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327- Thomas Dewar on Mistake-Proofing IT and Understanding Business Needs

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Dissecting Popular IT Nerds
Dissecting Popular IT Nerds
327- Thomas Dewar on Mistake-Proofing IT and Understanding Business Needs
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Thomas Dewar

Thomas Dewar serves as the CIO at Acupath Laboratories. With a background in psychology and self-taught programming skills, Thomas brings a unique perspective to IT leadership. His career spans various industries, including child protective services, healthcare, and software development. Thomas’s approach emphasizes understanding business needs, user experience, and continuous improvement in IT operations.

Thomas Dewar on Mistake-Proofing IT and Understanding Business Needs

How can IT leaders create more reliable systems and align technology with business needs? In this episode, Thomas Dewar, CIO at Acupath Laboratories, shares insights on applying the concept of poka-yoke (mistake-proofing) to IT, understanding business processes, and creating user-friendly solutions. Thomas discusses his journey from psychology major to IT leader and offers practical advice for improving IT operations and communication with business stakeholders.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by guests on this podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of their employers, affiliates, organizations, or any other entities. The content provided is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. The podcast hosts and producers are not responsible for any actions taken based on the discussions in the episodes. We encourage listeners to consult with a professional or conduct their own research before making any decisions based on the content of this podcast

Thomas Dewar on Mistake-Proofing IT and Understanding Business Needs

3 Key Takeaways

  • Applying poka-yoke principles can help prevent user errors and improve system reliability
  • Understanding business processes and user needs is crucial for effective IT solutions
  • Continuous improvement and proactive problem-solving are key pillars of IT leadership

Episode Show Notes

01:39 – Introduction to poka-yoke and its application in IT

08:12 – Tom’s key principles for IT management

13:06 – Tom’s background in psychology and early IT experiences

22:45 – Advice for understanding business needs and user perspectives

27:38 – Example of designing user-friendly case management system

32:40 – Discussion of LanSweeper for IT asset management

35:43 – IT leadership challenges and the importance of staying vigilant

Transcript

tom dewar2

Transcript

Speaker1

[0:06]All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. We’re changing our logo, by the way. We have changed our logo, if anyone hasn’t noticed it yet, to DPIT with a pair of glasses underneath. So, I don’t know, someone said dip it sound cool. But anyways, Dissecting popular it nerds we have mr thomas doer on the show tom and did i pronounce i know it’s doer but i don’t know if that’s it sounds like doer but maybe it’s just my my weird east coast accent or something but welcome to the show very excited to have you on and the you know chief cio at Acupath Laboratories. Very top secret, so we’re not going to talk about that. But what we are going to talk about is a very interesting concept that’s, Quite. Could be quite game changing from a methodology standpoint or a methodology or a way of thinking about something or a way of tacking a problem, and that is the concept of hokey oak. I’m going to let you take it from there and describe this this this concept first off. And let’s start with that.

Speaker0

[1:32]Sure. Hi, Phil, and thank you for having me. And you did pronounce it correctly. It is do or like the scotch.

Speaker1

[1:38]Thank you, sir.

Speaker0

[1:39]There you go. So yeah, Pokey Oak. So it’s basically mistake-proofing, and it’s what you see in car manufacturers do all the Thank you, sir. The car wrong, and they’re trying to correct it and make sure that you don’t do it again. So sort of a good example is that if you notice a lot of cars now, you are not able to lock the car doors with the engine running. And the reason for that is because people used to leave the engine running and keep the car. our door is locked. So now they won’t let you lock the doors. So they’re always doing stuff like that. Uh, other examples are, you know, um, you could get a ticket if you have two, um, taillights out. So it used to be that you only had two taillights. And if one of them was out, you’d get a ticket. Now they have multiple taillights so that this way, you know, they added a third one up on top. Sometimes they add many of them. It’s a whole array of lights, but this way it’s very hard for you to get a ticket because you’re always going to have more than two. So they’re always looking for things like that. And it’s a way of making sure that users don’t make mistakes, which I always thought was a fascinating idea.

Speaker1

[2:45]And in IT, it applies beautifully because people make mistakes all the time. It’s the idea of a preemptive strike, so to speak, before your end users do something that they shouldn’t do, like maybe click on an email or something like that. So it applies a lot to IT. And I was thinking from some other practical examples of Pokey Oak in life. For example, you can’t open up the washing machine and it still runs because there’s that little Pokey thing, Pokey Oak, that pokes a little hole in the washing machine that makes it, the agitation cycle shut off so that, I don’t know, your kids don’t, I don’t know, mangle their arm or do something stupid or jump in the washing machine while it’s still running. And yet, it’s, us as humans users of devices and machines of course we figure out that you can stick your pinky in there and keep the machine running um for whatever reason you might want to have that lid open with the machine running because i forgot to put the soap in or whatever it is um but let’s think just just the concept of pokio to to begin with where can we apply that in it in ways that have been very, I don’t know, successful game-changing for you?

Speaker0

[4:04]So yeah, so I constantly look at the tickets that I’m getting to see what it is that users are doing, trying to figure out things that I can do differently to make sure that I mistake-proof my environment. So, you know, one example is I discovered that for some reason Dell laptops, They had two different voltages, and I found this out because one of my users at one of the places I worked plugged in a laptop charger and accidentally started a fire because they plugged in the wrong laptop charger. And weird as it is, there are two different models of laptop that Dell had that used the same exact adapter connector, but they had two different, completely different voltages. So if you plugged it into the wrong one, it would cause a problem. So, you know, I realized that was a really bad design on their part. But, you know, certainly it’s a bad design on my part to have these two users sitting next to each other with two different plugs that, you know, could be interchangeable between their devices and allow that to happen. So one of the things that I did is I sort of standardized and made sure that everybody had the same exact laptops and the same exact charges so that they could interchange them without causing problems.

Speaker1

[5:22]And then, of course, well, yeah, because probably both chargers said Dell on them and they both had either a round or I would assume round plug in piece. So why not? You know what? How does this apply elsewhere? It applies everywhere. Obviously, security, it’s going to apply big time.

Speaker0

[5:44]Oh, yeah, for sure. Security and other places. I use it right now. I’m doing a lot of software development where I am now. And in software development, you know, we’re constantly looking at like things like field validation to try and make sure people can’t put in the wrong values in the field.

Speaker1

[6:00]Oh, please, please tell me how. How could that happen?

Speaker0

[6:05]Happen it just people accidentally put the wrong thing so for example you know if you have a birth date you know um it shouldn’t be you know a date in the future so you make sure you put in field validation to say you know hey don’t put anything in in the future stuff like that um.

Speaker1

[6:19]Because that could really i mean that’s a think of y2k there

Speaker0

[6:23]You go remember.

Speaker1

[6:24]That yeah i’m gonna date some people. Pokey Oak White. Y2K was a Pokey Oak gone wild. Pokey Oak gone wild. Y2K. Let’s advertise all kinds of fear and things. We got to prepare. We got to prepare because the whole world’s going to blow up. No meltdown in the numbers and the banking system and all of that. I hate when you can’t enter something else into a field value that I need to enter in that’s not a number or something like that. I need to type here. I don’t want to put a number in. I need to type. I’m And I really needed to type something in that was not a number. So where does Pokio go wrong? Does it go wrong?

Speaker0

[7:06]Oh, it does. Yeah, sure. I mean, we’ve discovered that sometimes we’ve locked things down too much. And that, you know, sometimes we’ll lock down a field and we’ll not allow a character when it actually needs to be a character. You know, just as an example, we get electronic orders, and they were always numbers to some extent. And then all of a sudden, people started putting, you know, alpha characters in there. And so we had to change our field validation a little bit. It. You know, so you do have to modify it, you know, but is it one of the things that goes along with Pokey Oak is that I kind of have some golden rules that I use in my IT environment. And one of them is to constantly look at, you know, things that we’re doing and improve them as well, you know, sort of continual constant quality improvement. And so that’s also another piece of it is, you know, revisiting things and trying to see how we can make them better and fixing our Our Pokey Oak is one example of that.

Speaker1

[8:03]So what are these other pillars of your organization or methodology? I need to know. Sure.

Speaker0

[8:12]So one is I try and have equipment take care of itself whenever possible. So whenever it’s possible in an environment, and I did this in one particular place that I was at, Lutheran Social Services, where I was trying to, we had a very small staff, and we needed to get a lot done, and we had a lot of locations and users. So we set things up so that we had new machines that had warranties on them and replacement warranties so that this way, if something went wrong, they could fix it. I tried to create things so that they were as simple as possible. So that’s another thing is simplicity. Whenever whenever possible, you simplify things. things, also being able to manage things remotely so that this way you can fix them as quickly as possible from a remote situation.

Speaker0

[9:06]Another thing is to try and set things up. It depends upon the environment, but in a lot of environments, I’ve had to set things up where people are able to work from anywhere because you never know where they’re going to have to work. In many of my environments we’ve had a lot of users that that had to work remotely and sure enough i’m setting things up that way certainly helped me for covid um because i had set things up that way ahead of time and then when we did have to work remotely it worked out perfectly um i try and make as much as possible i don’t want my network infrastructure tied to real estate because you never know when they’re going to try and make you move that server room and that’s not an easy thing to do, I try to make things cloud-based whenever possible and also try and make them so that we don’t have that server room infrastructure like we used to have anymore where it’s just stuck in one place and it’s hard to move. So I try and avoid that wherever I can. Yeah. Uh like i said standardized things um spend smarter and try and invest to save long term uh another one is to do it right the first time.

Speaker1

[10:13]I would love to spend um oh gosh do it right the first time you’re like you’re making me think of my own problems uh okay keep going keep going so So spend smarter for the long run. That’s great. And do it right the first time. I mean, we could probably do a couple shows. We could do shows on just that. But let’s just break those. Keep going. Keep going. Go. You’ve got a list here. I can tell.

Speaker0

[10:43]Yeah. So like I said, create an environment using Pokey Yoke or mistake proofing. Create an environment of constant improvement and self-examination. Be proactive and not reactive.

Speaker1

[10:57]Yeah.

Speaker0

[10:59]When be customer or patient focused and work smarter and not harder.

Speaker1

[11:07]Oh, all of these are beautiful things. If they could just, if we could just do all of these things and then in a very, the truth, right? What’s the truth? The truth is to do a good job. It’s hard. There is no, there is no shortcuts. Oh, there’s shortcuts, I guess, but it was, uh, it took a long time getting there or it took a long time or it wasn’t easy to figure out the shortcuts to begin with or whatever it was, you know, because otherwise everyone would, I don’t know, would be doing it, I guess. Is there, is there such a thing as a shortcut?

Speaker0

[11:43]Well, that’s kind of the problem with do it right the first time, right? I mean, sometimes a shortcut is good, but another times if a shortcut is just, oh yeah, let’s just do it this way for now. And we’ll worry about the rest of it later. that usually backfires.

Speaker1

[11:58]What about the whole good is done is better than perfection? That concept.

Speaker0

[12:08]That’s true.

Speaker1

[12:09]Does that apply to IT?

Speaker0

[12:11]Oh, sure. Yeah.

Speaker1

[12:12]Sometimes you spend so much time over-analyzation by parallelization or parallelization by over-analyzation that something never gets done and then the whole face of technology is changed by then.

Speaker0

[12:23]Mm hmm. Yeah, no, that’s possible. That’s possible. I’ve seen I’ve actually seen developers that, you know, were never, ever happy with their work and would continuously keep trying to fix it and make it better and make it better and make it better and then would never get to where they needed to be because they were just constantly, you know, there was always that one little thing that they needed to get done. So, yeah, it’s possible for sure.

Speaker1

[12:46]You have an interesting career path you you’re a psychology graduate mm-hmm which I don’t know. Why don’t there’s a story there? There’s got to be a story there.

Speaker0

[13:06]Oh, yeah. So I actually I started with computers before psychology. I actually had a computer in my house just when I first started high school. My dad was a computer geek and he had the idea that, you know, a good excuse for him getting a computer in the house was to use that. I was going to high school. So he got a computer for us.

Speaker0

[13:26]And so I had a computer in the house then and I taught myself how to program. And I got really good at it. Uh, and then I thought about going, you know, taking computers in college. And when I, um, got to college, um, two things happened. One is I, I met the, um, head of the computer science department. Cause a friend of mine knew him because his brother was in there. And, um, he introduced him to me and told him that I had a computer at home. And the guy looked at me and he said, Oh, he said, uh, a home computer. He said, those things are just a fad. And I said, what? And he said, those things are just a fad. He said, you know, that, that, that’ll go away. No, no, that’s never going to work out. So I said, what do you mean? And he said, um, you know, everybody’s going to need to connect to the, you know, to the network that that’s all that’s important. So, you know, having, having those devices is just, you know, it’s just a fad. So I said, well, you know, would it be great to have something that does both? I said, you know, I can connect to your network using a terminal emulator, the same way that your students connect to terminals that cost almost the same thing as my computer, but I can also play games and do personal finance and all kinds of things that I can do locally on the computer because it works as a computer as well. And, um.

Speaker0

[14:40]He just didn’t seem to think that made sense to him for some reason. And so I realized quite quickly that, you know, this probably wasn’t a good move for me. And I decided that, you know, I would pursue something else in terms of a college degree. I mean, you know, at the time, computer science wasn’t really as defined as it is now.

Speaker0

[15:03]So it really, you know, so it was it was early days. You know, I mean, this this was back when like the Mac first was coming, you know, the Apple two was actually first coming out and stuff like that. And Microsoft was just starting. So it was very early days in the computer world. And so computer science degrees weren’t very useful at the time, as far as I could tell, unless you were going to do something like, you know, be an engineer and build chips or, you know, things like that. Um, otherwise they were teaching languages that, you know, um, I thought, you know, we’re probably not going to last long-term, um, things like COBOL and stuff like that, which, you know, it’s useful to have, but, you know, nobody’s really using it now. Um, so, um, I, I do know one person that graduated as a computer science major in that year that, that I was a friends with, and he’s now a Toyota salesman. So, uh, I guess that speaks to, to the situation. So yeah so i was so i got a computer science degree but then um all of the jobs that i’ve ever had sort of like i sort.

Speaker1

[16:05]Of or psychology degree you got a psychology degree not a computer science degree

Speaker0

[16:09]That’s yes sorry yes i got a psychology degree um but um all the jobs that i’ve had i’ve sort of gravitated towards it in one way or another just because it’s what i know knowing what I’m good at. So I’ve sort of tried to use both, um, whenever possible. And, um, One of the jobs I got with the computer science degree was I worked for the city of New York in child protective services. And when I was there, they realized I had computer skills, and they asked me to do some things. And I ended up programming two things. One was their very first personnel database in D-Base. And then the other thing I ended up programming was their very first statistical analysis stuff in Lotus Macro language.

Speaker0

[16:56]Um, they were doing all their statistics on paper and they wanted me to do the final, um, statistics for the office. And I figured out a way to get them to just put them on floppy disks and have me collect the floppy disks. And then I could put them all into the computer and have it suck all the data in and produce a report and make it a lot easier. Um, and then I was also able to create graphs and charts, which they couldn’t do with the typewriter that they were using to create their reports. Um, it was interesting. thing, the very first time that they had a meeting after I did that very first report, the meetings were normally about 45 minutes long, and this one was about two hours. And when my boss came out of the meeting, he looked at me and he said, it’s all your fault. And I said, what’s all my fault? And he said, the fact that this darn meeting was so long. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, he says, for the very first time ever, people actually understood the data and knew what the heck they were looking at because of the graphs and charts you made. So they started to ask questions about the data that they’d never asked before. And that’s why the meeting ran for so darn long. He said, so it was a good thing because we finally understood it. He said, but it was just fascinating that, you know, it ended up making the meeting last so long just because for the very first time we knew what we were talking about when we were looking at this information, we wanted to know how come you had so many cases and how come you close cases faster and how come I got more cases than you got. And, They started having insightful questions about all that stuff.

Speaker0

[18:18]And it was funny because I left there and got another job. And about 10 years later, I got this phone call. And they said, you know, is this Tom Dewar? And I said, yeah. And they said, is this a Tom Dewar that used to work at the Prince office? And I said, yeah. And they said, I got a question. They said, what is this weird statistic thing they’re doing? And I said, what are you talking about? out. And it turns out that they were trying to replace the system they had there with this new statistic system that they had developed and that the central office was putting in to organize it. All the different offices were using the same thing. And the office was pushing back and saying they liked what they were already using and didn’t want to use something new because they liked what they already had and they thought did what they needed. And it turned out that what they had was this stupid thing I had programmed 10 years before and couldn’t possibly believe they were still use it.

Speaker1

[19:07]I have so many questions one as a psychology major who fell didn’t fall into it but it’s interesting how many people get into it it’s because they naturally kind of did something but you mentioned all these pillars and all these things that i think a lot of people would find very difficult to do um you know pokio you know kaizen let’s just throw a bunch of japanese terms out there in business right but you mentioned all these pillars and these things and then you also mentioned uh really a silo that you created so people were and we want to keep the old antiquated silo that that tom doer created years ago and we don’t want to migrate to this other thing ironic very ironic there’s some deep thoughts that could probably go into that well

Speaker0

[20:04]The interesting thing is their their reasoning was because it did some stuff that the new system didn’t do.

Speaker1

[20:09]Of course that’s why why do we have old silos to begin with why do we have a an as400 running some i don’t know erp software because it does something that there’s no there’s no hole to fill because we’re not gonna i don’t know take whatever new erp thing that was built for everybody and move a bunch of uh i don’t know things that we were talking about earlier on like you know like uh you know um you know just different form fields and matching and kind of making it you know duct taping it together to do what the i don’t know the old homegrown thing that tom built who we don’t know his name is but we got to call around and find him you know so you do all there’s this idea of imposter syndrome and i’ve come to terms with the fact that we’re all imposters to some degree yet some of us do some things kind of very naturally

Speaker1

[21:18]And what makes what makes a good it leader you had all these different points but what allowed you to figure this out? What way of being, what, I don’t know, psychological, this is like a psychological deep question. Is there anything that helps you? At what point were you bad and then you changed something or is there some piece of something that we can give to someone? And we’re always saying, you gotta be curious in IT. Like you gotta be curious, you gotta always be learning. Okay, we get that. Yes, you always gotta be learning. You always gotta be curious. maybe your teacher in college that said the home computer was never going to be anything i don’t know maybe he wasn’t curious or always improving i don’t know what is it is there something that we can give to people to help them see their it environment differently to make them more How can they make change quicker, better, faster with less problems and improve faster without being overburdened and overloaded like so many people? Mid-market it leaders vps of it cios and ctos are so many are overburdened with so many things and such a huge workload what can what can we do to make them successful

Speaker0

[22:45]Um i think two things stand out right away um one is understanding the business and like understanding it you know um as best as you possibly can you know at a level where you can speak the same language as your peers in the company. I’ve seen a lot of IT people that really don’t embrace and understand the business well, and it ends up having them create solutions that don’t work well for the business just because they don’t understand the business well enough to know what it really needs. So that’s one thing. And then probably a similar thing is trying to look at things through the eyes of your users. It gets back to the whole Pokey Oak thing. You know, I mean, if you can sort of understand what it is your users are trying to accomplish and what their job is, and if it’s at all possible, even try and do their job. You know, like one of the things that I do when I do software development is I’ll try and do tasks that the users do as a user and try and see, you know, like what that’s what that experience is like. And a lot of times I’ll see that the things that we design may make sense to us, but in the real world, when a user tries to use it, man, is that a pain in the neck. And it doesn’t quite help them at all. The last thing you want to do is create a system that makes it harder to do your job instead of easier to do your job. So, you know.

Speaker1

[24:12]What do you say to the IT teams out there that are afraid of MSPs coming in and taking over their jobs or AI taking over their jobs or the future taking over their jobs? Jobs, there’s something wrong there. There’s a mindset that’s wrong. They’re not understanding the business or they’re not seeing, in my case right there, that would be a leadership piece where you’re not teaching your team like, hey, look, we support the business. If there is actually an MSP or a product out there that could replace you, you should be suggesting that. If it really does exist and you should be backfilling the next piece that needs to be taken care of, uh, for that. Cause it’s just in inevitable. It’s inevitable that you will be replaced if that is the case. Um, so anyways, understanding the business, how do you understand the business though? Are you saying, what do we do? How do we make money from the, from a very, What I was thinking from my standpoint is asking the question, how does this company make money?

Speaker0

[25:27]Yeah. But also, you know, understanding some of the intricacies of business, I mean, especially when it relates to I.T. And, you know, what it is, what it what what the company means for the customers, what it is, you know, that that.

Speaker0

[25:40]So, for example, you know, when I worked for hospitals, you know, I mean, we had to build this ICU and we had to do it in a hurry because we had patients that were building up, you know. So I tried to explain to my staff, hey, understand that the reason we have to get this thing done so quickly is because we’ve got COVID patients who are sitting out in the hallways because there just isn’t enough room in the ICU we have currently. So we’ve got to expand this thing so that that doesn’t happen. And if that was your family that was out there in the hallway, you wouldn’t want them there. You’d want them in a more stable environment. So, you know, understand that that’s why we’re working hard to get this accomplished is for that reason, you know, and to sort of, you know, humanize it and to understand, you know, like what what the business is in terms of what what what do you get out of it, you know, and I mean, that’s also the other thing is the more people understand the value of what we do to the end users and how that helps to, you know, provide service to customers and things like that, you know, kind of makes you feel better about what you do. You know, I mean, if I know that I’m working in a health care environment and that what I do is ultimately making the lives of patients better, then that makes me feel better about what I do.

Speaker1

[26:58]The big why.

Speaker0

[27:00]Yep.

Speaker1

[27:01]The big why. You’ve got to be explaining the big why. And. What we’re doing and how we’re doing it. OK, so they’ve got the big why. The. What else behind the business? So an IT guy that understands the business and understands is going to have a seat at the executive round table. Was there ever something that you learned or a turning point for you that, or something that you did that gave you an aha moment?

Speaker0

[27:38]Well, one of the things that was interesting is that when I when I one of the very first big software development projects I worked on was I worked for an organization where they had their own in-house case management system.

Speaker0

[27:54]And I used to work one of the jobs I had gotten because I was a psychology major was as a caseworker. And so because I was a caseworker, I was actually doing that kind of work. And so when I was doing this case management system, when I ended up becoming CIO and being over development of this system, I realized that the people who developed it really didn’t understand what it was to be a caseworker. And because I did understand that and because I understood what caseworkers needed because I’d done the job, you know, it made me look at it differently. So, for example, one of the big things I realized was that, you know, when you’re when you’re in a position like that, everybody wants everything yesterday. So because of that, it makes it really hard for you to prioritize because when everything needs to be done yesterday, you have no idea what to do today. You know, so I ended up designing this menu dashboard system that actually helped them to prioritize their work and they loved it. And it really helped them to be more productive. And it was because I really saw the job from their eyes and really, you know, had been through it and done it, you know. And so I carry that forward in just about every IT project I do where I try and sort of like walk in their shoes somehow, some way, to understand it enough that I can make sure that what it is I’m doing in IT is actually making things better and not worse.

Speaker1

[29:21]Can you describe that menu system a little bit and how other people could implement it?

Speaker0

[29:27]Yeah, sure. So for example, the system initially, you would just have to go in and search for a person and stuff like that. And so I said, you know, that’s crazy, you know, what it should do, because keep in mind, this was back in 2000. So, you know, things were kind of primitive back then. So I said, you know, the system should know what cases you have, and should show you just your caseload as soon as you log in. So that was the first thing I started with was this list of cases. But then I thought, well, what if we could sort it, you know? And so what if we could sort it by the fact that you’ve got to do notes on that case every, you know, you’ve got to do two notes, two visits on that case every 30 days, right? Right. So what if we also showed the last visitation date and we allowed you to sort it by that so you could see which ones were late and which ones were new. But then we could also color code it so that if you’ve got to make two visits within 30 days, that means roughly you need to make a visit within 15 days. So if you haven’t made a visit in the last 15 days, that means you’re late. So I make that red. So I show that, you know, there’s a problem there. So that date is read. And so then you also have to document your visit. So it’s not just a question of you’ve been there, but you also write about it. So that also has to be done within a certain amount of time from a visit. So I also put the date of the documentation.

Speaker0

[30:47]And then the other thing I did was I made it so that, you know, it’s not just you seeing this information, but you’re actually able to create action on it. So you look, you sort it by the last progress note written, and then you click on it and you hit edit progress. You know, you get a little menu that pops up. And one of the things it says is enter progress note. And now I click on that. Now I’m right in there doing a progress note on that case. Space so it just makes it really easy for me to be able to do that documentation because i want to try and make it as fast as possible for them to do it but also to understand what it is they need to do and when they need to do it boom.

Speaker1

[31:23]Done how do you do that for your own life as an it leader with all of the Application licensing coming up for renewal. And where are we at on the ERP migration and the testing and the beta group? And where are we at with, I don’t know, any number of thousands of things, increasing KPIs and blah, blah, blah. Blah and where are we at with uh employee reviews and help desk guys and where are we at with training and and uh end user security awareness and i don’t know the sock to um audit coming up like how do you do it well

Speaker0

[32:12]If you were lucky enough to be in an environment that has project managers which i have been in the past that they help with that greatly unfortunately you’re not always that lucky. And so like, for example, right now I’m in a position where I don’t have project managers, so I have to be the project manager as well as everything else. Um, so it’s tricky, you know, I mean, you just kind of have to keep track of things. Um, I find that there are some systems that, um, sort of help do that.

Speaker1

[32:38]Um, what do you like?

Speaker0

[32:40]Um, I, one system I like a lot is something called land sweeper. And so, um, land sweeper, um, I always like documentation that creates itself you know because people hate to do documentation so if you can get documentation that creates itself that’s always a good thing so um landsweeper um it creates an automatic inventory of everything that you have so it runs out there and it um pulls all the network and pulls in information on all the machines that you have and it’ll tell you you know like what software is installed what patches are installed and all that um it’ll give you it it’ll give you a dashboard of what patches need to be done, it’ll give you warnings about vulnerabilities and let you know that you need to patch something because there’s a vulnerability on there. But the other cool thing is in addition to all that, you can put in all your contracts and warranties and it’ll also notify you if they expire.

Speaker1

[33:38]Loving it. I think a land sweeper needs to be a sponsor. Land sweeper, we’ll take $10,000 more.

Speaker0

[33:46]There you go.

Speaker1

[33:49]All right. Awesome. Solid, solid, solid advice there. If, final question. If you were in a room with, I don’t know, know colleagues just like yourself and you guys are drinking tea and coffee and just i don’t know it was 10 o’clock in the morning and i don’t know all the neurons are firing what would you really want to talk about it related it related like what would to you like if you really wanted to have an in-depth conversation and just kind of really nerd out like high level sophistication had not, you know, who cares that we don’t, the CEO is not around. I mean, what is it? What would you really be like, guys, what do you think about this? What would you really want to talk?

Speaker0

[34:42]Um, few things. One is, you know, what are you guys working on right now? You don’t find out what, what, what people are working on. That’s interesting. You know, um, maybe just to find out because it’s interesting to know, um, maybe because it’s something I might want to do, or maybe it’s something I should be doing and didn’t think about it, you know? So So it’s useful in that way. So to find out what they’re doing. And then, you know, when I.T. guys get together, sometimes it’s good to just sort of exchange information about like, what do you have in trouble with? And, you know, if anybody else, you know, had trouble with that and what did you do when you were in that situation and had it, you know, how did you get through it? But, you know, almost like a therapy session, sort of, to help each other out and let each other know, you know, how to get past certain roadblocks that you have.

Speaker1

[35:33]The, I love it. What, what do you think IT guys struggle with the most? IT leadership? What’s, what’s the biggest struggle?

Speaker0

[35:43]Oh, all kinds of things. Um, um, worry is probably one of the biggest ones. Um, you know, I mean, in, in today’s world, if you’re not paranoid, you’re not doing it right. Um, you know, So.

Speaker1

[35:56]It’s a really hard way to, it’s a really difficult, it’s a hard way to live your life, but keep going.

Speaker0

[36:04]Yeah. I was at a security conference and one of the security experts opened by saying, um, there’s two types of people in this room. People who know they’ve had, they know that they’re currently have a, um, some kind of a, a breach and people have one and don’t know about it. And I was like, oh, that’s wonderful. Wonderful. You know, that’s a good way to scare the hell out of us and wake us up this morning. So, yeah, I mean, you know, you got to be paranoid because security is certainly something that you constantly worry about, because no matter how good a system you create, somebody else is out there trying to outdo you or trying to get some user to do something silly. So, you know, so you got to worry about that. that, um, you know, uh, we always have, you know, like all kinds, like you said, you know, there’s that list of stuff that we’re working on that we always have to like, you know, keep track of and make sure we haven’t missed anything. Um, so yeah, so those kinds of things.

Speaker1

[37:04]We’re no, we’re going to end on a positive note. If you’re not paranoid, uh, you’re doing something wrong. So, um, Thomas Dewar, thank you so much for, uh, you know, speaking reality and, and, and you know, just keeping it positive. You know what I mean? Like, because you gotta be paranoid. And if you’re not paranoid, then I don’t know, you’re in the wrong, you’re in the wrong seat at the executive round table. You’re the most paranoid guy. The most paranoid guy at the executive round table is the IT guy, but he sits there with a smile.

Speaker0

[37:42]You also have to have a good sense of humor too. That’s really important as well.

Speaker1

[37:48]Thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popularity here. It’s awesome.

Speaker0

[37:51]Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.

Set Audio File

UndoRedo

327- Thomas Dewar on Mistake-Proofing IT and Understanding Business Needs

tom dewar2

Transcript

Speaker1

[0:06]All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. We’re changing our logo, by the way. We have changed our logo, if anyone hasn’t noticed it yet, to DPIT with a pair of glasses underneath. So, I don’t know, someone said dip it sound cool. But anyways, Dissecting popular it nerds we have mr thomas doer on the show tom and did i pronounce i know it’s doer but i don’t know if that’s it sounds like doer but maybe it’s just my my weird east coast accent or something but welcome to the show very excited to have you on and the you know chief cio at Acupath Laboratories. Very top secret, so we’re not going to talk about that. But what we are going to talk about is a very interesting concept that’s, Quite. Could be quite game changing from a methodology standpoint or a methodology or a way of thinking about something or a way of tacking a problem, and that is the concept of hokey oak. I’m going to let you take it from there and describe this this this concept first off. And let’s start with that.

Speaker0

[1:32]Sure. Hi, Phil, and thank you for having me. And you did pronounce it correctly. It is do or like the scotch.

Speaker1

[1:38]Thank you, sir.

Speaker0

[1:39]There you go. So yeah, Pokey Oak. So it’s basically mistake-proofing, and it’s what you see in car manufacturers do all the Thank you, sir. The car wrong, and they’re trying to correct it and make sure that you don’t do it again. So sort of a good example is that if you notice a lot of cars now, you are not able to lock the car doors with the engine running. And the reason for that is because people used to leave the engine running and keep the car. our door is locked. So now they won’t let you lock the doors. So they’re always doing stuff like that. Uh, other examples are, you know, um, you could get a ticket if you have two, um, taillights out. So it used to be that you only had two taillights. And if one of them was out, you’d get a ticket. Now they have multiple taillights so that this way, you know, they added a third one up on top. Sometimes they add many of them. It’s a whole array of lights, but this way it’s very hard for you to get a ticket because you’re always going to have more than two. So they’re always looking for things like that. And it’s a way of making sure that users don’t make mistakes, which I always thought was a fascinating idea.

Speaker1

[2:45]And in IT, it applies beautifully because people make mistakes all the time. It’s the idea of a preemptive strike, so to speak, before your end users do something that they shouldn’t do, like maybe click on an email or something like that. So it applies a lot to IT. And I was thinking from some other practical examples of Pokey Oak in life. For example, you can’t open up the washing machine and it still runs because there’s that little Pokey thing, Pokey Oak, that pokes a little hole in the washing machine that makes it, the agitation cycle shut off so that, I don’t know, your kids don’t, I don’t know, mangle their arm or do something stupid or jump in the washing machine while it’s still running. And yet, it’s, us as humans users of devices and machines of course we figure out that you can stick your pinky in there and keep the machine running um for whatever reason you might want to have that lid open with the machine running because i forgot to put the soap in or whatever it is um but let’s think just just the concept of pokio to to begin with where can we apply that in it in ways that have been very, I don’t know, successful game-changing for you?

Speaker0

[4:04]So yeah, so I constantly look at the tickets that I’m getting to see what it is that users are doing, trying to figure out things that I can do differently to make sure that I mistake-proof my environment. So, you know, one example is I discovered that for some reason Dell laptops, They had two different voltages, and I found this out because one of my users at one of the places I worked plugged in a laptop charger and accidentally started a fire because they plugged in the wrong laptop charger. And weird as it is, there are two different models of laptop that Dell had that used the same exact adapter connector, but they had two different, completely different voltages. So if you plugged it into the wrong one, it would cause a problem. So, you know, I realized that was a really bad design on their part. But, you know, certainly it’s a bad design on my part to have these two users sitting next to each other with two different plugs that, you know, could be interchangeable between their devices and allow that to happen. So one of the things that I did is I sort of standardized and made sure that everybody had the same exact laptops and the same exact charges so that they could interchange them without causing problems.

Speaker1

[5:22]And then, of course, well, yeah, because probably both chargers said Dell on them and they both had either a round or I would assume round plug in piece. So why not? You know what? How does this apply elsewhere? It applies everywhere. Obviously, security, it’s going to apply big time.

Speaker0

[5:44]Oh, yeah, for sure. Security and other places. I use it right now. I’m doing a lot of software development where I am now. And in software development, you know, we’re constantly looking at like things like field validation to try and make sure people can’t put in the wrong values in the field.

Speaker1

[6:00]Oh, please, please tell me how. How could that happen?

Speaker0

[6:05]Happen it just people accidentally put the wrong thing so for example you know if you have a birth date you know um it shouldn’t be you know a date in the future so you make sure you put in field validation to say you know hey don’t put anything in in the future stuff like that um.

Speaker1

[6:19]Because that could really i mean that’s a think of y2k there

Speaker0

[6:23]You go remember.

Speaker1

[6:24]That yeah i’m gonna date some people. Pokey Oak White. Y2K was a Pokey Oak gone wild. Pokey Oak gone wild. Y2K. Let’s advertise all kinds of fear and things. We got to prepare. We got to prepare because the whole world’s going to blow up. No meltdown in the numbers and the banking system and all of that. I hate when you can’t enter something else into a field value that I need to enter in that’s not a number or something like that. I need to type here. I don’t want to put a number in. I need to type. I’m And I really needed to type something in that was not a number. So where does Pokio go wrong? Does it go wrong?

Speaker0

[7:06]Oh, it does. Yeah, sure. I mean, we’ve discovered that sometimes we’ve locked things down too much. And that, you know, sometimes we’ll lock down a field and we’ll not allow a character when it actually needs to be a character. You know, just as an example, we get electronic orders, and they were always numbers to some extent. And then all of a sudden, people started putting, you know, alpha characters in there. And so we had to change our field validation a little bit. It. You know, so you do have to modify it, you know, but is it one of the things that goes along with Pokey Oak is that I kind of have some golden rules that I use in my IT environment. And one of them is to constantly look at, you know, things that we’re doing and improve them as well, you know, sort of continual constant quality improvement. And so that’s also another piece of it is, you know, revisiting things and trying to see how we can make them better and fixing our Our Pokey Oak is one example of that.

Speaker1

[8:03]So what are these other pillars of your organization or methodology? I need to know. Sure.

Speaker0

[8:12]So one is I try and have equipment take care of itself whenever possible. So whenever it’s possible in an environment, and I did this in one particular place that I was at, Lutheran Social Services, where I was trying to, we had a very small staff, and we needed to get a lot done, and we had a lot of locations and users. So we set things up so that we had new machines that had warranties on them and replacement warranties so that this way, if something went wrong, they could fix it. I tried to create things so that they were as simple as possible. So that’s another thing is simplicity. Whenever whenever possible, you simplify things. things, also being able to manage things remotely so that this way you can fix them as quickly as possible from a remote situation.

Speaker0

[9:06]Another thing is to try and set things up. It depends upon the environment, but in a lot of environments, I’ve had to set things up where people are able to work from anywhere because you never know where they’re going to have to work. In many of my environments we’ve had a lot of users that that had to work remotely and sure enough i’m setting things up that way certainly helped me for covid um because i had set things up that way ahead of time and then when we did have to work remotely it worked out perfectly um i try and make as much as possible i don’t want my network infrastructure tied to real estate because you never know when they’re going to try and make you move that server room and that’s not an easy thing to do, I try to make things cloud-based whenever possible and also try and make them so that we don’t have that server room infrastructure like we used to have anymore where it’s just stuck in one place and it’s hard to move. So I try and avoid that wherever I can. Yeah. Uh like i said standardized things um spend smarter and try and invest to save long term uh another one is to do it right the first time.

Speaker1

[10:13]I would love to spend um oh gosh do it right the first time you’re like you’re making me think of my own problems uh okay keep going keep going so So spend smarter for the long run. That’s great. And do it right the first time. I mean, we could probably do a couple shows. We could do shows on just that. But let’s just break those. Keep going. Keep going. Go. You’ve got a list here. I can tell.

Speaker0

[10:43]Yeah. So like I said, create an environment using Pokey Yoke or mistake proofing. Create an environment of constant improvement and self-examination. Be proactive and not reactive.

Speaker1

[10:57]Yeah.

Speaker0

[10:59]When be customer or patient focused and work smarter and not harder.

Speaker1

[11:07]Oh, all of these are beautiful things. If they could just, if we could just do all of these things and then in a very, the truth, right? What’s the truth? The truth is to do a good job. It’s hard. There is no, there is no shortcuts. Oh, there’s shortcuts, I guess, but it was, uh, it took a long time getting there or it took a long time or it wasn’t easy to figure out the shortcuts to begin with or whatever it was, you know, because otherwise everyone would, I don’t know, would be doing it, I guess. Is there, is there such a thing as a shortcut?

Speaker0

[11:43]Well, that’s kind of the problem with do it right the first time, right? I mean, sometimes a shortcut is good, but another times if a shortcut is just, oh yeah, let’s just do it this way for now. And we’ll worry about the rest of it later. that usually backfires.

Speaker1

[11:58]What about the whole good is done is better than perfection? That concept.

Speaker0

[12:08]That’s true.

Speaker1

[12:09]Does that apply to IT?

Speaker0

[12:11]Oh, sure. Yeah.

Speaker1

[12:12]Sometimes you spend so much time over-analyzation by parallelization or parallelization by over-analyzation that something never gets done and then the whole face of technology is changed by then.

Speaker0

[12:23]Mm hmm. Yeah, no, that’s possible. That’s possible. I’ve seen I’ve actually seen developers that, you know, were never, ever happy with their work and would continuously keep trying to fix it and make it better and make it better and make it better and then would never get to where they needed to be because they were just constantly, you know, there was always that one little thing that they needed to get done. So, yeah, it’s possible for sure.

Speaker1

[12:46]You have an interesting career path you you’re a psychology graduate mm-hmm which I don’t know. Why don’t there’s a story there? There’s got to be a story there.

Speaker0

[13:06]Oh, yeah. So I actually I started with computers before psychology. I actually had a computer in my house just when I first started high school. My dad was a computer geek and he had the idea that, you know, a good excuse for him getting a computer in the house was to use that. I was going to high school. So he got a computer for us.

Speaker0

[13:26]And so I had a computer in the house then and I taught myself how to program. And I got really good at it. Uh, and then I thought about going, you know, taking computers in college. And when I, um, got to college, um, two things happened. One is I, I met the, um, head of the computer science department. Cause a friend of mine knew him because his brother was in there. And, um, he introduced him to me and told him that I had a computer at home. And the guy looked at me and he said, Oh, he said, uh, a home computer. He said, those things are just a fad. And I said, what? And he said, those things are just a fad. He said, you know, that, that, that’ll go away. No, no, that’s never going to work out. So I said, what do you mean? And he said, um, you know, everybody’s going to need to connect to the, you know, to the network that that’s all that’s important. So, you know, having, having those devices is just, you know, it’s just a fad. So I said, well, you know, would it be great to have something that does both? I said, you know, I can connect to your network using a terminal emulator, the same way that your students connect to terminals that cost almost the same thing as my computer, but I can also play games and do personal finance and all kinds of things that I can do locally on the computer because it works as a computer as well. And, um.

Speaker0

[14:40]He just didn’t seem to think that made sense to him for some reason. And so I realized quite quickly that, you know, this probably wasn’t a good move for me. And I decided that, you know, I would pursue something else in terms of a college degree. I mean, you know, at the time, computer science wasn’t really as defined as it is now.

Speaker0

[15:03]So it really, you know, so it was it was early days. You know, I mean, this this was back when like the Mac first was coming, you know, the Apple two was actually first coming out and stuff like that. And Microsoft was just starting. So it was very early days in the computer world. And so computer science degrees weren’t very useful at the time, as far as I could tell, unless you were going to do something like, you know, be an engineer and build chips or, you know, things like that. Um, otherwise they were teaching languages that, you know, um, I thought, you know, we’re probably not going to last long-term, um, things like COBOL and stuff like that, which, you know, it’s useful to have, but, you know, nobody’s really using it now. Um, so, um, I, I do know one person that graduated as a computer science major in that year that, that I was a friends with, and he’s now a Toyota salesman. So, uh, I guess that speaks to, to the situation. So yeah so i was so i got a computer science degree but then um all of the jobs that i’ve ever had sort of like i sort.

Speaker1

[16:05]Of or psychology degree you got a psychology degree not a computer science degree

Speaker0

[16:09]That’s yes sorry yes i got a psychology degree um but um all the jobs that i’ve had i’ve sort of gravitated towards it in one way or another just because it’s what i know knowing what I’m good at. So I’ve sort of tried to use both, um, whenever possible. And, um, One of the jobs I got with the computer science degree was I worked for the city of New York in child protective services. And when I was there, they realized I had computer skills, and they asked me to do some things. And I ended up programming two things. One was their very first personnel database in D-Base. And then the other thing I ended up programming was their very first statistical analysis stuff in Lotus Macro language.

Speaker0

[16:56]Um, they were doing all their statistics on paper and they wanted me to do the final, um, statistics for the office. And I figured out a way to get them to just put them on floppy disks and have me collect the floppy disks. And then I could put them all into the computer and have it suck all the data in and produce a report and make it a lot easier. Um, and then I was also able to create graphs and charts, which they couldn’t do with the typewriter that they were using to create their reports. Um, it was interesting. thing, the very first time that they had a meeting after I did that very first report, the meetings were normally about 45 minutes long, and this one was about two hours. And when my boss came out of the meeting, he looked at me and he said, it’s all your fault. And I said, what’s all my fault? And he said, the fact that this darn meeting was so long. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, well, he says, for the very first time ever, people actually understood the data and knew what the heck they were looking at because of the graphs and charts you made. So they started to ask questions about the data that they’d never asked before. And that’s why the meeting ran for so darn long. He said, so it was a good thing because we finally understood it. He said, but it was just fascinating that, you know, it ended up making the meeting last so long just because for the very first time we knew what we were talking about when we were looking at this information, we wanted to know how come you had so many cases and how come you close cases faster and how come I got more cases than you got. And, They started having insightful questions about all that stuff.

Speaker0

[18:18]And it was funny because I left there and got another job. And about 10 years later, I got this phone call. And they said, you know, is this Tom Dewar? And I said, yeah. And they said, is this a Tom Dewar that used to work at the Prince office? And I said, yeah. And they said, I got a question. They said, what is this weird statistic thing they’re doing? And I said, what are you talking about? out. And it turns out that they were trying to replace the system they had there with this new statistic system that they had developed and that the central office was putting in to organize it. All the different offices were using the same thing. And the office was pushing back and saying they liked what they were already using and didn’t want to use something new because they liked what they already had and they thought did what they needed. And it turned out that what they had was this stupid thing I had programmed 10 years before and couldn’t possibly believe they were still use it.

Speaker1

[19:07]I have so many questions one as a psychology major who fell didn’t fall into it but it’s interesting how many people get into it it’s because they naturally kind of did something but you mentioned all these pillars and all these things that i think a lot of people would find very difficult to do um you know pokio you know kaizen let’s just throw a bunch of japanese terms out there in business right but you mentioned all these pillars and these things and then you also mentioned uh really a silo that you created so people were and we want to keep the old antiquated silo that that tom doer created years ago and we don’t want to migrate to this other thing ironic very ironic there’s some deep thoughts that could probably go into that well

Speaker0

[20:04]The interesting thing is their their reasoning was because it did some stuff that the new system didn’t do.

Speaker1

[20:09]Of course that’s why why do we have old silos to begin with why do we have a an as400 running some i don’t know erp software because it does something that there’s no there’s no hole to fill because we’re not gonna i don’t know take whatever new erp thing that was built for everybody and move a bunch of uh i don’t know things that we were talking about earlier on like you know like uh you know um you know just different form fields and matching and kind of making it you know duct taping it together to do what the i don’t know the old homegrown thing that tom built who we don’t know his name is but we got to call around and find him you know so you do all there’s this idea of imposter syndrome and i’ve come to terms with the fact that we’re all imposters to some degree yet some of us do some things kind of very naturally

Speaker1

[21:18]And what makes what makes a good it leader you had all these different points but what allowed you to figure this out? What way of being, what, I don’t know, psychological, this is like a psychological deep question. Is there anything that helps you? At what point were you bad and then you changed something or is there some piece of something that we can give to someone? And we’re always saying, you gotta be curious in IT. Like you gotta be curious, you gotta always be learning. Okay, we get that. Yes, you always gotta be learning. You always gotta be curious. maybe your teacher in college that said the home computer was never going to be anything i don’t know maybe he wasn’t curious or always improving i don’t know what is it is there something that we can give to people to help them see their it environment differently to make them more How can they make change quicker, better, faster with less problems and improve faster without being overburdened and overloaded like so many people? Mid-market it leaders vps of it cios and ctos are so many are overburdened with so many things and such a huge workload what can what can we do to make them successful

Speaker0

[22:45]Um i think two things stand out right away um one is understanding the business and like understanding it you know um as best as you possibly can you know at a level where you can speak the same language as your peers in the company. I’ve seen a lot of IT people that really don’t embrace and understand the business well, and it ends up having them create solutions that don’t work well for the business just because they don’t understand the business well enough to know what it really needs. So that’s one thing. And then probably a similar thing is trying to look at things through the eyes of your users. It gets back to the whole Pokey Oak thing. You know, I mean, if you can sort of understand what it is your users are trying to accomplish and what their job is, and if it’s at all possible, even try and do their job. You know, like one of the things that I do when I do software development is I’ll try and do tasks that the users do as a user and try and see, you know, like what that’s what that experience is like. And a lot of times I’ll see that the things that we design may make sense to us, but in the real world, when a user tries to use it, man, is that a pain in the neck. And it doesn’t quite help them at all. The last thing you want to do is create a system that makes it harder to do your job instead of easier to do your job. So, you know.

Speaker1

[24:12]What do you say to the IT teams out there that are afraid of MSPs coming in and taking over their jobs or AI taking over their jobs or the future taking over their jobs? Jobs, there’s something wrong there. There’s a mindset that’s wrong. They’re not understanding the business or they’re not seeing, in my case right there, that would be a leadership piece where you’re not teaching your team like, hey, look, we support the business. If there is actually an MSP or a product out there that could replace you, you should be suggesting that. If it really does exist and you should be backfilling the next piece that needs to be taken care of, uh, for that. Cause it’s just in inevitable. It’s inevitable that you will be replaced if that is the case. Um, so anyways, understanding the business, how do you understand the business though? Are you saying, what do we do? How do we make money from the, from a very, What I was thinking from my standpoint is asking the question, how does this company make money?

Speaker0

[25:27]Yeah. But also, you know, understanding some of the intricacies of business, I mean, especially when it relates to I.T. And, you know, what it is, what it what what the company means for the customers, what it is, you know, that that.

Speaker0

[25:40]So, for example, you know, when I worked for hospitals, you know, I mean, we had to build this ICU and we had to do it in a hurry because we had patients that were building up, you know. So I tried to explain to my staff, hey, understand that the reason we have to get this thing done so quickly is because we’ve got COVID patients who are sitting out in the hallways because there just isn’t enough room in the ICU we have currently. So we’ve got to expand this thing so that that doesn’t happen. And if that was your family that was out there in the hallway, you wouldn’t want them there. You’d want them in a more stable environment. So, you know, understand that that’s why we’re working hard to get this accomplished is for that reason, you know, and to sort of, you know, humanize it and to understand, you know, like what what the business is in terms of what what what do you get out of it, you know, and I mean, that’s also the other thing is the more people understand the value of what we do to the end users and how that helps to, you know, provide service to customers and things like that, you know, kind of makes you feel better about what you do. You know, I mean, if I know that I’m working in a health care environment and that what I do is ultimately making the lives of patients better, then that makes me feel better about what I do.

Speaker1

[26:58]The big why.

Speaker0

[27:00]Yep.

Speaker1

[27:01]The big why. You’ve got to be explaining the big why. And. What we’re doing and how we’re doing it. OK, so they’ve got the big why. The. What else behind the business? So an IT guy that understands the business and understands is going to have a seat at the executive round table. Was there ever something that you learned or a turning point for you that, or something that you did that gave you an aha moment?

Speaker0

[27:38]Well, one of the things that was interesting is that when I when I one of the very first big software development projects I worked on was I worked for an organization where they had their own in-house case management system.

Speaker0

[27:54]And I used to work one of the jobs I had gotten because I was a psychology major was as a caseworker. And so because I was a caseworker, I was actually doing that kind of work. And so when I was doing this case management system, when I ended up becoming CIO and being over development of this system, I realized that the people who developed it really didn’t understand what it was to be a caseworker. And because I did understand that and because I understood what caseworkers needed because I’d done the job, you know, it made me look at it differently. So, for example, one of the big things I realized was that, you know, when you’re when you’re in a position like that, everybody wants everything yesterday. So because of that, it makes it really hard for you to prioritize because when everything needs to be done yesterday, you have no idea what to do today. You know, so I ended up designing this menu dashboard system that actually helped them to prioritize their work and they loved it. And it really helped them to be more productive. And it was because I really saw the job from their eyes and really, you know, had been through it and done it, you know. And so I carry that forward in just about every IT project I do where I try and sort of like walk in their shoes somehow, some way, to understand it enough that I can make sure that what it is I’m doing in IT is actually making things better and not worse.

Speaker1

[29:21]Can you describe that menu system a little bit and how other people could implement it?

Speaker0

[29:27]Yeah, sure. So for example, the system initially, you would just have to go in and search for a person and stuff like that. And so I said, you know, that’s crazy, you know, what it should do, because keep in mind, this was back in 2000. So, you know, things were kind of primitive back then. So I said, you know, the system should know what cases you have, and should show you just your caseload as soon as you log in. So that was the first thing I started with was this list of cases. But then I thought, well, what if we could sort it, you know? And so what if we could sort it by the fact that you’ve got to do notes on that case every, you know, you’ve got to do two notes, two visits on that case every 30 days, right? Right. So what if we also showed the last visitation date and we allowed you to sort it by that so you could see which ones were late and which ones were new. But then we could also color code it so that if you’ve got to make two visits within 30 days, that means roughly you need to make a visit within 15 days. So if you haven’t made a visit in the last 15 days, that means you’re late. So I make that red. So I show that, you know, there’s a problem there. So that date is read. And so then you also have to document your visit. So it’s not just a question of you’ve been there, but you also write about it. So that also has to be done within a certain amount of time from a visit. So I also put the date of the documentation.

Speaker0

[30:47]And then the other thing I did was I made it so that, you know, it’s not just you seeing this information, but you’re actually able to create action on it. So you look, you sort it by the last progress note written, and then you click on it and you hit edit progress. You know, you get a little menu that pops up. And one of the things it says is enter progress note. And now I click on that. Now I’m right in there doing a progress note on that case. Space so it just makes it really easy for me to be able to do that documentation because i want to try and make it as fast as possible for them to do it but also to understand what it is they need to do and when they need to do it boom.

Speaker1

[31:23]Done how do you do that for your own life as an it leader with all of the Application licensing coming up for renewal. And where are we at on the ERP migration and the testing and the beta group? And where are we at with, I don’t know, any number of thousands of things, increasing KPIs and blah, blah, blah. Blah and where are we at with uh employee reviews and help desk guys and where are we at with training and and uh end user security awareness and i don’t know the sock to um audit coming up like how do you do it well

Speaker0

[32:12]If you were lucky enough to be in an environment that has project managers which i have been in the past that they help with that greatly unfortunately you’re not always that lucky. And so like, for example, right now I’m in a position where I don’t have project managers, so I have to be the project manager as well as everything else. Um, so it’s tricky, you know, I mean, you just kind of have to keep track of things. Um, I find that there are some systems that, um, sort of help do that.

Speaker1

[32:38]Um, what do you like?

Speaker0

[32:40]Um, I, one system I like a lot is something called land sweeper. And so, um, land sweeper, um, I always like documentation that creates itself you know because people hate to do documentation so if you can get documentation that creates itself that’s always a good thing so um landsweeper um it creates an automatic inventory of everything that you have so it runs out there and it um pulls all the network and pulls in information on all the machines that you have and it’ll tell you you know like what software is installed what patches are installed and all that um it’ll give you it it’ll give you a dashboard of what patches need to be done, it’ll give you warnings about vulnerabilities and let you know that you need to patch something because there’s a vulnerability on there. But the other cool thing is in addition to all that, you can put in all your contracts and warranties and it’ll also notify you if they expire.

Speaker1

[33:38]Loving it. I think a land sweeper needs to be a sponsor. Land sweeper, we’ll take $10,000 more.

Speaker0

[33:46]There you go.

Speaker1

[33:49]All right. Awesome. Solid, solid, solid advice there. If, final question. If you were in a room with, I don’t know, know colleagues just like yourself and you guys are drinking tea and coffee and just i don’t know it was 10 o’clock in the morning and i don’t know all the neurons are firing what would you really want to talk about it related it related like what would to you like if you really wanted to have an in-depth conversation and just kind of really nerd out like high level sophistication had not, you know, who cares that we don’t, the CEO is not around. I mean, what is it? What would you really be like, guys, what do you think about this? What would you really want to talk?

Speaker0

[34:42]Um, few things. One is, you know, what are you guys working on right now? You don’t find out what, what, what people are working on. That’s interesting. You know, um, maybe just to find out because it’s interesting to know, um, maybe because it’s something I might want to do, or maybe it’s something I should be doing and didn’t think about it, you know? So So it’s useful in that way. So to find out what they’re doing. And then, you know, when I.T. guys get together, sometimes it’s good to just sort of exchange information about like, what do you have in trouble with? And, you know, if anybody else, you know, had trouble with that and what did you do when you were in that situation and had it, you know, how did you get through it? But, you know, almost like a therapy session, sort of, to help each other out and let each other know, you know, how to get past certain roadblocks that you have.

Speaker1

[35:33]The, I love it. What, what do you think IT guys struggle with the most? IT leadership? What’s, what’s the biggest struggle?

Speaker0

[35:43]Oh, all kinds of things. Um, um, worry is probably one of the biggest ones. Um, you know, I mean, in, in today’s world, if you’re not paranoid, you’re not doing it right. Um, you know, So.

Speaker1

[35:56]It’s a really hard way to, it’s a really difficult, it’s a hard way to live your life, but keep going.

Speaker0

[36:04]Yeah. I was at a security conference and one of the security experts opened by saying, um, there’s two types of people in this room. People who know they’ve had, they know that they’re currently have a, um, some kind of a, a breach and people have one and don’t know about it. And I was like, oh, that’s wonderful. Wonderful. You know, that’s a good way to scare the hell out of us and wake us up this morning. So, yeah, I mean, you know, you got to be paranoid because security is certainly something that you constantly worry about, because no matter how good a system you create, somebody else is out there trying to outdo you or trying to get some user to do something silly. So, you know, so you got to worry about that. that, um, you know, uh, we always have, you know, like all kinds, like you said, you know, there’s that list of stuff that we’re working on that we always have to like, you know, keep track of and make sure we haven’t missed anything. Um, so yeah, so those kinds of things.

Speaker1

[37:04]We’re no, we’re going to end on a positive note. If you’re not paranoid, uh, you’re doing something wrong. So, um, Thomas Dewar, thank you so much for, uh, you know, speaking reality and, and, and you know, just keeping it positive. You know what I mean? Like, because you gotta be paranoid. And if you’re not paranoid, then I don’t know, you’re in the wrong, you’re in the wrong seat at the executive round table. You’re the most paranoid guy. The most paranoid guy at the executive round table is the IT guy, but he sits there with a smile.

Speaker0

[37:42]You also have to have a good sense of humor too. That’s really important as well.

Speaker1

[37:48]Thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popularity here. It’s awesome.

Speaker0

[37:51]Thank you for having me. Thank you so much.

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