfather now too so if my daughter like came with their kid a big massive bulb on their head or like he fell and hit their head or something but don’t panic don’t worry uh that one’s an ice pack uh big cut uh that one it’s not a panic but it’s definitely six stitches uh go uh you know so anyways don’t panic okay but please Please go more in depth on that.
Speaker 1 | 20:29.504
Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, like I end up, you know, interfacing with and talking with, you know, co-workers and groups of co-workers and staff and other signs, you know, at all sorts of different intervals. So, like when they ask me what’s going on, you know, they want you to share and be like in a lot of ways, the rock of the organization in the realm of cybersecurity and in the realm of like making sure that things are protected. You know, people don’t like… a panicky looking or like you know you don’t have it under control if you will and and it doesn’t matter especially in the medical field too if you go in you don’t want to be like oh my gosh i’m dead i’m gonna die yeah yeah i mean like when i say you like you don’t have to have under control doesn’t mean that you have to control every single piece of what’s going on but you certainly have to have a handle of an understanding of like you know i’m i’m
Speaker 0 | 21:25.394
exude confidence exude confidence and you know it you’ve got the knowledge base and if there’s anyone that should be in charge of this particular issue it should be you because you’re the one that’s best fit for this thing but in
Speaker 1 | 21:40.818
giving that advice in giving or training my own staff my well and this staff i should say my own team so uh training my own team on how to do that and that that’s an important part of what we do. You know, we’re, on one hand, we’re process consultants. We’re not just here to help and reactionary help, you know, for the IT staff and the IT desk and everything else. But we’re also, we’re part of the group that people look to to be reliable. So if we can put those two things together, we gain a ton of trust. And then that leads to a situation where you get a ton of slack. You know, I was a county CIO for, for almost 10 years, a couple of different counties in upstate New York. And, uh, one of the things, so when I first started my first round at the first county I was at, um, the, the sheriff’s office didn’t trust us, you know, as a, as a department, they were, it’s a call would come up or something would go wrong on the computer network. And then the sheriff’s like the secretary of the sheriff would call my department and be like the, the. the sheriff has requested that you send uh an update on the time to status restoration and he would like hourly updates on it as well you know you know so like you know i would get these like declarative statements about what i’m going to be doing if you will um
Speaker 0 | 23:04.148
yeah so he basically thinks that you guys are a bunch of dudes like you know goofing off in a server closet somewhere like playing video games or you know whatever it is and like yeah the typical you
Speaker 1 | 23:17.034
never seen don’t know who you are no clue just it’s a 1-800 number whatever yeah he did have faith that the right people working on the job at any particular given point in time so you know would try to insert himself into the into the problem to solve it you know thinking that like if i just uh you know write them you know because you think about in this particular case you can think about a sheriff’s office is a very hierarchical you know a police department it’s you know hierarchically organized so a lot of like like I’m going to tell you what you’re going to do and you’re going to listen to this thing. You know,
Speaker 0 | 23:48.280
I have a lot of cop stories and I have a lot of friends that are cops.
Speaker 1 | 23:51.561
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 23:51.761
I have a lot of friends that are cops and I have friends that the cops arrested too. And in jujitsu, like, cause I do jujitsu or practice jujitsu and everyone’s saying like, jujitsu is like three types of people. It’s like middle-aged guys that are going through a midlife crisis that want to get in shape and be like, you know, maybe I could one day like be in the UFC. Then the rest are cops. and guys that got out of jail. So it’s basically like you’re in there with cops, middle-aged guys, and guys got out of jail. So, well, then there’s a bunch of just, you know, nowadays, you know, everyone knows, everyone that’s been in jiu-jitsu knows there’s cops in the class and there’s like ex-cons in the class and they all get along well and it’s great. But keep going.
Speaker 1 | 24:31.923
Oh, yeah. So, well, yeah, that, that.
Speaker 0 | 24:35.145
So the hierarchy, I guess my point is like, yes, when I talk with them, they’re like, oh, there’s absolutely a hierarchy. And I’m like, well, you got to change the system, man. You got to do it. They’re like, Because once you move up, you’re back at the bottom. Like what? Yeah. Once you move into the next tier in the police department, you’re back at the bottom again. You got to build yourself up to the next top. You know what I’m saying? I was like, okay. Anyways.
Speaker 1 | 24:53.964
Yeah. So. you know, we’ve got the, this, this, you know, the sheriff is calling and it’s because he doesn’t have faith that we’re doing the right things when something goes wrong. Talking about like major stuff. It’s not like, you know, Hey, the whole network’s down. I mean, like they can’t access like a file server that they want to. And they’re like, you know, next thing you know, I’m getting calls from the secretary. So, um, you know, that it’s took time, but over time we, you know, we built, um, you know, the rapport with, with that department, with the, with the staff where we’re, you know,
Speaker 0 | 25:23.878
there’s good communication there’s good so what’d you do so what’d you do when you say what was it well what is it can we make up a name for the sheriff like i don’t know mccracken something like that so like how do you uh how did we uh how do we build the rapport with you know like uh i don’t know whatever how do we build the rapport with them how do you build that relationship up what’d you do
Speaker 1 | 25:45.262
So, so some of it was just showing up and being there. You know, I’ll show up myself when it comes to, if that’s what it takes, you know, I mean, even though I’m the CIO of the operation and their staff will do this stuff, it oftentimes is useful for you as an executive to show up and be present when something else is going on, you know? And so, so I built rapport and I built an understanding that I understood with him, you know, and with other staff. So, you know, I was there almost eight years in that position. And from the beginning to the end was a very dramatic difference. I mean, like by the end of the time I was there, we had one time, I remember it was about a year before I left. We had fiber optic lines of our own on power, you know, utility poles connecting some of our buildings together. And a car quite literally struck a utility pole and cut it in half and it cut our fiber. Uh, so that they’re building off from our building and, uh, you know, so their internet’s offline and other stuff like that. And other than calling in to let us know that it wasn’t working, like, like at that point, they had enough faith and confidence that what we were doing was, was keeping up with it. And I had established, you know, back reverse communication back, you know, here’s a notice about what’s going on. Here’s what, you know,
Speaker 0 | 27:04.626
I will let proactive management. Yeah. Proactive alerts. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 27:09.122
sudden, like the pressure was relieved. And, you know, so going back to where I kind of started with this, we got to a point where because the trust in the report was built, we were given a ton of slack to be able to operate and get things done. And there was trust, you know, like you could go ask to be like, oh, you know, things are down, we let them know, they told us they’re on it, I have faith and I have confidence that they’re working on it. So, you know, we were then given the room time. operate without having somebody necessarily breathing down your neck all the time hey you know what’s going on hey is this fixed yet how much longer do you think it’s going to be you know and stuff like that and and that that’s that takes a long time to build that type of uh of system with a group and it takes a long time it takes a long time if it’s broken to begin with and in it but it requires a lot of intentionality it requires a lot of um of good you know good interaction and you know like getting back to the things i mentioned before like you can’t show up and be panicky you can’t show up and you know you have to you have to be confident but not overconfident you know it’s not it’s not enough to just show up and be like well i got this like like you know step aside let daddy drive type of deal you know but
Speaker 0 | 28:20.824
yeah like you said like don’t be like don’t be a jerk or or whatever it is right like don’t it’s interesting because people respond in kind and as like the it technology leadership people we need to learn to not respond in kind it’s kind of like we have to like stop ourselves and realize that we can’t meet their frustration with frustration right we actually have to just kind of like like
Speaker 1 | 28:48.643
i don’t know um yeah you’re de-escalating my so and like that’s a that’s one of the other like key things that i teach my teams too about de-escalating i like that i like other terms into something so like if i get a call or if i see a call like our let’s say our team gets a call oh this thing is is you know big problems over here you know um you know you know like like in the movie office space you know big problems in accounting a lot of money missing uh first step that i always say to folks is like we’re going to take away the crisis so if If you’ve got a problem right now, I want to figure out what’s the thing that’s driving the immediate crisis. How do we solve that? Or at least create a path that gets you out of your crisis for now, that then gives us the space to think about and fix your problems without making decisions under duress. So how can we stop, take a beat, maybe we can get you something that works, maybe it’s not the permanent fix. But what we don’t want to do is start like throwing stuff at the wall to solve your problems and solve your solve your things because everybody’s just like, oh, my God, like Jane’s not working.
Speaker 0 | 30:09.001
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 30:10.142
I chain that. Get her a new computer.
Speaker 0 | 30:14.866
Yeah, you do have to be able to deescalate that and calm people down. And there is a yes. I don’t know if there’s like a, it’s not like it’s like a crazy special, like end user whisperer skill or anything like that. Like you said, you just have to not match their freaking out. You have to not panic and not freak out yourself. Great advice. You mentioned, okay. So that’s like number one. I would say that that’s almost like a prerequisite to any type of it leadership role nowadays. Like that’s like a prerequisite. Like if you’re a freak out, if you’re a freak outer, you’re not ready for this role. However, something that is a big differentiator from the average IT leader and the top IT leader, which is the whole point of the show, is something that you said, which I loved that this is almost like a top-down thing. I imagine you teach your people this to be process consultants. Normally we think of, oh no, that’s just reserved for me. No, if you teach all of your people to be process consultants, help desk people, everyone, I love that term. And I think process consultants means, when I hear process consultant, I hear better efficiency, cost savings, potentially making more money. Well, if you’re in a government sector or nonprofit sector, it’s just opening up more money on the budget to spend somewhere else so we don’t lose it the next year. Talk to me about how you, just some of the ways that you teach and look at things that maybe there’s something other people haven’t thought of. Process consultant alone is enough. That is enough. For anyone listening to this show, if you just start saying, hey, we’re process consultants. We’re not the IT guys. We’re process consultants, okay? Stop it. We’re the consultants. We talk to the engineers so that people don’t have to or whatever that line was. We’re process consultants. Dang it. Yeah, yeah. So go talk to me about that.
Speaker 1 | 32:24.880
Yeah. So I was consulting in the idea of process. You can call it a handful of different things, but it’s the idea, the mindset that we’re not just reacting to what happens in IT anymore. And that’s for me, like when I come into an organization, that’s literally the first thing that I talk to staff, my team about, I should say, in those types of situations is like, we want to move away from being a reactionary group. that is brought in after the fact. And that happens a lot in IT. You know, the IT team is brought up as the responders, you know, so the bus, if you will, is driven by other members of the organization. You know, the finance team decides that they’ve needed a new finance package and they kind of come to you later and they’re like, hey, well, we did all the evaluation work and we figured it out here, you know? And so this is what we need you to install.
Speaker 0 | 33:14.200
We’re going SAP, here you go. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 33:17.081
And so like… Getting a seat at that table, it can be a challenge because it takes a good skill set to get the time with those folks and approach them and interface them with those people in those other roles, the HRs, the finances, your lines of business and stuff like that as peers. And that your IT is not just nowadays, IT is always a peer in an organization. So from, so I talk about business process consulting and I talk about the team IT should be asking people what it is you’re trying to do. So if we get a ticket, you know, that says, Hey, I need, I need, um, you know, I’ll use a very simple example, I guess, but like Adobe Acrobat and you’re like, why? You know, like, and I, you know, I asked that and almost like the way I sound,
Speaker 0 | 34:09.891
I need to make a quote card for this podcast. Oh, it’s a Canva free go.
Speaker 1 | 34:14.514
Absolutely. So, you know, it’s funny, I just got asked about Canva today. But the idea here is that, like, we should understand what it is you’re trying to do, not just answer what you’ve asked us to do. And if you have trust in your team, or sorry, the staff has faith in your team, they’ll understand that when you make that approach, it’s not so we can get to like a no, it’s not so we can control what’s going on or anything else like that. It’s so that people can help. And the other thing about business process consulting and IT is that the answer is not always technology. So I’ve run into so many situations where they’re like. oh, we need to do this. And I think what we should do is have this tool that automates this, and it plugs into this API, and it does this thing. And I’m like, why isn’t somebody just sending an email for this? And I mean, there’s different levels of when it’s appropriate to do something, but you can automate. There’s a ton of people who get confused, if you will, about the idea that technology is the solution to the problem. But really, the people are the solution to the problem and technology only enables that solution. So if we’re going to answer the question of like, why you want to do it, part of one of the answers is always potentially like this technology or this thing isn’t really the solution. It’s a process that you need to do. And that’s where we get back to process consulting. So, you know, our role, if you will, is to simply move people along in understanding how to get things done. Whether it involves technology or whether the answer is that particular thing doesn’t really need a technology solution to get it done.
Speaker 0 | 35:57.953
This led me to what I think is kind of a hard question, which I don’t know if I’ve ever asked. The topic comes up a lot, but I don’t know if I’ve ever asked it. And that is, how do you deal with not knowing? How do you deal with not knowing what the correct solution is? But you know there definitely is a solution. There’s definitely a solution to this process. The only reason why I say that is because I’m dealing with it right now and various different moving parts of, of, um, there’s definitely just moving parts of the podcast right now. So we’ve got a ton of content. We’ve got all this content out there. And at the beginning, it was just like a podcast. We’re like, okay, you record it. It’s kind of like, you didn’t think about security when the internet was first invented. It just kind of became like a thing that needed to happen later on. Like no one cared about security. Like when we had AOL or when Microsoft first started doing email, you could look up, you had a global email address book. Everyone could look up everyone’s email address. I mean, it’s like, we have stories of guys on the show that found their wives because they were trying to find someone that they went to high school with back in the day. when they were in college and in a different part of the world or whatever. So they looked them up in the global, like Microsoft email address book back. And that would never happen now. You can’t look up someone’s email. It’s just, you know, now it’s like spam and like, no, it just would never happen. So now we’re at that point in the show where it’s like, okay, we’ve got all these shows. We never really thought we’d record this many shows. We never had this much data. How do we index all of this? I just don’t know the answer to that. We’re thinking like, oh, AI pulled this, do that. Maybe we’ll look at this, talk to this consultant, talk. I just don’t know. Yeah. So like, that’s just like a process thing. That’s like, how do you deal with, do you have any process to, for the process of not knowing the process?
Speaker 1 | 37:47.822
That’s, that’s a, I mean, that is a real challenge. Like, and there’s a, there’s a bias that you’re, we’re all going to have because like in your case, you know, you’ve, you’ve worked with these AI tools and other stuff like that. So like you’ve got, you’re holding the AI hammer. And all of a sudden,
Speaker 0 | 38:02.084
everything looks like the AI nail. Love it.
Speaker 1 | 38:07.128
It’s a big problem. I encounter that all the time.
Speaker 0 | 38:11.452
You’re like the metaphor guy. I’m like the headline guy, but you’re like the metaphor guy. Next time I need some metaphors, I’m coming to you. AI hammer. Everything is an AI nail. That is so much of everything, isn’t it? You ever talk with the data guy, like the data scientist guy, where everything is just like, no,
Speaker 1 | 38:31.371
cognitive biases are…
Speaker 0 | 38:32.732
Python. Everything’s Python.
Speaker 1 | 38:34.593
How we all… That’s the idea behind a lot of the more recent work on inclusion work and stuff like that about understanding how our biases work and stuff like that. But those biases have always worked and we’ve talked about them in other places too. If your HR team is in charge of figuring out your workforce management solutions… they’re going to pick ones, their bias is likely to skew towards what they need and what their team, what’s good for their team and not necessarily what the workforce folks might actually need. So to go back to your question there about how do you find stuff that, how do you find information when you don’t really know the answers? It’s like the unknown unknowns. I mean, it’s so tough. I don’t know that I have this deep, like, informative answer other than than i just find people and other folks to talk to and start bouncing things off of folks you know this is where being outgoing and being like collaborative with folks really helps you know i i can share like like uh even at the place that i’m at now we’re embarking on um this the organization i’m with now is hit an inflection point where it’s growing from being a smaller business to being a you know a mid-size enterprise and um you uh you know worth like 500 staff and continuing to grow and stuff like that in the systems that we had before that were they they might have worked when we were you know 150 200 people but now that we’re five 600 people and and potentially growing larger those systems don’t work anymore and the internal folks struggle the folks who have been there for a long time they recognize that they don’t there’s things that they don’t know so where do we bring in the people from the outside and even me like you know, I’ve worked at midsize organizations. So then I bring in a slice of information and knowledge that I can help. But then I know that there’s going to be gaps that I have. So like we, some of my colleagues who also were relatively new to the organization, they, you know, they brought together their people. And, you know, we found a great group of outside consultants who have specialization in this type of work. So like we’re working, to be honest with right now, we’re working on like enterprise architecture work, trying to build a you know a corporate wide enterprise architecture for our organization to work and operate against in order to facilitate the next stages of our growth and to bring out the efficiencies and what’s going on but like i didn’t know that stuff when i came in if you were like i think admitting
Speaker 0 | 41:10.052
the bias and removing the bias and bringing in someone that’s i don’t know complete opposite of you i don’t know having different people that you trust to um yes be i don’t know agnostic or neutral or whatever you want to call that term um there’s a good book called rocket fuel i don’t know if you ever read it it’s just kind of like making sure that you have like every visionary has like a has like a an integrator so every visionary has like this this crazy person to get all these visions and all these ideas going on all the time but there’s an integrator that’s like no no you could like stop you’re gonna focus on this one thing we’re gonna help you integrate we’re gonna put the systems and processes in place you know i mean there’s got to be that almost that like complete opposite of you steve jobs head yeah they all did
Speaker 1 | 41:51.618
they all did yeah yeah uh yeah bill gates they all they’ve all got you know that kind of like i don’t know the person behind the curtain type of thing you know what i mean but wants to be right there working to to make it great and you know and that’s that’s a big part of like where it always is you know and and that’s so so talking about this whole process and where you end up learning how do you know how do i how do i find those things but one of the first things to do is to know first of all, know that I probably have gaps and then know that in this position, one of the conundrums of the position is that you’re hired for your knowledge and your ability to figure things out and understand stuff, but you don’t know all things. It’s not possible to know all things. So how is it that you… Sorry, not how is it. You have to think hard about like, I have to leave that behind and I have to be vulnerable enough to say like, I’m going to have gaps here. These are the gaps that I have. We’re going to need to bring in some folks to look at this stuff. Doesn’t mean that I’m not capable of doing this job well, because bringing in the right people or pulling people together is a part of the job too. And that’s what I’m going to excel at. Yes,
Speaker 0 | 43:03.202
totally. It has been an absolute pleasure talking with you. And I have three high, I mean, process, first of all, process consultation, teaching our people to be process consultants is just outstanding. I just, I love referring to our, our it people as. process consultants. Just amazing. Not freaking out. I have that as a bullet point. Don’t panic. Don’t freak out. De-escalate the problem. And then, I mean, I just, how can you not love the AI hammer? And make sure you have laser beams behind all your pictures.
Speaker 1 | 43:35.879
It would pull Satan glow.
Speaker 0 | 43:37.819
Yes, yes, yes. Any final words of wisdom to any IT leaders out there, people listening to the show, future IT leaders?
Speaker 1 | 43:46.526
I think that the biggest thing in IT nowadays is that you have to be integrated and be a part of the rest of the business. If you want to be a leader, you have to be willing to engage. You can’t kind of hang back and just do your thing. It’s really critical to be seen as a peer and to know that you are a peer. You know, that’s that’s you know, there’s there’s the part where you. you know, your perception of yourself and the perception that others have of you. But people generally see their IT folks as being very smart people. The gap is a lot of that I’ve seen is they don’t think that they understand what they’re doing. You know, so like they, you know, you know, tech and I know finance, but you don’t know the intersection between the two. But chances are most good IT leaders know the two and can can learn up very quickly. That’s why you’re in IT. So leaning into that is really helpful to get that seat at the table and to move up in those organizations and move up to be a part of. uh you know part of the the the real like the leadership that goes on in the organization because that’s where it sits nowadays like no organization there are very few organizations anyways out there that it does not sit at the probably one of the critical nexus points of
Speaker 0 | 45:06.588
the function of the organization you know without it the organization just doesn’t happen yes there are very few businesses and we wouldn’t know them anyways we wouldn’t know them if they didn’t exist without some cord plugging something in or some internet thing uh lean in bridge the gap between IT and all of the other parts of the company that would not survive without IT anyways. Doug, thank you so much for being on the show. It has been an absolute pleasure. Just great.
Speaker 1 | 45:35.416
Thank you. I appreciate the invite.
