Speaker 0 | 00:09.562
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have Doug Barry on the show. We’re completely winging this. He might have some construction going on in the background. Hopefully, you’ll probably hear my kids running around going crazy. And we’re super lucky. We might get Zoom bombed and record this whole thing, and then we can fearmonger everyone with why Zoom is so insecure lately. But with that, welcome to the show, Doug. And I guess my first question for you is you have a really, really cool LinkedIn background with a bunch of, I’m assuming, electrical bikes that people rent and maybe put their credit card into. Tell me all about that.
Speaker 1 | 00:52.382
Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. Very excited to be here. Um, and, uh, it’s funny that you, uh, you mentioned that actually, that’s, uh, probably one of the most, um, most fun projects I’ve ever worked on. Uh, don’t know if, um, if you’ve seen a lot of the rentable bike sharing schemes that are popping up in big cities all over the place, but that started about 12 years ago or so in, um, 12, 14 years ago in, in Paris and, uh, Montreal had one. Basically the concept was if you provide a cheap mode of transportation, uh, to people, um, that is healthy, gets, uh, gets cars off the road and, um, you know, and, and helps people get some exercise in. And so, um, a couple of cities that done it, uh, mixed results, uh, and London decided that they wanted to, uh, take a stab at this. And it became one of, um, uh, London’s, uh, uh, London mayor’s, uh, two flagship programs. Uh, uh, one was a, uh, cycle super highway, uh, it was called, which was basically some uh, dedicated bike lanes, uh, the Cardinal points outside the city into the center of London. And then the other was basically the, uh, the bike sharing scheme, um, that mayor actually ended up, uh, you know, as you know, uh, being the prime minister now, uh, Boris Johnson, he, um, he reached out, uh, to a number of companies and said, Hey, how would you, how would you do something like this in a way that, uh, makes it cost effective, um, uh, sustainable, uh, and, basically make all this stuff happen. And so, um, I kind of got, uh, uh, the opportunity to work on the integration strategy for something like this. You know, what would the plan look like together to pull something like that off? And, uh, that one is the contract. Um, and then, uh, ended up getting to actually lead the implementation of it. So, uh, if you go to London and you see bikes all over the place, uh, that was me.
Speaker 0 | 02:51.359
That’s awesome. I actually have, you know, So I lived down in Northern Virginia for a long time. So probably not too far from you. And I lived in Percival for like almost four or five years. And last time I went down to DC, everyone’s riding electric scooters around and there’s bikes and everything. So I was just looking at it. Like how often do those, how often do those just get stolen or someone try to break into it? Or is it even impossible? And how often do they break down? And does one go like a, like a blip off the map off to like, you know, I’m assuming they, have some kind of GPS or wireless? I mean, how does it work? And this is probably completely way off subject, but I’m sure there’s plenty of people that want to know how this stuff works.
Speaker 1 | 03:32.357
Oh, yeah, no, no, no, absolutely. And the technology has certainly improved. We did the London Cycle Project in 2009, 2010. So it’s been over a decade ago. And now you can see these bird scooters and all these other different, you know, rentable electric personal vehicles all over the place. And The technology certainly gotten more sophisticated, but at the time when we did this, it was basically your rental of the bike was tied to a credit card that you had to insert. And basically you get billed accordingly once the bike was returned. And if you didn’t return it, there’d be some kind of a penalty charge. But the funny thing was, Phil, that the earlier schemes, especially the one in Paris, it became kind of a fad to actually take one of the Paris bikes. to some iconic landmark someplace else in the world and take a picture of it. So pictures of the bikes at the pyramids and Angkor Wat, these different places. But one of the things we wanted to do was come up with a way to actually do this where the steam wouldn’t get ripped off because people thought it’d be funny to take a bike and leave it someplace hundreds of miles away. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 04:43.873
All right. So do we have any statistics, any statistics on any of that?
Speaker 1 | 04:48.334
On, on, on the, on the, the theft of them? Nothing that I know of off the top of my head.
Speaker 0 | 04:52.835
Obviously it wouldn’t be that bad. It can’t be. I think in general people are like, if you trust them in general, if you trust people and you put something out there, they think there’s no way I can get away with this or they’re just, you know, trustworthy in general. I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 05:07.459
I think with a lot of people, it becomes an intellectual challenge. Like how would I, how would I actually do that? Right.
Speaker 0 | 05:12.501
Yeah, I’m actually, I was thinking about it. I was looking at it. I was like, wait a second, that’s going to be hard to break into. It’s probably like an ATM machine. Then once you do, there’s probably these alarms that go off that knows once someone’s broken through the, you know, like thinking of all these things, like how did they engineer this so that it was, you know, there was a return on investment in actual, this, you know, project became self-sustainable or profitable or whatever it was for whatever the reason, because obviously it was, you know, in London, it was part of, you know, like a public service type of thing. So it was probably like, I don’t know if they wanted to break even or pay for something in public or, you know, create, like you said, better for health, health and wellness, which is awesome. Didn’t think about that. I don’t know how, I don’t know how healthy scooters are. I’d be more dangerous because they’re always crossing traffic and everything.
Speaker 1 | 05:55.928
Well, and people leave them all over the place. I can’t tell you what statistic I love to see is how many people have broken a bone tripping over one of those things, especially around here where I live in Arlington. But no, I mean, what, you know, one of the things that we, that we did when we built the scheme was actually a, network operations center that actually tracked the whereabouts of bicycles or, you know, the bikes that were actually currently in use. And so we had visibility into all of that. And you couldn’t take the bike out of the rack until it had read and verified a credit card. And so had, you know, had that kind of information security around the prospect of theft of the bike. So, um. Yeah, no, I mean, it was great. The integration challenge was amazing on that project. We had aspects of construction because we built permanent sites all around the city. We had aspects of software development. We had payment card industry standards that we had to meet. We had a supply chain because the bikes were manufactured elsewhere and shipping. I mean, it was massive. And we pulled this whole thing off in about 14 months. Nice. You know, on time and under budget.
Speaker 0 | 07:12.584
So this is actually a really good example of, I mean, IT leadership and or trusting IT leadership. And it’s a good example. And, you know, whether it be Boris Johnson or however it is from top down, it’s a good example of someone from the very top realizing that there’s a vision for something. And the only way that we’re going to make that vision come to fruition is if we bring in the right nerds. Yeah. You know what I mean? And quite frankly, honestly, you know, it’s the opposite of a cost center type mentality, which a lot of people are battling all the time. They’re constantly fighting for dollars, fighting for IT to get a seat at the table, fighting for, you know, technology to not have to kind of beg for scraps from the table from the CFO. I mean… This is a great example of where technology was the winner and really the leadership were asking technology, hey, can you make this happen? Is it possible? And then it was all, you know, pretty much thrown in your hand. How do you manage the budget of a project like that? I mean, how did you, where do you even start?
Speaker 1 | 08:22.718
Well, gosh, so we had a program plan of over 14,000 lines of manageable, trackable, specific. work items that had to be performed. And we had people basically accountable for each of those and accountable not just for their completion on time, but also for the dollars that one were estimated for each of them and also were then subsequently spent. I had the great, I guess, luxury of being what they termed over there as the technical authority. So I did not have to manage money, which was great. We did come in under budget, but it certainly wasn’t as a result of my, you know, physical stewardship as much as my involvement in making sure that dependencies across different components of the program, you know, never became roadblocks or something blocks for us.
Speaker 0 | 09:24.857
Gotcha. Well, let’s take it into where we sit right now. So you’re in Arlington. Well, you’re in, I guess, Vienna. Give me a kind of like, what’s the general overview of your role right now? What’s the environment like right now? And how do you manage? uh, maybe what are the dynamics between cost center versus moving the company forward is what’s the environment like where you’re at right now with, you know, business shutdown and all kinds of things going on around.
Speaker 1 | 09:57.016
Sure. Um, great question. So, you know, one of the things that, that, that I personally am seeing at, at my company, um, uh, at accelerate solutions is that, uh, this whole pandemic has, uh, has been a bit of a forcing function for a number of things. Everybody has virtualized, or not everybody, but the vast majority of companies are going virtual, are putting things in the cloud, are trying to not be responsible for their own infrastructure. And the common reason, or one of the many reasons that people will throw out there is, well, we want to be able to work from anywhere. Well, the reality is that… this pandemic has actually forced people to prove that they, they, they really can. And, uh, you know, I spent a, or at least, you know, in the last, last month or so, I’ve spent quite a bit of time, you know, making sure shoring up those little pockets of, uh, uh, uh, I don’t want to call it, um, little, little items where there was, um, uh,
Speaker 0 | 11:04.267
uh, maybe weird little hybrid things where there’s,
Speaker 1 | 11:08.028
it’s everything from making sure that, um, The consultants that we have that support the federal government have the equipment that they need to be able to actually work remotely from home, making sure that in doing that, that we’re secure. We’re not introducing any security risks.
Speaker 0 | 11:25.501
Yeah, that actually brings up a really great point. I bet you there’s a lot of shadow IT that has appeared that has become very apparent throughout this. pandemic.
Speaker 1 | 11:42.958
Absolutely. I mean, I think the biggest observation, kind of like the nicest byproduct of this whole thing that I’ve seen is that I think IT is actually looked more now as an essential ingredient and business enabler. I mean, when you think about in our space, and we do technology consulting to the federal government, a lot of our folks are on site at the government. on government equipment. And so as a result, the government’s had to make some concessions to be able to allow people to work remotely.
Speaker 0 | 12:20.977
Are you saying security, like security concessions?
Speaker 1 | 12:24.878
Architectural concessions. And yeah, to some degree, some security concessions.
Speaker 0 | 12:30.201
Temporarily, I’m assuming temporarily.
Speaker 1 | 12:32.342
Temporarily, yeah. But for us as a company, what I’m seeing is that now, we’re not a cost center. I don’t think we’re looked at as a cost center. I think really what we’re looking at now is an essential component to being able to continue to operate during a situation like this. This has been probably one of the best tests of crew plans that any business could undergo. And I think what’s going to happen is the smart companies are going to look at this after it’s over and we return to whatever normal looks like in the future. And I don’t think it’s what it was before the pandemic. I think that the smart businesses are going to look at, you know, what did we what did we find? What worked? What didn’t work? You know, what did we think we have or what did we think that we could do that we couldn’t do? And why? Why couldn’t we do those things? You know, I look at this as a as a great learning opportunity. You know, I jokingly told my little girls who are six and eight, someday they’re going to tell their grandkids about the great pandemic of 2020 where they look at it like they had three heads. But I will tell you, I think that the smart CEOs, the smart CIOs and technology leaders are going to look at this and say, hmm, that would not have worked had we not had X, Y, and Z. Or that didn’t work. And as a result, we’re going to do these three things, right? To run. We better prepare ourselves for something like this if it ever would have happened again.
Speaker 0 | 14:09.062
Yeah, there’s so much there. I hear a lot of stories. I’ve got people emailing me on a daily basis. I have people calling me on the verge of mental breakdown. I have people telling me that everything is fine, business as usual. We were great. We were totally prepared. I have people that say, kind of in the middle, like you say, we’re finding a few things here and there. The people that call me on the verge of almost breaking down, it’s usually in a company that… was severely impacted by this pandemic. So they had to lay off staff. They had a 40% reduction in force. So IT director also loses a few staff members. And what ended up happening was because your IT department, and this is in numerous cases, because your IT department is kind of like the hub for, hey, we need your laptop screens cracked. Okay, like, you know. drop it off at the IT department or, you know, send it to us and, you know, we’ll send you a replacement. What’s ending, what’s ending up happening is some of these IT guys, they’re, I mean, I even have someone with like, you know, they might live in an apartment or they might live in a condo, right? Or even their house becomes the shipping hub for all equipment, mouse, keyboards, laptops. I mean, everything and they now have less staff and you have people that never worked from home before, uh, literally asking how to use, you know, you know, things that should be basic. Like, you know, I guess Mike, I wrote, I dropped it down this little question before, uh, before we got on, which is, uh, what’s your philosophy on old school learning new school, i.e. soft phones for the elderly. And I mean that with all due respect, but, um, yeah. These guys are getting completely overwhelmed and they’re taking a pay cut. They’re still employed. And I’ve had numerous people say, I think I’d rather be unemployed right now. I would rather be one of the people laid off than one of the people taking a pay cut and just being absolutely the whipping post for everything. I don’t even know if that’s a question. I’m just like, what do you think about that? What do you say to that person?
Speaker 1 | 16:38.589
It resonates. It hits home with me because I’ve done a great number of the things that you’ve just mentioned, with the exception of saying I’d rather be laid off right now. Because for me, again, I look at this as a great learning experience and an opportunity for us to improve how we as a business operate, how we better prepare ourselves. But I’ve had equipment from Dell shipped directly to my place. I’ve taken phone calls from folks who forgot how to use RSA when they log in for two-factor authentication. Those are real world issues and challenges that this is presenting to IT. They’re certainly not the only ones. But yeah, I mean, I completely get it. And the thing is, Phil, I’ve got a great number of friends that work in the restaurant business here or that work in the-You guys have the birthplace of five guys. Yeah. Well, hey, exactly.
Speaker 0 | 17:34.084
You know, near and dear to my heart. Anyways,
Speaker 1 | 17:36.845
keep going. So many of them are out of work. And it’s a completely different kind of struggle. So I look at this and I consider myself, as an IT professional, truly fortunate because several things are happening. One, IT is being looked at as, hey, this is a way that we can continue to stay in business, that we can continue to keep our doors open. And two, it’s… I don’t want to say providing justification for some of the things that we’ve been fighting for for some time. But one of the things that, a concept that I actually spoke on another radio program about once was the challenges that CIOs in the federal space have. And it’s not, it’s just the federal CIOs, but it’s a bit more stark there. And I can explain that. But CIOs typically and CTOs typically have responsibilities that increase disproportionately with their degree or level of authority. So what do I mean by that? If you think about some government departments, certain government departments have been around for a couple hundred years. You know, they’ve changed over time, sure. But there are established roles within those government organizations like the CFO. There’s always been a person responsible for the money, the treasurer, whatever, the finance. I mean, that’s a relatively, in the grand scheme of it, a relatively new position, new role, new thing. And so I’ve, over the last decade or so, supported a number of CIOs across federal government.
Speaker 0 | 19:23.804
Let me just summarize that first. Responsibilities increase disproportionately with level of authority. And I’m just, I’m asking, are you saying that maybe… Job summaries are not accurate. People are asking or making unrealistic requests to make the new space program happen inside the business, for example, metaphorically speaking? Is that what you’re saying?
Speaker 1 | 19:55.105
Yeah. I mean, I’m not sure that it’s necessarily that job descriptions are inaccurate or anything like that. But the reality is that everybody looks at IT and is like, oh, that’s the IT guy’s responsibility. But the reality is that in order to be able to satisfy the IT requirement. it takes money. It takes an investment. It takes resources. And it’s not usually the technologists or the head of technology that has the authority to pull the trigger on, you know, a $50 million investment.
Speaker 0 | 20:28.591
So alignment, alignment is off.
Speaker 1 | 20:30.712
That’s exactly right. So like, I think of one particular example, I supported the CIO at NOAA for a number of years. And NOAA is a very interesting organization because they are the only U.S. government organization besides NASA that puts rockets into space. And a lot of people don’t know that. But the NOAA mission actually goes from the bottom of the ocean into outer space. So the research and development, I’m sorry, the research, if you will, of like the seabed and those things, all the way to the weather satellites that circle the globe. Sweet. Six different. line organizations, vastly different missions, all of them with their own specific mission-related requirements. And then you have, at the headquarters level, a CIO that’s responsible for making all that stuff happen. Well, a couple of things that were challenging is that the CIO didn’t control the budgets of these six line offices, couldn’t enforce standards or even control procurement. Until he got creative and said, you know what, I’m going to put a vehicle together, a contract vehicle together that’s mandatory use for anything IT related. There’s infrastructure IT. And that’s what he had to do. Wow.
Speaker 0 | 21:50.867
That’s actually pretty genius. It is genius. It forces other people to do the ridiculous, crazy work of asking for money and everything. It forces them to make all the arguments. And it takes that. responsibility off your plate. But not only that, it doesn’t, that’s so important because it’s somebody else asking for the money.
Speaker 1 | 22:14.192
Exactly.
Speaker 0 | 22:14.992
Like we always used to, you know, I used to be very heavily like trained, like direct Salesforce guys. And like, I used to always tell people like, you know, when you say it, it’s skeptical when the customer says it, it’s real, right? Like if you say it, it’s just like when the IT guy asked for the money, they’re like, I don’t know. But when other people, when the end users are, are, kind of requesting it through that contract vehicle, like you said, I mean, they’re probably not end users. You tell me it’s whatever other entity that is proving the point that you need the money to give to you and they’re doing it for you. That’s pretty powerful.
Speaker 1 | 22:49.049
It is. I mean, I think that’s the same sort of thing is happening now with the pandemic, right? People are saying, I need this to be able to work remotely.
Speaker 0 | 22:57.333
Can we break that down, break that down real quick? So how was the contract vehicle or how? was it like an RFO? Was it like, you need to do this, you need to do that. And so here’s just to summarize again, in case anyone’s lost or hasn’t kind of put two and two together, because I see this stuff every day and I totally get what you’re saying. So you have alignment off between really what is being requested of IT. So IT, they’re saying, yes, you know, we get it. We understand what you’re asking for and yes, we can do it, but guess what? We don’t have the money, but we don’t have the authority. to get the money to spend the money. That’s what I’m assuming. I mean, that’s my real first grade summary of that.
Speaker 1 | 23:40.543
No, that’s a good summary, Phil. That’s actually spot on.
Speaker 0 | 23:45.084
But then what the solution is, is basically is what you’re going to lay out right now.
Speaker 1 | 23:50.567
Right. So what this particular CIO had to do was figure out a way to be able to influence the spend decisions in such a way that he could. achieve those things for which he was responsible. Security across the enterprise.
Speaker 0 | 24:08.015
Okay. So let’s hit that one because everyone’s complaining about security. No one has money for security until there’s a breach and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So how would they, how would he do that? Like, let’s just use that. Let’s hit that one up first.
Speaker 1 | 24:18.721
Well, so, so he did that the same way that he insured standardization and insured business alignment. He basically made that a component of what had to be submitted. as a part of any request coming into the contract vehicle. So if somebody wanted to buy something, say a computer system, they had to answer certain questions. One, was it budgeted? And where? If so, you know, was it was it budgeted? Was there something Was there a, let me take this over. That’s okay. Budgeted. Was it budgeted?
Speaker 0 | 24:55.090
We can make them up. I don’t care. We can make these up right now.
Speaker 1 | 24:58.812
Was it budgeted? Was it in alignment with the enterprise architecture that the CIO had developed and had promulgated out to the line offices? Because in the past, before they had to go through this vehicle, the CIO’s office, you know. The figurehead was just saying, hey, we want to do this, but everybody else would just say,
Speaker 0 | 25:19.410
yeah, that’s, you know. I get it now. So, again, man, this is hitting even more. So, it really is in alignment with our policies and procedures handbook, kind of.
Speaker 1 | 25:28.556
Including security.
Speaker 0 | 25:30.717
But also, oh, and in alignment with security, but also it’s preventing all those stupid decisions that get made without IT involved.
Speaker 1 | 25:40.322
Well, and even without… big picture involvement, because if you think about it, you know, why, why would one particular office go out to five other offices to say, Hey, do you have an enterprise wide license that I can actually hang on to and, or, or, or jump on board with so that we don’t have to spend this money twice? There was, you know, there, there, there was duplicative spend, you know, all across the organization. So there was an awful lot of opportunity to save. And I mean, as a taxpayer, you know, I’m not a taxpayer. I got a huge kick out of that every time something was identified that somebody wanted to buy that we already had somewhere else in the organization that they could use without additional costs. So, I mean, there was that.
Speaker 0 | 26:25.175
Wait, explain that again, because we might go down the rabbit hole of how much money people actually do spend in D.C. and how I saw money being spent while I was there. I don’t know if we want to open up that door.
Speaker 1 | 26:35.841
It’s a big can of worms. But, I mean, the point is just to identify. to have a way centrally to identify duplicative spend and avoid it. It’s cost avoidance, essentially.
Speaker 0 | 26:48.906
It was great.
Speaker 1 | 26:50.226
It was a very, very neat thing. So I want to pull that back, though, Phil, and kind of tell you a little bit more about the concept of what I saw, because that was just one example. What I was seeing was that CIOs were doing things all over the place, having to be creative, crafty, figure out. ways to get past the fact that they didn’t have the authority to meet all of their responsibilities, all the things, you know, all the roses that had been pinned on them.
Speaker 0 | 27:22.517
Yep, yep, gotcha.
Speaker 1 | 27:23.978
So, you know, I think of another example, a CIO that, you know, over a, let’s just say, a national organization located, you know, all over the country, but Everybody, you know, each particular area of the country doing things their way with their own money, and they were actually using money that wasn’t really intended to be used in that way to create systems, to field systems, and then not having money to actually maintain those things. Anyway, the long story short was this CIO said, you know what, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do a roadshow. We’re going to go around the country and do IT security and resiliency audits, which everyone’s supposed to do anyway on a regular basis. And we’re going to use that to uncover how many systems are out there in the field that weren’t authorized by headquarters. And so as to not do that in a way that could be viewed as threatening, we will go ahead, we’ll document those systems. And if it’s something that we can’t support because there’s nothing headquarters approved already for that particular capability, we will write a business case justification to get money to actually support those systems. Great plan. It was basically going out there, doing some work for field organizations that they were on the hook to do anyway, but weren’t doing, presumably because they just didn’t have the resources. But thereby also getting visibility into exactly what does the enterprise technology portfolio look like. Another example of just going about… satisfying all the responsibilities in a way that got around the fact that they didn’t have the authority to actually mandate things.
Speaker 0 | 29:14.712
So let’s put, I just need to kind of like connect the dots here. So alignment’s off. People know IT need to make it happen. IT doesn’t have the authority to spend. So how do we influence the spend by putting together basically making other people argue, argue their, basically argue to IT, like what, you know, I guess, argue to IT or, and then you can, you can send that to whoever to get it, to get it approved. But how do we… I guess, how do we draw the line together? How do we use this to provide more authority for IT? You know what I mean? How do we bring it all together?
Speaker 1 | 29:57.012
Well, you know, it’s funny that it takes something like a pandemic for that to become apparent, I think, to a lot of folks. I think, by and large, it’s always… I don’t know. It’s not a problem until it’s a problem, right? Just like a breach, right? Well, we don’t have to worry about that. It’s not going to happen to us, you know, until something does happen. And then it’s like, well, why didn’t we, you know, why didn’t we secure, you know, against that particular intrusion? And it’s because nobody wanted to spend the money. On one of your previous shows, somebody had made a comparison of, you know, what if it costs five bucks to secure a… a particular virtual box, but it costs $15,000 to reconstitute each box. Fantastic example, right? Yeah. But you could take that same construct, and it’s true of almost every aspect of IT. It’s like, you know, do we really need this? Not until you really need it, but the point is, is when you really need it, you’re not going to have it in time without spending a lot more money. It’s… It’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s doing things now is always going to be cheaper than doing things later when there’s a crisis.
Speaker 0 | 31:24.844
Well, here’s the, here’s the big one. Here’s the other big one. And this is, I think, true of anybody. But how does, how does an IT leader effectively manage their time and where they spend their time? And how do we prevent? A lot of the process and procedure can slow down exponential growth of an organization because, at least in the government space. And the only reason why I say that is because I’m like a big not a fan. I’m a big not a fan, if that English makes sense. I’m a big not a fan of long RFP process. Yeah. And I’m not a fan due to, and I have friends that are, you know. Alaskan, tribally owned, women owned, 8A, service disabled, veteran status, middlemen government, you know, guys. And anyone that understands that at all will kind of understand what I’m talking about and why do they exist. They exist purely to most of the time cut the eight month bid process down to say a couple of weeks or something and then allows, you know, and then there’s other monetary pieces to that as well. But. How do we stay ahead through all this red tape? And then how does an IT leader effectively manage their time? What are some of the best things that they can do to avoid maybe taking responsibility or doing things that they shouldn’t be doing?
Speaker 1 | 32:53.666
Wow, great question. Let me kind of take a step back real quick. One of the things that gets around the government sales cycle, which really is, for some, some of the bigger things, 18 to 24 months. That’s the time investment required to actually pursue a specific opportunity within the government.
Speaker 0 | 33:17.799
Technology is ridiculous.
Speaker 1 | 33:19.921
It is ridiculous. I absolutely agree. I think there are several things that the government does to try to speed that up. Certainly the set-aside programs have shorter timeframes in terms of the actual contract action taking place. um, IDIQs and GWACs and other contract vehicles, um, that are, are, are task order based or BPAs, um, those also can have much shorter, um, turn times for individual tasks. Um, but again, you know, to actually put that contract vehicle in place, that takes time. So, um, you know, there’s, there’s some, um, onus on the part of the government to actually put enough vehicles in place that they have a vehicle they can use, um, to quickly procure a specific. a specific thing if they’ve got an urgent need. But, you know, from the standpoint of IT leaders and what we can do to kind of not get bogged down in these, one of the things that I always think about is what are all the actors in a particular problem, right? It’s never just technology. You know, oftentimes, you know, a situation that looks like it just requires, you know, a new IT system. that’s probably a bit of a false assessment because there are business processes that need to adapt to accommodate new systems. There are people that need to be trained up or potentially hired. They’re all different. opponents. And I think that, you know, as an IT leader, understanding that there are multiple disparate actors in any scenario is key. And I think if you don’t understand that, if you look at things as purely an IT problem, you’re probably never really going to solve the issue.
Speaker 0 | 35:08.980
And one of the industries that suffers a lot from that is healthcare, I believe.
Speaker 1 | 35:12.402
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 35:14.343
And it’s just so obvious that a lot of times it’s like, we got this old crap. We’ve got to bring in a new thing, or we’ve got EMR. And, okay, let’s look at these three vendors and pick this one. And then the next thing you know, you’ve got 1,000 nurses that really just pushed the computer into the corner of the you know what I mean? There’s so many people that need to be taken into consideration from an end-user standpoint alone, let alone just the right solution.
Speaker 1 | 35:41.926
You know, one of the things that I’ve been kind of kicking around is the Now, as some states start to lessen the restrictions and, you know, we return to some kind of normal, is how do businesses that don’t necessarily have an appreciation for the multifaceted nature, right, of reconstituting operations, how are they going to survive? And I had a conversation with a good friend of mine who runs a little… innovation consultancy about what you would do or what you would need to do to actually help a company slowly start up operations again. Because think about it, we’ve been at home, sequestered, away from our colleagues, away from our peers, trying to perform the same functions that, from a process perspective, from a human interaction perspective, it’s not going to work. we’re not meeting all those things being at home. So how do you start that stuff up?
Speaker 0 | 36:49.629
How do you start? How so? Give me an example.
Speaker 1 | 36:51.731
Well, so, you know, in a lot of organizations, it’s culture that actually makes the organization successful, right? It’s people knowing, hey, I know that Sally is going to do X, so I’m going to do Y, knowing that I can count on Sally to get this thing done. You know, those kinds of things. But we’ve been apart for, what, four, six weeks almost in some cases. People aren’t going to have that natural rhythm again. How do you, how do you help reinstill that kind of rhythm? How do you help them? How do you help businesses?
Speaker 0 | 37:23.863
It’s going to be weird. In other words, people are like, this is weird coming back.
Speaker 1 | 37:27.865
It’s going to be weird.
Speaker 0 | 37:28.366
Everyone’s like, huh? Like, what do we do? You know, in other words, like, what do we do? We’re just going to go right back to normal again. I think people do bounce back though. It’s kind of like coming back from a long vacation.
Speaker 1 | 37:38.871
I’ve never had a vacation quite this long. So, um,
Speaker 0 | 37:42.233
I, uh, I left for, I took 30 days in November and I was working while I was gone. I just wanted to see like, can I work while I’m traveling? And I was in Egypt and I was all over the world and I was in all these different places that were just, you know, a completely different culture, completely engulfed in different time zones. Just everything was just overwhelmingly different. And when I got back, it probably took… two weeks for a month for my OCD, overworking personality to come back in. And I wished it hadn’t because what I found out was, and this is just me, my particular situation is different for everybody else. It’s obviously different for manufacturing organizations. It’s different. I can do a podcast with a Zoom and a microphone anywhere. I can do technology consulting and quote fiber circuits around the world. globe anywhere in the world. You know, I can help you, you know, ask a thousand questions on how do you want to use, unify your communications. You know, I can do that. I can do that anywhere. Me personally, I found that. But what I found was that I had to be more efficient with my time or traveling and doing all these things. And when I came back, what I realized is that I think my stress level steadily increased when I got back. uh, anxiety, whether it is anxiety or not, I don’t know, whatever it is, this kind of constant paranoia, like the American paranoia, I’ve got to work, got to work, got to work. We got to work all the time. You know, you just, you know, you just got to work. And from an entrepreneurial standpoint, it’s, it’s, you know, 40 hours would never be enough.
Speaker 1 | 39:26.198
Uh, it’s funny because there are two parts. I mean, to, to what you say that, that, that I’m seeing certainly one, um, uh, I I’ve been busier now than I think I’ve been in quite some time.
Speaker 0 | 39:38.969
I’m sure. Like many other people, their apartment or house has become the hub and spoke for all IT. But go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 39:47.011
But the other thing is that it’s the culture change. I think that people are realizing that, wow, remote work is possible. We can continue to operate.
Speaker 0 | 39:55.253
It totally is. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 39:57.154
And I honestly think so. My CEO, great guy, made a comment to me. it’s probably like a couple of weeks into this. And he’s like, you know, if I had known how well this was going to work, uh, you know, with, with folks being able to connect remotely and still do, um, you know, still support our clients. I might’ve reconsidered renewing our lease for headquarters.
Speaker 0 | 40:20.791
Exactly. Exactly. Now, if you don’t have a, if you don’t have manufacturing, you don’t have that. Honestly, really, why do you need real estate in downtown Manhattan?
Speaker 1 | 40:31.819
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 40:33.072
That’s a pretty big bill to pay. And quite frankly, I don’t think people care that your name’s on the outside of the building that much anymore.
Speaker 1 | 40:40.795
Yeah, they don’t. You know, so that’s one example, I think, of like a mental shift that’s happening in business, especially around in business leadership as a result of this thing. One of the other things that I’m seeing, and I’ll give a shameless plug to our company for doing this, companies are making investments. And. people in times like this to make sure that not only can they work and continue to earn their livelihood, but also can they continue to develop and grow professionally. So we went out and we bought an unlimited use license for every member of the company for an online learning service, LinkedIn Learning. It’s fantastic. I’m administering this thing for the company right now. And I go in there and I see all the people that have signed up and activated their accounts and… and the hours of, uh, folks are doing, it’s fantastic. What we can do with this extra time that we don’t spend commuting.
Speaker 0 | 41:39.170
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 | 41:40.210
Conductive. And, and, and, and it’s personally beneficial to them as well.
Speaker 0 | 41:44.311
Well, especially in your area of the woods, my, my, my remote work started when I was living in the DC metro area. So I was managing, this is years ago, a direct sales force. So I probably had maybe 18 people. Um, uh, you know, it was selling, it was a Cisco startup, uh, you know, selling like dynamic, like some, like, you know, like, like a Cisco dynamic router to do voice and data stuff. And anyways, a while back, but the point is, is I was getting in, getting up at whatever five o’clock in the morning, driving down route seven to avoid the toll road, the dullest toll road or whatever the five 56 bucks, whatever it was a time, both ways, you know, the tolls are ridiculous. Um, waiting in bumper to bumper traffic to get to the office for a little bit of water cooler talk to a standing meeting from a standing meeting to a sales meeting to eventually we got to work, I think around 10 o’clock. When we did get to work, it was different because it was a sales organization. So it was all right. It was different that everything was measured. But when I went to kind of outside channel sales and left the office and I could just get on the phone at 7.30 or 8 o’clock and talk to MSPs and other IT directors prior to getting into their water cooler time, it was a massive increase in sales. It was literally 4x what the normal was. And that was easy. And it was an easy 4x. It wasn’t like it was, you know what I mean? And the level of the work-life balance from that standpoint was very well. Can’t be done everywhere. Can’t be done in, you know. where we got guys manufacturing stuff in the plant and shipping and receiving and logistics and obviously healthcare and stuff like that. It can’t be done everywhere, but every single business has people that are working in the office that could be working from home. Every business has that.
Speaker 1 | 43:43.653
And every single one of them incurs an overhead expense for them to be able to sit in that office. Yeah. So I want to ask you something that’s going to be off topic, Phil. I was listening to you. You said you recently sold a boat.
Speaker 0 | 43:56.919
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 43:57.479
What kind of boat?
Speaker 0 | 43:59.044
I sold two boats, actually. I just sold another boat prior to that. I sold a 19-foot Grady White with a 150-horsepower Yamaha outboard.
Speaker 1 | 44:11.775
Okay. I spend an awful lot of time here, and I’m sorry that I’m absolutely just, like, re-steering the conversation, but it is one of my favorite things to talk about.
Speaker 0 | 44:19.783
I love it.
Speaker 1 | 44:20.723
I’m sailing on the Chesapeake.
Speaker 0 | 44:23.046
I grew up on the ocean, by the way. My dad’s a cat. My dad’s a retired urologist. He’s also a captain and has a 42-foot TR that I grew up on. Nice. All of his boats, you know, being first made, taking people out fishing and stuff.
Speaker 1 | 44:35.680
Well, if you find yourself back in the D.C. area and want to get out on the water on the Chesapeake, you have an open invitation.
Speaker 0 | 44:42.261
Let’s do it. Is that it? Is that the end of the questions? We’re done with this conversation? Because this is a fun one.
Speaker 1 | 44:48.303
Well, no. I mean, wait. There’s more. So you mentioned in one of your other podcasts that you’re a creative writing major.
Speaker 0 | 44:57.946
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 44:59.326
I was just interviewing a young man that we’re going to. that we’re bringing in this summer to be an intern, an infrastructure intern, working directly with me to help us in our pursuit of CMMC. You’re familiar with that?
Speaker 0 | 45:15.377
No, but go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 45:16.558
It’s the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification that the UD is putting out. Basically what that is, this is an interesting thing. What that is, is they’re saying we now want an independent party assessed rating of your stance on cybersecurity, the protection of industry secrets, because we’re tired of spending billions of dollars to, for example, develop the next generation stealth fighter, only to have China come out with this thing two years later looking exactly the same. So what DoD is doing is they’ve come up with this model called CMMC that has a couple hundred individual items around business process and technology infrastructure security. And you need to be able to demonstrate how you satisfy those requirements to be rated at a certain level. And then they’re going to make those signs of certification, the level of certification, a requirement to be able to bid on. particular work, especially work that went into the national security. So, interesting stuff.
Speaker 0 | 46:38.730
You’re giving me ideas, but go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 46:40.530
No, it’s very, very interesting. So, this young man that I interviewed is going to come in and be an intern for us. We were chatting, and the call was great. It wasn’t a particularly long call, but we quickly digressed from IT to… his interests and things of that nature. And he started asking me questions about when I was in school. I’m like, God, that was like, you know, in the eighties.
Speaker 0 | 47:08.571
But I didn’t know the most prior to cell phones.
Speaker 1 | 47:13.573
Your question, what was my first cell phone? Yes. That’s somebody recently as well. Do you remember the suitcase phones, the Motorola suitcase phones?
Speaker 0 | 47:21.296
Yeah. I mean, my dad had a bag phone. I remember when we had the bag phone in the car and I used to tell him like, Hey, take it out and put it in the golf cart. That’d be cool.
Speaker 1 | 47:29.300
Well, we’re talking about this stuff. And he said, what was the most useful class you took? Because I have a degree in computer science. And he said, what was the most useful class that you took? And I said, to be very honest with you, it was technical writing. That class has served me better than any other individual class in undergrad or my grad work. So.
Speaker 0 | 47:56.268
Is that because you’re like translator, you’re like tech translator for people?
Speaker 1 | 47:59.449
Yes. And that’s precisely why. It’s given me the ability, you know, to combine my love for, you know, creative depiction of challenges and their solutions, and then communicating those to people who aren’t necessarily as technical.
Speaker 0 | 48:17.740
Yeah. I mean, it’s your ability to provide empathy and understanding. the fact that you can put yourself in another person’s shoes is needed so much.
Speaker 1 | 48:28.768
You have to in this business. Cause I mean, again, we’re, we’re, you know, we’re, we’re a federal, um, federal contractor and every piece of business that we have, we have to compete for and we have to be able to communicate our approach in a way that is, um, more compelling than anybody else’s. Um, so.
Speaker 0 | 48:47.803
That’s a big problem for people. That’s a big, that’s a big roadblock for a lot of, uh, uh, people that are in it, they, it’s almost, it’s like a, it’s almost like a psychological, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s almost like a psychological profile for a lot of people that they can’t break out of because they might have a very engineering mindset. Um, they come off as jerks, uh, because they look at other people as stupid for not knowing this stuff. And really it’s not the other people. It’s really their inability to kind of like step out of the box, emphasize, put yourself in another person’s feet as, as. smart and technology centered as you are. And they might not even mean to do it. They might not even know that they’re doing it, but they have no way of kind of, yeah, it’s, you know, so it’s. it was an important class for you because it helped you kind of like, you know, connect the dots for other people. And I don’t know if it was like, if it was more of a psychological thing for you or if it was, or if it was just, you know, helped me connect better with people, but kind of this connect, discover, respond, and then putting it down on paper is something that I think is a weakness for many people not even knowing it.
Speaker 1 | 50:01.230
But it’s… I guess the way that I would summarize it, when you ask somebody that’s a technologist that’s billing on some contract, providing a very specific technical service to a client to help out on a proposal effort, it is almost without fail, you know, like somebody just sentenced them to six years hard labor. Really?
Speaker 0 | 50:29.126
I did not know that. Why?
Speaker 1 | 50:32.148
Nobody wants to write, especially technical folks. It’s like pulling teeth. I could probably count on my 10 fingers the number of really great technical writers that I’ve met in 30 plus years in the business.
Speaker 0 | 50:53.141
Wow. You may have just blown the top off this. Do you think that that might be a reason why a lot of people have problems getting their, getting money because they can’t write a really good business, technical business acumen report to deliver to executives to be able to present and all the time spent presenting and putting that report together? Phil,
Speaker 1 | 51:19.559
absolutely. And that’s why you have a whole group of companies and businesses out there. that do nothing but strategic communications. Some do it better than others, but the point is their entire business is helping others communicate the requirement in such a way that-See,
Speaker 0 | 51:37.302
I would think my, and this is bad for me, bad assuming this, you know, seriously, shame on me. I would assume that most IT directors being the arrogant self-centered people that they are, and that’s complete stereotype, by the way. I do not mean that. would be like, oh, I can whip this report together. I don’t need you to do that. I know ROI and phone and numbers and blah, blah, blah. I would assume that a lot of people would think that they could do that on their own.
Speaker 1 | 52:01.263
Yeah, they do. But they don’t want to do it. They don’t want to do it for one. It’s an inconvenience and an annoyance. You know, I’m here to deliver the work. I’m not here to win the work. I’m here to make it happen, not to explain how.
Speaker 0 | 52:16.916
Yeah, I had someone tell me the other day, like, wow, it’s really impressive the amount of content you put out, Phil. And I was like. It absolutely is. It’s just one email a day because I was forced. I take this course, if anyone wants to know what the secret weapon is, I probably shouldn’t even say this because if my competition hears this, but Ben Settle, who’s known as kind of like the number one email writer in the world, he takes a very kind of, he’s like a comic book guy. But he’s, he… He… I took his course and he forced me to write an email a day. And when I thought of writing an email a day to my list of IT guys, I was like, there’s no way. They are going to opt out of this immediately. They’re going to spam filter me. I am going to get roasted like immediately. No one writes an email a day. And he’s like, and I even encourage two emails a day. People are going to slaughter me. Anyways, but he said, but they won’t do that if you write it. the right way and you actually do it in a way that’s like fun and you’re speaking to people and it’s your actual, actual personality and it’s not just the next white paper, you know, Hey, did you read my white paper on this? And I would like five minutes of your time to jump on your calendar so that we can talk about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s what people hate. Um, but if you tell them, Hey, uh, I just sold my boat to this person. I mean, you know, whatever it is for whatever crazy story it is to this. you know, a guy that showed up with a bunch of gold chains on and you said, can I pay you in Bitcoin? And, uh, he came, he got off the boat. And I mean like what, you know, some crazy story like that. Um, and he asked if he could trade, you know, I don’t know, Russian data intelligence for my, in exchange for my boat that, you know, people might read that.
Speaker 1 | 54:03.956
I would think, yeah, but, but no, you’re absolutely right. I mean, here’s the thing. It’s, it’s, um, compelling, you know, there’s gotta be an, um, an aspect of, um, entertaining, uh, um, in order for you to actually keep readers focused and looking at what is the content. or the point that you want to get across. So I don’t know. I mean, I thought that, you know, with your background as a creative writing major, I got to tell him about, you know, this young man asking me this question. And it took a while.
Speaker 0 | 54:38.264
So what was the end game for him? So he was a creative writer. What are we doing with this guy?
Speaker 1 | 54:43.645
Okay. So he is, he’s getting a degree in cybersecurity. We want to give him, he’s about to enter his junior year. We want to give him some real-world work experience that is going to translate when he gets out. So he’s going to have on his resume when we’re done, he has done a number of network scans on an information technology consulting company. He’s going to have CMMC on his resume. I mean, I got to tell you, he’s going to graduate within… 24, 25 months. In 24, 25 months, this thing will have been live for about a year, year and a half. He’s going to be a very hot commodity at that point. And, you know, we’re going to, our goal is, you know, with all of our interns is to keep them, to bring them on once they graduate. And certainly he will be no different.
Speaker 0 | 55:42.166
Well, I would encourage him to write about that, to write about every aspect. I would encourage him to write something twice a week. You know, because by doing that, he’s going to become, by sharing information, by sharing the learnings and everything, not only is it going to make you guys look better, obviously, but it’s going to make him look better. It’s going to create him as a young. There’s so, security is so overblown right now. It’s like everyone and their mother wants to be going to security. And how do you separate yourself? And that would be a huge opportunity for him to separate himself, to kind of share my journey as a security intern and what we’re doing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, something like that.
Speaker 1 | 56:22.493
And he’s got, he’s got, he’s got, um, uh, uh, an assignment to do that actually through school for the internship. But Jaden, if you’re listening, um, we’ve got high hopes for you.
Speaker 0 | 56:32.280
Well, you’re going to send this to him. You’re going to send this to him obviously after this, but have him share that. Yeah. Have him share, you know, the value of a, you know, security internship and share that story, but it’s got to get on social media, however that gets on it. Definitely on LinkedIn, at least, you know, you put that in the article session, article section or something like that. It’s interesting how well articles on LinkedIn get, get pushed. I mean, that would be, that would actually be pretty huge. I’m sure there’s a way to leverage that. And then you guys are paying for their LinkedIn learning or something like that. You could probably leverage that even further. Hey, by the way, we want your guys. People don’t know about the algorithm on LinkedIn, but there’s actual live people sitting, deciding what articles they can push or not. So there’s live people on LinkedIn, like looking at the post streams and saying, hey, we could push this. And they definitely push people that pay money to LinkedIn more. That’s the reality. But it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show to summarize, first of all, because I have a lot of nice bullet points here from honestly… electric bikes, which was a great starting point. But I think really the big takeaway here is alignment is off between IT and the spend, right? And how is IT going to influence the spend is a huge piece. And by aligning that influencing with really policies and procedures in turn and making sure everyone’s on the same plate, all aligned with the vision is huge. And then my favorite was, of course, technical writing and people, you know, technology, technology leaders not wanting to necessarily technically write is my favorite. So thank you so much for being on the show. If you had one message to send out to everyone out there listening, you know, what would that be?
Speaker 1 | 58:25.316
Stay in school, kids.
Speaker 0 | 58:28.897
Mine would be the opposite. If I knew what I knew now, I would have dropped out of school.
Speaker 1 | 58:34.108
All right, Phil, thank you so very much for having me on.
