Speaker 0 | 00:07.381

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Sitting back today lounging a little bit with my nerd neck. It’s been termed nerd neck. I’ve heard other chiropractors call it tech neck. And I just want to tell everyone now, work on your posture. If you’re in IT, get a standing desk, even though I am sitting and no one can see that at the moment. I have been in excruciating pain since July. I’m trying everything. Mass amounts of physical therapy, iron neck, spinning balls, all kinds of different rubber bands that I need to use. It’s just my advice. I’m just advising the world now to be careful of your neck. I should have a sponsor here of some sort. Greg DeFrenchman, go get us a sponsor for, I don’t know, nerd neck stuff. So Eric Bloom, welcome to the show. Executive Director, IT Management and Leadership Institute. You are the man. I would like a fellow Massachusetts kind of outside of Bostonian. I’m originally right outside of Worcester, so I’m sure you guys have plenty of jokes about the guys from Worcester, like a bunch of wicked mothers from Worcester. A welcome to the show. Can I say founder of the Leadership Institute?

Speaker 1 | 01:30.422

Yes, you can.

Speaker 0 | 01:31.502

Okay. So how did you get into IT leadership? Did you fail miserably at first and have many nights crying yourself to sleep and then you figured, I need to learn how to do this and now I’m going to teach other people how to not cry themselves to bed or what was it?

Speaker 1 | 01:46.829

Well, actually, yes, but that’s when I was in an IT management role. Is that how I got into this was I taught… college one night a week for a bunch of years early in my career you know typical you know like tooth oh it’s tuesday night you know i’m a young faculty thing and it was always on computer related topics i’m gonna date myself here by please i know i got to know what we were teaching back then all right uh windows 3-0 uh ms dos essential yeah how to load first

Speaker 0 | 02:18.572

First thing, class. Okay, we’re going to work on Windows today. I need you to type in cd backslash and then win.exe. We’re going to load Windows first. Do you remember? Could you even have more than one window open back then, or was it more like window?

Speaker 1 | 02:35.288

When Windows 3.0 came out, it was more like window. The big advantage of it was that not only was it graphical. But as I remember, it let you get above the 64K barrier for the software you were developing.

Speaker 0 | 02:50.483

Yes, yes. Isn’t that, it’s amazing. I still, I say this every show, every time we talk about old technology, it never gets old. I’m saying it again. It just blows my mind that, like, that was the thing. No one really just, you know, that’s older, past a certain age, really just understands that, yeah, you used to not just be able to use a mouse and scroll around and click on things.

Speaker 1 | 03:13.995

It’s true. You know, what’s interesting is, as I was talking to a friend of mine about this the other day, is when I learned computers, you know, like when I learned to be a program, is that, among other things, I learned assembly language. I learned how computers work. You know, when C came out, we had to do our own garbage collection. If we didn’t, we’d have… you know, null terminated strings in our software. And all of a sudden the servers would blow up when they ran out of memory is, is that we really had to understand how computers work. We were algorithmists by nature, you know, by programming, but we had to understand all this stuff, this stuff like null terminated strings and all this weird stuff that nobody has to worry about it.

Speaker 0 | 03:54.317

It sounds like, yeah, it almost sounds like, and then if you had like, you know, trainees or something or whatever it is, you’d have them, you know, Yeah. Or you got to start out by taking out the garbage. It’s where everyone starts out.

Speaker 1 | 04:05.442

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 | 04:06.203

You’re going to take out the garbage for the next year.

Speaker 0 | 04:08.324

Like, no, what do you mean?

Speaker 1 | 04:10.285

Also, when I started, I actually went to school to be an accountant. They made me take a computer class. I loved it. And then worked on accounting systems or account of business related systems through my career. But the type of people that were programmers then are a little different than they generally are now.

Speaker 0 | 04:25.936

Are you sure? Are you sure? Oh, yeah. How different?

Speaker 1 | 04:30.359

Can I tell you?

Speaker 0 | 04:31.240

quick story i absolutely please this is this is a show of stories we’d much this is really a story this isn’t even a show about it sometimes the other day i was talking about languages and other crazy stuff i was working at digital equipment corporation at the time deck great great company i just left because of another offer somewhere else i know three mil in maine i know three mil in maine very well shout out to steve cote steve cote i’m gonna have to uh you I’m gonna have to tag you on this episode. Three mil in Main Street. And, uh, oh gosh. What, why is the town skipping my mind?

Speaker 1 | 05:06.025

I was Maynard.

Speaker 0 | 05:07.205

Maynard, yes, yes. Thank you. I wonder what’s in that lake there, too. That’s another thing. I always look out into that kind of dirty, like, is it a lake? What is that pond or the mill pond or whatever that thing is there?

Speaker 1 | 05:19.530

I don’t know. Oh, God, I haven’t been to Maynard in years.

Speaker 0 | 05:23.292

Anyways,

Speaker 1 | 05:23.592

I know I wouldn’t drink it. I’ll tell you that.

Speaker 0 | 05:26.593

So you’re working a digital. Put that.

Speaker 1 | 05:28.614

And, you know, we had what was called, what was it, an LA-120. It was a keyboard printer.

Speaker 0 | 05:35.717

Yep.

Speaker 1 | 05:36.637

And people would use that for programming. We were programming COBOL at the time. Anyway, we had a contractor in that cube. I was in the cube next to him. Contractor was there with us for six months. You know, you know, then Hayden, you know, he left. Anyway, about two or three weeks after he left, there was this awful stench coming from somewhere in our office space. So, you know, we did the old sniff test, you know, sniff here. No, I think it’s a little less sniff there. So you find out where it was. We isolated it back to this LA-120 printer. We opened the back of it. I mean, it was a raised floor, like a data center. We were pulling up tiles, thinking that an animal got under there. I mean, it was awful. So anyway, we finally opened up this LA-120. And what’s in it is, you know, the little half pint cartons of milk you get in like elementary school? Yeah. One of those opened and a little package of chocolate chip cookies opened. In the back of the printer.

Speaker 0 | 06:35.850

Was he heating it up?

Speaker 1 | 06:37.231

Well, anyway, but you can imagine this is weeks later in a nice warm printer.

Speaker 0 | 06:44.015

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 06:45.176

It was a science project back there. To give you an idea how bad it was, we decided we didn’t want to even clean it. What we did was we took this like $50,000 piece of computer equipment and threw it in the dumpster. Wow. But anyway.

Speaker 0 | 06:58.385

But it still worked. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 07:00.267

it’s questionable. But no one used it since he was there. Anyway, I run across him at a tech conference about six months later. And I said, all right, I got to ask you a question. I said, what the heck were you thinking? You know, is he left us a present in the back of the printer? And he said, oh, my God, I’m so sorry. I said, what happened? He said, every day, and this is the kind of techie people, at least then, this is like 1981, I think. He said every day what he would do is when he came into work, he would put it, he would open up his milk and his chocolate chip cookies and put them back in the printer. so that when he had them for lunch, they’d be nice and warm.

Speaker 0 | 07:36.043

See, he was warming them up. He was.

Speaker 1 | 07:38.385

Last day of work, we brought him out to lunch, and he forgot about it.

Speaker 0 | 07:44.008

That actually sounds more than normal. That sounds like a little, that sounds like one notch above normal programmers now. Yes, I’m making fun of programmers.

Speaker 1 | 07:50.693

So many stories just from that time. But I tell you, I really learned computing. You know, what’s been fascinating, my daughter is a genetic counselor. And I told her. what I saw happen to computers during my career, you know, I mean, when you think of, you know, DOS based machines with 64 K to where we are now, um, is she’s going to see happen in genetics over her professional life. You know, we hit,

Speaker 0 | 08:18.185

well, I hope so. I hope they can regrow me a hip or something. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 08:21.806

Well, no, actually she does counseling. It’s people who either, uh, have, um, uh, genetic issues in their family, you know, like the, uh, breast cancer gene. She does consulting. She’s not like taking taking orders. But do you want your kids to have blue eyes? You know, I think that’s illegal anyway. But she’s doing, you know, like medical counseling, assisting people, almost specifically people, you know, children are born and they don’t know quite what’s wrong with the child kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 | 08:50.214

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Speaker 0 | 11:10.189

It’s, yeah, when I was in college, Yeah, they didn’t even have the entire human genome mapped out yet. It was at 1%. And they were like, oh, we’ll have the human genome mapped out however many hundreds of years from now. And then technology got involved. And yeah, probably some sort of AI to help map that out back then to finish mapping out the human genome, which is quite the feat.

Speaker 1 | 11:34.301

Oh, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 11:35.301

It wasn’t, you know, when was that? It was like 96, 95 back then. So I’m only lightly dating myself.

Speaker 1 | 11:43.489

so that’s all right you’re a kid you’re you’re a punch card era just about a lot of my house floppy disk era i was uh uh fortunately where uh i used them for a very short a short time you know what the computer operators did when you brought your deck to them yeah i’m organized it i’m assuming take one then put it in the machine and tell you your program doesn’t work oh there’s no

Speaker 0 | 12:10.561

Was there even a way to reorganize it? No way, right?

Speaker 1 | 12:12.901

Actually, there was. What you do is, this is totally old school, but it’s a deck of cards, right? You know, that’s like five, six, ten inches wide.

Speaker 0 | 12:21.964

This is computers. This is computers,

Speaker 1 | 12:24.585

guys. It’s a magic marker, you know, just like a, of some sort, big black magic marker. And you put a diagonal line up the side of it.

Speaker 0 | 12:32.667

Well, we had to do that before they shuffled it.

Speaker 1 | 12:34.387

Yeah, before they shuffled it. Once they shuffled it, you’re done.

Speaker 0 | 12:37.188

Yeah, forget about it. Reminds me of a C beyond story. Anyone out there that used to work at C beyond or remember that crazy place. Um, so you moved into something that wasn’t even a thing back then. I don’t think it was a thing back then. Like there was no like, um, it leadership institutes back then or anything like that. Right. It just doesn’t exist. And so now you, you do, um, uh, training at pretty much like, uh, almost every level, I would say, or where do you start off at?

Speaker 1 | 13:12.031

We spent, well, we have various sort of interpersonal communication leading through influence classes like that for really people of most levels, individual contributor up, but where we concentrate on is soon to be managers up to about director level.

Speaker 0 | 13:28.142

Great. So I’ve always wanted to ask, well, no, I do want to ask the, what do you think? And I have I’ve done hundreds of interviews, so I have, I have, I think I know, like if someone asked, but what is the difference between an IT manager, IT director, possibly maybe VP of IT in CIO or CTO?

Speaker 1 | 13:54.413

Okay. Interesting. I, when I see like, uh, when I think of IT director, it’s funny, that’s not a term I often use. Cause it means 85 different things. You’re going to be the IT director.

Speaker 2 | 14:03.175

I just find that sometimes IT manager and I,

Speaker 1 | 14:05.736

you know, Okay.

Speaker 0 | 14:07.177

if I talk, if we, I have, um, I have a couple of guys that go out and try to recruit for the show. Like, Hey, we want you to be on the show. And then people are like, you know, like, well, what do I have to pay to be on the show? I’m like, no, we’re, we’re literally like a real it, literally like a real it podcast. But on, on LinkedIn has become so, you know, watered down with like weird, uh, I don’t know. It’s just not what it, it’s hard to find, to have someone actually believe that you want to have them on a podcast and talk about it leadership. But Anywho, what I find is that guys, I’m like, look for guys that have the title IT director, IT manager, CTO, CIO. And I find often that the IT director and the IT manager have the same job. Yes. It’s just, it’s the same, to me, the title’s the same. It’s just like, pick one.

Speaker 1 | 14:55.020

Company and industry specific.

Speaker 2 | 14:57.462

Correct,

Speaker 0 | 14:58.002

correct.

Speaker 1 | 14:58.222

For example, if you’re in asset management, the chances are most likely, not all, you know, obviously you can make, when generalities, you can always find someone that’s different. But like, for example, in asset management, the head IT person is generally called the CTO instead of the CIO. The reason is a CIO in an asset management firm means chief investment officer, and they by no means would want to have the same initials as an IT guy.

Speaker 0 | 15:24.488

Oh, jeez.

Speaker 1 | 15:26.029

Now, generally what I’ll see in, for example, early in my career, I worked for Dun & Brad Street Software, or anyone who’s had a software company kind of thing, is generally the CIO will be in charge of the IT stuff, and the CTO will be in charge of the software for sale, the software engineering side.

Speaker 0 | 15:45.736

Okay.

Speaker 1 | 15:46.917

There are also many companies where someone will be IT director where they’re in a CIO role. But for one reason or another is that either if it’s a private company, is that the senior management there doesn’t feel that IT warrants a chief.

Speaker 0 | 16:04.412

Exactly. And that’s a good point. I think we could talk there just for 15 minutes alone. And I guess the question is, why? Because that’s one of the biggest. purposes of this show is to take um it from the server room to the boardroom that’s my greg thank you for that by the way uh all credit to greg liddall from server room to boardroom for that one the or bridging the gap where technology needs to have a seat at the executive roundtable where nothing gets done without technology where technology is a business force multiplier credit to all of the it directors that have been on the show cto cios that have that have deemed all these terms over the years. Why would a company not want to have the IT director in a C-suite position? Is it because they, I don’t know, IT’s never earned that right or has never shown their value enough? And I’m assuming that’s where you guys help.

Speaker 1 | 17:06.046

Let me begin by just asking a question and then I’ll ask why. Are you familiar with the terms? digital native and digital immigrant uh i mean well it’s coming to my mind but i wouldn’t be able to i wouldn’t be able to define it so please define it i would say no i’m no a digital immigrant to someone like me is that i grew up during my informative years the most advanced gaming platform i had to use was the mechanical pinball machine at the arcade love it i’m a digital immigrant i came to technology to use technology After my formative years. Love it. Now, someone, for example, my son’s age.

Speaker 0 | 17:46.419

I disagree with that, though. Just digital immigrants. I would say like founding father. I would say like, I mean, you were the building blocks of it all.

Speaker 1 | 17:59.665

Well, I didn’t invent it. I learned all about it.

Speaker 0 | 18:02.687

Yeah,

Speaker 2 | 18:03.007

but I mean.

Speaker 0 | 18:05.809

We actually have a clear understanding of where things came from, like how the internet came about. I wouldn’t call that immigrating, but go ahead. What’s the next one? Digital nomad?

Speaker 1 | 18:16.979

No, digital native. That’s someone who grew up with technology, gaming platforms, internet, all that stuff. Now, the reason I wanted to mention that, back to your question, is a lot of people who have… most baby boomers, at least the middle to older age baby boomer, is they’re digital immigrants. They did not grow up during their elementary and high school years with really effectively any technology. So as a result, they tend to, unless they went into it for business like I did, tend not to know it as well. It’s not as important as marketing or consulting or whatever else they’re doing in their business. Now, as a result of that, they tend… to remember it from earlier in their career when quite frankly it isn’t wasn’t what it is now now everyone my age is beginning or the baby boomers are all starting to age out you know they’re retiring stuff like that and they’re being replaced by digital natives you know people in their 40s and 50s yes by the way i’m not that that old just so you know but i’m more than 50. but anyway um is that like i guess i gave it away in 60s but anyway um is that as digital natives, people who grew up with technology, move into the regular C-suite and running corporations as many are now, is they’re looking at technology differently. They’re not afraid of it. They understand it. And they understand that the power they can bring to it, that they can use to transform their company. So as a result, that separation is going to be much, much less just due to demographics year by year.

Speaker 0 | 19:58.441

I say that all the time to sometimes when we’re just talking with people. And this is just advice to people listening now, too. If you’re looking for a job, look for, you know, a CEO that is a digital native, I guess. That’s the politically correct way of saying look for a young CEO. And then you’ve got because you’ve got the good old boy network. You’ve got some, you know. some large corporations and businesses in the United States, I don’t need to mention any particular vertical markets, I guess we would call them. You can guess what they are, that are more prone to having an old-school good old boy network of people that you find those industries to be less on the technology edge or curve.

Speaker 1 | 20:47.179

Interestingly, some of those are changing. Like warehousing used to, you know, nothing technology. Now they have some of the most advanced robotics that are made.

Speaker 0 | 20:57.439

It’s have to Amazon effect, Amazon effect.

Speaker 1 | 21:01.081

And you mentioned the start of the internet. Do you remember what politician was credited for it, for inventing the information highway?

Speaker 0 | 21:09.464

Al Gore.

Speaker 1 | 21:10.424

Yes. Do you know that there’s scientific proof that Al Gore founded the internet?

Speaker 0 | 21:16.867

Please. Please, because we’ve joked about this in the past. Like,

Speaker 2 | 21:19.789

who is it? Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 21:20.710

Al Gore did it. Please, I want scientific. This is great. We need to run with this one. Again, Greg, run with this one.

Speaker 2 | 21:28.417

Al

Speaker 1 | 21:29.097

Gore. Yes.

Speaker 2 | 21:30.999

I want the scientific proof that Al Gore invented it.

Speaker 1 | 21:34.482

Okay. Do you know what keeps the internet up 24 hours a day with such incredible speed, agility, and uptime?

Speaker 0 | 21:42.068

No.

Speaker 1 | 21:42.669

An Al Gore rhythm.

Speaker 0 | 21:47.116

I was really hoping for some real proof. Sorry,

Speaker 1 | 21:49.017

that’s all I got.

Speaker 0 | 21:50.818

I was going to say, please, do we have some more dad jokes? We need more. Someone will use that joke. I’m so mad now. I wanted real proof. That’s good. We just…

Speaker 1 | 22:03.185

No, you know, the purists will say it was ARPANET, it was this other stuff, which of course it was. That wasn’t just fun.

Speaker 0 | 22:09.769

If you really do try to explain what the internet is to someone, could you? What is it really? I don’t know. It’s a mix of electricity and ones and zeros and headers and footers and packets. And what really is it all combined together? If we said the internet is this, this, and this, could you really describe it? It’s still kind of like this mind-blowing thing to me.

Speaker 1 | 22:32.742

It’s interesting you say that. I used to be asked that a lot. And the answer that I would give is that if you take your laptop or desktop whatever it is you know let’s just say laptop for now if you take your laptop and you seal yourself in a room where you have no connectivity anything that works on that singular pc not connected to anything is not the internet everything

Speaker 0 | 22:58.039

else is so once we take a cord and we connect it to another computer that is the internet well by definition you know it’s connectivity there’s got to be some kind of What’s the electrical factor to the internet? Is there any electricity factor to it?

Speaker 1 | 23:15.791

I guess so. I don’t have a good answer for that.

Speaker 0 | 23:19.073

We’re sounding real dumb now.

Speaker 2 | 23:20.374

And now back to the leader of…

Speaker 1 | 23:23.476

If you’re connecting from one machine to another machine, I mean, it used to be direct. You know, like with modems, you’d dial up a phone,

Speaker 0 | 23:30.722

you’d get network cards. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 23:31.802

but it was not internet. Internet is more, I think I like to describe it as more sort of the general collection. that lets you go from anywhere to anywhere.

Speaker 0 | 23:43.106

It’s still, it’s somewhat of a miracle in my mind. It is. And they’re like, and that’s what dumb people say. You’re going to see. That’s what I’m saying. No, it’s hard to, it’s not hard to imagine for us. It’s hard to imagine other people’s life without the internet. I wonder what my kids would imagine. Like, I wonder what it was like before the internet, Dad. Well, let me tell you. We used to go out to… have pizza and do things. Okay, so back to the difference between IT manager and CIO, CTO. I don’t know if we really covered that.

Speaker 1 | 24:17.051

Oh, yeah. One other difference, let me say, and I’m going to go beyond the title now to the position, is the CIO position, I’ll just say the head of IT position, whatever it’s called, is a very different role than being within it. Because when I was in an IT manager role, my peers were other IT people. I went up the app dev, application development. So who are my peers sitting in a staff meeting? Was the head of testing, the head of help desk, operations, data center, etc. And my boss was an IT person. When you move into a CIO role, and it’s the only position in the company, now that could be CIO of a five-person shop in a local municipality. But when you’re in the head IT position is you have no peers. Your boss is a business person of some sort, and your peers all have input into your performance review. Because IT, it’s omnipresent, is that whatever business you’re in, if you’re the head of IT, You’re supporting sales and marketing and accounting and HR and whatever else is there. So as a result, all of your peers have input into your performance review, which means if you ask the question, are they really your peers?

Speaker 0 | 25:29.704

I don’t know.

Speaker 1 | 25:30.964

I would say no. The example that I use, and again, I have a financial services IT background, is stock trading. You know, the traders. It’s incredible, wonderful, cool technology that’s used. And a big part of my job was, among other departments also, was to support the equity trading department. So when it came time for my performance review, was it fair to ask the head of equity trading, hey, you know, has Bloom given you a good your department, all the technology that it needs to be effectively doing trades? I’d say, yeah, that’s a big part of my job. It’s fair to have input into my performance review. When his performance job review came up. Do you think they asked me if he was able to find appropriate liquidity in a volatile stock market? No. So I asked you again, are we peers?

Speaker 0 | 26:22.821

No. Exactly.

Speaker 1 | 26:24.522

So that when you move into the top IT job, everybody who is your peer is also a client.

Speaker 0 | 26:31.765

That sounds like the hair clip for men. Remember that?

Speaker 1 | 26:36.387

I do,

Speaker 0 | 26:36.787

actually. I’m also a client. What was that guy’s name? Why can’t I remember his name? I’m… Oh. Gosh, I’m going to have to think that.

Speaker 1 | 26:44.390

Big speed or something like that?

Speaker 0 | 26:45.570

We’re going to look it up in the meantime. I need a sidekick. I need a sidekick for this show from now on. We should probably, it would just be great to have a sidekick, and we’re building out a studio as we speak. So, one thing that I’ve heard, and people have been asking to start a community for a while, and we’ve tried, and I’ve had some other people collaborate, and how do we start a community, and everyone’s busy with their day job. And the reason why people have been asking for a community and I’m like, well, we’ve got all these other communities. We have LinkedIn, we’ve got whatever, someone’s Slack group, secret IT Slack group, and then we’ve got, you know, whatever else there is out there. But the reason why they’re asking is because we have a significant group of IT directors and CTOs, CIOs that are within the kind of mid-market space, so I would say. 2000 and end users or less so not really enterprise not small business so it’s this kind of group in america that has a significant um not problem but a significant lot of problems when it comes to managing it there’s a constantly challenges are constantly wearing multiple hats the end user to leadership ratio is about one to a hundred so the it director has to do you know whatever vendor management and appease every department and drive the business forward and meet whatever KPIs. And I do believe that they should be using MBOs and we’ll talk about that in a second. But what I find is that when they get to the top, they say it’s very lonely at the top. And that goes right in line with what you said. Absolutely. Once you get to the top, you no longer have any peers and now I’m alone. And who do I bounce ideas off of? And I think, so

Speaker 1 | 28:30.807

I have your advice there.

Speaker 0 | 28:32.327

What’s your advice there? What take your course? I mean, what do we do? Like, what’s your, what’s your advice there?

Speaker 1 | 28:37.830

Well, let me begin. I’m allowed to say professional association names and such?

Speaker 0 | 28:41.933

I don’t see why not. I’ve said we didn’t even fly to the moon before, so I’m still alive.

Speaker 1 | 28:47.738

I’m a member of CIM. It’s the Society for Information Management.

Speaker 0 | 28:51.140

Sure.

Speaker 1 | 28:51.781

It has about 5,000 members nationwide, give or take. I don’t know exactly, but about there. About 30 or 40 different chapters around the country. And who it’s really designed for is CIOs, and I’ll say CIO minus one. you know, a head of app dev, head of the PMO, you know, sort of that level, senior IT positions. And, you know, it’s a wonderful association. You know, our chapter in Boston here, I don’t know, has three, four hundred members. And the advantage of it is that you really get to, you know, not going once and listening to a speaker and then leaving. But I believe this in professional associations in general. If you go there, you know, good speaker, bad speaker, you’re going to meet the people. When you become part of the fabric of the association, you know, you can go and ask questions and get really honest answers. Like, hey, I’m in the process of moving from. I’ll just pick moving from. um people soft to uh uh to work day anything i should know or do you know a decent consultant who could help me out right or you know it’s it’s those kind of questions when you really get to to know people because they see you month in and month out all peers of yours they’re really really willing to share that kind of advice so we need to do a podcast with sim yeah i could i could help you set that up very very easily let’s do that okay by the way it was sigh

Speaker 0 | 30:19.260

Sperling. Is that right? Cy Sperling. Remember, I’m Cy Sperling, and I’m also a client. President of the Air Club for Men, and I’m also a client. That’s a great ad.

Speaker 1 | 30:28.044

I absolutely could set up. Mark Taylor is the CEO of Sim. Brilliant guy. I would be more than happy to make an introduction for you.

Speaker 0 | 30:37.129

Yeah, let’s get him on the show. Let’s do it. So IT directors in the IT director role might be doing well. Maybe they don’t have a CTO role at the company. Maybe they do. CTO quits. Now they’re interviewing for new CTOs. Why would the IT director not have that option to move into that CTO role? What do people need to be doing in an IT director role? Acting as if, meeting with various different departments in the company. What would your advice be for moving up in the world?

Speaker 1 | 31:08.705

Okay.

Speaker 0 | 31:11.125

They want to and should they want to.

Speaker 1 | 31:13.146

They may or may not want to. I mean, I know individual contributors that would never want to move into an IT management role. I knew one, a friend of mine, he was the best techie, often becomes the manager. He did a great job, IT management for a number of years, sort of sucked the life out of him. His mantra was management would be great if it wasn’t for the people. He eventually went back to an individual contributor role. If you are the kind of person that you want to move up, I have a concept I like to say called level up management. And what that is, is you should be thinking about things from your boss’s perspective. This is an individual contributor who wants to be a tech lead. It’s the VP of help desk who wants to be the CIO. But if you can think of things from your boss’s perspective, what it does is it changes the way you think about things. And by the way, it also helps your day-to-day job performance. Because Phil, let’s say that you were my boss and you asked me to do something, whatever it was, you delegated some task. If I understood it from your perspective, you know, what were the critical success factors that you were going to judge me on, why this task was important, and so on, I would, by its nature, because I had that understanding, do a better job at it. So that’s one step.

Speaker 0 | 32:32.138

I would probably enjoy it more, too, thinking kind of more out of the box rather than just banging the task out, I guess.

Speaker 1 | 32:39.382

Absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 32:39.922

There’s something about helping other people. Yes. There’s something about helping other people and doing things for a reason outside of yourself that makes it so much more rewarding.

Speaker 1 | 32:49.789

Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, there’s that sort of what’s the worth? What are people doing? You know, how am I helping people in the task I’m performing? Which, by the way, if they’re working virtually and in their own little island working at home, you know, for a manager to say, hey, you know that thing that you that report you did last week or that program you put together, the analysis you did. That was just used by the C-suite and they landed a $50,000 deal on it. Great job. That is so motivating for people. But anyway, back to your question. What I’d say is think about things from your boss’s perspective. Because not only does it position you to be doing things the way your boss would do it, but when you’re talking to your boss’s peers, you’re doing it from almost a peer-level discussion instead of, oh, wow, that’s how you do things there at the vice president level. You’re thinking of it and you’re talking it from that perspective. So you almost become the heir apparent. And then the second advantage of it is, let’s say, then you get that promotion. It’s not like everything’s new to you. You’ve been thinking about things from your boss’s perspective for a year or two. So it’s much easier for you to get more, to come up to speed on that job more quickly and be more successful.

Speaker 0 | 34:02.113

It’s excellent. I’m highly enjoying this. Are you familiar with MBOs?

Speaker 1 | 34:09.156

Yes.

Speaker 0 | 34:10.156

Do you think most IT leaders are familiar with MBOs?

Speaker 1 | 34:14.980

I think generally they’ll, yes. I think they generally will refer to it as SMART goals and performance reviews, sort of the same neck of the woods, you know, managing by objectives or SMART goals. It’s an acronym for anyone listening may not know it that stands for that whenever you give someone a goal, it has to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound.

Speaker 0 | 34:37.755

Yes. I say achievable, but it’s handleable. Same thing. But an MBO, from my understanding, like a professional kind of from an enterprise standpoint, should be tied to a bonus structure.

Speaker 1 | 34:51.417

Yes. The big problem with that in IT is it depends on the type of job you have. If you have an operational role, like running the data center, implementing or managing cloud architecture, then MBOs are awesome. The problem is if you’re in a part of the company, for example, application development, that’s project-oriented.

Speaker 0 | 35:12.509

I think it should just be reserved for leadership.

Speaker 1 | 35:15.430

Yes, there it works. But if you do it on, yes, for MBO, for senior leadership, awesome. When you try to do it at people that do projects, projects come and go. You know, you change the project you were working on, gets canceled, you start a new one. And then if you don’t update their MBOs or SMART goals, there’s nothing to give them a performance review on because you can’t complain to someone that the project wasn’t finished if you’re the one who canceled the project.

Speaker 0 | 35:41.819

Correct. Yes. No. I’m thinking more specifically around IT management. CTO IT leadership. If you can measure that you have saved, created efficiencies and or grown sales by some factor, what I’m saying is I want to encourage people to think more along what can we measure, how can we measure our success. How many IT directors do you think measure their level of success or measure success or are there more opportunities to measure?

Speaker 1 | 36:17.085

I think there’s a lot more opportunities to measure. One of the things we actually say in one of our classes is if you can’t count it, it doesn’t count. So IT does a lot of things that can increase job performance, increase productivity, reduce costs. That’s what we do for a living, basically. And if you can’t quantify it, then everybody forgets it. If you can walk into your boss’s office, or better than that, into the CEO’s office. and say, you know, we just saved you, you know, $200,000 by implementing this change in process. That’s $200,000 that can be used in other things. It’s quantifiable. That’s absolutely the key. There’s an old IBM ad. When IBM moved from being just selling hardware to being a consulting-type operation, I don’t know if you’ve ever saw it, but someone runs in their boss’s office carrying a nickel and says, boss, I saved the company a nickel. And the boss says, well, why should I care? We’re a multi-billion dollar corporation. And he says, you don’t understand. I’m saving a nickel on every one of the 350,000 transactions we process per day.

Speaker 0 | 37:29.411

Superman 30.

Speaker 1 | 37:30.692

Yeah, it’s those numbers. It’s those numbers that really will help quantify IT’s great work. But also, we help them get extra budget.

Speaker 0 | 37:42.677

Yeah, yes, yes. Or the office, however you want to look at it. We’re just going to shave fractions of a penny off of everyone’s paycheck. We’re going to just… It just disappears in the system anyways. We’re just going to round up or something.

Speaker 2 | 37:56.331

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Speaker 0 | 40:18.336

whatever top five things that you can think of top of your head that it directors are not measuring that they should be measuring. Um, that is quantifiable that they can start today so that when someone listens to the show today, they can say, wow, I walked away. I actually took something away from the show other than a 1984’s Hair Club for Men ad.

Speaker 1 | 40:39.412

That might be the best.

Speaker 0 | 40:40.613

And a great dad’s joke and a great dad joke algorithm.

Speaker 1 | 40:44.155

One thing I would say is time to completion. What I mean by that is from a business perspective.

Speaker 2 | 40:50.459

Love that. I’m doing that right now,

Speaker 0 | 40:52.781

Greg. We’re doing the website. Time to completion.

Speaker 1 | 40:56.423

Yes. So if it normally, like this happened, who was it? Ford. You know, they put them. implemented new operation a new technology cad cam stuff like that they reduced how long it took a car to get to market from don’t quote me on the numbers i don’t remember them but like from three years to a year and a half it you know who was who was talking where i was i talking about that on a show the other day about how many car i

Speaker 0 | 41:20.478

think that might have been yesterday with how many car how when it started out how many um like car manufacturing companies there were there was like you know 50 or something and then it went down to like five um so okay

Speaker 1 | 41:31.028

But anyway, is that so the faster IT can get a project completed to market, or let me say for implementation, the faster the business people who need it can use it.

Speaker 2 | 41:43.414

Oh,

Speaker 0 | 41:43.474

and by the way, just credit to Prashant Natarajan for that. We were talking about how the market, when a new thing comes out, is first flooded, and then there’s all of this consolidation, basically. And anyways, Henry Ford was obviously the last man standing.

Speaker 1 | 42:03.625

Actually, I’m glad you said that because the second measurement is the percentage of, or let me say the, I’ll say the percentage of technologies that were selected that actually made it.

Speaker 0 | 42:16.130

Oh,

Speaker 2 | 42:17.291

love that.

Speaker 1 | 42:18.851

You know, today’s shiny toy can very, very quickly become tomorrow’s technical debt. And, you know, you see it in new markets, like right now in AI. everybody’s coming out with an AI tool of one sort or another. You know there’s going to be some type of shakeout there, just because there has been in every other technology that’s come out in the last 50 years.

Speaker 0 | 42:40.144

Percentage of tech that made it,

Speaker 2 | 42:42.185

love it.

Speaker 0 | 42:43.686

What’s another one? We’ve got to have top three at least. I won’t make you do that.

Speaker 1 | 42:50.088

User productivity. In other words, the people using the true effect that you’re having on… the systems that you’re implementing? I mean, everybody does project completed on time and all that, but you know, what is the business value that’s created through the projects that it has implemented?

Speaker 0 | 43:10.278

That’s a difficult one. You really gotta, you really have to, um, cause there could be a lot of correlations there. I’ll give you a betting on whatever the project is, you know,

Speaker 1 | 43:19.183

I’ll give you another one. Um, and it’s, uh, how would I describe it? Um, uh, strategic flexibility.

Speaker 0 | 43:27.948

How do you measure that?

Speaker 1 | 43:29.469

The rock star. I think that the new rock stars in IT are the enterprise architects. The reason is, is because they have to come up with an architectural structure for all of their combination of hardware and software.

Speaker 0 | 43:43.200

Oh, that’s like saying.

Speaker 1 | 43:46.042

It’s strategic risk is the other.

Speaker 0 | 43:48.885

Number of silos we’ve eliminated. That’s like saying less number of silos.

Speaker 1 | 43:55.830

Well, yeah, but I, yes. But in addition to that, what I would say is it’s the flexibility to implement new technologies into your existing infrastructure.

Speaker 0 | 44:08.060

Yes. Percentage of anti-roadblock capability.

Speaker 1 | 44:14.485

Now, these sound rather… How do you measure that,

Speaker 0 | 44:16.747

though? That sounds kind of wild. Like, how do you measure that? Because we’re more flexible? I mean…

Speaker 1 | 44:23.144

That’s the goal. The measurement of that one can be really difficult and, quite frankly, for people to understand it, even outside of the IT space. But yet it’s a crucial, crucial requirement to be able to do that. It’s called strategic risk from the other side of the coin, is that if the market, if the business people, whoever they are, it could be a municipality wanting to implement a new tax collection thing or a new CRM system. How easy can you do it? An example of that is like when Europe came up with GDPR, you know, the privacy thing.

Speaker 0 | 44:58.204

Ah, I get it.

Speaker 1 | 44:59.406

Now California is doing it. How fast can IT be able to adjust to be able to do it? When you move to cloud computing, what’s the ability for them to be able to do it?

Speaker 0 | 45:13.227

If WordPress blew up tomorrow and there was no WordPress, how quickly could we migrate all of these thousand websites to a different platform?

Speaker 1 | 45:20.473

Yes. Or if WordPress had this great new feature, did you architect WordPress in a way that allows you to implement?

Speaker 0 | 45:29.861

Without…

Speaker 1 | 45:31.082

um malware attacks from russia another one and this this is sort of i think getting to come up among my various it jobs in the past i was a dba so i love data um is the data is truly the new oil is they’re referring to it because you know if you think about it what is machine learning i mean machine learning is in fact a way like if you go to if when it automatically calculates if you are trying to get life insurance and it comes back right away can you or can’t you you What it’s doing is machine learning is an algorithm that reads a data set. So the question would be is how good is the quality of the data and the flexibility of the data and the ability for this part of your data to connect to another part of your data to be able to move toward, among other things, AI-based applications?

Speaker 0 | 46:24.873

You just made me think of something. It goes in alignment with what your daughter is doing too, right? Because There, um, the, there’s a, a friend of mine, his name’s, uh, Mark Isaacson. He owns Village Green Apothecary and IQU Health. And what they’re doing with the data is amazing. So you, you go get your DNA tested. Um, he takes all the biomarkers and the genetic pre, the, the genetic anomalies, or what do you call it? The, what’s the X-Men morphing thing? What do you call it? The genetic, uh. um um anyways the the anyways the genetic morphs and the the things that are not normal right so they take your they take your dna and map that out um so you’ve got that data first of all right then you get blood tested and you get all of your um allergies and everything tested so now we know kind of like what what you’re allergic to then this is the big thing that he that he does takes that He has an API into the, what’s it called? Whatever the health ministry is, whatever the, in America, why can’t I think of the name of the organization? API into all of their data and maps via zip code where you’ve lived and the potential toxins that you’ve put into your body over your life that you’ve broken in. And then. correlates that to diet plans and future predictability of like you know just think of where the future predictability of disease could go and everything if you take dna you take geographical location how you grew up what you’ve been eating your whole life and then actually and then correlate with blood tests and all that other stuff there’s a lot that could be done there from a data standpoint i just made me think of that that’s fascinating your daughter’s doing genetic you know whatever yeah

Speaker 1 | 48:24.930

you know, anywhere where you can integrate different types of data. Like I’ll give you another one is what a lot of fundraising organizations are doing. You know, let’s say you donate, let’s say you and I donate $25 each to some charity. They’ll do an analysis of our zip codes and more particularly data like from Zillow. And if you’re living in a $10 million mansion and I’m living in, let just be saying not a $10 million mansion is who do you think they’re going to go after for a bigger share of wallet? Me, maybe $25 was as much as I could put into it. But if you’re living in a $3 million home, if they could potentially come to you or would come to you first looking for bigger donations than they would come to me by bringing together what seems like separate types of information brought together to provide new value. That’s another way of, to your question on measurement, is how well is the organization overall with IT’s leadership? using the data they have in new and inventive ways.

Speaker 0 | 49:25.057

I’d be regretful if we could do that internally with the psychology of our end users internally. The data that Facebook and some of these social media companies has is probably way beyond what anyone really truly knows.

Speaker 1 | 49:36.468

Yeah, I mean, even little firms like us, the people who’ve taken our certifications, as we analyze where they’re from or what industries they’re in and things along that line. Some of it had to be manually calculated and it’s, oh yeah, I bet this is that. So it’s not 100% clean. But what we did was we found that 15% are coming from local and state municipalities. We learned we have a certain amount coming from financial services or manufacturing or consulting or other areas. And what that allowed us to do by adding that piece of data tied into their industry is where are we going to market? Where do we have the deepest penetration for our two IT leadership certifications?

Speaker 0 | 50:19.228

So let’s end with that. Eric, where do people get started with you at ITML? IT Management and Leadership Institute, what would your suggestions be for people listening to the show? How can you help them? What, I don’t know, courses or things that you have that would be vastly helpful and exponentially helpful to anyone in an IT management role, IT director role, even CTO, CIO?

Speaker 1 | 50:44.103

Okay, well, thank you for asking. First thing I’d say is we offer free monthly webinars on IT management related topics. Just go to our site, click on

Speaker 0 | 50:53.092

registration and you’ll see they’re all out there till the end of uh the end of this year let’s get some of your links and uh let’s get some of your links in the podcast so uh greg um or adam now we’ve got multiple people working behind the scenes here um let’s add some of these links that

Speaker 1 | 51:08.743

would be great and then for anyone who wants to wants to take it uh then from there if you’re a soon-to-be it manager so you’ve been in it for a while you’re looking for credential or to gain some knowledge so you from a soon-to-be it manager up to about five years of it management experience we’re with a governing body for the it management and leadership professional itmlp that’s been quoted in cio.com and indeed you know all the play the kind of places that say that we’re real and fun we’re actually starting to see it as a preferred um as a preferred certification in the job um in job descriptions but then if you’re you I’ll say above that, I’ll refer to it as an IT manager of IT managers. Or you’re just an IT manager with some pretty good experience. We have what we call our IT management leadership executive. If you go to our website and click on certifications, you’ll see both of those described. At the end of the day, the one that’s right for you is the one when you look at the topics that are in it that resonate with you most that will help you with your job.

Speaker 0 | 52:09.718

Beautiful. So go to the ITML website. Obviously.

Speaker 1 | 52:14.300

tell them that dissecting popular it nerds sent you over and you were listening to the podcast and now i signed up so that would be really cool um uh eric been a pleasure having you on the show uh thank you so much for being on dissecting popular it nerds thank you phil great to be here and great podcast you have i’ve listened to a bunch of them anyone that this is the first one the people before me they’re way smarter than me we

Speaker 0 | 52:34.855

got good and bad ones we’ve had better shows good shows which is how it is right here with you phil you