Speaker 0 | 00:09.728
All right. Welcome, everyone, back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have with us Mike Kelly on the show, Chief Information Officer. You’re one of the first CIOs we’ve had on the show. I mean, we should probably talk about what really would. what is it, a CIO versus a CTO? I’ve had this conversation before. I already forgot. You know, but kind of a big deal over at MVT Services. So we’re going to talk about, well, first of all, why are you chief information officer? And then second of all, what the heck is a railgun? Let’s just go there.
Speaker 1 | 00:48.327
Railgun, you know, it’s a gun where the payload is delivered using magnetism. So they… with a serious electrical charge and electromagnets, they can fire projectiles at super high rates of speed. Anybody that’s been reading science fiction has been hearing about railguns for decades, actually.
Speaker 0 | 01:13.958
And this is different from the someone could send out some sort of electromagnetic wave and knock out all communications. There’s speak of that that people like to talk about as well.
Speaker 1 | 01:26.824
Yeah, yeah, that’s an EMP, electromagnetic pulse, that has no, well, typically isn’t really defined or isn’t focused at a specific target. And the railgun is, you take a couple of, like, imagine railroad tracks, and you run electricity through them so that you’ve got that magnetic pulse running down those rails, and that pushes the payload out in the direction that you want. When I first heard about it, the scientists that came to our class talked about it back in, I was in ninth grade, was talking about using this as a way of getting rid of radioactive waste by shooting it into the sun or using this as a way to launch things into space.
Speaker 0 | 02:20.673
This is cool because it’s like real super nerdy. you know rail guns and electromagnetic waves and launching stuff into space and it was like ninth grade and it kind of gives us a little insight into mike kelly and and how he got started in life right so what what are we launching into space trash like what are we doing why should we be launching anything into space anyways yeah
Speaker 1 | 02:44.829
you know it was just an example that the uh the giving for it um In science fiction, they’re using it as cannons on spaceships for defense or for aggression. At some point, I imagine that they’ll make them small enough that you’ll have one as a personal weapon. Right now, it’s not economical for a personal weapon, but it’s different than the black powder weapons that we have today.
Speaker 0 | 03:20.888
uh shooting bullets you know it’s just another way of moving a projectile forward would it be silent um i you know what i probably have some kind of anger you know i have some kind of like i’m sure it could be more of a more of a silent electromagnetic guns why is it why do we always think of weapons you know why do we always think of weapons when we come up some with some new you know some technology or something you know it’s always a weapons you know we were talking about the atomic bomb as well We’re really not summarizing this well at all, but this is cool. This is exactly why we do this. Really, atomic power, right? First thought, how can we make a bomb? Electromagnetic propulsion, how can we make a gun? What’s up with that?
Speaker 1 | 04:08.489
Well, think about it, though. We actually have used this in other ways. I believe the bullet trains in Japan and… And that region of the world are running off of magnets versus other ways. So they are using it in positive ways as good energy versus, you know, diesel.
Speaker 0 | 04:32.147
It’s kind of appropriate considering the, you know, the industry that you’re in, right? So, I mean, what do you think about America’s infrastructure and our ability to move stuff around?
Speaker 1 | 04:44.814
It’s been interesting. I really never thought about it. growing up as a as a kid through my early 20s and then i got a job working at a trucking company and have now been involved in it there’s been times where we’ve had to not had to, but held into coopetition with the railroads. So there would be times that we would take our trailers, bring them to a railhead, put them onto a train, move it across the country at a lower rate than we could drive it across the country, but at a slower rate and sometimes less reliable, thus cheaper. And we… We just kind of struggled with that, and some of our customers didn’t like that unreliability of it. So we’ve gotten away from that, and that’s known as multimodal transportation.
Speaker 0 | 05:43.245
There’s going to be a ton of efficiencies to be gained that we could wrap our minds around. There’s going to be a ton of efficiencies in the future that we could be doing things differently. Kind of like… how the internet was born and how we do even network infrastructure in the United States. We spent so much money on copper. We spent so much money on digging trenches for so long. And we’ve got one of the best infrastructures in the world, but kind of one of the lower kind of behind the times as far as, you know, what’s the word efficiency, I guess. We don’t say truckers over here. We really do. I’ve got a lot of Russian friends. I would say of all my Russian friends, 80% of them are truck drivers. And I asked him, what’s the best thing about America? You know, I’m asking, I’m talking to Russians. You gotta ask me, you know, like, well, why, why America? What’s the best thing about America? And they’re like, the roads.
Speaker 1 | 06:41.249
And then I forgot how much damage companies like ourselves do to those roads every day. You know, usually when I’m driving on them, I’m feeling the bumps. You see the ruts from where all of the trucks have been going. Again, you kind of feel that. But you know what, you bring up an interesting thing to me that I run into a lot, and that’s trying to stay on the leading edge of technology, evaluated technology today, and think, oh, you know, it’s got a little ways to go, either that or we’ll latch onto it. And then we leverage it for a couple of years and not look at the evolutions of that technology so that, you know, the infrastructure that we have. in the United States and all of that copper. So we latched onto that copper, we distributed, we created this great network infrastructure. And as we consumed that and continue to consume that, other countries have said, well, you know what? Copper is not the best way. Let’s lay down our fiber infrastructure. And so they get ahead of us because of being behind us, which is really kind of an interesting dichotomy. But it’s bitten me multiple times in different ways.
Speaker 0 | 08:00.454
Okay. So back to the CIO thing real quick. Why CIO? Why not CTO? Do titles really matter? I mean, they definitely matter. That’s how I find you on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1 | 08:15.798
Those two, not really. But, I mean, I could easily try to define them based on the terms inside of them. you know information being more of the digital side and technology being more of the physical technology and so you know i if we were an organization that was large enough i could see a cio and a cto at the same organization um in my place i’m acting as both you know whether it’s the physical infrastructure or whether it’s the um the virtual infrastructure I get to deal with both sides of it.
Speaker 0 | 08:56.635
It’s kind of like what comes first, the data or the infrastructure? Yeah. I would say that, you know what I mean? Like, so from a C-level perspective, like we’ve got an IT director, we’ve got an IT manager, he’s taking care of the network, he’s taking care of the infrastructure, and we’re collecting all this data. So I think maybe the CIO comes first because now, like, how are we going to grow as a company? What are we going to do with this data? How are we going to analyze it? How are we going to turn this into reports? How are we going to use this data to grow as a company? This is just me talking out loud here. I don’t, you know, just an assumption here. The CIO might come first.
Speaker 1 | 09:36.308
Well, but I think it really kind of depends on the industry too, because that physical technology might be more of the focus than the data. So in our industry, you know, that data is helping us set ourselves apart when… kind of standardized hardware that we use within the industry. You know, a semi-truck is a semi-truck. Now there’s all kinds of things that you could do to make that semi-truck. more optimized and whether you care about that or not you’ve got to be able to measure those differences and know whether it’s actually helping or not I would think that if I was building I’m trying to think of a good example but if I was in the manufacturing business that technology of no one producing the item that we’re selling that might be more important than the information.
Speaker 0 | 10:36.304
And even more important than maybe the product because we’re certainly making tires to wear out, but we got to make those tires a heck of a lot faster.
Speaker 1 | 10:44.887
Well, and actually that’s, you know, that’s one of the side businesses that we have is a tire company. So they make a part of it so that it wears out, but they also make the core of it stronger so that you can grab that core and retread it and then put it back out on the road.
Speaker 0 | 11:04.791
Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. When the trucking company starts manufacturing tires, we’re going to get better tires.
Speaker 1 | 11:10.773
Yeah. Cause we know what we want out of it.
Speaker 0 | 11:13.153
Exactly. But you gotta,
Speaker 1 | 11:15.654
you gotta put that entrepreneurial hat on and decide, you know, at what point do you want to make more money at the tire company than you want to run more efficiently at the trucking company?
Speaker 0 | 11:27.397
Yeah. It all depends. Are we selling tires or are we making the tires for us? Um, Hmm. Wow. Double-edged sword. This kind of just kind of reminds me of your, your founder. So I think it’s always interesting how a company starts up. It’s interesting to me, the kind of duality between like a visionary leader and someone that’s like an ops leader. Do you think it can be both? Can you be a visionary leader and be the leader and also be the guy that’s like has his hands in the operations and needs everything to work like a machine? Or do you have to have like two separate minded people, two different types of. You know what I mean? I don’t know if you’ve read the book Rocket Fuel, but the book Rocket Fuel kind of talks about the two different, like behind a big, great leader, there’s an integrator, right? There’s a visionary and there’s an integrator. Like the visionary is just a crazy guy with all these ideas and like, you know, thinking he can’t stop the ideas from coming into his head. And then there’s the integrator, the guy that controls it all and kind of says, no, like we got to stay on target here. You’re going to focus on this and focus. Okay, that’s a good idea. We should layer that in. But no, you got to wait. You can’t do all this. You got to integrate all this stuff.
Speaker 1 | 12:32.911
We definitely had the two different sides. The owner had a partner or has a partner, and that partner was always kind of that visionary, that idea guy, whereas the primary owner is more of he was always that businessman. He was looking at these ideas and going, okay, I can make this much off of that idea. Let’s do this one. And, you know, he could I don’t have a better way of saying this, but his bullshitometer, you know, he could see whether it was something real or whether it was something that somebody.
Speaker 0 | 13:11.122
What’s the fastest path, the fastest path to profitability and cash and that’s the point of a business.
Speaker 1 | 13:18.748
We were working with somebody just recently and they changed one of the fundamental ways we were doing something to make their product look better. And had the owner not picked up on that. he probably would have been sold on the efficiencies that this product added.
Speaker 0 | 13:37.160
So it wasn’t really an efficiency. What was it?
Speaker 1 | 13:41.802
So it’s supposed to be an efficiency by making the trucks more aerodynamic. One of the primary things that helps make large trucks like that aerodynamic, how far away is the trailer from the tractor? Yeah. If they’re snugged up next to each other, then they make their own aerodynamics. But there’s that fifth wheel where the trailer connects in. Yep. If you leave that fifth wheel where you can move it, which is the natural design, or almost every truck is designed that way, then you can kill your own efficiency, the miles per gallon that you get.
Speaker 0 | 14:23.901
So you put that little fender on the top of the cab or something like that, that little like… diagonal thing, right? I’m assuming that that’s what that’s for.
Speaker 1 | 14:30.305
Yeah, exactly. There are dynamics. So when this, um, this vendor slid our fifth wheel back to be able to add their product to the, uh, the truck, well, our trucks became less efficient and thus he was able to show more efficiency once he added his product. put our trailer back to the position where we normally have them without their product so it’s like robin peter to pay paul kind of thing yeah and being able to catch that stuff That’s where that entrepreneurial mindset, that one that we were talking about, the business guy versus the idea guy. The idea guy is like, oh, check this out. You know, if we do this or if we do that, it’s going to pull us this way. You got to figure out what’s real and what’s not.
Speaker 0 | 15:24.893
Where do you think that exists in our industry and technology? Let’s say, for example, Cisco. Is there a lot of extra complication and a lot of extra selling and a lot of extra courses going on there? I mean, what’s the deal with that? I like to pick on them. I like to pick on them a little bit.
Speaker 1 | 15:44.814
Yes, there is all kinds of extra stuff there. I mean, it’s one of the things that we did was we went away from Cisco and our organization only to find ourselves fully enmeshed in Cisco because they purchased the technology we started using. But the benefits we got by switching away, I went from having to hire certified people who had years of experience and very specialized experience in Cisco to being able to let my help desk manager and my director by team become the network people. They no longer… had to have all of that cisco training and the na and the ccoe and you know the five separate levels or certifications of cisco yeah that’s crazy that’s why i’m a big fan you mentioned you were you were migrating to ring central and
Speaker 0 | 16:47.578
i’m a fan of ring central i am everyone knows that um not for every situation but in general i’m a fan and uh you know going from a cisco call manager to ring central is like you know my my 17-year-old daughter and my 14-year-old kid could probably manage your call center, could probably manage your RingCentral account. They could. I know they could. It would take a week maximum, and that’s overkill, to teach them how to add users, delete users, make changes, call routes and all that stuff. And they’d have to go take a course and graduate to manage a Cisco call manager.
Speaker 1 | 17:26.066
And they’d have to spend years working with it, too, to be able to do anything besides a simple setup.
Speaker 0 | 17:32.791
We used to have, I had this friend that works for Microsoft now years ago when I was at the Cisco startup. And we used to have this thing, we used to go like, that’s a stupid thing. We used to say that all the time. Like, that’s a stupid thing. And that’s just like, you know, we just had that like little catchphrase that we would say all the time. And that’s a stupid thing. Really? Come on. Like, you don’t need that. That’s just, to me, that’s inefficiency. And I don’t understand that. Maybe it’s part of, maybe they think it’s called making our customers sticky, you know, and creating this whole culture. And, you know, it’s just funny to me that a company is responsible for accreditation and courses and a whole life, spending a whole decade of taking courses. and maintaining the certs and all that stuff. It’s cool, I mean, but it’s, you know, good for them. It’s just, you know, that’s crazy. Like, at least from the telecom standpoint. So, I mean, congratulations on simplifying your life and making your team’s life, you know.
Speaker 1 | 18:37.890
That’s one of the biggest things there, is that Cisco is trying to solve absolutely every problem with their bot when it comes to interconnectivity of devices. And then… But I mean, you know, that’s stupid. They kept trying to sell me on conference, video conference technology.
Speaker 0 | 19:04.377
That’s a joke.
Speaker 1 | 19:05.618
$50,000 to $300,000 for it. And I’m going, but guys, I can get a camera and Skype for free.
Speaker 0 | 19:14.878
Anyone that’s on WebEx and listening to this podcast, this is where I always forget to take my commercial breaks. By the way, if you like listening to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, please go to the App Store and give us an honest review, an honest review of the podcast. Because I hear that if I get like 150 reviews on Apple iTunes specifically. I will be in the top 100 technology podcast. So if anyone’s listening to this, if you could be so kind, it would really be like your good deed of the day to do that. Second thing, if you are on WebEx, really, if you’re on WebEx, and I hope I don’t, you know, or any other platform, you know what I mean? Like really. Just give me a call because I can enter some numbers into a quick little spreadsheet and I promise you we’ll save you 60% of complete wasted money that is just going for something simple. Not simple, but video conferences is important. Collaboration is important. Writing on a whiteboard with a dongle in India and in Canada and in Thailand and in the UK and at the United States all at the same time and not having any latency issues or jitter issues. That’s important. But you don’t have to pay. You don’t have to pay. And you’re going to pay in many ways. Yeah. Paying time, money. Yeah. So, anyway, enough of that. Cisco does do some good things. They do. 52-port PoE gig switches. There you go.
Speaker 1 | 20:46.459
Yeah. And they’re solid devices. They run for decades. There you go. But they’re expensive. And the people that you have to hire to manage them are expensive. It’s way more complicated than you need to be.
Speaker 0 | 21:07.743
We spoke before about internships. And we talked about growth in general. Your first computer, you couldn’t use. You were a complete failure. You could not use your first computer.
Speaker 1 | 21:22.951
I don’t even remember what brand it was. I just know it was a hand-me-down from my mom who worked. for el paso natural gas and she had it working um but i was handed a a computer with no instruction manual no hint at all of how it worked um it took me a few years to recognize the fact that that it needed a tape like
Speaker 0 | 21:46.178
a cassette tape an lp for all you millennials that’s called an lp And you were in New Mexico, which is like another world in the United States. Love it, by the way. Anyone that has been to New Mexico, it’s, I mean, really, I’m from Maine. I’m in Maine right now in the Northeast, right? Just New Mexico is like a totally different world. Okay, so your computer ran on LP. You could not figure that out. You were from a small town in New Mexico. I’m summarizing what we talked about before. So, I mean, how much technology… influence or, you know, acts.
Speaker 1 | 22:29.716
That small town in Los Alamos, some of the other nerds out there have to recognize that name. That’s Los Alamos, New Mexico. You know, it’s hidden up in the mountains up north of Santa Fe, but it’s where the atomic bomb was created. And that’s, you know, one of the reasons that this keeps entering into our conversation. So supposedly the highest per capita of PhDs in the world. And, you know,
Speaker 0 | 22:57.835
I was born and raised. That’s like saying New Jersey has the most, what is it called when you have to license your product? New Jersey has the most, anywho, go ahead. Yeah, anyways, keep going. Do you have the highest number of PhDs?
Speaker 1 | 23:16.443
Yeah, born and raised there. And, you know, sitting there in school with all of these other kids. And none of us really realize the combined intelligence of all of our parents. We all know that our parents go work at this laboratory and come home and can’t talk to us because they all have security clearances and they can’t tell us about their day. But we’re provided with all kinds of other opportunities that we don’t recognize.
Speaker 0 | 23:44.986
They’re like, believe me, you need to know this. I can’t tell you why, but you need to know this. Son, you need to know this.
Speaker 1 | 23:51.842
There were, oh man, there’s so many little stories that I can tell, but the largest class I think I ever was in was maybe 30 students throughout my whole, you know, scholastic career from kindergarten all the way through high school. So all of the classes were small. We had, you know, the teachers are of quality that can have conversations with all of these PhDs. at the laboratories. We talked about my failure at that first computer, but in seventh grade, we have a classroom full of Apple IIe’s. For me, seventh grade was 1981. And so in 81, I get a chance to do some programming on an Apple IIe, and the class that they are… The program that the teacher wanted us to write was 99 bottles of beer on the wall. And all we were supposed to do was just loop through it and decrement the counter. and go from 99 down to zero and stop and um being the uh like you know i i told myself i was never going to be a programmer but i add to that program and i make it where you can do a data entry into it all he wanted was for it to display on the screen 99 bottles of beer on the wall 99 bottles of beer and then just decrement um and play those lines again well i have to add in a data entry point so how many bottles of beer do you want to do and put in 15 and then it runs through the cycle and so i i use that as a way of debugging my program as i’m creating it but you know i just it’s one of the things that i did but
Speaker 0 | 25:41.893
i didn’t recognize that how many other kids had a classroom of computers in 1981 no not many if they did it was like a high school laboratory with a punch card you know a system i mean 81 i was five so yeah let’s see i stayed back in first grade so that wasn’t even until we had the computer lab let’s see i can remember fourth grade having an apple 2e with a double disk drive so that would have been geez i don’t know what
Speaker 1 | 26:10.055
is that 87 85 somewhere in there not not the the uh two and a half inch with no five and a quarter or whatever yeah yeah
Speaker 0 | 26:22.128
The boot disk, you had to use a boot disk. And the boot disk wasn’t so that you could install Windows on the machine. The boot disk was so you could boot it up.
Speaker 1 | 26:29.554
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 26:30.855
And then take it out.
Speaker 1 | 26:31.656
You did that LBP for it to boot the damn thing up. Like, turn it on and get the cursor on the screen. But beyond that, it was just like, okay, now what?
Speaker 0 | 26:41.644
So, the thing is, is you had this kind of, you had this…
Speaker 1 | 26:47.769
There’s opportunities. Weird.
Speaker 0 | 26:49.611
Yeah, yeah. But what’s interesting, though, is to me, you said what hurt you was not doing internships with technology by the time you got to college or something. I just find that interesting. I’m trying to think of, did I have any internships? No, I worked at Jim’s Wings, you know?
Speaker 1 | 27:10.163
And so I’m working on my degree and getting a bachelor’s of business administration with a major in business computer systems. And I’m bartending. and I’m already raising a family. I’ve got my first kid, and actually by that time the second kid was already there. I’m working full-time, going to school full-time, and the classmates who are, because I didn’t go back to college until I was 25, so I’m in class with these kids who just left high school and started going to school and working on the same degrees. during the summers they go get internships and go work for other government agencies and places around the state in new mexico and when i graduated um when i was going to those job fairs they’re like okay what experience do you have well i bartended and i’ve got the highest grades in the class and all of these other guys that you’re you’re hiring came to me for help with debugging their programs um but they’re like but what experience do you have
Speaker 0 | 28:18.968
What was the job fair?
Speaker 1 | 28:20.568
Yeah, at the job fair.
Speaker 0 | 28:23.029
But what was the job fair? Just talk to me about a job fair.
Speaker 1 | 28:26.910
So the job fair, the university would put on a job fair.
Speaker 0 | 28:30.171
Do you think they still do that type of stuff?
Speaker 1 | 28:33.752
They do, because we participated in them. I send my team to these job fairs to look for people to do internships. Because of how it hurt me, I’m trying to make sure that opportunity is out there for… next generation generation after and plus you know i it gives us a chance to bring some people in and i’m telling you guys that the what i was educated in and what the real world does completely different thing yeah of course yes so you know that’s that’s one of the things that i missed out by not doing the internship i didn’t get that introduction to the real world you Until after I had my degree and had to take basically the only job that was in that degree specialty that I could get, which was working for the university that I just got the degree from.
Speaker 0 | 29:33.651
So the experience working at the, once you got the experience, what was, did that create the stepping stone? In other words, what you’re saying is if you can get an internship or you can work. in the field that you want to be in. Do it.
Speaker 1 | 29:52.760
Do it. It’ll help give you an idea of what to expect and what’s really out there. Because what I experienced in… programming in class was vastly different than what I experienced in programming for the university and trying to debug other people’s code and fix on computer problems. And so it just helped me understand more about the real world. Now, you know, when we were talking earlier, one of the things that you asked, well, was I really hurt by not having those internships? And actually, I think, you know, you brought up a good question because my time bartending, learning how to do business gave me another unique perspective that I was able to bring the natural talent that I had in programming and problem solving and blend the experiences that I had from business and problem solving in business. bring the two together and that’s what gave me I think a leg up on my co-workers at MBT. You know I was able to provide a level of customer service and I could see the problem in the perspective of business. Why is the business trying to do this and why is it important to be successful at whatever Or at fixing whatever problem was brought to me.
Speaker 0 | 31:30.585
I think ultimately what we’re saying here is you end up where you end up. Because you’re here. But what’s the real kind of like deep philosophical thing here? It’s believe in yourself and keep pushing forward. And you’ll end up where you end up. But. And the only reason why I say that is because I had my first kind of technology job, I guess, would be working for Quest Wireless doing cell phone stuff and repair and then working for large business cell phone accounts. And then I worked for Starbucks for like four years managing a store and taking care of a P&L and profit and loss and managing all kinds of craziness, security. And then when I went to the Cisco startup, the experience I had running a business and reporting and understanding gross margin and flow through profit and cost of goods and labor and understanding that 15 minutes of labor per hour, per day, per week, a month, whatever, all those different factors. really flow through to the bottom line. That made me, that experience made me the top Cisco consultant within six months.
Speaker 1 | 33:05.349
So did you ever have the experience of figuring out that sometimes technology is not the answer? And sometimes the best answer is to just let that person who’s manually pushing their way through it. do it because sometimes the amount of effort that i’ll put into trying to automate a solution or that my teammates put into trying to automate a solution um we can pay somebody minimum wage and
Speaker 0 | 33:37.147
stuff envelopes and get it done oh there’s definitely something to be said with delegation yeah well what about taking tickets i mean a lot of uh you know a lot of people don’t understand that outsourcing your help desk isn’t outsourcing your job. A lot of people don’t understand that. There’s certain things in IT that you can outsource. Sometimes you don’t, you want to bring it in-house. Sometimes it’s, no, I came to a place and my help desk was outsourced and we got to bring it back in-house because I can do it better. Other times it’s, well, this is just a complete waste of our time and we should really be focusing more on, I don’t know, business drivers and things like that. You know, using technology as a business force multiplier. And it really just depends on the situation. So I guess the answer is yes and no.
Speaker 1 | 34:21.810
Yeah. Well, context.
Speaker 0 | 34:23.670
Data center? I mean, should we host our own data center?
Speaker 1 | 34:27.971
I don’t think so anymore.
Speaker 0 | 34:31.192
Should we have Microsoft Exchange? Should we have an Exchange server, you know, sitting in a closet?
Speaker 1 | 34:35.994
Oh, my God. That was one of the hardest lessons. And actually, it was one of the greatest beliefs to get rid of that on-premise Exchange server and go to a cloud service, a software as a service.
Speaker 0 | 34:51.130
So why do people still have PBXs? It’s a box. It’s just another server.
Speaker 1 | 34:55.936
Because they’re afraid or because they think that they’ve got better control.
Speaker 0 | 35:00.482
Paid for, it’s cheaper. What are we using phones for anyways, right?
Speaker 1 | 35:04.968
Well, anymore. You know how hard it’s been to get people to set down that handset and instead pick up a headset and leverage the computer that’s involved? Now, agreeably, I don’t think a decade ago that the PCs that we had and the network connections that we had really were optimized for it. But anymore, you know, the speeds I get on my cell phone are… Absolutely amazing compared to what I got when I first started. When I used to use that AOL disk to get on the internet and the modem. Our cell phones get, what, 40 megs per second now on just a regular connection? That’s before we go into live.
Speaker 0 | 35:59.486
Sure.
Speaker 1 | 36:00.447
You know, I’ve supported offices of five to ten people. on a cell phone connection letting them do voice letting them do video having all of the activity they need because we had to we had to get an office up and running faster than i could get anything delivered to that office we used a cellular connection and fed that to the uh the router that then provided the activity for everybody you know and 10 people’s pushing it but five people easy The only problem is if they’re all gamers. If they’re all gamers or if they’re all streaming video, well, they’re going to suffer. But if they’re doing regular average work, you know, emails, whatever application, that’s a single cellular connection. They’re not providing.
Speaker 0 | 36:57.226
What do you do to manage application load?
Speaker 1 | 37:03.070
It depends on what it is and what’s going on. And usually it’s if any more, any more of the computers that we buy today, I equate it to something like, you know, buying a Ferrari and always driving the speed limit. Why? Why pay that much for a Ferrari when that VW bug is going to get you to the speed limit as fast as you need to and you’re never going to go past that.
Speaker 0 | 37:30.782
That is why I have a VW Jetta. And I could be driving around something else, but I don’t.
Speaker 1 | 37:37.308
Yeah. I mean, you can get something that makes it look flashy and stuff, but do you ever really use all 100% of your CPU and RAM anymore? And if you do, well, then you can prove it. Then you upgrade that. piece of hardware and the application constraints go away.
Speaker 0 | 37:59.677
It’s true. When my daughter was buying a, she was buying her, her Mac book. And she’s like, well, I’ve got to have, you know, a 500, whatever SSD drive. I was like, no, you don’t. I was like, cause I don’t even need that.
Speaker 1 | 38:15.689
Cause I think the thing you guys need is connection to the internet so that you can get at whatever you store online.
Speaker 0 | 38:21.653
Exactly. Exactly. How much of your business education, what was more important, your business education or your lack of internship? If you could have traded the two, would you have traded the two? Because you’re a CIO right now with education. no technology internships. And, you know, one of the biggest themes that I find on the show is that most people need to be able to sell the value of IT. Oh,
Speaker 1 | 39:06.091
and that’s okay. That’s where the business education and customer service comes in. The customer service, I think, was one of the biggest lessons for me. sales and customer service, I think, are almost the same thing. It’s a good question. I think that if I had had those internships, my life would have taken a different trajectory.
Speaker 0 | 39:35.362
You might be still managing stuff in the closet, man. You might still be working the server in the closet.
Speaker 1 | 39:39.624
Yeah, well, I still have multiples of those, but I’m trying to work on getting rid of them. It’s just… Certain things are hard.
Speaker 0 | 39:47.747
That’s because they’re like AS400s or something.
Speaker 1 | 39:49.548
Nope. That’s part of it. The AS400s and all of the ancillary systems that feed off of that damn thing.
Speaker 0 | 39:59.896
Or some weird old CRM that has some soldered… license on a chip somewhere.
Speaker 1 | 40:07.333
Soldered dongle to the back so that nobody can pull it out.
Speaker 0 | 40:12.177
My kids are ready to come in and invade this podcast any second. It hasn’t happened yet. It hasn’t happened out of the 88 podcast, but I can tell it’s about to happen. What else we got? As far as a piece of advice. piece of advice for people in IT that didn’t get to grow up in, you know, Los Alamos. Am I pronouncing that right? You know, with a very, you know, privileged PhD family, family of PhD holders, you know, and an LP running.
Speaker 1 | 40:47.763
I’ve been part of the PhD group, but, you know, just that it was that the culture of that. And I am recognizing the fact that, yes, it was very privileged in those sense.
Speaker 0 | 41:00.172
You get to ride on the, you get to ride on the curtails of the other people in the PhD town. Okay. And, but no, but being serious, the modern day kids, my kids don’t know. My kids do not know what it’s like to not have a device that has a touchscreen on it. Okay. They don’t know. My one year old child swipes the TV, tries to swipe the flat screen TV in the house.
Speaker 1 | 41:27.967
Oh. Because they expect it. That’s what everything else does. Why doesn’t that? Come on, Dad, fix it.
Speaker 0 | 41:35.459
What are they going to do when the earthquake happens and all the cell phone towers go down? I mean, I’m just saying, what’s the advice?
Speaker 1 | 41:43.523
Oh, well, that advice is different than where I was going to head.
Speaker 0 | 41:47.185
You’re like, that is like quickly get online and start Google. Oh, wait a second. No,
Speaker 1 | 41:52.848
in that case, get off the device, go outside, and don’t care, man. Go find it. But find out what it’s like to get away from a cell signal where, you know, if you don’t have a hand crank power generator, your device will die within 12, 24 hours. You know, get out there.
Speaker 0 | 42:16.475
Just don’t go into the wild. Just don’t go to Alaska and live in a bus.
Speaker 1 | 42:21.139
Maybe.
Speaker 0 | 42:22.560
That could happen. You know, that’s the extreme. We’re on such extremes lately. It’s like, what is, what happened in the middle path? Yeah. What happened in the middle?
Speaker 1 | 42:30.986
Houses or the tents on top of vehicles. Have you seen those?
Speaker 0 | 42:35.329
I’d have to have, I thought of the tiny houses thing before. I’d have to have at least 10 of them.
Speaker 1 | 42:43.293
Yeah. For your family,
Speaker 0 | 42:45.034
yes. I was thinking when I, when I moved, I actually thought of, there was two properties. The house they were in now. And then there was like this, like. little piece of property with this like group of like motels on it and i actually contemplating buying it and like renovating it was a kind of a horror movie like you know like some like rundown like you know like kind of like hotel thing and my kids were like that’d be kind of cool we could each have our like own little house i was actually contemplating it and then i got real so no for real though what’s what’s the piece of advice and and something you know what do we have this real concrete here maybe different well
Speaker 1 | 43:24.844
There’s a couple pieces of advice that I always try to give the new members on our team. And one of the first ones is to ask why. Understand why. What is the person trying to do? Because, you know, working at a help desk or managing a help desk, and now it’s just a subcomponent of the overall. But people come to IT or to us and they say, I need this. And they tell us. how to provide them with the solution that they’re looking for. They don’t tell us what they’re… So I’ve taught my people to find out what that goal is because there’s lots of times that I’ve found out that I have a better path to the goal than the co-worker that’s bringing me the problem. They’re bringing the problem. They’ve used the tool set that they know of to create a solution. And there’s been times where I’m like, wait, we don’t need to do all of that. Watch what you can do in Excel. Or guess what? They’ve already built this report. Here’s the menu option where it is.
Speaker 0 | 44:35.823
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s some real Stephen Covey stuff there. Start with the end in mind.
Speaker 1 | 44:40.227
Yeah. Find out what the goal is because then there’s times that you can just get to it. and help them. And then the other thing is a philosophy of mine, and that’s around that customer service, and it’s follow up, follow through. So, you know, if I fix something for you, Bill, and you say, okay, cool, that’s good. And we walk away. Well, I need to come back to you in a day or two and say, hey, everything’s still good?
Speaker 0 | 45:13.484
And,
Speaker 1 | 45:14.125
you know, that’s the follow-up. And then wait like two more weeks and come back again and say, everything’s still good? Because in my experience, people will tend to hold on to the problem. And suddenly, you know, you walk through the main room of the building that you work at. Suddenly, they’re like, oh, hey, Mike, hey, Mike. And suddenly they just dump all these problems on.
Speaker 0 | 45:42.276
Or you get weird stares.
Speaker 1 | 45:43.857
Yeah. So now I’ve got all of these things fixed. But if I keep coming back and making sure that the things that I’ve fixed actually got fixed and it hasn’t morphed into a new problem, then the. satisfaction of your coworkers and your customers will be huge.
Speaker 0 | 46:06.056
Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up.
Speaker 1 | 46:07.777
Yeah, follow-up, follow-through. It’s two distinct actions. You’ve got to make sure that you’re taking care of it. Do all those things, and then it becomes real easy to sell the technology. I mean, selling technology when you can prove that you can get to the goal isn’t hard. It’s sell, it’s sell.
Speaker 0 | 46:29.738
Yeah, it’s the little things, you know, I had a manager once that said TLT all the time. The little things can be, you know, for a user, if there’s this one little annoying thing or this thing that’s always getting in the way, it’s like the whole thing’s annoying.
Speaker 1 | 46:42.666
Yeah. And if you show them the shortcut and not only one of the other things that I’ve always done too is I never tell somebody here, just move and let me sit there. I show them how to, I walk them through fixing it. so that now they can fix that problem and tomorrow they’ll bring me something more interest versus that same damn thing if i keep pushing them out of the way and fixing it for them you know it’s that that uh saying of you know um teach a man to fish yeah yeah so you know i’ve always been a you’ll feed them for a lifetime how many people my career that like poured their knowledge They feel like their worth is defined in what they know. So they’ve got to keep that from you because otherwise sharing that knowledge takes away their value.
Speaker 0 | 47:37.607
Yeah, that’s when those people become replaceable real quick.
Speaker 1 | 47:40.550
Yeah, and you want to replace them because you want people, you want everybody doing things. But the more that everybody in our organization understands IT and leverages that IT, the more interesting. puzzles and problems and challenges that they bring.
Speaker 0 | 48:00.625
I had a very good IT manager director for a pretty large company the other day say, Phil, look, man, I like to be lazy. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know about all these IT directors that are saying like, I need to work hard. Honestly, I like to be lazy. Help me be lazy. In other words, automate. Get this crap off my plate. No, I don’t do this.
Speaker 1 | 48:25.487
let me just be honest with you let me tell you a little secret about it directors they really don’t work hard they want to be lazy you know and they want to do it like let the system handle the work that’s that’s why i’ll spend so much time trying to automate something that i should just let a
Speaker 0 | 48:41.101
manual process like my headline on linkedin’s like i help busy it directors or how can busy it directors you know streamline or you know whatever it is right now i felt like changing it to like I help lazy IT directors become more lazy.
Speaker 1 | 48:58.891
Yeah. It’s true, but I don’t think it’s true.
Speaker 0 | 49:02.133
No, you’re not going to be like, no, haha. Yeah. It has been a pleasure having you on the show. And there’s more that we could probably talk about, like more atomic bombs and magnetic rail guns. Rail guns. People Google that. Google rail gun. They’re probably already, everyone already knows it. And I’m not the nerd. So thank you so much. Been a huge pleasure having you on the show and we look forward to having you on again in the future.
Speaker 1 | 49:33.226
Yeah. Appreciate it. And we’d love to come back. Thank you.
