Speaker 0 | 00:09.787
Welcome back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. We’ve had a little bit of gap in the time. I don’t want people to go fear-mongering and think it’s due to COVID-19. Part of it is. The other part of it is just my own life in general. I just had to move my house. So we took a little bit of time off. And this is the first show back with Brian. I don’t want to miss… Please don’t let me butcher your last name. Is it Blount?
Speaker 1 | 00:33.475
Yes, you hit it on the nose, Brian.
Speaker 0 | 00:34.796
All right. Phew. I can just wipe the sweat off my head on that one. So, Chief Information Officer at Piedmont College. And we have done a little bit of education. We have done a little bit in the educational space back in the day, but not enough. And when we were talking last, you said something that was really mind-blowing to me. And, you know, call it… white privilege call it whatever it is a lot of my friends call me the whitest guy they know because I grew up like the son of a doctor playing golf and tennis and all of that but you really you said something that was quite mind-blowing and that is for people that have never gone on to college they don’t know really know like where the process starts you know and for people that come from from a generation of people that have gone to college or come from people that haven’t that you know, that have just gone to college. It’s kind of just like this known thing. You go through high school, you apply to college, you go through this application process, you know, that you’ve got a stretch school or the school in the middle, and then you’ve got your safety school and all these different things. And it’s just kind of this known process. But for someone that’s never gone to college before, they’re kind of left out there in the, in this unknown, it could be quite of a, quite a stressful situation. I don’t know how technology plays into this. Maybe we can link the two, but. It really kind of got me thinking on, you know, there’s some work to be done there, and technology can probably take a part in that, especially with just in general, everyone being able to either be stuck at home or not stuck at home, however you want to say it. But I just want to let you speak to that because that was something that, you know, that kind of really rang true with me.
Speaker 1 | 02:12.278
Oh, yeah, you hit it right on the mark, Phil. I mean, the term we use in education is the first generation. That first-generation student is loosely defined as a student that has no direct relations that have attended college. No mother, no father, brother, sister, etc. And like you said a minute ago, that gap of knowledge and the lack of knowledge that first-gens have, and it’s not through their own fault, it’s just the social acclimation. I mean, you and I are both the same way. We have families, we have siblings that have gone to college. So, you know, We knew the language. We knew the unwritten rules. We knew how to navigate the unwritten systems.
Speaker 0 | 02:53.219
It’s just something you take for granted.
Speaker 1 | 02:54.840
Oh, yeah. They come in, even in their high school situations, they come in and they really don’t have that support structure to help them even know how to fill out a FAFSA. In fact, if you say the acronym FAFSA, a lot of the first gen is going to look at you like you’re speaking Latin. They have no idea what F-A-F-S-A means. But real quick, to segue on the technology. You know, perfect tie-in for a thing that we look at in one of my transformational projects that I’ve got written up on my whiteboard here in the office, you know, digital transformation. In general, the way this digital transformation idea, how I can tie into the first-gen conversation we’ve got going right now, the point we’re making. Digital transformation is not necessarily about digitizing information or digitalizing processes. You know, those are substructures and foundational components of a digital transformation. Maybe a good example is needed here. Digital transformation, an example, online education is not digital transformation, but the ability to award a micro-credential through an online education portal, that’s an example of digital transformation.
Speaker 0 | 04:03.931
And let’s just dig in there just for a second. Yeah. Why is that? Is it transformational because it’s hard to do right now? Is it transformational because there’s no way to really prove? education has taken place? What is it?
Speaker 1 | 04:16.682
No, and the transformation is not necessarily hard to do. The transformational part is more of a paradigm shift. There is a non-profit advocacy group called Educause. Their main purpose is to advance higher education through effective and efficient use of technology and to really be a proponent of technology and education. Educause, loosely defined, they say digital transformation, it’s a… It’s a paradigm shift in your culture, your workforce, and your technologies that enable institutions to increase and change their value proposition and to radically alter their business models. So to tie up the thought we had just a minute ago on that first gen and how technology can help them, a digital transformation in that. And that example is the fact that you’ve got first-gen kids who are technologically comfortable, adept, using mobile technology, using social platforms. Digital transformation, you’ve got a first-gen kid who’s got to navigate these unwritten rules. Well, instead of burying your processes and your procedures on your college webpage that might be on the front page, it might be two or three years deep on this webpage. You put it out there on a social media platform that’s easily accessible for first-gen kids. You put it in language that they understand. You give them a tool that they can navigate easily. And you help them fill out a FAFSA.
Speaker 0 | 05:44.421
In reality, it opens up a whole world of, it could be fair. You could make it fair for smart kids that are after it, that want to get after it, to get. an education and make a difference. And not only that, use back to, again, if we’re in this capitalistic money-making society that we’re in, really use technology as a business force multiplier and allow kids to get an education, give them access to an education to really, really apply that and apply themselves. And I remember on the side, we were kind of, you know, I don’t know if I want to say bashing. No, I do. I think I do. I think I want to say bashing. The, you know, kind of the larger Ivy League colleges where you’re going to pay, well, I don’t know, let’s just say throw out a number, $40,000 a semester, which is absolutely ridiculous to show up on campus, which can’t even happen right now. And I’m sure people are saying, is it worth paying that? And I guess we would say yes, because you’re still going to have access to the same tenured teachers. But it’s definitely through business. you know, through digital transformation, you can definitely level the playing field. And I think we could make colleges compete more for maybe getting, I don’t know if it’s compete for getting the right students or compete for providing the better education through and, and, and finding the right students, maybe flip-flop it a little bit versus, you know, we can, we can kids that kids can access education easier. They should be able to access it easier.
Speaker 1 | 07:28.884
And when you say that, it might not be the fact that, you know, we’re looking at the technology used to attract the better students to give them a better education. But we’re using this technology so that the tier three schools and we’ve got the idea of tier one, tier two, tier three. Your tier ones include the Ivy League, but they’re the top elite schools that have waiting lists.
Speaker 0 | 07:51.358
They can be one percenters. They’re the one percenters.
Speaker 1 | 07:53.964
And maybe even the 10 percenters, but yeah, the one percenters and the tier twos are these large state universities, research universities, some of the private schools like Notre Dame. And then you’ve got tier threes where we fall into. Tier threes have no waiting list. They’re dependent on tuition. So, you know, increasing the availability of the education, increasing the value of the product, that’s paramount. But the technology also, we focus on the technology at a tier three level is, you know, that’s going to let us keep the doors open, keep the lights on. the revenue stream coming, keeping viable industry for this community going. I mean, it’s the livelihood of a region.
Speaker 0 | 08:31.189
Okay. What else, what else we got? What, the, the paradigm shift that is happening, how does that, there has to be some kind of ripple effect, butterfly effect, whatever you want to call it, but there has to be some kind of ripple effect to make the change happen, right? Everyone talks about Disney, you know, digital transformation, obviously COVID-19 allowed, uh, Some people’s like my job very easy for a guy that implements cloud voice and technology, right? For a guy that was selling Zoom and using Zoom and part of Zoom before anyone even knew what Zoom was. When Zoom was just a little baby and was pretty much doing business strategic partnerships with other VoIP companies and other VoIP companies were basically giving away for free. I remember we were just giving Zoom away for free. It was a free thing. COVID-19 made that whole transformation of, hey, you know, the old legacy, you know, PBX, it’s not broke yet. And, you know, so why are we even bothering to replace that? And now all of a sudden no one can go into work and, you know, your site-to-site VPNs and extension dialing didn’t even matter anymore. Now it’s all of a sudden, like, how do people take phone calls from home? Well, they’re just using their cell phones. You know, it was either, we don’t even need a phone system anymore or, you know, oh my gosh, you know, what are we going to do? Like, hurry up. you know, just pick a provider. And I can’t, I’m sure there’s thousands of nightmares, just, you know, stories out there. There’s a ton of really good, most of my IT directors were We’re completely prepared and right on top of it. So I actually have a lot of really good stories that came out of COVID-19 and not any nightmares, but I’m sure they’re out there. I just don’t know them. They were the stubborn people that weren’t ready for migrating to the cloud yet. But now, boom, here we are with COVID-19 and we’re doing it. So why does it take a COVID-19 to make this paradigm shift happen? What are we doing wrong? Why can’t, is it technology leadership doesn’t have a big enough seat at the table yet to make a difference? People don’t care. What is it?
Speaker 1 | 10:27.952
That’s part of it. And since I’m in the education vector, I’m going to focus on that one. In higher education, it is a highly entrenched, reluctant to change industry. And I say that both positively and negatively. I mean, the reluctance to change. You can go into a classroom today. And if you were in a time machine, you could say, 40 years ago, I’m in the same classroom. There’s so little change between the product.
Speaker 0 | 10:54.295
You still have the… the projector with the clear sheets that, what was that thing called?
Speaker 1 | 10:59.180
An overhead projector. Well, I had an institution and I came from.
Speaker 0 | 11:04.106
Microfiche.
Speaker 1 | 11:05.167
About six months ago down here, we still had those overhead projectors and we would take them out of the classrooms as we needed to. But, yeah, higher education is reluctant to change. So. And I forgot where the heck I was going with that one. But yeah. Sorry,
Speaker 0 | 11:18.001
it was my fault. It was my fault. Because I love talking about old, I love talking about old tech. It’s really my fault. And I’m very ADD and I’ll draw you off at any point. So just be prepared for that. So no, what was the, the point was, is what is the reluctance? Is it because executive management powers that be people that sit on the board, whatever it is, are they not taking technology seriously enough? And, and is it, is it, uh, is it us as it nerd folk? that are not, I don’t know, are we insecure? Are we not powerful enough? Are we not stepping up to the table? Are we not saying, look, if it’s going to be, it’s up to me. I’m the one that’s here to bring this digital transformation. And if I don’t do it, no one else will. And we need to be strong enough to kind of fight that battle. Is that what it is? Or, you know, what is it? Because clearly COVID-19 did a much better job.
Speaker 1 | 12:08.510
Oh, yeah. It’s all of those. The reluctance of some, whether it’s in higher ed or in, you know, for-profit business, you have executive managements who still believe that technology is there to keep the lights on, keep the doors open. Pick up the phone, ring, ring, ring. I’ve got a problem. You’re my ticket taker. Thank you very much for the help. And then the other part of that is you’ve got IT middle management, senior leaders and executive leaders who have come up through the ranks of technological advancement. But then I’ve heard you say this before on a podcast, you know, they don’t have that ability to sell. They don’t have the ability to empathize and to project to the other C-level executives, you know, what the vision is and why IT should have a seat at the table and why digital transformation should be going on and why it’s important to have you fill in the blank. That’s all part of that. And, you know, part of it’s our fault, part of it’s the, well, I’m going to throw that back. I think it’s all our fault being IT industry.
Speaker 0 | 13:08.944
One,
Speaker 1 | 13:09.484
if we’re in a business where their philosophy is to have an IT director, and I’m not bashing my IT directors at all, but the guys that work for me, they focus on the operational strategic. They focus on the operational task. That is what they’re there for. My job, the guy that works for me, we focus on these transformational long-term thought projects, digital transformation. We’re looking at some other long-term.
Speaker 0 | 13:32.463
Visionary stuff.
Speaker 1 | 13:34.144
Visionary. You need both of them, but too many of the executive. The executives at IIT, they are still focused on operational standards, operational tactics, operational functions. And you’ve got to get out of that mindset. And it’s our fault that we don’t. You know, for example, I’m not going to toot my own whistle up here at Piedmont, but the staff I have here on campus, one of the items that we go through with yearly training, they give me a list of items that they want to train on, certification, new qualifications, new technologies. And I make them pick one or two soft skill trainings. For example, my help desk manager is doing ITIL certification. The whole help desk staff has gone through the HDI certification process. Two or three of their training modules. In fact, every one of their training courses, at least two of the modules deal with soft skill and emotional quotients.
Speaker 0 | 14:24.790
We should have the Phil Howard delegation training and certification.
Speaker 1 | 14:31.235
It pays off, though, because it gets my guys out of the mindset. They’re technical experts. I know. I do not know a single thing about pulling cable. I could not configure a patch panel. I’ve got a gentleman that I pay well, and he is extremely intelligent. He handles all that for me. In fact, my technical background is in web development. You give me HTML, CSS, and PHP, and I can put together a nice page for you. But the point I’m getting at, I don’t have the technical expertise to go out and run my network. But I’ve got the ability to hire the person that can do that for me. And I’m teaching him to have the ability to go to these senior directors and put forth the projects that he knows are important. We’re on the Piedmont soapbox, for example. This was done primarily before I came on board. When COVID hit, we were in a sweet spot technologically. We basically took about two hours to write some scripts so that everybody could go home and reboot their machine and have everything they needed. Network-wise, we’re sitting on a… We’ve got a 10 gig infrastructure completely in place. Our ISP providers given us a one gig pipe. So, I mean, basically, as soon as they give us more bandwidth, we’re ready to suck it in. We’ve got the capacity. We’ve got the availability to where the kids on campus. The only complaints we get are when they’re on the Wi-Fi system. And it’s typically nine out of 10 of the help tickets come in are going to come back to something on their computer or something on their mobile phone has got a configuration. That’s. The box is checked or unchecked, and we fix the form, and I’m good to go.
Speaker 0 | 16:01.148
So how do we eliminate that problem? So that’s the next question. How do we eliminate that problem? Signs in the bathroom. By the way, before you call the help desk, have you done this?
Speaker 1 | 16:13.196
Well, we’ve got, and I know you don’t mind saying vendor names. We use Zendesk for our help desk platform. One of the things I’ve been advocating is not just to have that as the ticket taking place, but we’re building a knowledge base off that one. We’ve got… On the homepage, we’ve got it set up with, I was able to do the HTML styling on that one. We’ve got these little panels in there for faculty, staff, students. We’ve got Zoom category. We’ve got wireless category. So we’re trying to educate all of our end users. If you have a question, whether it’s technology related or not, if you’re not sure where to go or what to do, go to this page. You start typing in your question, you’re going to get a pop-up and you’re going to get a chat bot that kind of guides you through some, hopefully. answers to your problem. If that doesn’t do it, put a ticket in and we help put it.
Speaker 0 | 16:59.335
What do you think? Let’s just, I’m going to flip this around for once because I’ve always been talking about how IT needs to communicate with end users. We always talk about how end users are the challenge and every industry is different. Like, you know, the trucking industry, for example, if you’ve got a bunch of truckers, like that’s an interesting group of end users. If you’ve got nurses, that’s another group of end users. You’ve got all these different groups of end users. I’m always asking, you know. How do we communicate with them effectively? How do we put technology in their hands that’s easy to use, that doesn’t cause more tickets, that doesn’t create training issues? You know, the whole, we focus on that a lot. Just, I’ve never asked this question before. How do you think, what do you think is the best way for end users to communicate with IT staff? I mean, typically it’s like, hey, can I grab you in the hall? Can I do a drive-by and grab you in the hall? Can I enter up a ticket? Can I call this 1-800 number? But in all reality, I’m just curious. What do you think is the best way for end users to get what they want out of IT?
Speaker 1 | 17:57.949
That’s a good question. Like I say, we don’t want to talk about how we can.
Speaker 0 | 18:00.510
Never ask that.
Speaker 1 | 18:01.091
And I’m going to put it into a relative three-point answer because it’s what we really do here on campus.
Speaker 0 | 18:08.995
Hold on, we’re going to put this three points out. I’m going to write an article about this. The three ways to communicate with your IT. Anyways, go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 18:17.139
And it all boils back to the. you know, educating and collaborating. And I’m going to get to the three points here in probably about 30 seconds because I always talk a lot. But one thing that I do personally, I go out to the end user groups and, you know, meet with them. I’ll learn their language. I hear their needs. I’ll talk about their pain points. We communicate and collaborate. So, you know, they’ve got an understanding of who we are, what we are, and how we do it. So the three ways that we advocate communicating, we tell the end users, you know, if it’s just a standard request, if you need to have a… piece of software upgraded. If you need to have a machine tuned, if you need to have an extension moved, just a typical non-emergency request, go to the help ticket system. If it’s something, the service request can be done self-service, they’re going to have the answer there. And so that’s one way is get into the service request, non-emergency, go to your help ticket system.
Speaker 0 | 19:11.046
Are you saying your help ticket system will point them towards a… did you know or have you read this first? Or it will send them to kind of like the library of stuff first.
Speaker 1 | 19:24.107
And if they can’t find the answer, and we’re going to be incorporating a chat bot here in the next few months. But, you know, if they can’t do self-service answering, then they can submit a ticket and say, hey, I’ve got this request. I can’t figure out where it is. Help me out with it. And then we tell them, you know, if you’ve got something that’s a little more critical in nature, or if it’s time sensitive, give us a call. And we put out our, we’ve got the system set up, we’ve got cell phones, we’ve got the system set up to where they, and I forget the comm lingo, but we basically have the, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 19:53.494
tree the phone tree set up auto attendant auto attendant or uh yes yeah gotcha do you guys have a uh do you have a call queue do you have like you’re number two in line do you guys have a call queue yep we do okay so you guys are and then the third thing we tell you know if you’re in the building stop
Speaker 1 | 20:09.863
by knock on the door and you know we and if it’s something that is a urgent situation we’ll expedite you right in and there if it’s something you know somebody knocks the door and says hey you’re reading into a machine for me We’ll say, yeah, we’ll take your machine, we’ll give you a loaner, we’ll put you on a schedule. You’ll take anywhere from two hours, maybe two days, depending on the schedule. We do service tickets, phone calls, in person, depending on the nature of the situation.
Speaker 0 | 20:39.295
Flipping that around, you have to call vendors every now and then. Just out of curiosity, what’s the worst vendor experience for you to happen?
Speaker 1 | 20:50.598
And I’m going to say, because I tell this vendor, I’m married to you. Well, it’s an ERP vendor and it’s a colleague. It’s written by a Lucian company. Yeah. And the amount of money in education and for-profit business, when you drop the hundreds of thousands to below millions, implement and fully have operational ERP system, you better be married to him for 15 years or so. That’s a once in a career move. So, yeah, I told my Ellucian vendor, I said, we’re married to you. Good, bad, or ugly, we’re not getting divorced. But I told him, I said, if I had been here when they were going through the process, you might not be here. I mean, they’re so big, they’re a pain in the butt to work with. You said before, it’s 1-800-pound sand. Yeah, yeah. They’re very nice people, but having to go through the bureaucracy of their company, it is frustrating. Very frustrating. And as my…
Speaker 0 | 21:50.062
As far as slow and time and time to like fix things, or I’m assuming there’s a little issues.
Speaker 1 | 21:55.544
I’ve got, I’ve got two general on staff and they, you know, they’re programmers. I’ve got one’s an Ellucian administrator slash programmer. The other guy’s a junior programmer and he’s report writer and a business analyst. And all they do is work with the, the product we have as colleague. So they work with the colleague system and the, we’ve got five periphery systems that integrate in with it. And that’s, you know, that’s what they do. And they’re necessary to the college because if we had to rely on a Lucian for the support, we would be two to three months out, sometimes four months out on the project list. And that’s just, there’s no way you can do business that way.
Speaker 0 | 22:31.422
So do you have, just, just all made me think to tie it back to education. Now, do you guys have a, and it, and the reason why I asked is because I was having my sister, she’s a nurse and I was having this conversation with her because I sent her a voice note through WhatsApp and she was, she was like, I, I will not click on that. I do not know what this is. You know, and I was like, I was like, wow. I was like, you probably, you said exactly what your security guy wants you to do. I was, you know, and I’m sitting to my, you know, but then she’ll say some other stuff that is just kind of like, you know, we’re way out there. She’s like, look, I was, I’m a baby boomer. You know, the only computer we had in high school was the punch ticket machine. I was like, yeah, I get it. And then she was talking about, you know, her basically, you know, I guess ERP system where you were saved for the hospital. Right.
Speaker 1 | 23:15.901
She’s an epic.
Speaker 0 | 23:17.390
Yeah, they’re definitely using Epic. But it’s the same exact thing, right? It’s such a nightmare. And I think in the medical industry, a lot of times, I feel like the software and technology people take over and we forget on the vision, which the vision is at the end is to educate. For you, for your situation, the ultimate vision would be to educate for the hospital, obviously, healthcare and to provide healthcare services and whatever that vision is. Do you guys tie that back in with your team? Do you guys have some kind of vision like, hey, look, ultimately we’re trying to educate here. How do you tie it all together? Do you think the two kind of is that part of the paradigm shift?
Speaker 1 | 24:01.146
You better believe it. And, you know, I like the way in our conversation we’re doing a lot more high-level talking than we are nuts and bolts. But, you know, answer that question how we tie it back in. I tell this when I’m at board meetings. I was at an all-campus meeting. A couple weeks ago where I had to discuss, I tell my staff here is that until they’re ready to throw up. Everything we do, the end result, everything we do is geared toward answering four questions. One is our activity fulfilling something that’s part of our strategic plan. And our strategic plan is wrapped right back into the college’s five, ten year strategic plan. So if it’s part of the strategic plan, fantastic and great. We’ve got three questions we look at additionally. Is the activity going to increase the value? Is the activity going to help control the cost? Or will the activity help manage the risk? So we’ve got four questions we ask. I love it. I love it. And if you do, it has to answer. And, you know, ideally, it’d answer all four of them. But I’ve yet to see anything that I’ve, any project I’ve worked on that’s covered all four activities. But we can always hit one. And sometimes we get two or even three of those questions answered. But, yeah, that’s the litmus test. If we want to do something, whether it’s a small operational task or if it’s a, you know, large, holistic, multi-year transformational project. If it doesn’t answer at least one of those questions, we’re not doing it.
Speaker 0 | 25:27.869
I mean, that’s great. Increased value, control cost, manage risk. In other words, you’re saying a lot of times an increased value does not necessarily mean always control cost.
Speaker 1 | 25:38.234
I use the phrase control cost because, you know, if you say contain or cut cost, I tell folks around here, I say, I have no problem spending money, but we’re going to make sure that we’re investing it. It’s going to be intentional. It’s going to be well thought. and we want to make sure that we get a good return on whatever we’re spending. Because the spending of money, you know, the effect of spending money is that you’re going to increase the value of your product or you’re going to be able to manage your risk better.
Speaker 0 | 26:07.468
Do you guys have, in the education space, do you guys have MBOs or managed by business objectives tied to IT? Do you have anything like that?
Speaker 1 | 26:14.011
We do some. A lot of the objectives we have tied to IT, I look more on the objectives. Most of our objectives are tied to ITIL standards. We’re also looking for the security at NIST standards. And then for us, our creditors are a big push on how we do the business of the college.
Speaker 0 | 26:35.320
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 26:36.140
We’re a little bit more specific than the MBOs.
Speaker 0 | 26:40.582
So just curious on the creditors thing, maybe just give me an example there of a good example. And the reason why I’m asking that also is for a lot of… a lot of IT directors out there, even people just complaining in general about, you know, not having a seat at the table or no one cares about IT, even if it isn’t their fault, you know, all these things. I’m always trying to see how can we dig in and, you know, just look, I’m the phone and internet guy at the end of the day, right? And a lot of people don’t, you know, Phil, what’s the big deal? You know, you guys have a master agency, you know, you guys are app smart, you guys help us. We’re basically like the CDW of the telecom world. You can help us purchase all these things. They say, you know, what’s the big deal about internet? But it is a big deal when you have to call 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND. It is a big deal when you don’t have the right support structure. It is a big deal when you don’t have people on the inside. It’s a big deal when the sales rep makes a sale and disappears after the sale and doesn’t support you forever, right? And then there’s a whole other aspect of that as well, which is really supporting IT leadership and what they’re trying to accomplish and the level of knowledge and connections that we have throughout the technology world. And I’m always looking to give. I don’t know, an extra piece of advice. And I’m just thinking to myself, if you had a young IT director that was aggressive, looking to grow into a chief technology officer role, or looking to just grow in general, how many business leaders, executives, people sitting at the roundtable would appreciate someone that came to them and said, hey, look, I want a job here, or I want to raise, or I want more this, and I’m willing to put… numbers behind it. I’m willing to tie it into the business. I’m willing to tie it into the rules because I don’t know how many IT directors have MBOs or have some sort of salary tied to or bonus tied to those four activities that you just talked about, increasing value, controlling costs, managing risk, strategic planning. I’m just wondering if there’s ways, tricks that IT directors could maybe add to that. conversation that would give them more of that answer to why COVID-19 is driving the growth and not them.
Speaker 1 | 29:03.452
You said a minute ago that word trick. I don’t know if it’s so much a trick as it is just being aware that, and this kind of parks back to our technical nature anyway, we’re all tech geeks in a sense. If I’m an aggressive, you know, and I was this way five years ago, because I have my IT executive management experience. I’ve only been senior level and executive for five years, and I basically went to a dean of the former school I was at, and I said, hey, I can do this job. He said, give me three months, and, you know, if you like it, great. If you don’t,
Speaker 0 | 29:34.237
you know. Yeah, that’s it.
Speaker 1 | 29:35.418
And he said, we’re going to give it to you, and in three months, if you’re not doing the job, you’re going to be fired. So I was aggressive that way, but there’s no real trick to it. You just got to sit down and. the big things, like you said, MBOs, if you put it in a general concept to quantify what you’re doing. And whether that quantification comes from internal drivers, such as an MBO, or if it’s an external driver that you have to satisfy, for example, accreditors or, you know, board requirements, you quantify what you’re doing. And then you’re able to go to the board, to the president, you know, to the other C-level executives and say, hey, this is what we plan to do. Here are the numbers we’ve got. And when you get it done, you come back and say, this is what we did. And here’s the actual results.
Speaker 0 | 30:18.714
Yeah, it’s almost like, I mean, I guess I don’t mean trick as much as I mean, like awareness, right? Kind of like awareness of what you might have in front of you. And a lot of times it’s just, you know, we look at reports all day, why not tie those to ourselves? And, you know, just not be that, just not be a butt in the seat. Like IT really can’t be a butt in the seat anymore, right? Especially if we’re leading the digital transformation. So how does, you know… I guess to, again, bring it all the way back to education in your field of work. You’ve, are you happy with, you know, are you happy with staying? You’ve been in education for, I mean, how long have you been in education for? Did you fall into that industry or, you know?
Speaker 1 | 31:07.863
In a sense, yeah, I’ve been in, I’ve been in education since 2006. So we’re talking just, you know, 13 years, 14 years now. Just quick history. I’m, I’m, um. degree in mathematician. I’ve got my master’s in mathematics. I have my undergrad in mathematics. I started my first career as an industrial engineer, which is basically the lowest paid of the engineers because you’re a mathematician that does mathematical modeling and statistical analysis. I was an industrial engineer and I fell into education.
Speaker 0 | 31:35.900
Yeah. Hey, look, I was the lowest of the lowest of a degree in creative writing. Okay. So somehow I ended up, my dad was a math major. And then he became a doctor. He didn’t even graduate college. He did three years of college and then he got accepted into med school, but he was a math major and he was also going engineering. And I don’t know, for whatever reason, probably the same, probably some of the same reasoning as you, he decided, no, this ain’t going to work out. I’m probably going to become a doctor like the rest of the rest of the people in my family. So that’s what happened to him. But where do you see, and we’ll kind of, we’ll kind of wrap this up here with, if you had, you know, to other people in the educational space or. And just in general, because everyone’s, we don’t know, most of the people are homeschooling right now or dealing with whatever systems, even other teachers in general. Geez, other teachers have had curriculums forced upon them and new technology forced upon them. And just talking with people, I talk with teachers. Just the nature of my family, for whatever reason, my wife ends up talking with someone and, oh, I teach the school and she says I homeschool. And so you immediately kind of hear all of this barrage of, you know, now we’ve got to deal with this and we’ve got to deal with this. And the teachers have been kind of barraged with all this technology and they feel overwhelmed. Their workload is actually now harder because. They’re not teaching in a classroom anymore. They don’t get in a car and drive to whatever the school now They’re teaching via digital technology. So now their life’s actually harder So I don’t I don’t even know where the question was there. I don’t know there’s there’s a question There’s a deep question in there. So I’m gonna say yeah,
Speaker 1 | 33:14.706
I’m gonna say a but real quick Yeah, when you said that twice or life is harder I was thinking but then that’s the failure of their technology support one of our fundamental jobs It’s not just to keep the lights on and the doors open, but we’ve got to enable and enhance these end users so that, at the very least, their life stays the same, their workload stays the same, their stress level stays the same. And at best, and it shouldn’t be an ideal, it should be something we strive for and realize, we’re out there making it easier for them to do the same amount of work. That’s part of what we do is to not take jobs away and replace it by a robot. We make the… routine task we make the job of doing what an end user does easier so that they have the time to focus on more personal interactions more high level thinking more transformational projects they can be involved with us in in a perfect technology world that’s what you do yeah
Speaker 0 | 34:12.557
we all know there’s bad technology there’s bad software right oh yeah we’re all blown away by the by the you know by the iphone and we mean one button there’s one button like no one you know that That to me still blows my mind, right? But we all know that there’s plenty of technology. And just like we just got done talking about the ERP system, we all know there’s plenty of things with endless problems and issues that come into play. So there’s obviously a, I don’t know, it’s not a double-edged sword. It’s whatever that is. There’s two parts to it, right? And a good IT department, a good IT leader will make it easy for them. So I’m sure there’s some teachers out there. There’s probably some teachers that said, No, it’s awesome. Everything’s systematized. Everyone jumps on Zoom. I don’t have to drive into the office. I don’t have to deal with, I don’t know, the gossip around the water cooler. I don’t have to deal with any of this. Kids show up, they either do their work or not. You know, however that is. So where, where is, where in your opinion is technology going with education?
Speaker 1 | 35:18.308
Man, that’s a five-hour conversation.
Speaker 0 | 35:22.530
Okay, let’s cut this back. Let’s dig in back to where we were at the beginning. Let’s say, what’s the first part of the digital transformation that people can grab onto right now? What’s kind of like the very first part, the first problem that we need to fix or drive?
Speaker 1 | 35:41.520
That’s definitely a manageable question. I appreciate that. Yeah, in the scope of the digital transformation, The first two steps, they’re fundamental. They’re part of the transformation, but they are not the transformation. The first thing anybody ought to do is examine and evaluate your information and your data. Digitize it. If you’ve got paper-pencil forms, get rid of it. If you’ve got something that’s analog, digitize it.
Speaker 0 | 36:09.862
Really? We’re still dealing with that. We’re still dealing with that. Spreadsheets and papers and filing systems.
Speaker 1 | 36:16.627
Yeah. Man. And the simple thing is, you know, if you’ve got a paper-pencil form, put it into a PDF. Put it into a WUFU form. You know, it’s not going to be the end result, but that gets you digitized. And if you start to digitalize the processes that are involved around the paperwork, you just digitize. You know, for example, in higher ed, a real classic one is your drop-add form for a student. Typically, the old school day, as a student, we want to add or drop a course. Student grabs a sheet of paper form from the registrar’s office. The student. Fills out the information on the form. Then the fun part comes. The student signs it. The student takes it to the instructor to either get signature for drop-ad. The student takes it to his advisor.
Speaker 0 | 36:56.280
Oh, my gosh.
Speaker 1 | 36:56.600
The student takes it back to the registrar’s office for approval, takes it to the business office if there’s any change in fees being added or reduced. If the student’s an athlete, there’s a good chance that student’s going to have to go to an athletic advisor to make sure that the change in courses don’t affect his eligibility. I mean, and… we’re looking at doing that. That’s the process that’s going to get digitalized.
Speaker 0 | 37:18.469
And think of the time,
Speaker 1 | 37:20.810
think of the hours. You’ve got the workflow with a set of logic steps, and the kid fills out the form, hits the submit button, and then it’s going to all the necessary parties for their signature. So you’ve got one-step process. What could have taken days or weeks to complete takes minutes or hours. So that’s the first two things. When you’re doing something that’s just, like I said, a five-hour conversation, start with the simple stuff. Get rid of the paper and pencil. After that, start getting rid of all these manual workflows. Then you can sit down and start looking at these cultural shifts that you’ll want to, you know, make the transformation on. Because you’ve got the foundation laid already. You’ve got folks that are used to using technology, that are used to being educated about how to use it, that are educated about how to ask questions about the technology.
Speaker 0 | 38:09.227
And then we’ve got to sell it, though. We’ve got to sell it. And this is what we’re talking about. You got to sell it. You got to be able to tell that story or get someone to help you tell that story of, Hey, take a look at this process. This is what we did from here to here. This guy takes the here, this guy takes the here. I mean, I don’t know if you know this, but this guy makes this much per hour. This guy’s makes this much per hour. We know labor is the biggest controllable cost. If you’re an it director, it manager, you don’t know how to talk a profit and loss P and L statement, gross margin, controllable costs. You can’t speak that language better. There might be one of your courses right there, a quick little business course that we make people take. These type of things are very important. It has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. If there was one message, any one message you had to deliver out there to either your IT fellow brethren, either in education or just in general, what would that be?
Speaker 1 | 39:04.448
One quick message is… Learn to sell the services. Don’t just produce results. Sell your services. Sell your team. Make yourself valuable to your institution.
Speaker 0 | 39:21.671
It’s so ironic, too, because we’re always shutting down sales reps every day. We’re ignoring emails. We’re ignoring calls. We’re drawing memes about them.
Speaker 1 | 39:30.716
I feel for them. The cold call vendor, I’ll tell them, frankly, I said, I don’t have time for a cold call right now. Please email me. If it’s something I’m interested in, I’ll call you.
Speaker 0 | 39:38.290
I would never email you. I would never email you. I might mail you because that’s much more effective. I might send you something in the mail. I shouldn’t give away my secrets here, right? Because if you ever really want to get a hold of somebody nowadays, remember how junk mail used to be? Junk mail used to be the way that you don’t, you just don’t send junk mail. email me or something. No, never email somebody. If you’re not at all, the most important person in their life, they’re not going to open your email ever. Send them like a big manila envelope. That’s like bulky with something in it and handwrite their name on the front. And that’ll guarantee you it’ll get them.
Speaker 1 | 40:13.860
Yes, it does. That is true. It’s amazing how that’s flip-flopped nowadays.
Speaker 0 | 40:18.462
I got to go back to the mail. I got to go back to the mail again. Uh, and Brian, I’ve been great having you on the show. Thank you so much. And, uh, please, um, I look forward to having you back. The next big transformation that happens, please just let me know. We’ll have you back on the show.
Speaker 1 | 40:33.432
I definitely will. Yeah, we got some stuff I’m looking at on my whiteboard. I’ll keep you calling about a half year, nine months.
