Speaker 0 | 00:02.188

Hi, nerds. I’m Michael Moore, hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I’m here with Steven Singer, CIO at Julius Silbert, an adjunct professor of computer science for Rowan University. Rowan is the, actually is my daughter’s name. So I’m sure she’s going to be pretty happy to hear that.

Speaker 1 | 00:22.713

It’s a great name. Great name. I appreciate that, Mike. Thanks for having me on today. On top of that, I’m also a proud father of two and a half. My wife is pregnant third. Hi, babe. And letting you guys know I’m also a firefighter. So I really do enjoy keeping a busy schedule. I appreciate that.

Speaker 0 | 00:40.060

Yeah, Steven, is there anything that you don’t do?

Speaker 1 | 00:44.723

Not as of yet. I mean, I’m a little rusty in programming. So I try not to touch that approach now in the management level of IT. But yeah, not many things.

Speaker 0 | 00:56.029

People here know that I research everybody. prior to them coming on. And as I was researching your name, I came across some interesting billboards, by the way. Just, I don’t know if you’ve got like an anti-fan club over there where you’re at, but it’s just these menacing billboard signs of people not liking Steven Singer. What is happening over there?

Speaker 1 | 01:30.876

Yeah, in the Philly market, there’s this great guy that owns a jewelry store long before my time, Mike, that owns a billboard for an I hate Steven Singer campaign. And it’s kind of a reverse advertising flair for marketing locally. It’s done pretty well since you’re bringing it up on the podcast here.

Speaker 0 | 01:51.565

So, hey, well, maybe you’ll benefit from that. Maybe you should start a campaign. I like Steven Singer. See what happens.

Speaker 1 | 01:58.428

It sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. I’m going to try to.

Speaker 0 | 02:03.512

Oh, well, as people know, we have our icebreaker segment. It’s called Random Access Memories. I ask a question and then you respond with the answer that just comes to your head first. This is a totally nice breaker. Have fun with it. Your first question is, what is the most funny, funniest IT related typo or. autocorrect that you have either made or seen? So what’s the funniest IT related typo or autocorrect?

Speaker 1 | 02:37.097

So I thought it was a typo, but once upon a time when I was working in the help desk, I got a ticket that said something from an end user to the effect of there are ants crawling out of my laptop. What do I do? And I did not comprehend that it was an actual ant as in the insect. that they were talking about, I had no idea. So in my head, it always comes back when somebody asks about humor and technology or what’s going on and, you know, something that matter in any one of these types of interviews. I always think about that help desk ticket. It was, you know, I was on the job for like three weeks or something like that. And somebody asked me that. And I was like, I don’t know, you call an exterminator, put it in the freezer. I’m not sure what you do. You know, that kind of thing doesn’t doesn’t come out in our training. That’s for sure.

Speaker 0 | 03:27.413

Why? Why were there ants coming out of a laptop?

Speaker 1 | 03:32.117

You know, end users, they love to eat near their computer. I’m sure there was some food in those keyboards or something of the sort.

Speaker 0 | 03:41.065

Oh, boy. Well, I don’t. That’s where you’re like, well, don’t send it back to me. I don’t want that laptop.

Speaker 1 | 03:48.071

At least return it to Dell or wherever it needs to go.

Speaker 0 | 03:53.476

Okay, your second question, if you could influence or change any IT related policy or decision, what would it be and why?

Speaker 1 | 04:07.181

That’s a great question. You know, I think my perspective from a security standpoint first, and I know everyone seems to think that the CIO and the CISO care so much about cybersecurity, and we do, right? But we’re also known for… breaking the rules ourselves and changing passwords and giving administrative access in the world of things that shouldn’t happen. I am a trust-first kind of human being, but from a computer standpoint, I hate the password policy, right? Change your password every three weeks, change it every month, change it every six months, change it once a year. All businesses are different. And we set these hard, fast rules, whether it be CST or NIST standards for passwords. And we say… If you’re at a hospital, you have to badge into your job, or if you need a password, it needs to be 25 characters long. But the simple fact is, if the system is not connected to the internet, does it really matter? Is it offline? Is it really going to keep…

Speaker 0 | 05:05.068

the bad people out or is it only going to keep the good people out that just don’t understand enough to get in there yeah the you know it’s interesting because this came up at uh recently where i’m at and uh um you know someone had talked about passwords and and uh they had a password change there’s a password change policy that somebody had and they were debating whether it was actually even relevant anymore um they had other controls that were uh other other mitigating controls on there and and we were just kind of debating is you know listen this doesn’t even require password changes anymore uh it’s and and why are we even talking about passwords in in the days of where authentication goes way beyond that you know um you’re gonna check a password one time and then just assume everybody’s safe that’s not even the methodology that anyone uses anymore. Everyone’s like, I don’t trust you. Continuously authenticate. This is the new paradigm for security. So yeah, I think you’re right on that. That’s a good question. People really need to rethink those password policies, because I don’t think that that’s even, it’s not even relevant anymore.

Speaker 1 | 06:30.124

I think locks only keep the good people out. Isn’t that the ongoing joke anyway? So if you’re a CISO out there or a CIO and they’re cringing at our questions today, I would challenge them on, you know, what’s their security types for the offload and offline type of stuff. I think physical security is also super important. You know, keep the data centers locked. And as we move more and more things to the cloud, you know, that data center becomes someone else’s problem.

Speaker 0 | 06:55.761

Yeah, and keep the data centers monitored. You know, know who goes in and goes out, right?

Speaker 1 | 07:03.789

Always the business owner. It’s like, I’m not going to have a password policy. We’ll just, you know, you can just let mine stay the same and they have the most rights. I get that.

Speaker 0 | 07:13.193

Oh, man. It’s always the people with the most access that bend the rules. And that’s never a good thing.

Speaker 1 | 07:25.938

IT heroes out there. I love it.

Speaker 0 | 07:28.900

Everyone’s cringing right now going, sorry. All right. All right. Here’s the last one. What is the most beautiful or as the as the young folks say now, aesthetic IT related thing that you have seen or created?

Speaker 1 | 07:49.365

I am an avid drone pilot and an average everyday surfer. I really like to be in the ocean. So. When I think about technology, I think of more than just the keyboard, the mouse, and the traditional computer that, you know, we’re using to talk to each other on now, right? I think of the way modern technology exists, and I look back at some of the film I’ve taken, and I think water in general is such a fluid, beautiful thing. And when you can capture it in that really like 8K slow motion time frame and just replay it, recast it, put some music to it. whether it be on a social media platform, you know, LinkedIn or something of the sort for work, or you’re doing it professionally or just, you know, personally, I think whenever I make a video about surfing, or if I get to film anything like that with water, it just, it’s Zen, you know, to me, I think it’s a time where we can take technology away. You get in the water and you don’t have your iPhone, there’s no Apple Watch or Samsung or anything like that. You just, you and the wave. And recording something like that adds a little bit of technology from a mile high view that you can get this beautiful recording of. And I have a couple of them that I really like.

Speaker 0 | 09:02.998

You know, it’s interesting you say that about about water. Right. Because there is there is a quote by Bruce Lee. Right. Where he says, empty your mind, be formless, shapeless like water. You put water into a cup. It becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle. It becomes the bottle. You put water into a teapot. It becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. A great quote from Bruce Lee, but it kind of encapsulates exactly kind of what you’re talking about. There’s such a good beauty to water because it… It can just form into whatever it is and crash and flow. And you’re right. There’s just such a great beauty to it to be able to do that.

Speaker 1 | 10:02.481

Yeah. And as Lee says, right, be water, my friend, at the end of the quote. And as we talk about being in technology and how it relates from whether it be some type of adaptivity, if you’re looking at flexibility, resilience, if you talk about integration or any of those things, water is all of that. And so is technology. And it’s a beautiful way to take something very modern and something as old as time and merge them together. So whenever I think of something that is art and technology, I always think of the ocean. I think of, you know, again, being a guy on the surfboard or somebody operating a drone and just literally watching the beach and checking it out and seeing how the wave breaks. And just like where is technology going to go left or right? You never know when the wave starts. You have no idea. And truthfully, if it starts right in the middle, how do you know which way you’re supposed to go?

Speaker 0 | 10:54.656

And that’s such a good thing. There is so much water. And there is also so much technology out there and navigating the water, navigating the tech. There’s a lot of parallels you can draw to this metaphor. I think that being a CIO, CTO, and trying to… navigate through the field that we’re in right now, you know, is it can be daunting, right? Because there’s just so much out there. It’s kind of the thing, like the more tech you know, the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know, right? And, you know, when you, when you see the ocean at night, like you’re on a boat or anything like that, you see it at night and you really see how, uh, how vast it is and how dark it is, you just go, oh my gosh, like there’s so much here I don’t see. And that’s why, you know, it’s one of the reasons I love doing the podcast is because I get to talk and chat about a whole bunch of different topics within IT and with a whole bunch of different people and a whole bunch of different perspectives. So it’s just, it’s endless. I, you know, I thought in doing these things that I would run out of material. And I never run out of material or things to talk about because there’s just so much to cover. So I was looking at some of your background. It looks like you come from, kind of similar to me, you come from an infrastructure background. That’s right. I even saw you in healthcare too, which was one of the things where I started too, over in healthcare.

Speaker 1 | 12:51.184

That’s right. i uh i started off well my very first job is a company that is not in business anymore so circuit city right came out of the mid circuit right the only competitor best buy i guess outside of amazon but uh wasn’t as cool it didn’t have the cool like plug when you walked in that’s true you know i started as a bench tech there you know working on uh honestly camera systems and computers was one of the first couple of uh fire tech benches what they called them at the time and I cut my teeth in an enterprise company that was in healthcare and a staffing agency and infrastructure and kind of really grew up in the security and worked, you know, through my first couple of career jobs, both back and forth between infrastructure and security and eventually becoming management and still wanting to be hands on, you know, still wanting to be that bottom up approach to making sure that I was. taking tickets to making sure that I had a pulse on what was happening, even as a director and IT manager, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just managing a system or a person. I was actually managing not only those two things, but also people’s expectations of what technology can and can’t do for them and their business.

Speaker 0 | 14:10.118

No doubt. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 | 14:12.540

That’s it’s just one of those things where I feel like IT is, is like any other tool. you know if if you’re building a house you need a foundation and if you’re building a business you need a foundation if you’re going to do any one of those things today you need some type of technology it doesn’t matter if you’re a pizza shop locally in town and you need a way to order pizza from your mobile device today or get in one of those you know uber eats or doordash delivery services it’s all tech there and if you think about from a healthcare perspective you have patients that are relying on simple health care as in getting access to a medicine cart or something like that. And as constructive as it is to share x-rays and film with specialists and things like that, it’s one of those things that you just, you need in your everyday life. And now every business needs it. I can’t think of one that just doesn’t use technology at all.

Speaker 0 | 15:05.195

No, absolutely. You know, it brings me to the question, what did infrastructure teach you about tech? And I’m saying that because infrastructure itself has changed. It’s morphed. It’s modified. It is not the same as it once was, but it still exists. What, you know, what different talents and and pips and tricks and pieces and stuff like that were kind of, you know, given to you from from working in infrastructure?

Speaker 1 | 15:49.089

So chances that I got to take you on a little journey. Right. But in my world, I’m still sub 40 right now for the time being. And I’m in that generation of. You grew up on OS2 Warp and DOS, and you understand the command line and things like that. And to do infrastructure, you have to understand the basics. You need to understand what is the PuTTY session. You need to understand what does command prop do? What is the power of PowerShell itself in a Windows world? What does it mean to be in the shell or bash script of a switch or Mac, right? Understanding the infrastructure on how… interconnected the world is before the internet existed when I used a computer at the first time to what it looks like now think post-COVID world where everything is in the cloud everything is interconnected you have all these buzzwords like IOT and all these devices internet of things where stuff is just you know your nest camera at your house is talking to your thermostat to let you know your home infrastructure taught me just like it did when we were little kids playing with Legos or building blocks or Lincoln Logs or K’nex or any of those other cool nerdy toys that I like to bring up, is there are the pieces that allow you to build something cool, right? The infrastructure allows you to get to something grand or bigger from whatever you are, and it allows you to be connected, whether it be a vendor, a customer, a potential customer, a potential partner or business partner out there, a sales lead. It all starts. with infrastructure. Every single thing you do starts there.

Speaker 0 | 17:30.520

Speaking of infrastructure and Lincoln Logs, I’m looking at where you’re talking to me from, right? And I’ve got this almost Lincoln Log feel to it, right? Talk about paying attention to infrastructure, right? You want to tell the folks here what you’re currently in?

Speaker 1 | 17:54.727

Yeah, I’m in a 24 by 30 building that is about a football field’s length from my home in my backyard in my home office. During COVID and the chaos of having the kids at home and everything, I was like to my wife, I need to get out of the house if I’m going to continue to work and do my job. I can’t be sitting on the sofa and have these headsets on. Like, you know, it’s impossible to think. The dog is barking. The kid is crying. Someone’s asking what’s for lunch. and then there’s also someone doing school work so i’m sitting in this building and and mike has the uh the advantage of being able to see me right now and we have this wood frame up it’s actually pallet board with some uh i’ll take it like a uh a home improvement show type of shiplap ceiling but it’s very modern there’s a mini split out here i’ve got a tv there’s an xbox in here don’t worry it’s definitely a man cave slash garage at the end of the day uh it’s it’s warm and cozy but it’s a place that separates work from life uh and it gives me a place to unwind before i go inside to go back to the kids go back to the family make dinner whatever it is that we have to clean up you know on the inside so it’s it’s one of those buildings that’s uh modern yet that chic like old lincoln log looking building yeah

Speaker 0 | 19:12.314

with a collection of license plates from it looks like almost every state in the union

Speaker 1 | 19:20.899

That’s a good catch too. Yeah, there’s a, I have a great deal of friends from around the places. Most of these are coming from somebody either I knew in the state or had traveled through or something of that sort. Like I said, I’m a pretty avid server, although the dad bod is a very real thing as I go to my third kid, you know, and just, I didn’t travel a whole ton, kind of middle age area, I’ll say middle age to what I am now. I had a child very early on in life, so my oldest is 22 years old, my youngest is 18 months, and I guess my wife being pregnant with her third is a negative month, not born yet. And if we look at that and the places we’ve been and traveled, I always think about that stuff, and licensed plates are a good reminder of some of the places I’ve seen.

Speaker 0 | 20:07.778

Well, congratulations right on the upcoming addition to your family there. In true infrastructure, you know, it is a really nice build out. I think it looks really neat. And it looks structurally sound as well. So I think we’re good. It’s very clean, very organized, very neat. People would love it. It is a very, very cool place and secure place it looks like to work from. So that’s pretty awesome. You can tell that it was done here with somebody with infrastructure in mind. You know, there’s an order to things. There is a, you know, as you build something, build it and make sure that it will last. Make sure that you can add to it later. There’s, I see elements of infrastructure, you know, infrastructure that we have here in a physical sense. But also, you know, you can take those elements kind of and move them over to tech. And I always thought that, you know, infrastructure was such a good name for it because it’s exactly what it is. It’s just, you know, in some cases now more virtual infrastructure. And nonetheless, and that kind of kind of brings me to our, you know, to our little change here is what we’re kind of talking about is there is a there’s been a metamorphosis of physical. I get a server. I put the server in, you know, it’s sitting in on my on premise, you know, either in my office in a data center and a colo. But I can feel it. I can see it and stuff like that. And then it’s become intangible. Right. It’s become this this thing where you’re almost having to dream up the architecture in your mind and or design it on a paper so you can kind of visualize it to to work with it. Tell me a little bit about how that, you know, that metamorphosis happened. It kind of in your viewpoint on it.

Speaker 1 | 22:25.774

I think a lot of that has to do with the way the environment change happens. You know, you’re looking at. whether it be a seasonal change, whether it be a political change, whether it be something that happens within world policy or something like that. When you’re looking from a business perspective, if your business sells X for Y, you know, it’s always going to continue to be the same. But as that business owner, you know, whether they’re a bank or PE firm or something of the sort, whatever it is, as they get money coming in, they can somehow streamline. their organization and that’s where the technology really comes into play and the infrastructure expertise comes into play we as cios and as management and directors we have to look further out than what’s today right we have to look at what does the business need now what’s it need tomorrow what’s it need in the future we have to build the infrastructure to be able to support from that foundation upwards and if you could see us laying down something like a cable on the ground running it across a temporary warehouse to some wi-fi to then all of a sudden we have this mfa process like i said about security or you know multi-factor authentication of some type uh if we take the acronyms away from everything right it’s just planning for what’s next how do we lay the foundation the brickwork today to make sure that we’re looking at the future to make sure that whatever is inside of the business as it grows expands acquires other companies things like that that happen we hire more staff we get more technically competent we learn things as cios every day too our end users do something that we don’t anticipate them doing and we have to make sure our infrastructure is able to expand and contract for those things especially in a post-covered world where things can expand and contract quite quickly no

Speaker 0 | 24:22.923

and um and and even even in that case the ability for that to expand and contract quite easily has really accelerated because of the virtual nature or the intangible nature of stuff and how quickly it is to spin things up and turn things off. Which kind of brings me to my next point, which, you know, with this kind of ability to add on to infrastructure, remove from infrastructure, add apps, remove apps, add workspaces, remove workspaces, and change quite quickly, right? How does that affect the security dynamic? Because, you know, I know a lot of people I speak with

Speaker 1 | 25:09.336

uh just are just struggling to keep up from the security aspect yeah for sure i mean just it’s like in the classroom right uh we we begin with the basics but we plan towards an end and security is the same way security and infrastructure have to go hand in hand with the business we started off you know with a couple of questions asking me about you know some things i would change about rules and security is one of them i think that the policies in place in a lot of businesses are old-fashioned with security policies And I think the businesses don’t realize the infrastructure underneath, you know, you have a legacy software that might be running something that can’t be supported by a modern authentication type, whether it be MFA or something else, right? And the real popular terms today are like passwordless access and stuff like that. If you’re looking at infrastructure and we’re looking at where it’s going to go, we need to tie security into it. When we talk about when even. Let me rephrase that. Even when I talk to my students about this, and I teach an infrastructure class, and I teach a class that is full of web platforms at Rowan, where it’s 75, 150 students in a term, something like that. And I’m building blocks with these guys, and they have prerequisite classes, right? So they come in, and I’m expecting them to understand some things. But transfer students don’t always have the same infrastructure and security mindset, because they come from a different school or different curriculum. So sometimes we have to give those. interjectory like changes so we go in we ask one question we build another we build another and from my perspective infrastructure and security have to be married together but I take security a little bit lighter from an approach that we need to make sure that we’re blocking externally then we need to make sure that we’re blocking things internally and we’re having the right people do the right things with the right access at the right time and we don’t always think of that

Speaker 0 | 27:05.860

perspective when we plan the infrastructure like i said a legacy application could flub that right away yeah i i i love that you said that you know you have to kind of build in the security from the ground up um you know if you’re if you’re adding a new app if you’re adding a new infrastructure that’s where security really needs to come first and and think about that because if security is an afterthought uh you’re you’re always gonna have trouble right um if you go to build um if you go to build an office space and you build a weak structure around the windows, no matter how strong a window you put in, someone’s going to be able to get through it. So it’s a really, really important part of it to start with security first when you’re building your infrastructure. And you had talked earlier about building a strong foundation. That’s part of it. I agree with that. So security is undergoing a lot of different changes right now as well. It’s interesting. I was looking up passwords the other day, password policies in NIST, and looking at their password policy, by the way, which was written back in 2022, the latest Rev4 version for authentication. And I was just sitting here scratching my head going. it’s almost 2025. Are we not able to update policy and standards at a pace that is going to keep up with what’s happening? I mean, if you look at how fast things are going now and how fast things are updating and changing, it gets concerning when passwords standards and, and policies and stuff. And we brought this up on here. Can’t keep up.

Speaker 1 | 29:08.558

Yeah. Again, it’s, it’s one of those things that I think really needs to change. I think if you look at any government type of organization, you’re going to see a lag between a good person and a bad person. I think we’re always out there chasing our tails. Banks are chasing the tails, government’s chasing it, military’s chasing it, right? We’re always looking for a way to be a hundred percent proof, but The long and short of it is the end user training is just as important as the security tool that you select, just as important as the password policy that may exist in an organization. And it needs to be looked at and it needs to be updated, but it needs to be a conversation from a business perspective. If you’re a pizza shop logging into your point of sale system and you’re sharing it with DoorDash, Uber Eats, or any of those other social delivery systems versus… you know, your Fort Knox or the federal government looking to protect everything. There’s only so much money that those smaller businesses have to to protect those assets. So we have to think from a business perspective, like I said, and I’ve repeated it here, that foundation of the business, what is the business do? What’s its appetite for security and budget? And then how do we protect our end users the best while also protecting our intellectual property. Locks are only going to keep the good people out.

Speaker 0 | 30:29.543

Yeah. And you had mentioned the security piece and we’re going to keep harping on it, but you had mentioned something else too and alluded to people having these smaller companies having your data. And let’s just jump real quick from security over to privacy, right? Because it’s not that far of a jump. And you look at the United States, they still don’t have a privacy, a comprehensive privacy thing. I mean, besides California, right, there’s no, you know, that’s not even federal, right? That’s just state. But, you know, there’s no comprehensive privacy. In fact, it affects anybody that has any worldwide businesses and trying to move data left and right because you can’t. you can’t move data effectively over overseas without, you know, trying to, you know, try to work with the privacy regulations over there. And there’s no good way to do that. You know, they try, they try to make these ways to do it, but there’s no framework in place for the US and Europe.

Speaker 1 | 31:52.004

to trade data uh if they tried to do it i think they’re on their third try right but you know it’s uh they keep doing they keep uh they keep kind of failing to come to an agreement on it sounds like you just invented the next business that needs to be created here in software right how do we get gdrp to communicate with california’s new recent past privacy rules that you know i’ll say tongue-in-cheek the people’s republic of new jersey might need one day or you know new york versus florida or wherever else you’re going to be in the us we have neighbors to the north in canada that you know follow a bunch of different french laws and then you have a bunch of them that are going to follow a lot of mainland united states laws and if you go really west you’re going to find ones that are going to follow the the russian you know supported laws in that native land especially towards you know the alaska border of the us when we look at privacy we also think about things like social media today you know we’ve seen facebook we’ve seen instagram meta you know in the news for their privacy and that’s just protecting the everyday rights of you know you and i as private citizens and we’re the ones that are putting our pictures and our information out there like that you know so we’re to blame to start with and then you have the doctors and the things with hipaa and jaco compliances that exists in the healthcare world that you and I alluded to from some of our starting points right in technology and those are privacy laws and rules to protect our personal health information but yet we’ll go on Facebook or some meta platform and say I’m sick today I’m taking the day off right so the same tongue-in-cheek you know mechanics of talking out of both sides of your mouth we’re doing as private citizens that is also being instructed for privacy from the federal government or any other state government and local governments. And I’m sure New York City will have its own policy someday if the feds don’t rule on it. But privacy, just as much as security, is outdated in our country here in the U.S. And it’s up to us to figure out where is it going to go? Are we going to keep telling everybody that we’re sick and our wives are taking care of us on the couch because we have man flu? Or are we going to start tightening that up and not broadcasting things like that out there in the world?

Speaker 0 | 34:12.072

Yeah, you know, it’s a it’s a it’s really interesting when you start to think about how outdated it is. And then you think about how fast things are moving and and how to stay on top of it. You know, not only that, I’m trying to, you know, stay on top of the infrastructure changes, stay on top of the security changes. We’re also trying to, you know, manage our folks. and make sure they are doing the right thing through this very chaotic time period where things are being changed very quickly and new technologies being introduced at a rapid pace. Talk to me a little bit, because you had mentioned earlier on this thing, this bottom-up, not top-down style of management that you… you use. Let’s talk about that real quick and how that can help in that fast-paced infrastructure security world.

Speaker 1 | 35:17.930

Yeah. So recently I changed companies that I worked for. And in that change was also an industry change. I went from… a place where our inventory always came back to a place where our inventory leaves and I never see it again because it’s a consumable item. And not just changing from one industry to another, especially as a C-suite member in technology, I’m looking at things from a bottom-up approach, from management, from infrastructure, from security, from IT, but also from the business perspective. I think it’s our responsibility to learn a company, learn the industry, learn what we do. go into your warehouses, into your kitchens, into the back end and learn from the base scenario of what’s that common denominator that most of your staffing is doing, right? What does your team do? Not your technology team, your business team. Is it mostly salespeople? Is it mostly warehouse? And I’ll give you the, for instance, where I’m at at Julie Silver is it’s almost all warehouse, right? We’re a food distribution company. So I have to learn. from the bottom up what’s it like to select food for the palette for the some of the best restaurants in the world specifically here in the northeast where we’re located in the philadelphia metro how does that guy in the warehouse go from picking and receiving that fresh fruit produce etc to getting it out the door on the truck to the right customer at the right time frame that’s not perishable you got to learn from that approach take the help desk tickets learn from the entry-level warehouse guy and work your way through the business hierarchy, right? Work your way through the work chart and really learn how those jobs function so that when we put in infrastructure and we put in security and we put in these technologies, we know what it’s like to be the end user. And we have a facet for their everyday world that’s not just, oh, click the easy button and get the job done.

Speaker 0 | 37:24.996

You know, kind of a great way to, absolute great way to put that. When do you, when you’re, I’m trying to think of a different word besides professoring, teaching probably. It should be the word that I, that should have came to my head there.

Speaker 1 | 37:42.863

Lecturing,

Speaker 0 | 37:43.323

sure. But professoring, that’s a, I kind of like that word regardless. No, when you’re teaching there, do you… have conversations with your students about management?

Speaker 1 | 38:01.187

I do. One of the approaches I take from a student body perspective, and my classes are kind of unique, I get a student that could be a junior year student, or I could have a graduate level student in any one of the two classes that I usually teach on rotation. And I always talk about a real world presence to the technology because there’s what the book says to do and then there’s what the end user does which might be completely different and how do we approach those scenarios if you don’t understand what it is that you’re selling whether it be a service a square box you’re not going to really understand how the end user is coming up with that work around to whatever problem they might have had on the screen or if they can’t print or something of that sort so i always talk to the students about generally listening without the intent to respond and really encourage them from a mentorship standpoint, take the internship to learn a couple different companies. Don’t just take one, take three or four. Look at those job descriptions that are out there today that are mostly written by AI and someone in human resources that doesn’t necessarily understand what the hiring manager’s actually looking for because they’re not the hiring manager and they’re not a technology person to begin with. So they’re looking at a tech stack. that might be Microsoft-based, might be Oracle-based, and they’re intermixing the acronyms that you and I take for granted to know that those students don’t really understand. And yet, even when we teach them, they don’t understand from a lecture standpoint to what it actually is in the real world of technology. How do you use it in everyday basis?

Speaker 0 | 39:43.299

As you were talking about that, I was thinking about Lincoln Logs again. And I was thinking about… uh, what you were saying. And then I was just thinking it, you know, a good kind of visual representation of the way that it is right now would be like taking linking Lincoln logs and, uh, and putting leg Legos in them and then connecting them with those, uh, other types of blocks that I can never remember the name of. And right. And then, you know, taking some bubble gum and sticking that in and then just having like, uh, it straws. Right? Like that is like what infrastructure is at the moment and trying to secure that. is just remarkable, right? I mean, that’s the tall order that we’re asking. And we have new folks coming in all the time, entering this world. They’ve been taught, you know, one way, which you have to, you have to teach people, right? And you have to teach them on paper what they should follow, right? But- when you get them into the real world and they start seeing the Legos connected to the Lincoln logs and putting all that together and they’re going, whoa, I haven’t seen this before. They have to fall back on something and they have to fall back on their principles and what they were taught and try to apply them as best they possibly can in this scenario. And I think that’s kind of goes back to the password thing that you were talking about as well, which was, you know, hey, you know, I understand the password policy, right? But We’re trying to apply this password policy to, you know, some things that just may not even been around when that password may have been around before that password policy was even ever thought of. Right. Before this new authentication way of life is going to place before this new privacy reg is going to go into place and trying to fit all that into this, these older and will still be running because the. because people don’t have endless money. They’re going to run things until they can’t anymore. And unfortunately, even at the risk of their company, they will do that.

Speaker 1 | 42:02.239

I can’t take credit for the quote, but I went to a vocational high school growing up and the computer teacher that I had at the time, she used to always say, technology is kind of like comparing you to welding. metal versus welding plastic? Can you actually do it without putting a hole in it? When you take the amount of pace that modern technology happens, how do you put them together with the cybersecurity budget of bubblegum like you’re talking about? And then we look at a business that exists today, like the FAA and flying people around the world and technology that’s literally from the 60s, that is still running on a bulletproof AS400 or Linux backend. right?

Speaker 0 | 42:48.402

I’ve dealt with AS400s. That’s going back. That’s going back. Yeah, I dealt with them.

Speaker 1 | 42:56.964

And try to weld plastic to those things. How are you going to do it? How do you get the Lego to fit the Kinect block to fit that erector set, which I think is the block metal word that we were talking about earlier, to the Lincoln lock? How do you get it all to work when you’re taking that modern technology of what we look at today as Legos? and try to fit it into that wood archaic technology debts that we’re all guilty of having out there in those legacy components and systems yeah it it’s a great point and it’s and that’s that i think perfectly describes the challenge uh

Speaker 0 | 43:31.783

of where people are at you know and um and you start to look and you go okay you know from a security standpoint we go okay well let’s get the critical data uh let’s identify that data let’s make sure that that’s put somewhere safe, but sometimes you don’t even have that choice. Sometimes that critical data could still be on the older equipment that you mentioned, right? You know, who knows at this point? There’s probably still stuff sitting on deck alphas as out at other spots too, right? So, I mean, that could be there, you know, you never know. And probably behind a a 56k modem right so i mean in health care that could be a normal thing especially government government health care right because government uh uh doesn’t you know even though people say it doesn’t spend a lot of money on the infrastructure of its uh of stuff it uses to connect with other people so it you will find that there are still fax machines and uh and um modems and people connect to them and transfer stuff like you would when you were using a BBS back in the day. And they transfer plain text text files back and forth, right?

Speaker 1 | 44:58.656

The best systems today still have those legacy console connectors to them. I mean, technology debt exists. We acknowledge it as CIOs. We acknowledge it as business owners. We look at… Again, how do you weld that plastic? What do you use? How do you mend it? You know, is it rubber? What are you going to do with it? And we look at those things and we take some of that stuff for granted. you know imagine that guy the first time they went in a space shuttle and looking at how do you code hexadecimal uh you know there’s that great movie that’s out there that’s the martian that they actually talk about it and no one understands what hexadecimal is the general audience just understands the camera’s just spinning but the nerd and you and i and the rest of the people probably listening here are like wow i totally get that reference right um we just look at those things and we we take it for granted and we take the security of that you know 28-baud or 14-baud modem that the fax machines use and the on or off, the zeros or ones. And we take it for granted of what those people in those times did. And they laid that foundational groundwork from infrastructure to security to power poles, Einstein. Think about it. It’s all here for us based on somebody else’s technology innovation from a previous time frame.

Speaker 0 | 46:13.759

I think it’s a perfect segue to go into my next segment, which is the IT crystal ball. And in the IT crystal ball, what we do is we think of, you know, what is the next five years look like in IT? And and we’ve talked about a lot here. We’ve talked about all all the different older generation stuff that still lurking today and and hasn’t gone away. And it may not completely, you know, it may still lurk out there for quite a while. We talked about security that is kind of still trying to catch up. We talked about things that are just the pace of technology just speeding past and all this stuff kind of trying to catch up and keep up with it. Where do we, you know, what do we see in here in the next five years?

Speaker 1 | 47:20.458

yeah i mean i get this question a lot um in the classroom from my kid what’s the next iphone gonna look like you know to what what’s the the world of ai doing for us right um i think that’s the hot topic we’re gonna hear a lot of people talk about artificial intelligence large language modeling we’re gonna hear about the internet of things the cloud we’ve heard cryptocurrency you know we’ve heard these great organizations out there in different countries that are going to have you know federalized or you know a whole country global type of currency i think if we look back through movie trivia whether it be star trek or star wars or take any stereotypical geek movie genre you see the future you saw inspector gadget open up things from a phone you saw a spy with a shoe that had a telephone in it or some type of laser beam and James Bond, right? We see all these things, and all of a sudden, now you have an Apple Watch, just like the Jetsons did when we were kids, and now you can talk to somebody and video chat on there.

Speaker 0 | 48:28.100

I still want my food replicator from Star Trek. That’s what I want. And the holodeck, too. We’re getting closer to that.

Speaker 1 | 48:34.905

Definitely. I think you’re going to start to see more HCI, right? More human-computer interaction. These are things that… I’m preparing us to see augmented reality as one piece, but you have people who are still sick of technology that hasn’t been able to be compounded yet, like it was with the vaccine and mRNA things that existed before COVID, but we put a lot of time and money and energy into solving things like that. I think we’re going to see more of this computer-human interaction, whether it be a Musk-based company like Neuralink. or we see a deeper impact from a healthcare standpoint at getting people healthier or giving them better experiences, whether it be voice recognition or gesture controls, which we see a little bit of today. We see a little bit of that example in Apple’s new, you know, vision pros. We see it in the Apple Watch and Samsung with the gesture controls and things like that. But I think we’re going to see more of that in the future. And we’re going to see that guided with policies like privacy, with infrastructure pieces like the big ISPs out there laying gigabit foundations to people’s homes. We’re going to see other countries that have cell phone usages like Africa and other cultures of the world that are going to show us here in the U.S. things that we need to solve for. How do we clean water faster? How do we get food, to your point, to be replicated to a recipe? And. How do we get that stuff to someone where the raw material can physically be beamed or recreated from a virtual space to move it? I think you’re going to see more of that. I hope to see it in our lifetime, but at least in our kids’lifetime, see things from a healthcare perspective and a human-computer interaction space that betters the world for something more than give an amputee a leg. Not saying, and not to diminish that, but give someone who doesn’t have the ability to even see. the ability to see someone who can’t taste smell or touch the ability to do those things how can we use technology to better the world’s interaction with technology itself and with other human beings and with coven we saw the world slow down and fight a problem unanimously and then speed ourselves back up in a post-covered world here where you and i are facing an everyday thing that our businesses want better bottom lines better dollars you know list goes on and on and on how can we crease ebita in our p l statements what can we do as technology leadership to help that is human computer interaction how do you give that something like ai something like iot something like llm something like that but where it’s going to be productivity and an end user experience that is more accessible and more intuitive to anybody else and can help someone from a physical virtual presence so

Speaker 0 | 51:40.336

All great points there and all and all things that I do expect to pick up. You also because you teach or as I earlier said it, professor, you’re a professor. Because you teach, you have another perspective that I want to hear from here from as well, which is you have students that are going to be entering. in some cases, the workforce, or some cases, probably reentering the workforce in tech. And they come with unique and new perspectives that we don’t have yet, we have yet to see, right? Because they haven’t made their impact. So what are you seeing? And what do you expect? Because you talk to these folks, you know, regularly, right? What do you see them bringing in the next five years to tech, to the tech world, right? That will help with some of these issues.

Speaker 1 | 52:52.017

Well, as you call it, professoring, as I like to call it, lecturing in some cases. That’s even better.

Speaker 0 | 52:58.100

That’s a good one. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 52:58.960

there you go. I try to treat the classroom like a real-world vision, right? I teach from a business perspective often. in a students of an infrastructure assist admin class i teach them from choose a hobby choose something that you love to do turn it into a business and now let’s apply technology to it there’s always someone who’s unique in a classroom not that every individual student isn’t unique themselves but there’s always that business idea right and they always come up with the craziest things last semester i heard someone was like i want to create the tesla of boats And then lo and behold, you know, there’s these jet skis and there’s these electric things out there. I always see the students thinking of this process outside the box. But what’s really cool is when we take the tools that are available today, like AI, like a chat GPT, and we teach with it instead of against it. We open a world from a professoring standpoint. Mike, I’ll use your term there, right? To acknowledge the students’ability to get something done quicker because they had access. to information so much sooner and so much broader than we did when we were younger and i’ll speak for myself right as a sub 40 but almost 40 year old man i saw a library system that didn’t have a computer i got to see and i’m sure out there there’s still someone still that has an unknown recorded album from elvis or tupac on a vinyl that we haven’t heard yet that seems to always come up right or another Michael Jackson fan that’s a new song or a collaboration that we don’t know happened. But yet you and I with children can record in 4K in the highest definition possible their first steps. But yet that child who’s being recorded now today in 2024, their life hasn’t even seen a tablet yet, let alone interacted with one. Yet my 18 month old can literally open my phone, unlock it and notice how to browse with his finger around in the different apps. And it’s so intuitive like that, that if you think about it from the student body perspective, they’re going to be able to see information so much quicker. They’re going to recognize it so much faster. And then we add AI. And the large language modeling systems on top of all that, they’re going to change the world at a pace that you and I have never even thought of yet. Wow.

Speaker 0 | 55:22.447

Wow. Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was an absolute pleasure and a great conversation here. Nerds, I’m Michael Moore. hosting this podcast for Dissecting Popularity Nerds. I’ve been here with Stephen Singer, CIO at Julius Silbert and adjunct professor of computer science for Rowan University and firefighter and most importantly, dad. And congratulations again on the upcoming addition to your family, Stephen.

Speaker 1 | 56:01.516

Thank you very much for having me today. I appreciate the time.

Speaker 0 | 56:04.317

Yep.