Speaker 0 | 00:00.500
Well, welcome to another Dissecting Popular IT Nerd. Today, we’re talking with Jeff Schmidt. Jeff comes to us from the medical industry, or the healthcare industry, I should say. It’s probably a better term than medical industry. And Jeff, tell us a little about your journey from the first day that you started working on computers to today.
Speaker 1 | 00:19.445
Absolutely. So, my beginning started around, oh, I suppose 1990, when my dad brought home our first computer of the house. uh which was still pretty rare in those days it was an old ibm clone then 8088 processor and 640k ram um that thing must have been a monster oh it was awesome it ran dos 3.3 you know no windows there was no mouse uh which blows my kids mind that you know you could use first computer yeah there was my mouse wasn’t even a thing yet well you just touched it’s not what you want yeah not quite uh and i broke it so i i figured out You can do change to a CD and go kind of browse through. And if you find a.bat or a.exe or a.com, you can run it and just see what it does. And in those days in DOS, if you don’t know what the format command does and you just run it. And in those early days, you didn’t have to give it an argument and tell it what drive. It would just assume you want to format the drive you’re sitting on. And so I wiped the operating system.
Speaker 0 | 01:23.011
And he probably didn’t.
Speaker 1 | 01:24.092
copies of the discs oh of course not no um because he got this at a garage sale or something oh no no it was he went to the local shop and bought it and it was not cheap and so so now we had a very expensive paperweight in the house and eventually my my dad brought home a dos 6.22 disc and a dos manual and handed it to me and said you broke it if you want a computer you better fix it
Speaker 0 | 01:53.368
And while you’re at it, program the light or the clock on the DVR.
Speaker 1 | 01:56.670
Yeah, exactly. And honestly, that really was my start. It’s like, oh, this is kind of cool. And I read the DOS manual and figured out how to reinstall DOS, which, I mean, wasn’t that complicated of a thing. Yeah, it wasn’t like
Speaker 0 | 02:09.581
Windows 3.1.1.
Speaker 1 | 02:11.362
Yeah, but I was like 12 years old. And I’d read through the tech manual and try to figure out how to reinstall. Yeah, that’s kind of where it all started. And then ended up in college and made a part-time job. And a little later,
Speaker 0 | 02:28.628
what are you using by now? Six years later, you said 92, so around 98.
Speaker 1 | 02:33.532
Yeah. So, so 90, 97, um, got my first part-time job at a, at a local computer shop. Um, Pentiums, Pentiums were just coming out now. It wasn’t nearly cool enough for radius shack in our small town, but yeah, everybody was on like three 86s, 46 is the Pentiums were just coming out. Windows 95 was the latest and greatest but we were still working with a lot of Windows 3.1 and the internet dial up was becoming a thing right so we spent a lot of time installing like 288, 336 modems 56k was just coming out if you could afford a 56k modem and installing those on like Windows 3.1 machines and we used to have to play the settings on the hardware for the comm channel and all of those other things that’s right you have to choose the comm channel and set the irq and the io settings and and resolve any resource conflict i mean that that that was my first job man yeah they teach us about us being able to recognize the sound of a modem and and the kids going huh that’s right my next job was as a as a support tech at the local dial-up isp and so yeah i got really good at diagnosing connectivity issues based on the
Speaker 0 | 03:51.832
the sound of the modem oh really okay oh yeah i i you know i know that it was a handshake and all of those pieces and then it would get to the communication part and it would quiet down a bit but yeah i didn’t i didn’t it makes sense but i never quite recognized the fact that that if you knew what you were listening for that you’d gather information out of that you
Speaker 1 | 04:12.147
could essentially it sounded right but it failed usually meant you had your password wrong um you There’d be a segment of the handshake that if you heard it, like repeat, it sounded like it was stuck in a loop. It was a handshake error. So you’ve got a setting problem where they’re not speaking the same language, or you’ve got some noise on the fire, something like that. Exactly. So yeah, you could, you could kind of diagnose based on the sound.
Speaker 0 | 04:34.427
Wow. Damn. Okay. Um, while you’re working at the ISP, how, what era are we talking about now? Cause we’ve,
Speaker 1 | 04:42.593
so that’s like,
Speaker 0 | 04:43.273
you’re starting to get the CDs from AOL by now.
Speaker 1 | 04:46.824
Oh, yes. That’s right. Of course, we are an ISP, so we hated AOL. They’re the competitor, and we thought what they were doing was garbage. But very popular.
Speaker 0 | 04:56.008
Everybody in the country online?
Speaker 1 | 04:58.489
That’s right. Well, they had their own browser. They had their own little segmented mini internet experience that we didn’t have a lot of respect for at the time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Not to mention the grammar issues with you’ve got mail.
Speaker 0 | 05:11.578
And that reminds me of, I can’t remember whether it was Netscape or if it was one of the other browsers, Net something, where it was. Webpage roulette. Like you just click and we picked a website because we were still in the hundreds of websites.
Speaker 1 | 05:28.683
Exactly. Oh yeah. Yeah. So I was doing this stuff, man, like pre-Google. Yeah. yahoo was the big winner back then yes and jeeves ask jeeves ask jeeves oh yeah in fact we still had some clients that would every once in a while call having issues with their gopher or their archie client like not everybody was 100 on www
Speaker 0 | 05:53.737
even by them yeah yeah and it mattered you couldn’t get away with nothing in the www that’s right because because literally they were different protocols different ways of accessing you know i had a buddy at work who ran his own bbs you know bulletin board service less than flash right close print or close up or backslash um greater than exactly
Speaker 1 | 06:19.737
i mean we i was a big netscape navigator and then communicator fan you know internet explorer was garbage like it was it was the wild west words and going to the uh the chat rooms and and wandering around room to room and talking to different people and that’s right wow okay so yeah i came up through that like nitty-gritty techie stuff yeah um found myself later as a software developer at at&t it’s probably a decade into my career at this point so something like
Speaker 0 | 06:52.777
2000s uh mid-2000s yeah had the dot-com bubble burst yet um when did the dot-com bubble had burst okay things had slowed down a little bit
Speaker 1 | 07:02.765
That’s right. And I found myself from the hardware side over to the software side. And I’m hunched over a keyboard 40 hours a week hacking out code, which was cool. But it was then that I imagined myself 20 years down the road going, I don’t think in 20 years I still want to be hunched over a keyboard hacking out code 40 hours a week.
Speaker 0 | 07:23.613
And this is still pre-object-oriented programming even. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 07:30.596
So we’re talking like… 2000 mid 2000 2004 2006 all right so it’s starting to show up starting to show up right you’re starting to see some object-oriented stuff um it was it was the new the the cool new technology uh we were doing mostly cold fusion which is like completely died out now yeah and even cold fusion now it’s science fiction and we’re talking about energy yeah exactly uh cold fusion was a scripting language uh that was kind of like JavaScript only it was all server side instead of client side and then they tried to go object oriented too so that’s what we were doing then and I went you know what I need to learn something about business because I don’t still want to be hacking out code in 20 years so so that’s where I kind of had a mindset shift where I went I need to understand not
Speaker 0 | 08:16.649
just how to build the technology but how to solve business problems so this is a key thing for a lot of us in technology anymore is understanding that business piece so um you How did you get that business education? Was this go back to school and get an MBA or was this start asking questions at work?
Speaker 1 | 08:34.582
So it was some of both of those. I went back to school, enrolled in college and started taking business classes. Didn’t finish the degree, but learned some stuff. And in the meantime, the business that I had started my career in and worked there for like almost seven years, starting as an internet tech support and then doing hardware tech and then doing software. And. the business came up for sale and I bought it. So then we had this trial by fire thing of like, oh, I want to learn business and now I’m running. And that was 2006. And if you remember the world in 2008, that was a really bad time to have borrowed a bunch of money to go buy a business.
Speaker 0 | 09:12.519
Yeah. It was more about real estate, but any loans at that point, because all of the loans were tainted because most everything had gone through real estate.
Speaker 1 | 09:21.903
That’s right. The banking industry kind of imploded. And so we were doing large network implementations. We’d go into a school system or a government agency or a business, rip and replace the entire network infrastructure, switches, video security servers, all that stuff. And we did it on net terms from our vendor. And when the banking industry imploded, our vendor sold, and we went from a million-dollar line of credit on 90-day terms to a $10,000 line of credit. Not being able to buy anything. We couldn’t buy anything. couldn’t do our core business anymore because we didn’t have the financial backing to do it. At the same time, as soon as they said the word recession, it’s like everybody locked up their checkbooks and every project in the pipeline went on hold. And we ended up shutting down the business in 2011.
Speaker 0 | 10:05.180
Oh, it’s damn. But okay. So talk to me a little about that business in that time. I mean, that must’ve taught you a ton about actual business sense and what it means and why the business side of the house and understanding that’s so important.
Speaker 1 | 10:20.146
People talk about failure as the greatest teacher, right? So imagine losing your investment, your livelihood, your home and your parents’home all in one swoop. And then you’ve got, well, for me, it’s been. oh 13 years to reflect on everything that went wrong and so the first five years of that you go to sleep every night laying in bed going man what did i screw up so yeah you learn a lot and and ultimately there are some things i could have done differently and there were some things that were just flat out bad timing and bad luck yeah yeah because like you had no control over the banks you weren’t you weren’t the player that brought everything down that’s right you were just one of millions at that point really you know exactly well us us and of course the ripples and across the world for the u.s economy going into recession that’s right but what i learned the biggest mistake that i made was the risk assessment going into it right i went into this optimistically it’s an existing business cash flow is good it’s growing i didn’t do the right risk assessment where i went what’s the bad thing that could happen and can i handle it if it happens right
Speaker 0 | 11:28.406
and do i have any okay yeah the contingencies can i hear exactly how
Speaker 1 | 11:33.020
How do we mitigate the risk? How do we survive in the worst case scenario? And being a young man, I was all optimistic and, oh, it’s going to be great.
Speaker 0 | 11:42.926
Happy. Sorry.
Speaker 1 | 11:45.008
I’m guessing. No, no, you’re right.
Speaker 0 | 11:46.969
Because you’re paying all your bills. Everything’s going well. You’ve got that line of credit.
Speaker 1 | 11:51.472
You’re doing projects.
Speaker 0 | 11:53.354
Because the job that I’m at currently, we’ve been doing some of the exact kind of stuff that you’re talking about, usually with government.
Speaker 1 | 12:02.124
um funds for the schools but going in and redoing their network all their switches the cameras and access control all kinds of stuff those are exactly what we were doing the the state of ohio was spending a ton of money across all revamping schools across the entire state and we were bidding on those jobs and that was the bread and butter of that business oh man and then it just gone it’s it’s gone your credit limit gone customers are gone and then off
Speaker 0 | 12:28.795
and then all the stuff that you’d leveraged on top of it So now you know about incorporated versus LLC versus all those things and the differences amongst that.
Speaker 1 | 12:40.463
And exactly how much consideration you should give before you ever sign a personal guarantee.
Speaker 0 | 12:45.687
Okay. Actually, mark that down, guys. Pay attention.
Speaker 1 | 12:50.271
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 12:51.172
Because, you know, in multiple situations, I gave personal guarantees within business as not the business owner. You know, just as the guy I teach. guy contract and they’re, they’re putting that in front of you with those words on it. Personal guarantee.
Speaker 1 | 13:08.124
Right.
Speaker 0 | 13:09.064
And, uh, you might want to know what the implications of that are.
Speaker 1 | 13:12.326
Exactly. The worst case scenario can happen. Make sure you can live through it.
Speaker 0 | 13:16.849
Yeah. Yeah. Because it doesn’t, because I put my signature on it. That means I am on there. Not, not the owner of the company that I work for. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 13:26.194
If you do any, ever do any like firearm training. one of the things they teach you is when you pull the trigger, you own that bullet wherever it goes. So if you miss or it goes through something, that bullet belongs to you wherever it ends up. Yeah. Uh, the personal guarantee is kind of the same thing, however it goes and you own it now.
Speaker 0 | 13:43.840
So, like I said, mark that down, learn that lesson from us.
Speaker 1 | 13:48.481
Exactly. Um,
Speaker 0 | 13:50.522
don’t learn it through personal experience.
Speaker 1 | 13:52.403
That’s right. Yeah. Learn, learn from other people. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 13:55.223
So. So all of that stuff is tanked. You’re going to bed going, oh my gosh, what do I do now? What do I, or what did I do? And how do I take care of mom and dad? And then.
Speaker 1 | 14:04.809
And I’ve got a wife and three kids. And realistically, it was one of those things where I probably wouldn’t have gotten out of bed in the morning if it hadn’t been for that. Man, I’ve got kids to feed. I don’t have a choice. Yeah. And the light at the end of the tunnel for that was I happened onto a job at Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, a nationwide children’s hospital. working in their data warehouse as the liaison between the data warehouse and the research institute. And my job there was to go talk to researchers and doctors who wanted to leverage clinical data, figure out how they wanted and what they needed, and go back to the data warehouse and work with the technical guys there to figure out how to go source the data, how to store it, how to deliver it. And it was a fascinating job. It was a meaningful job. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 14:46.449
At that point in history, all you kids out there, we didn’t have, BI was not a term at that point.
Speaker 1 | 14:54.682
Right.
Speaker 0 | 14:55.701
That’s right. And it was queries. We were lucky to have SQL and be able to put things together and just drop them into spreadsheets. We weren’t really taking things and putting them into graphical dashboards, let alone KPIs, let alone all of these different things that are just everyday products today.
Speaker 1 | 15:17.097
That’s right. This was like 2011 that I started this job. And it was right at the beginning of that stuff you’re talking about. So we’re doing ETL from databases into the Oracle data warehouse. And we bought ClickView, which was a like Tableau competitor, still is a Tableau competitor, to start building some dashboarding. But getting creative about how do we first, how do we source this data? And then how do we deliver it back to the researchers and the QA people?
Speaker 0 | 15:43.253
We answer their question within two hours of them hitting the enter button.
Speaker 1 | 15:49.417
exactly and so we were building these cool like cohort discovery tools where they could just go drill in and immediately go oh well we’ve got this many patients who meet the criteria for the study that we want to do and it was stuff that would have taken them weeks to get answers before that we could give to instantly right and and still relatively instantly because i mean uh the speed and the power of these things and and we around that time i think
Speaker 0 | 16:16.421
the really high end stuff. And maybe you got to play with a little bit at that point. And from where you were coming from in memory and, and, you know, those terms, because otherwise than that, you were diving straight back into the database, into the true database and go through all of that. And not to mention that at that point, we still had everything in that normalized database. We didn’t,
Speaker 1 | 16:38.356
yes.
Speaker 0 | 16:39.517
Non-normalized or star schema databases that expedited reporting.
Speaker 1 | 16:45.141
And that’s what we were building. We were taking data from all these disparate data sources and putting them into a denormalized data warehouse so we could do analytics on top of it.
Speaker 0 | 16:53.304
The beginning of that. Yeah. Because we wanted to be able to report faster and have all of that information and look at financial situation compared to the prognosis that they’d gotten last week.
Speaker 1 | 17:08.290
That’s right. And so I had the opportunity there to work with researchers totally outside of like. technical it’s not the stuff that i ever thought i was going to get to be involved in but working like with our cardiology team and we ended up building out what at that point maybe still is the largest pediatric cardiology research database in existence that they were able to share them with other pediatric research institutes to you want to go study data on on kids with cardiology issues we’ve got all the data that you want to see so did you guys start incorporating some of that data from those other research institutes or you just made yours available and they would cross reference or the long-term goal was to build a coalition where everybody would kind of contribute but but i i left before they got that far okay well and that’s such a huge thing because um how long or when did hippa start kicking in because that oh we were well into hippa yeah hippa was hippa came in like 96 i think so we were well into the hippa era all right yeah so And so there are a lot of conversations that we had about informed consent and how do you get consent from patients to use the data? How do we de-identify the data so we can do research on it without consent?
Speaker 0 | 18:22.404
And think about the, or, and I’m telling the audience, think about the disparity or the mind games behind that right there. You know, you’re trying to look at this data anonymized, but yet you need to know all of the things of what race, what economic status, what… all kinds of personal information around this subject so that you could have meaningful data for the research.
Speaker 1 | 18:50.243
That’s right. And every research institute has an internal review board that you have to send your research plan to and say, this is how we plan to collect the data. This is how we plan to use it. And they help you navigate. Can you do that? Is it ethical? Is it legal? How do we de-identify it so that we can actually use it? And all that stuff has to get… Yeah. run through the internal review board before you can do anything.
Speaker 0 | 19:12.191
Interesting.
Speaker 1 | 19:13.472
Okay. And I worked one of the projects that I worked on there and I’m actually published. Like you could find me in pub med somewhere for this, which is, is fun. Not really meaningful to my career, but it’s just kind of a fun bragging rights thing to be like, yeah, no, I’m published in a medical journal as like one of 10 people who worked on this project. Okay. But we, we set up a clinic for cerebral policy kids to when you have a complex medical issue like that, you tend to go see a neurologist and you go see a physical therapist and you go see an occupation and you see a speech therapist and you see, but all those doctors and therapists aren’t really talking to each other and they’re not really coordinating your care. So we,
Speaker 0 | 19:53.111
let alone having. common access to all of the records. They have their slice of the pie and that’s all they care about.
Speaker 1 | 19:59.281
Exactly. So we set up a clinic where these kids would come in and they would see all of those specialists in one day, in one appointment, one after the other. At the end of the appointment, all the specialists sat down in a room together and talked about that patient’s case and coordinated their care plan, which was, I mean, it just makes sense, right? Right. But then our part of it from the research side, oh yeah. Very hard to do and not cheap, which was part of the study that we did is once we had collected data on that for a while and compared it to patients who were being treated for similar conditions outside of that clinic. Do they get better faster? What’s their improvement rate? What’s their cost? What’s their rate of hospitalization? How often do they end up in the ER? And what we found and what the paper shows is, yeah, it’s cheaper to treat them. I mean, it’s more expensive on the front end, but the overall. healthcare costs are significantly lower and the patient outcomes are significantly better just by treating them this way.
Speaker 0 | 21:01.202
Yeah. Holistically.
Speaker 1 | 21:03.142
Exactly. Which again, makes sense, but now we’ve got the data to prove.
Speaker 0 | 21:08.103
Cool. Okay. So, so we’ve switched from breaking dad’s computer because you found this cool format command to, to helping kids with cerebral palsy to next.
Speaker 1 | 21:24.368
i don’t know what was after that i did some consulting for a while well so left to work on on kind of a long shot startup that didn’t pan out but and did some independent consulting and decided someday i might want to start a software company and i want to understand how commercial software is made wait a minute wait so someday
Speaker 0 | 21:45.523
you might want to start a software company where you’re gonna end up hunched over that keyboard again yeah i know right
Speaker 1 | 21:52.428
So I took a gig at Xerox.
Speaker 0 | 21:54.770
You said it out to me.
Speaker 1 | 21:56.131
Yeah. Took a job at Xerox as a business analyst in a healthcare software development division where we were basically gathering data from a bunch of hospital systems, spinning the data into the formatting needed to be able to send it to government agencies for star reporting and all of those performance metrics that the government likes to gather on healthcare organizations. So I was a business analyst. I was just in a… product owner on the scrum team for one of those software packages, Xerox, and then got spun off into Conduent when they split that company in half. So did that for a couple of years.
Speaker 0 | 22:32.920
Getting closer and closer.
Speaker 1 | 22:34.482
Getting closer and closer. And then took a job as a software development manager at a pharmacy. It was like a home delivery, closed door retail pharmacy in North Carolina. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 22:44.990
Were you living there or were you doing this remotely?
Speaker 1 | 22:47.356
So at that point, I was living in Charleston, South Carolina, right outside Charleston, South Carolina, took the gig in Raleigh, North Carolina, ended up moving up there for a couple of years. Started as a software development manager. The company we had. So six weeks into that job, the building burned down. So talk about disaster recovery, literal trial by fire. Yeah. So there’s there’s a lot to talk about there. But ended up right after that, the infrastructure manager left. I took over the infrastructure team, got merged with another. It was a private equity-owned company. It got merged with another portfolio company out of Nashville. Took over the infrastructure team as the infrastructure director in the Nashville site. Split between North Carolina and Nashville. There’s a whole lot of stuff to talk about in that era. But the fire is probably the most interesting one.
Speaker 0 | 23:41.587
I was going to head back to that one for a second. because we didn’t talk about that in the pre-call.
Speaker 1 | 23:48.431
No, no.
Speaker 0 | 23:49.492
So what do you think is the most valuable lesson or the hardest earned lesson from that that you carry forth and make sure that you’ve got covered going forward?
Speaker 1 | 24:05.246
Well, it’s kind of the same as the buying the business one. It’s do your risk assessment. Understand what the risk is. and make sure you know how you’re going to handle it. Because we hadn’t, and I was six weeks in and was working on a disaster recovery plan for the software side of the business. What would happen in a worst case scenario like we couldn’t get into the building? Where’s our data? How do we make it available? Because we ended up with the whole company working out of a hotel conference room down the road for like six weeks. And we had a backup of our database on the cloud in Chicago somewhere, but we had no servers because they were all in the building. So we did a whole bunch of just innovate on the fly, building computers and installing SQL and restoring it just to give them something that they can work from.
Speaker 0 | 24:53.616
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 24:54.036
So at that point, we’re just calling patients saying, hey, you’re expecting medication from us. You’re not going to get it. You need us to transfer the script out to Walgreens. We’ve got to track all that data so we can reconcile once we’re back together. But yeah, do your risk assessment, have a real DR plan in place. So you’re not just trying to figure it out standing in the parking lot going, does anybody have a hotspot so we can start downloading a database backup, which is literally what we did.
Speaker 0 | 25:24.725
How much sleep do you get those three months?
Speaker 1 | 25:27.807
Sleep?
Speaker 0 | 25:28.648
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 25:30.429
No, nobody was doing any of that.
Speaker 0 | 25:32.490
It’s ass out.
Speaker 1 | 25:34.932
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 25:35.853
You’re working out of the hotel, so might as well have a couple of rooms that you guys could just go fresh in.
Speaker 1 | 25:42.058
Yeah, exactly. That’s right. The biggest thing, I mean, other than you learn some lessons, was the… the camaraderie and the teamwork that you have six weeks later when we finally got back into our building it was a different company it was a different team because they had been in the trenches together trying to make this thing work with no resources trying to work out of a hotel but i mean we’re juggling cell phones we’re going to walmart buying track phones just so people had something to make phone calls on and at the end of that experience and
Speaker 0 | 26:13.317
we were all on the same team cool i guess that’s one way of doing it but it’s not not the best that’s
Speaker 1 | 26:21.248
I wouldn’t plan it that way. But there’s something that happens when you go through that kind of thing together.
Speaker 0 | 26:28.030
Right. Yeah. I can only imagine because wear some wood, knock on wood. I have yet to go through that experience. But any other lessons, any other advice that you want to throw out there besides that do that risk assessment and really mean it?
Speaker 1 | 26:44.134
Really mean it. Don’t assume the bad thing can never happen.
Speaker 0 | 26:47.575
So, okay. Here’s a question for you. And I don’t know, actually, I do know you’ve moved on since then, right? And you’re at a new local organization, at the new organization, and you’re trying to teach them the business, this lesson. And, you know, I think of DR plans and cybersecurity and cyber insurance and a lot of these things, unless somebody’s… burned their fingers on that stove, they’re like, well, it hasn’t happened to us. Why do we need to invest in this? I just communicate that in a meaningful way so that they really understand it and go, you know, a few thousand dollars now are going to save us tens of thousands tomorrow. We need to do this.
Speaker 1 | 27:40.562
Fortunately, the leadership where I am now is pretty astute and they’re pretty pragmatic about that stuff. So as long as you can adequately verbalize, look, here’s the risk. This is what we need to do to mitigate it. Generally, it’s not that hard, but I have because I did IT services, right? So I had to do that pitch to a whole bunch of customers who just went, we’ll be fine. And yeah, you’ve really got to sit down and go, what if this happens? You’re like, tell me, let’s play out the scenario. You get a call tonight that says there’s smoke coming out of your roof. By morning, it’s clear you’re not going to be back in your building for a while, and none of your computers, none of your technology is usable, and all your paper records burned up. What do you do next? And if they don’t have an answer for it, then, you know, let’s put a plan on paper, because you don’t want to have to be making that plan, again, standing in the parking lot.
Speaker 0 | 28:34.434
Yeah, in the parking lot. In the parking lot, as you’re being told, hey, please step back behind the yellow tape.
Speaker 1 | 28:41.698
Yeah, exactly. The firefighters are still there. spraying the water on the building and you’re going, all right, so what’s next? Maybe figure out what’s next before you get there.
Speaker 0 | 28:51.105
Who’s the boss here?
Speaker 1 | 28:54.048
Right.
Speaker 0 | 28:54.809
As the investigators are asking and the police are looking around going, okay.
Speaker 1 | 28:59.413
Exactly. And that fire was such a fluke too because we had a camera system and you can see on video where the light fixture in the paper in the file storage room where we had. boxes and boxes of archived paper waiting to go out to the off-site paper storage and the light fixture just drops and falls onto boxes full of paper records so so that’s what cost it was a figure fell out of the the light fixture literally fell out of the ceiling and landed on on
Speaker 0 | 29:31.935
the papers you know on the boxes stored in the background okay wow okay so so you you just have to have that conversation with them Got to talk to them, got to have them visualize, see it, and understand that pain. That’s right. And or, okay, what if and what’s the financial pains? Because in the business, it’s, you know, I… I hate saying it this way, but it’s too true. What’s the goal?
Speaker 1 | 29:59.870
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 30:00.611
It’s money. They’re there for a reason, which is to make money or to make profits. And they can’t do that if none of their systems are going. And where we are today, everything uses technology.
Speaker 1 | 30:16.401
That’s right. Yeah. And you have to be honest, too, on the IT side. What do we really need to plan for and what’s really necessary? Right. Because not every investment, not every disaster recovery option is worth the cost. So there really is that balance of we’ve got to do what’s right for the business. We have to not oversell it. We can’t spend more preventing the disaster than what the disaster would cost.
Speaker 0 | 30:45.575
Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 30:48.016
it’s true. We’ve got to be pragmatic about it too.
Speaker 0 | 30:50.117
Yeah, because, man, yeah. Yeah. It’s got to make financial sense.
Speaker 1 | 30:56.089
That’s right. And whether it’s disaster recovery or whether it’s security or whether it’s just technology upgrades, those are the same conversations that you’re going to have to have with the C-suite or with the board. And you’ve got to be at that level of pragmatic. You can’t just say, well, we need to do it because that’s what we need to do. Right. You’ve got to be able to communicate business value, which goes back to sitting at AT&T going, I need to learn about business.
Speaker 0 | 31:23.780
Yeah, I don’t want to end up like this.
Speaker 1 | 31:26.822
Right. But if I want to be able to have conversations at that level with the business people, I’ve got to understand it from a business standpoint. And I’ve got to be able to show them how this technology investment or the DR plan investment or the security enhancements really do honestly make sense from a business standpoint.
Speaker 0 | 31:44.974
Did you do anything to learn the business lingo or was this involvement with running your own business? with surviving a few of these things um did you learn the language from you know living it or did you do anything to actually um try to prep yourself for that i mean kind of all of the above right like i i went to college and i took marketing and i took economics and i took accounting and i took you know the
Speaker 1 | 32:15.870
most of the basic business stuff i read a lot of business books you which has kind of been the thing over my career. Because you see, I went from hardware to software to data to like all the things. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 32:28.312
And back to software.
Speaker 1 | 32:29.553
And back to software. And now I’m back at infrastructure, right? Right. And I get a lot of like, how do you learn all that? Well, you go get the book and you read the book and you figure it out. And the business thing was the same thing. It’s a lot of hands-on. It’s a lot of having the conversation. It’s some formal education. And it’s a whole lot of just… read and consume whatever information you get your hands on.
Speaker 0 | 32:51.429
Right. So let’s see, what’s your role today?
Speaker 1 | 32:57.332
So today I am the vice president of information technology and security at a healthcare company. We are primarily a PBM, pharmacy benefit management company. And we are a transparent PBM, which is different than the traditional PBM model. And we also own a…
Speaker 0 | 33:16.032
retail kind of central fill pharmacy and a couple overlay programs but so um just curious and with the legalities and with the um scheduled kinds of things that go into pharmacies um what levels of security or what kinds of things have you run into they’re outside the norm of regular security if you can talk about those because i’m not trying to you pinch you in any kind of way or or your current organization or but i’m just curious what’s what’s different about your job today in that sense than just being a um it security somewhere so i mean it’s health care which already there there are right
Speaker 1 | 34:01.871
so you’ve got hippa you’ve got you know all those health care regulatory things and not only that but just the responsibility that comes from you’ve got people’s personal private health care information and and aside from the legal obligation you just have a moral and ethical obligation to do the right thing to protect that information yeah well and and so what i’m thinking of is like you know it’s one thing to receive a truckload full of fruit it’s a whole nother thing to receive a truckload full of medical um
Speaker 0 | 34:33.573
well pharmacy um inventory and and some of that you have to be super careful with i mean you guys probably have some of the it advanced cameras with built-in AI watching, okay, if somebody’s in this area too long, we at least note it, if not set off an alert for a remote review.
Speaker 1 | 34:53.522
Right. We have a combination of what you would call administrative controls and technical controls. And some of those administrative controls are by law. They are things that the Board of Pharmacy has put in place, which is anybody who’s doing work has got to be under the direct supervision of a licensed pharmacist. So you don’t have it’s a fairly small footprint building that we’re into. But you just don’t have people wandering around doing whatever because there’s. literal physical oversight in the building to have eyes on what’s going on. And then, yeah, you have camera systems and you have software and you have tracking to know what’s happening and who’s doing what. So,
Speaker 0 | 35:34.041
all right, this gives me a chance to break into the other topics that we said we’d talk about, but we haven’t made it yet. And so now I see this is an area where some of that AI stuff could really come into play. And have some business value. Because like right now, you know, when I start thinking of business and AI and trying to implement AI on, I’m thinking of, okay, how do I take this intelligent workflow system and apply it to some process in an organization? And how do I optimize that process utilizing this advanced workflow thing, this smart workflow thing? but we’re starting to see a lot of stuff in the video and the recognition of what’s going on or identification of, of what’s going on. And, and we just talked about that a little bit. So if you’ve got control saying that Mike’s only allowed to work at this station and this station, and suddenly he shows up at that station or he’s headed that way that, you know thus here are the next steps in the workflow.
Speaker 1 | 36:46.050
Exactly. So that technology is there, which is fascinating because it wasn’t there not very many years ago, where you can start to track, oh, somebody’s hanging out in this area longer than they should be hanging out in this area and throw a real-time alert to somebody. But AI in general, I see three kind of classes of AI that I’m interested in as the business IT side. Okay. Yeah. One of them is kind of the classic roll your own, right? And this is stuff that we were starting to do at Children’s Hospital. 10 years ago, where you’re going to train your own neural network. We’re talking about natural language processing then to try to figure out how to take unstructured and semi-structured data in doctor’s notes and turn them into discrete data elements that then we can analyze. So whether you’re building your own neural network or you’re using some Python libraries to do decision tree algorithm, whatever, there’s this build your own AI tool set, which was the only way really to do it. 10 years ago, five years ago, even. And then the next class is you have the tools like ChatGPT, your Gemini, that are more like individual productivity kind of tools. So I prepare for a podcast like this, right? You can go feed in what are some good questions, throw your resume into that thing and say, give me some ideas of what I should do with my resume, all those personal productivity kind of things that you can do with those tools, which can be transformational on a personal level. And then you have the enterprise level tools where you’re starting to integrate AI into your business’s workflows. And that’s where you get into security things like that. Like, oh, this dude was hanging out in this area too long. Or rogue object detection that some camera systems do. A lot of new camera systems do now. Where somebody walks into your lobby and they set a backpack down and they walk out without it. That thing stays there for very long and you get an alert that says, hey, somebody dropped something in your lobby. You might want to go see what’s up with that. And the search tools too with camera systems where you can be like, somebody said that there was a dude with a blue shirt wandering around who looks suspicious. And you can search your camera footage for everybody with a blue shirt that day. Yep. That day in the worst-case scenario. Start here,
Speaker 0 | 38:57.318
follow every blue shirt that was in this area for the next two hours.
Speaker 1 | 39:02.179
Exactly. And then you can look at those enterprise-level AI tools for things like your call center. One of the things that we’re looking at right now is can we use an AI tool to take the transcript of the phone call, essentially listen to the phone call, and automatically generate the notes so that the agent doesn’t have to spend minutes at the end of the call writing out the notes as to what happened to the call. And we can even let AI do things like rate the tone of the call. So I can have… The analysis. Exactly. Was the client happy? Was the member happy when they talked to us? Were they neutral? Were they really mad? And then there’s all kinds of stuff that you can do with that data.
Speaker 0 | 39:44.247
I live in the southern part of the country. And so, um, down here, all of our systems, we need them to be bilingual.
Speaker 1 | 39:52.191
Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 39:53.952
Or, or trilingual because you got, you know, full English, full Spanish, and then you got Spanglish.
Speaker 1 | 40:01.354
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 40:02.954
So, um, yeah, we ran into a couple of issues or, or thoughts or questions about how do we do that? How do we, how do we get sentiment analysis when, when you have a bilingual person, um talking in english to somebody who’s speaking in spanish so you have both conversations or one conversation in two different languages throughout the whole thing and both sides are completely comfortable with that it’s it’s an interesting thing but but um so ai in a corporate environment um what are the concerns throw the security hat on tell me tell me about ai in a um business environment corporate environment with security.
Speaker 1 | 40:46.106
So you remember when Windows released what Cortana as their like build in personal assistant kind of thing, like in the,
Speaker 0 | 40:53.212
they’re still trying to get that everybody hooked on that.
Speaker 1 | 40:55.955
Right. And, and the first thing I did as a security person was we disable that for everybody because it’s like, I don’t know what it’s going to hear. I don’t know where it’s spending that data. And until I can guarantee that whatever it happens to listen to the information that it picks up is safe and secure and controllable. I just don’t want it there. And you have the same concern no matter what the AI tool is with what is the data that’s picking up? Where’s that data being stored? How is it being stored? Where is it being processed? And you’ve got to really understand the flow end to end, especially when you’re using a vendor. Don’t just turn it on and feed data into it. And even the individual productivity kind of tools. Like one of my worst nightmares right now is somebody taking a bunch of our patient data, pasting it into chat GPT and saying, find the patient with. the most whatever uh so again you’ve got to have a combination of administrative and technical controls policies and and and essentially like we block the site and you’ve got to come and talk to us if you want to use those tools from from the corporate network and we’re going to give you the lecture before before you can even get there and how are you how are you staying ahead of that because right now if if you throw in ai
Speaker 0 | 42:08.047
tools even to just google let alone any of the ai the publicly free accessible ones that you’re trying to block so gemini co-pilot chat gpt um how do you keep them from using like fathom or um otter or there’s so many different ones out there now it seems like there’s a new one every day i
Speaker 1 | 42:29.906
i think it’s the the classic business it problem uh which is why you have policies which is why you have administrative controls in addition to technical controls like you’re never going to be able to keep up with blocking everything right you So now you’re into education and you’re into policy where people have got to understand and take responsibility. Security is everybody’s responsibility. You’ve got to know what you can and can’t do. We’ll do our best to block those things. And we’ve got decently advanced security tools to try to keep data exfiltration from happening. And we keep up with that the best we can. But on top of that, we’ve got to be able to educate our user base and say.
Speaker 0 | 43:12.706
uh they don’t don’t don’t do that yeah don’t do that and and or you know just trying to put those guardrails because because we have a lot of those guardrails in place already it’s just you know we’ve got to make sure that we tie all of those um boundaries into the ai before we release the ai it’s not bring in the ai tools and and here’s the the three racks in our data center that are the ai compute And it’s our private model, so only we get to use it. But you still don’t want Dave and Janet Torrio asking the questions of who gets the most. Or, yeah, who gets the most.
Speaker 1 | 43:58.246
And that might be the biggest proponent of good customer service in IT. Because I don’t want people trying to go solve their technology issues themselves. I don’t want them going, well, which AI tool can I use? If I have a good relationship with our business users and they know they can come to us and have a good conversation and we’ll help them solve their problem and help them find the right solutions, that’s the path we want everybody to prefer. Instead of us poking around on our own, let’s go ask IT what we should use for this. And so it’s that peering and partnership. Yeah, exactly. But it means you’ve got to maintain a good relationship. And you’ve got to be kind and you’ve got to be helpful and you have to have good customer service. So people will actually come to you instead of trying to go around you.
Speaker 0 | 44:46.199
And I believe on all of those, the only other word that I haven’t heard you use, but it’s implied in a lot of all of that, is trust. They have to be able to trust you. So when you say that you’ve got this or it’s going to do that, that they can learn that it does. I mean, come on, you spent how many years doing data and how many times that you produced reports did they come back and say, this is wrong. And.
Speaker 1 | 45:12.114
And you’re like,
Speaker 0 | 45:13.615
okay, you know what? It matches all of these things that you told me you wanted. So let’s figure out what you didn’t ask for that I didn’t filter out of because we didn’t know to watch out for that parameter.
Speaker 1 | 45:29.266
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 0 | 45:30.246
Because, oh man, so many of those, at least in my career.
Speaker 1 | 45:36.731
Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 45:37.692
You know, along with those customer service. vibes that you’re talking about um one of the other things that i always found was you know just just asking that that question that a lot of it people forget why you know hey i want this okay let me go get it you know and so there’s that aspect of customer service where they i want to be real helpful i’m just going to go and and make this happen that’s right but you got to stop for a second go well wait a minute what’s your goal where are you trying to go what are you trying to do why
Speaker 1 | 46:08.561
um i’m not saying
Speaker 0 | 46:10.118
I’m not saying it in the sense of, well, why would you do that? No, I’m saying, what’s your goal? Because I want to make sure that I am center on that target, not somewhere in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1 | 46:21.004
That’s right. I have a lot of those conversations and I have a few people in my team who are very good at that. Somebody asked for something that feels a little off. Let’s jump on the phone. I want to understand exactly what you’re trying to do so we can help you find the right solution. We spend a lot of time doing that. And try not to be the department where we just go, no, no, we don’t do that. No, you can’t do that. It’s not, let us, let us help you solve the problem. And we’re going to help you solve it in an efficient and secure way.
Speaker 0 | 46:49.250
Yeah. Now you’re making me think of Mordock. Mordock, the preventer of information.
Speaker 1 | 46:55.554
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 46:56.675
Yeah. I was going to say Douglas Adams, but that’s not Douglas Adams. That’s that other guy. Dilbert.
Speaker 1 | 47:03.799
Yeah. Yeah. That was a Dilbert thing, wasn’t
Speaker 0 | 47:07.258
So if you were going to apply AI in an absolutely ridiculous place, what is the most ridiculous place that you can think of? Because I asked for a couple of those questions. I threw that into AI. And actually, I just said, give me a couple of AI talking points. And it’s like, well, imagine that AI adjusts your chair automatically for you, but yet reports it to HR when you slouch.
Speaker 1 | 47:38.398
I kind of like that. And I hadn’t, like, along those lines. Okay. I have my desk in my home office is one of those power, you know, raise and lower. So I hit a button and it goes up and I stand to work and then I can be lazy and sit down if I want to. But an AI that’ll tell me how long I’ve been sitting and automatically change the height of my desk so I’ve got to move. Would be a really interesting use. Like I would use that.
Speaker 0 | 48:09.380
You would set that up until you found yourself sitting there going like this.
Speaker 1 | 48:14.002
You got to stand up at some point, right? Exactly. No, for me, because I spent the weekend putting Christmas lights up on my house because my wife is one of those crazy people who thinks that Christmas starts on November 1st. What I’d like is to be able to feed into an AI. This is what my house looks like. These are the strands of lights that I have. Put a program together for me where I can, like, how can I get the most out of these lights? Make them flash, sync them to music, whatever. Build me a light show based on what I’ve got to work with.
Speaker 0 | 48:47.513
Nice. I like that one. And see, you know, I’m sorry, I’m lazy. I want to, like, put the new multicolor LEDs all over the house so that I can leave them up year round. And then I can have a 4th of July. I can have Christmas. I can have Halloween. I can have whatever.
Speaker 1 | 49:10.027
Exactly. I like it.
Speaker 0 | 49:12.109
And then, you know, it’s just like go over to the computer, turn on that setting for that time of year and just let it go.
Speaker 1 | 49:18.414
Let it go.
Speaker 0 | 49:19.355
And then I’m up there every year.
Speaker 1 | 49:22.958
Oh, come on. That’s half the fun, isn’t it?
Speaker 0 | 49:25.099
Well, all my kids have moved out of the house, so there’s nobody there to help me with this anymore. It’s not that much fun. And then putting them away, by that time, I’m just like,
Speaker 1 | 49:36.225
I don’t know,
Speaker 0 | 49:37.507
get this stuff, just shoving it into the box. So next year when it’s time to get it out, it’s like, oh, God, why am I such an ass?
Speaker 1 | 49:45.176
Yeah, why didn’t I take a little extra time last year?
Speaker 0 | 49:48.099
Yeah. Well, you got any thoughts, anything else, any other IT wisdom that you want to lay down on us?
Speaker 1 | 49:54.626
So I would say, again, do your risk assessments.
Speaker 0 | 49:59.829
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 50:00.389
Do your customer service. Realize that your internal users are your customers. They’re not the enemy. They might be your biggest source of breaches, but that’s why you need to make them your partners so they don’t go hide from you.
Speaker 0 | 50:14.540
Hey, the CEO just asked me to send out $500 in gift cards. I need your help.
Speaker 1 | 50:21.046
Exactly. That’s right. And everything starts with what’s the business need, right? Your technology investments, your security, all of that stuff starts with how are we supporting the business? And as techies, we tend to want to work. with the cool new slick shiny technology that’s why we got into this right so we can work with cool new stuff yeah it’s fun sometimes the business need is the simple basic boring thing um sometimes the cheapest way to achieve a goal is to have a human just pick it up and walk it from a to b that’s right yeah what what’s the need that you’re trying to fill what’s the problem you’re trying to you know everybody you see these old movies where the inventor like keeps making all of these really fascinating, but useless inventions. You know, the nutty professor and what, like you always have that, this image of like the nutty professor that’s building these things that nobody needs. We don’t want to, we don’t want to be that in IT. You’ve got to start with what’s the need. What’s the problem.
Speaker 0 | 51:28.860
You also don’t want to be, you know, I’m listening to a book right now and, and they keep referring back to the Rube Goldbrook or Goldbrook machines.
Speaker 1 | 51:36.986
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 51:37.886
You don’t need something that’s. I mean, that complicated to kick the marble down the hill.
Speaker 1 | 51:43.929
No, you don’t. And protect your credibility because when you go to the business and you say, no, no, we need this and you don’t really need that. Or you’re trying to sell something because you want to put it on your resume or because it’s the slick new thing, but it’s really not the best fit. You’re going to burn your credibility. And the next time you go ask for something, you’re going to have a much harder time convincing people. So I like to make sure that. Everything I ask for and every dollar I spend, I can justify to anybody who wants to come and talk about it. We had to do this because it’s the right fit because of these reasons. Not, well, it was in the budget. We thought it’d be cool. No, everything is based on what business need are we solving.
Speaker 0 | 52:26.257
Right back to the AI discussion, because right now that is the big shiny that so many people have. And even the CEOs and the CFOs and the C-suite and the boardroom are all going, how can we use BI or AI to make everything perfect? And it’s, okay, wait a minute. You know, you got to have those discussions. Where’s the value? How are we going to do this? Because right now, all of the vendors are going, look at this big shiny.
Speaker 1 | 52:56.785
And those big,
Speaker 0 | 52:59.727
those vendors. see it as a shiny and they have increased the price on that just because of it being shiny alone.
Speaker 1 | 53:06.869
That’s right. And the parallel of that is look at the activity that you’re doing before you think you need to go buy some technology to enable the activity. I have this conversation with the business, with business people all the time where they go, we need this process. So we need to buy this technology. And I go, well, what’s your process today? And they go, we don’t have one. Well, the technology is not going to make you have the process. Yeah. I want to get in shape. I don’t need to go buy a home gym. I need to go for a walk. And if I can’t go out my front door and go for a walk, I’m not going to use the home gym. I’m not going to use the expensive gym member. What are you doing now? Let’s use technology to enhance and enable it. Not think that the technology is going to do our job for us because you’ll never.
Speaker 0 | 53:49.582
Let’s prove that we’ll do the simplest version of it before we go for the super complex version.
Speaker 1 | 53:56.448
Exactly. You don’t have a process today for how you’re storing your, you’re managing your contracts. You don’t start with buying the software. You start with, let’s make a process and then let’s use technology to enable that process. Not the other way around.
Speaker 0 | 54:10.397
You know, I was just interviewing at a, at a company and they were talking about, you know, well, we’ve got this problem and we want alerts when this happened. And I’m like, okay, well, yeah, we, I can easily get you those alerts when. when that happened and then it took a couple of days before it sank in and i’m like wait a minute i’m gonna alert group b or i’m gonna set up i’m gonna have group c set up an alert to alert group b who will then talk to group c or d and then group d is going to go talk to the perpetrators that set off the alert. And I’m like, okay, all of this makes sense, and I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve seen it done, and it’s a normal business practice. But why aren’t we just holding the perpetrators accountable? Let’s start there.
Speaker 1 | 55:06.325
Technology is not a replacement for good business process.
Speaker 0 | 55:09.508
Yeah. Let’s look at this whole thing and really take a step back and really look at it for a moment and go, okay, what are we trying to solve? And what’s the origin? Where does this whole thing start? Because we don’t always have, technology isn’t always the answer.
Speaker 1 | 55:26.561
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 55:27.882
And it’s so hard to get us to recognize. That’s right.
Speaker 1 | 55:33.946
When you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Speaker 0 | 55:36.368
Yeah. Oh, man. And you know what? You can change a tire with a hammer and a screwdriver.
Speaker 1 | 55:44.553
You can. Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 55:46.695
You may not be able to really. Use those lookups again in the right way.
Speaker 1 | 55:50.300
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 55:52.441
But you can do it. Oh, wow. Jeff, this has been a fun conversation. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.
Speaker 1 | 56:00.245
Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 56:01.545
You got anything you want to self-promote? You want to talk to us about anything?
Speaker 1 | 56:05.407
I really don’t at this point. You can always find me on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to have conversations like this. Love talking tech, love talking business, security, AI, all that stuff. Something tells me you love guitars too. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There’s a, the guitars you see on the wall behind me are probably about half of what I’ve got here. And that literally is a lifetime of just, so I sold one guitar one time when I was like 13 and I regretted it. So I keep buying them and I’ve never sold one since.
Speaker 0 | 56:37.712
So I’m looking at eight guitars myself right now. So, or maybe it’s only seven, eight. Yeah, maybe some more.
Speaker 1 | 56:46.836
and and there’s some in cases and there’s they’re all over the place nice nice well i for years i would loan them out to people uh because i didn’t want them all in well usually yeah but i didn’t want them all in one place at one time uh because then my wife would see how many there were so i tried to keep them scattered um but i’ve i’ve managed to get them all collected back here and and it turns out i underestimated her and she’s cool with it okay well
Speaker 0 | 57:15.912
As you said, reach out to Jeff through LinkedIn and catch him there. We’re both there to provide advice and help anybody who’s looking to advance their careers. I mean, I think that’s one of the other things that we didn’t talk about. But, you know, that customer service, that helpfulness is something that I’ve always tried to bring to every team that I’ve worked with. It’s just something that I try to provide. And I catch that in you also and just trying to be of use to my fellows.
Speaker 1 | 57:51.072
That’s right. If people hadn’t taken the time to invest in me, I wouldn’t have gotten very far. I’m happy to pay that forward and help people out.
Speaker 0 | 57:58.438
Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you, Jeff. And thank you all, everybody that’s been listening to us. You know, this brings to conclusion another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. So wherever you happen to catch this. please drop us a comment and hit us with a like. Let us know what you thought so that we can continue doing this for you. So thank you very much.
