Speaker 0 | 00:09.585

All right, everybody, welcome back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we’ve got a digital jack of all trades. We have Jared, and please, will you pronounce your last name so I don’t butcher it?

Speaker 1 | 00:23.852

Oh, it’s Medeiros.

Speaker 0 | 00:25.333

Medeiros, you know, because I would probably say Medeiros or something, and you know. I just don’t want to do that to you. Phil, Phil’s pretty easy to pronounce, man. Uh, really appreciate you being on the show. And well, first of all, I’m just going to come right out and say this. I’m just going to ask you what is infomatics and I’m feeling dumb for not knowing this. Maybe I should know this, but I’m just going to let you speak to that and why, uh, you’re so passionate about that.

Speaker 1 | 00:51.943

Yeah. Yeah, so it’s funny. When you and I first talked and you sort of asked me that question, I actually looked it up because I’d never really thought about what it is.

Speaker 0 | 01:02.733

This is what I do. Let me look it up. Hold on real quick.

Speaker 1 | 01:04.534

Yeah. Well, 90% of IT is just being good at Google, right?

Speaker 0 | 01:09.677

Yes, I’m a better Googler. I’m a better Googler than you. I tell my wife that. I was like, give me the phone. Hurry up.

Speaker 1 | 01:15.740

That’s how I get to where I am. Yeah. So informatics. I guess in different countries, it means sort of different things, but generally within the life science industry, it is the software and the technology around managing scientific data. I think generally it’s used as like a term for the study of data transference or data processing or something along those lines. But, you know, within the life science industry, we sort of, you know, It’s pretty much just dealing with the scientific data, right? Because we’re, as life science companies, generated a ton of data.

Speaker 0 | 01:59.601

For example, I’m sure there’s a lot of data on COVID-19 testing, and hopefully we’re getting that accurate because data is only as important as it is, as how we enter it as well, correct?

Speaker 1 | 02:10.929

Oh, yeah. Yep, absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 02:12.850

So I hear, I have a friend in jujitsu that runs a very large, um, I guess I don’t want to call it healthcare. I guess it’s healthcare, you know, retirement communities, um, that works in conjunction with the hospital. And he just says, you know, the data, um, you know, a lot of people may or may not have gotten sick from, you know, COVID, but it’s definitely been, it’s definitely been, um, input as a COVID-19, you know,

Speaker 1 | 02:47.851

anyways.

Speaker 0 | 02:48.552

I don’t know where I’m going. That just made me think of that, you know, as far as data. But give me some examples or give me something that you’ve been very involved in that I guess we would put informatics as a title on top of that and how it made a difference from a technical nerdy scientific perspective.

Speaker 1 | 03:11.321

Yeah. So, you know, informatics and particularly with scientific data management, it’s sort of the evolution from… Back in the day, we would have paper lab notebooks, and as you were doing experiments, you would just be writing in your notebook. And then as computers started to become more prevalent, people started using Excel to sort of put some of that data together rather than a piece of paper and a calculator. Well,

Speaker 0 | 03:37.791

Excel is a database, right? Anyways, keep going.

Speaker 1 | 03:45.557

That’s a whole other topic for conversation. But basically, all of it’s evolved from that towards, you know, dedicated software systems that are covering the needs of what people used to do in a scientific paper notebook. You know, when we, you know, at these companies where we’re investigating trying to find new drugs for diseases that… don’t have any sort of cure or any sort of drugs that treat them. What you’re really looking for is all of these different tests. You’ve got scientists that are all internal, all working on different types of testing. We’ve got external scientists at different companies where we contract for a very specific type of test that we don’t want to invest in, in setting that up.

Speaker 0 | 04:31.946

We don’t want to overlap. You don’t want to overlap and, you know, retest things multiple times if data is already there, I’m assuming.

Speaker 1 | 04:38.811

Well, that… That’s one part of it, but the other part is pulling all that data together to be able to make sense of it, right? So, you know, if everybody’s doing everything in Excel, that’s cool if you’ve got a handful of rows and columns, but, you know, you’ve got millions of data points on these things, and then you want to start trending them to see, you know, are we actually… impacting this disease the way we think we are, you know, what’s actually happening within treated with this drug. And you have all these different variables and data points on that, you know, you look at something that’s a little more sophisticated to pull that data together, and then be able to crunch those numbers and visualize it because a lot of the data that we’re working with is sort of secondary or tertiary data where you generate some sort of a measurement. And then you take that measurement and you do some calculations on it to actually see what’s happening there. And then you compare that to other data and kind of piece it all together. And on top of that, then you can add these sort of machine learning algorithms and statistical analyses to see what’s really happening.

Speaker 0 | 05:48.566

So that all sounds really cool and awesome. Now, but with that being said, you put selling and better data management on. as something that you do. So how do you take, how do you sell that? For a bunch of software nerds out there and people that are doing this stuff, how do you go and show that? How do you show like, hey, here’s our process or here’s how we’re doing something or here’s how we’re doing something better and collecting data and making it easier, faster, better, whatever it is. And how do you go, I mean, how do you present that?

Speaker 1 | 06:24.503

So I’ve worked on both sides of that. equation where I’ve done the selling side and building software to solve some of these problems as well as the purchasing and implementing side. And the biggest thing I think is showing the value that what you’re doing provides, right? And there’s a lot of software systems out there that just replace a paper lab notebook where people can take their notes and do that sort of thing. From a scientific perspective, there’s a certain level of compliance that goes into it, but that threshold is pretty low. Where companies really shine is what additional value can you provide that’s different than everybody else, right? And in the scientific space, it tends to be around certain very deep scientific functionalities where you’re really saving scientists a lot of time because these are people who are highly skilled. Saving them time helps us to be able to save.

Speaker 0 | 07:29.334

Can you give me an example of some really crazy, deep scientific process that maybe no one would even understand if you described it? But would you, you know what I mean? But no, really, when it comes to, because I’m assuming when it comes to selling some of this stuff, you might be dealing with someone that’s not that scientific minded person. it would affect that entire staff.

Speaker 1 | 07:57.913

Yeah. So, you know, for one good example is there’s a myriad of software tools out there focused on chemistry and chemistry at the molecular level, right? So, you know, you can spend just boatloads of money on basically, you know, what we used to do back in the day was you would synthesize a variety of compounds. right? All these different molecules with different shapes and structures and things. And then you would just basically blast, you’d create a test to see what do we think we want to have this do. And you would just blast hundreds and thousands of compounds in this test and see which ones sort of hit. And then you take those and start investigating them with your chemists and tweaking them a little bit and seeing what works. So nowadays with software tools, what you can do is you can actually take, you know, there’s a… compound set that’s basically just a bunch of theoretical chemical structures. And you can model how those would interact with any sort of other molecule and basically do a virtual screen. So rather than physically having to make all these compounds, put them into tubes and plates and test them, you could basically just spin up a bunch of servers and analyze how these compounds are interacting with what you’re doing. And then you’ve got your first pass at some interesting things you might want to investigate in real life.

Speaker 0 | 09:27.077

Are there a lot of guys like you that are both software and scientific-minded kind of merged into one?

Speaker 1 | 09:34.640

In my space, there are. It’s the sort of thing where you’re always kind of like it’s a small industry. But, yeah. But, you know, I think every company that… I mean, I started at my current company when we were 15 people. And that was an important part of… what they were doing. So it’s pretty ubiquitous within the life science space.

Speaker 0 | 09:56.576

What came first for you? You know, like chemistry and biology or a computer? um and i’m thinking back to back to high school right now like what was your first computer what was your first you know kind of uh experience with software and technology yeah so it’s it’s funny i i always was a little bit of both and interested in both um

Speaker 1 | 10:18.794

you know in high school i was i was in the computer club you know we had a vax terminal at school that i used to remote into and and you know i my initial program and training was in in a base Pascal. So, you know, I mostly wrote password grabbers instead of doing the assignments. So I was always more interested in just like futzing around and playing around with computers.

Speaker 0 | 10:44.194

You know,

Speaker 1 | 10:45.614

for college and my later schooling, all of that, I was scientific. So I started my career as a scientist doing biology. And then my love for my interest in computers and, you know, working with the data as a scientist, they just sort of merged and… It became, yeah, it just sort of kind of happened organically.

Speaker 0 | 11:06.187

So you make a very, a very bold claim with the current company that you’re working at right now. Ensuring, ensuring Chasma never needs to go through a digital transformation. How?

Speaker 1 | 11:27.956

So. I think that’s my goal here is that I have to go through a digital transformation. You know, as a company, we started… Well,

Speaker 0 | 11:40.104

let me ask you this way before you go into this. Like, what do you mean by that? Do you mean we’re going to stay ahead of the curve? Is that what you mean?

Speaker 1 | 11:47.550

Yes. My main goal here, both on the IT side, as well as on the informatics and data side, is trying to stay ahead of things so that, you know, when we do want to… I have a new… technologies come out that are potential game changers. We really want to implement this. We don’t have a giant legacy sort of migration. I love you to do that. Right.

Speaker 0 | 12:11.884

I can’t tell you. Well, first of all, let me just give you an example in my world. Right. And I’m just telling you this, it’s very important because it can become such a mountain. I’m assuming because it can become such a mountain to overcome that legacy piece. Because I deal with obviously, well. It might not be obvious, but I helped migrate a lot of companies off of legacy to cloud solutions. And what’s interesting is some of the very first cloud solutions that came out, they built their software. And then I would say that they maybe did not continue to stay ahead of the digital transformation because they kept building the software or they kept just adding customers on once they had the software. Now… You’ve got other software companies that I feel are coming to the marketplace that are able to be very nimble and run circles around them because they’ve been so complacent with their development. If that has any sort of, you know, what do we call this? If that’s kind of metaphorical at all as to what you’re talking about, because if you stay kind of behind, then it becomes much harder for you to A. Now we’ve got to build this whole platform because we were behind and now we’ve got to migrate thousands of customers off of a, I don’t know, multi-tenant environment type of thing. I don’t know if that rings true with you in any shape, form, or fashion, but that’s what you made me think of when you said staying ahead of the curve and making sure we don’t have to move off some legacy system.

Speaker 1 | 13:49.288

Yeah. No, you’re absolutely right. It’s about staying ahead of the curve. And for us, there’s two sides to that, right? Because one is the IT side and infrastructure, right? We have to migrate from on-premise Active Directory to Azure AD, that kind of stuff. And then there’s the actual scientific data. And on the data side, I’ve been a really big stickler about making sure that any systems we’re using to capture our data, I have programmatic access such that if we want to move it out, that we basically have control over it. And we have control over it in a way that I can program and script it.

Speaker 0 | 14:30.610

An open sandbox, kind of open API type of deal.

Speaker 1 | 14:35.252

Exactly. It’s got to be an open API or database level access. Or if not, if it’s a multi-tenant SaaS system, can you give me… Can you give me an export and dump it into S3 so that I at least have that data in some sort of a logical format that I can basically manipulate with programming so that when some system comes out that I want to use this data in, I have the mechanisms to do it, right?

Speaker 0 | 15:03.736

So you are in like the perfect situation and like, I would say kind of living the dream from a, an IT perspective. How do you help the other people listening to the show get into the same type of situation as you are that might have executive management that’s, I don’t know, still has a caller ID box sitting next to their phone and a typewriter in the background. And I don’t, I’m just trying to think, and a server closet, which might not be a bad thing, but, you know, I think, you know, the type of server closet I’m thinking of. What would you say to technology leaders or what kind of advice or, I’m just, you know, how do we stay ahead of the digital transformation or never have to go through a digital transformation? How do we start influencing upper management? it needs to be this way?

Speaker 1 | 16:03.648

You know, the one thing that I, that I kind of focus on when talking to the leadership team about, you know, why we’re investing in this, why we’re investing in that is the, the value that we get out of it is that we are, it’s going to save us money in the long run. Right. So investing a little bit here is you know, you’re, you’re, you’re spending a little bit today so that in the long run, we’re not having to spend a, we’re not having a huge major migration project. And that, you know, I’m, I’m lucky that here I have a leadership team that’s, that’s been through this before, that they, they understand what it takes, you know, when, when you’re dealing with a giant custom built legacy system and you actually have to move that around what that looks like. So, you know, I, I’m pretty lucky that my leadership team gets it, but, um, I think if you can quantify that as to what the business value provides, then that’s the number one way to unlock the funds to keep some of this stuff going.

Speaker 0 | 17:12.434

I think, and that’s like first grade math. I think most of us can do P&L math and quantify that. But the question is, how do we quantify it? So how do you break down that, hey, look, if we don’t do this now and we wait this long, there’s going to be a major migration and these are going to be the pain points. So what are the pain points in these major migrations? I guess, you know, data is not going to match up when we move it from one to the other. Fields aren’t going to match up. It’s going to be major downtime. I mean, what are you, what are some of those pain points?

Speaker 1 | 17:46.935

You know, I think a lot of that’s going to be industry specific. But, you know, for us anyway, one of the big things we’re, you know, we’re a small company. We’re, we’re… doing early research to try and discover potential new drugs. And so right now, we don’t actually make any drugs because we’re trying to figure out what might be a new drug. And so really what we generate, the only thing we make is data. And, you know, when we want to have value as a company from an investor or a partnership with a big pharma or somewhere along those lines, the data is going to be the big driver for that. So if we as a company don’t have, if if if we go to work with somebody and they say, Oh yeah, let’s give us access to some of your data. We want to see this and this. And it takes us a giant migration project and months to pull it together. That, you know, that deal is going to go South, right? That’s, that’s a lot of, that has real business impact if, uh, if we can’t get this stuff together. Um, so that, that’s a neat for us. That’s, that’s a pretty, that’s a pretty big, uh, ROI for, for continuing to invest and make sure that we. you know, it’s just my CEO.

Speaker 0 | 18:56.044

We can make data faster and sell it.

Speaker 1 | 18:58.665

My CEO actually just says, keep our data house in order. That’s how he calls it. You know, and I say, yep, this is what I’m doing to keep the house in order.

Speaker 0 | 19:08.528

And from his perspective, what does that mean? Like he can call on any type of information he wants at any time? Or I mean, what does he mean by that?

Speaker 1 | 19:20.551

So.

Speaker 0 | 19:22.092

Unless it’s too confidential. I mean, I’m just, you know, I’m just asking like, what would he mean by that? Because I could look at my data house and it’s probably not in order because I got like five spreadsheets up on the screen right now and I could probably have you clean up my house.

Speaker 1 | 19:38.436

And we have a lot of spreadsheets as well, right? It’s people working spreadsheets and that’s the nature of the game. The key for us is making sure that all of our data that’s very important is like you say, it’s structured such that it’s extensible, it’s joinable. And, you know, if we work, if let’s say we partner with someone and they want a data dump to go into a system that they’re using because they want to view it in their system, how are we going to give that to them? Are we going to dump them a zip file or give them a Dropbox full of Excels? Because,

Speaker 0 | 20:12.219

you know.

Speaker 1 | 20:13.152

That’s, that’s a mess, right? Or we can say, okay, you know, tell us what system you’re using and what format you want. And we can dump it into, you know, any pretty much any format because it’s, it’s all programmatically accessible. It’s all joined appropriately. And so, you know, tell us what you want out of this and we can, we can put it together for you pretty quickly.

Speaker 0 | 20:33.903

Very nice. Ben, a pleasure. Been a pleasure having you on the show. Let me ask you one final question. What would be your biggest and best piece of advice that you’ve ever gotten from a technology leadership perspective? Or maybe you’ve never gotten it. Maybe you just have it to give.

Speaker 1 | 20:58.619

Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know the exact wording, but one of the… So I don’t have a nice… It would be great if I had just a nice catchphrase here, but… No,

Speaker 0 | 21:11.832

but the thing is, though, is maybe it’s not that for technology guys. There might not be a catchphrase. There is no catchphrase when it comes to technology and the digital revolution, Phil, and that could be it.

Speaker 1 | 21:31.943

The general sentiment that I remember from this that I’ve taken and that I think has been a big help along the way is… As a technology person, sometimes I want to just automate everything and build the greatest piece of software to do it all and do everything. I think one time there was my boss at the time. I was trying to put something together and we sat down and he basically was like, look, that’s all cool, but this can be solved very easily if you just think, you don’t need to build the Taj Mahal of software to solve this problem. thinking about how you might solve it in a simpler way. Um, and that, cause as a technology guy, right, I want to like build all the coolest software technology and do, you know, manipulate all this and make it really awesome. But, um, but actually just kind of keeping it simple and solving the problem at hand sometimes.

Speaker 0 | 22:25.848

So there is a catchphrase for that. Keep it simple, stupid. So there we go. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 22:31.470

There you go. That, that is good.

Speaker 0 | 22:33.150

Perfect for a guy like me. Um, what, um, I’m not sure if I can get it to work. I got to ask you then, I got to ask you what that example was. So what was an example of some crazy complicated thing we were trying to put all kinds of automation in and the solution was just a simple like, hey, just do this. Why don’t we just do this?

Speaker 1 | 22:51.293

You know, I don’t actually remember what it was.

Speaker 0 | 22:53.714

Darn. Because I’m still automating everything. It sounded nice.

Speaker 1 | 23:00.076

I had to build a hardware box for something. And he was like, you know, you could just plug into this and try to do it this way. And it’s much safer. I think it was something along those lines, but yeah, I don’t remember the exact scenario. This was, this was years ago.

Speaker 0 | 23:14.496

Well, super fun. Thank you so much for being on my show and you know, have a wonderful day. And if you do come up with this, you know, some crazy example with a very, very simple solution, please share it with me so I can say, so I can share it with the audience and say, Hey, if you’re trying to do this really complicated thing, here’s the solution is much simpler.

Speaker 1 | 23:34.511

Thanks for having me.