Speaker 0 | 00:09.565

All right, everybody listening, welcome back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have Ed Lopez on the show, and we’re winging this again, man. This is the first time we’ve talked, so I appreciate you jumping on the show here and be willing to be one of the, you know, you’re probably like the fifth one that I’ve done this without, you know, at least. us doing an interview first so i appreciate it man so hey um director of it for and you’re currently a director of it at a fairly large kind of pharmaceutical company but give me kind of just your general you know how do you how do you get started into in technology anyways man what was um you know like i guess what was your first computer or your first taste of technology as a child um

Speaker 1 | 00:52.942

i i think you know for for everybody i think it was a commodore 64

Speaker 0 | 00:56.948

It does seem like that’s for every, it was an Apple two C or something, but you know, every now and then I get some guy that was like, Oh, I had, um, you know, like, I don’t know, it was Pentium two or something. Like you’re young. Oh yeah. So common, common or 64. So, so shoot, man. How’d you get that?

Speaker 1 | 01:12.981

You know, um, I kind of fell into it. Um, I’ll tell you that, you know, my dad was kind of like in a telecom and I see, um, I got, yeah, I got this and this is back in, in, in the day, but, um, You know, I got my Commodore and I remember him sending me one of the kind of the first IM where it was just like a bought modem just dialing up. And this is that’s how it kind of started. He just having conversations with my dad. He was, you know, he was in another part of the country and having that kind of conversation.

Speaker 0 | 01:50.979

That’s actually pretty deep. That’s pretty deep. That’s pretty deep on an emotional level, you know, let alone the whatever, how fast your modem was. What was the first modem? I mean, did you have like the old, I can’t remember. What was that thing called where we took the handset and put it on like that? What was that?

Speaker 1 | 02:09.179

Did you have that? Yeah. Something very similar. But yeah, it basically was actually the handset on his cradle and it was just like an analog receiver and oh my God, I’m dating myself too.

Speaker 0 | 02:23.696

I’m googling old school modems as we speak because I’ve got to get this correct terminology here because let’s see here what was that thing called? I think it was that 28 speed or something like that modulate why can I not remember the name of that thing I’m going to really make myself look stupid because people are going to be like come on Phil acoustic coupler acoustic coupler That was the name of that thing where you took the handset off the old kind of maybe, I don’t know, I guess maybe you could do it with rotary dial, but at least a touch tone tone to put it on there. It was in those movies like Weird Science and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 | 03:05.943

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it was one of those kind of early jammies where you had a huge floppy drive, five and a quarter. It was pretty archaic. I wish I kept it actually.

Speaker 0 | 03:20.592

300 baud. I do. I wish I’d kept all my old computers now. I went over to my dad. So my first computer was a Texas Instruments and my dad purchased it. He was a doctor. Kind of ironic because you’re in healthcare now. We kind of like learned together. I didn’t have a really cool dad that was in telecom that would communicate with me via that. We did not have, yeah, I come from a very small town. We definitely did not have access to any internet or you know, messaging boards and stuff like that. So you’re, so you’re going back and forth with your dad. And then, um, so kind of what was like, you know, what was the next step? Like what, what was high school like in technology? I mean,

Speaker 1 | 03:58.112

you know, high school was just a regular, um, uh, computer science, nothing really out of the ordinary writing code. I mean, we give you like a huge book and you’d probably write a code, like a sentence for probably about 45 minutes to get nothing to happen. Yeah. But back in the day, that’s how it started. And it kind of got me curious. But actually, I fell into IT. I’ll tell you, I just got a really good gig when I was in college. I started working for an MSP that was supporting a pharmaceutical company. I was supporting Y Pharmaceuticals. So I started off as a level one.

Speaker 0 | 04:39.185

Like in the NOC type of thing? Like in the NOC?

Speaker 1 | 04:41.966

Actually support, like help us. Just being able, supporting other field sales. making sure that they were able to synchronize and communicate and that really got me going What were you guys selling back then?

Speaker 0 | 04:55.881

Selling T1s or what?

Speaker 1 | 04:58.131

We were on T1. We were a call center basically in Manhattan supporting about 30,000 calls a month. So it was a fast-paced environment. And what was really interesting was I really got my first taste of the SLA. What a service-level agreement. And because you had a monthly… QA, right? So if you did, if you got X amount of scores in your QA, and I’m talking about like, if you have, if you have more than three seconds of dead air when you’re communicating with an end user, um, you, you know, you’d be dinged on it. I would always hit my Q, my QA, they would always have top scores. And, and, um, and eventually, I mean, it really took an interest, started, um, really getting involved with the reps and identifying what, what their perception of IT was. And so, um, And then quickly moved. I think I held that position for probably about a year. And then I was moved over to a level two spot. So I worked, you know, from the ground up.

Speaker 0 | 06:05.606

You know, I had my first non-restaurant job in college. Because it was normally like, you know, it was like Jim’s Wings in Fort Collins. I went to Colorado State. I was working at Jim’s Wings and I was delivering pizzas. But my first real job was in a very large call center working for Quest Wireless doing mobile phone support on old. like analog phones and teaching people how to, you know, enter a contact into their phone and press the, you know, the two button twice for B and six, three times. And then two again, twice to type in Bob and, uh, you know, the millennials won’t know what we’re talking about. Well, I guess maybe, but it depends if you, it depends on if the cutoffs at 78, 1978, then some people will know. But, um, uh, but yeah, that, that job, taught me a lot. It was fast paced. It was a lot of fun. And I think people underrate call centers, you know, working in a call center in college and kind of when you’re younger is actually a great job.

Speaker 1 | 07:05.096

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it took, it took, IT was never really the focus. I mean, I wanted, I wanted to go into meteorology.

Speaker 0 | 07:15.381

No money there.

Speaker 1 | 07:17.002

Yeah. But you know, that’s the only job that you get paid to be wrong.

Speaker 0 | 07:22.285

That’s pretty cool. You’re right. wow we have kind of a lot in common i did this this uh non-profit thing for this meteorology people that we were like what did we call what did we do it was uh it was how they measure like you know hail like hail placement and and where you you put basically put all these like square styrofoam things out with foil wrapped around it and then when there was a hail storm it would you know put pockmark and you would measure that and that’s how they figured out you know how they would measure hail storms and stuff.

Speaker 1 | 07:55.840

Yeah. Yeah. That’s really true. I remember that.

Speaker 0 | 08:01.444

So, all right. So meteorology and that was, um, not going to happen. And I was going to go to school and that was not going to happen. And, uh, you know, I kind of fell into this technology thing, selling T1s back in the day. And you were kind of doing that and working in, in the, you know, like help desk support area. So how’d you, so then what happened? What was the big jump?

Speaker 1 | 08:22.291

I mean, that was, I’ll tell you, I mean, I still think that, you know, support and everything that we know now didn’t exist back then. So I just, you know, moved into a level two role. I’m still just doing my job. But this time I was able to kind of look at everything that was going on from the perspective. And, you know, for some reason, I just worked very, very well with the people around me. I kind of got noticed. And I kind of became like one of their subject matter experts on the team. And it wasn’t until I was introduced, I had a really cool director who actually, actually showed me and kind of got it out of my head that my job is to just be looked at as my career. And he really, you know, introduced me to myself and why it’s really important to look at customer experience. And so, you know, and seeing how it helps us can actually become a service that, you know, so, and it wasn’t until then where I really took things a little bit differently and I knew that I wanted to focus, um, at that age, uh, you know, I didn’t see anything past 30. So, um, you know, I didn’t think that I would have the career that I have today, but, um, I will say that it’s, uh, it’s one of my mentors who taught me, definitely started me off and sent me on the right path.

Speaker 0 | 09:50.091

So that’s key because I’ve been talking a lot lately about mentorship and IT mentorship and you’re one of the very few I guess of all the guys that I ask I would say, and maybe this will, maybe the statistics will change as I start to ask more people on the show, but I would say so far, it’s about 95% of IT leaders, IT directors had no mentors. Wow. Which is really crazy to me. Wow. But you had, you can clearly, you can clearly speak to someone that made a difference in your life. And not only that, kind of noticed that you had the ability to possibly, I guess, listen to people and… not kind of that weird engineering mindset that some people can’t, you know, can’t get out of. And I was, I actually have a show that’s being released today from Phil’s, with Phil Sarang, and he actually had to like go into deep coursework and learn how to just, you know, kind of really filter and listen and listen to people and really be able to hear people. And then here you have a, you had a mentor. at a kind of younger age saying, you know, it’s about customer experience and a service desk, not a help desk. It’s not just fixing broken, you know what I mean? It’s serving people.

Speaker 1 | 11:07.530

Yeah. It was, it was tough, trust me. It was definitely a challenge because I was, you know, they really don’t teach you how to become a manager, right? You do have to manage in courses, but like when you’re, when you’re working on a large desk and you have to kind of manage a lot of different personalities, um, So and on top of field reps, you know and understanding their point of view and seeing what’s going on you you either It’s good to have that that customer experience and end background, you know

Speaker 0 | 11:38.201

What are some of those coaching conversations look like for you? Like what were some of the maybe what was like one of the things that you ran into that was you know Hey, you know service desk guy like Like, we’re going to serve this field rep. You know, he’s not just an idiot asking for, like, you know, I don’t know, whatever it is. You know, like, what were some of those coaching conversations? Or is there anything that you were able to help coach people on and help them maybe see the light, I guess?

Speaker 1 | 12:08.040

I’ll tell you that I get very involved with my staff. And I, so I, you know, I work. my way from level one. So I know all, everything that they have to do all the long days, just sometimes reading off the script, um, sometimes it gets a little monotonous. Uh, so I do engage my staff and I like to know that they’re either, they either have a career path or they know what they want. Um, I have very real conversations. Um, because you know, I, I don’t like to micromanage and they’re adults. Um, but I really try to have, uh, promote, um, where they are taking accountability. for a specific, maybe a ticket. It could just be a nonsense ticket that comes through the desk. Sometimes it’s those small things that fall between the cracks and that kind of turns into a hot issue, right? And just to be always accountable for their work and what they put out. And I always feel that, you know, you should always dress the part, make sure, even though you’re at something in a contact center and you’re not really, you know, interacting sometimes with a lot of management. You could always at least, you know, um, I have a thing that I kind of don’t, uh, approval by, um, graphic tees, right. But I don’t care what, what, what basically you, you come in with, right. You can always be able to support your end users and be able to have a conversation and present, um,

Speaker 0 | 13:34.854

graphic tees. Wait, are you saying graphic t-shirts?

Speaker 1 | 13:38.035

Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Speaker 0 | 13:39.516

So I can’t come in with like a, uh, like a slip knot, like t-shirt on the top.

Speaker 1 | 13:44.938

No, I’ve seen some crazy. I’ve seen. some crazy ones actually coming wherever i’ve had hr actually approached me on some of them and um and of course you know i mean i’m accountable for my staff and they know that um but i will tell you that um in my career i’ve never had um i’ve never had a technician call out on a snow day and um so i you know and so for the first time ever i’ve kind of gotten a 360 review so this is where my my staff gets to review me And I’ll tell you that those are the comments that mean more to me than, you know, not that it means more to me than what my superiors think, but it holds very high.

Speaker 0 | 14:28.256

One of the best things I think any leader can do is take his entire team, put them in a room, give them like a form, right? And then leave and let them like… completely, you know, provide all the feedback on you possibly, you know what I mean? I think it’s in like first break. I think it’s first break all the rules. I think that’s the book that has the form in it, but to, to, to leave and then. And then put someone in charge of typing up all of that feedback so that it’s completely anonymous. So no one has to feel like, you know, anything like that. And then you get handed this manila envelope with all the feedback on your leadership. That can be one of the most humbling and best experiences that you can do. So,

Speaker 1 | 15:16.094

yeah,

Speaker 0 | 15:16.755

I applaud you for that one.

Speaker 1 | 15:19.397

It really, it really shapes how you interact with people. But you know what? I’m only as good as my staff. So I know. that if I’m not doing the best for them, I’m not going to be able to do well myself. Right. And I’ve never, I’ve never, never dropped the ball. I can honestly say I’ve never had any major problems with staffing. I’ve always had a good crowd. And you know, you’re going to probably come from my experience, but I’ve been able to do this even and have staff around the world, like in Nairobi. So, um, And that’s interesting, managing a support desk and a whole different way of life in Nairobi, Kenya.

Speaker 0 | 16:03.879

Have you been over there?

Speaker 1 | 16:05.340

Oh yeah, I used to travel, I used to go almost every quarter. So, you know, I worked for the International Rescue Committee, so I basically helped them establish the support structure that I currently have now. And I got the great opportunity to… My CIO said, you’re going to have a problem if I send you to the Congo. He wasn’t joking. He sent me everywhere he could.

Speaker 0 | 16:32.181

I’ve traveled quite a bit lately, but I think traveling can be one of the most eye-opening experiences for any human being, especially stepping out of the U.S. culture. It’s kind of one way. step into a completely different culture and different country and you see how the local community community interacts and how people eat dinner together and how people just go about their, their general day can be quite life altering.

Speaker 1 | 17:03.799

Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I’m, I’m from the born and raised in Brooklyn. So, um, you know, so, so for me to be, you know, and I wrote,

Speaker 0 | 17:11.062

so it’s like, so it’s like you are like you already are in a foreign country. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 17:15.264

I got you. Exactly. Exactly. Um, But you know what? It was very, very eye opening. I mean, um, having to do, sometimes if you don’t have a budget or you don’t have staffing, what are you going to do? How do you support, you know, an organization of 14,000 end users with no support structure? I mean, basically when I stepped in, that’s what it was like. And so it was very interesting meeting so many different types of people, but more so working, um, with their local labor laws and, and, um, because you just don’t want to end up in a Nairobi prison.

Speaker 0 | 17:48.657

Wow.

Speaker 1 | 17:49.822

Yeah, yeah. Very, very awesome experience. Awesome. I definitely suggested you have a different appreciation for what you have. And I always used to come back, rushing back home and, you know, just walking down the street, you take it for granted. You can’t even step into your hotel without, you know, getting a metal detector. It’s really, it’s really something else.

Speaker 0 | 18:15.239

Yeah, I mean, I just got back from Egypt a month ago. And I stayed in this like very small village outside of Cairo. And I didn’t realize Cairo was 9 million people. It’s, you know, it’s twice the size of LA. It’s bigger than New York. And you just see, and I was living in like one of the, I was staying in one of the poorer villages. And I just saw, I saw everything that you just never see here in the United States. I saw a, like a dad driving a motorcycle with his kid in front of him on the handlebars with his wife on the back, holding a baby squished in between them. you know, flying down the highway and then like, you know, a donkey pulling a car with two kids on it, towing a cow on the side of the road, you know, with another truck that’s like flying down the street with this as much as you could possibly stack into the back of a pickup truck.

Speaker 1 | 19:02.151

Oh my God. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 19:03.433

You know, with like two guys laying down on top just lounging, you know, just like, hey, you know, and that’s that was just the highway. That was just

Speaker 1 | 19:11.700

I do like the traffic.

Speaker 0 | 19:13.254

Yeah, you know, and everyone uses the horn, you know, beeping every second. And they use it as like a form of communication. And it’s just, you know, it kind of all seems to work and meld together. And then I got back to the United States, actually landed in JFK, and I was driving back to Massachusetts. And I was like, no one’s beeping their horn. Like, this is weird. I was like, and now that I’m looking at this and I see the streets are clean, I was like, I’m in New York. I was like, I’m looking at this and this looks like. pristine cleanliness, I was like, there’s something wrong. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 19:48.063

Yeah. It really puts a lot of perspective, especially when you can’t really walk down the street. And, um, so I would stay next door to, I was very, very interesting. And I remember one of the first times I went, I was just very, you know, I’ll basically talk to anybody. And, um, there’s paramilitary all over, um, in Nairobi. And I, you’re saying, you know, saying that right to the Israeli embassy, because that’s one of the safest places in Nairobi to stay. So I didn’t get a chance to go. Like everyone asked me, did you go on safari? I’ve never gone on safari. I wish I did. Um, but, um. you know, I got, I got stopped one day and they asked me for my papers and, um, and I just took my hand off and Hey, I’m Ed, right. And he thought I said, I’m Ed. And so I got pegged as Lebanese and next to the Israeli embassy. So, you know, I, I definitely, uh, I woke up a little very quickly.

Speaker 0 | 20:43.599

He’s like, not Ahmed. It was Ed. Exactly. Oh man. Wow. Wow. So, man, 14,000 end users. I mean, it’s just like it’s a big responsibility, man. And then we got healthcare. And the one thing I noticed about IT leaders that are in healthcare, they kind of tend to stick in healthcare or it’s just healthcare people don’t trust hiring non-healthcare people that haven’t had any healthcare experience. What’s the… Do they throw a lot at you? I mean, are you also managing like the hand dryer in the bathroom plus the mobile phones plus, you know, I mean, what’s kind of like your scope of work that, you know, and how do you divide it all up?

Speaker 1 | 21:27.279

I mean, so I like to think that I handle all of the service delivery. So meaning I’m reporting with all the services and all the capacity for IT. I actually will say that I have a real knack for it. I mean, I really took the ITL and, you know. and got my cert and everything. So I know how everything should function, even in other departments, because I noticed that everybody, IT is high load, right? Very, very much so. But trying to really stay focused as far as services being offered. So anything from, yeah, your mobile, anything that touches IT, everything down from your new hire request all the way to you’re requesting a cell phone, so, or a report.

Speaker 0 | 22:13.778

for example it’s all about you know providing um value that’s um a very high level description of a very complicated a very complicated thing man yeah yeah okay gotcha so what would you say is your like single biggest and and you What’s your single biggest or what would be somebody else’s that might be in a similar position as you? Single biggest struggle, frustration, or problem that you think that’s very typical. What’s your single biggest struggle, problem, frustration for someone in this role, this type of role?

Speaker 1 | 22:58.136

So I’ll tell you that when you’re walking into an environment that’s not ideal or they do things their own way or there’s process, you know. process and maturity across the board, you know, you’re definitely walking into an environment where you’re not just you’re handling your work, but you’re also trying to change a company culture by yourself. You’re trying to educate your coworkers and teammates and try to enroll in actually enrolling them into adopting a view. It’s a massive, you know, it’s sometimes it seems a little overwhelming and it helps. when you have leadership that is on the same page. But at times when you’re… So I was brought in to my current role to bring in a certain level of IT security. And the first thing I walked in and saw that the incident process and how we even take and handle issues was completely wrong. And users would shoot an email over to IT. Anybody that saw that email would respond, hey, I got it. And end users never even knew. when to expect a callback. So it kinda, so the perception of IT was like, okay, somebody will get to me, and now you have a mass of people that all wanna be helped, there’s no workflow. It’s chaotic, right? But more so when you have to convince your teammates, the director of infrastructure used to be taking incident requests or escalations like this, handling it like this, we’ll own this. Those kinda little tedious things sometimes full between the cracks with some of these guys and so that’s that’s the the biggest challenge that i’ve had um is really trying to make sure that i got my the rest of the department on board

Speaker 0 | 24:52.930

Well, first of all, the, the, the trying to get people to join your parade and, and, and wave your flag basically and, and getting, and then, but you’ve got to get leadership is the, is the first kind of group of people. But if they, but if they brought you in to begin with to kind of fix broken, then hopefully they’ll be, they’ll be open to you. But any, any ideas or, you know, what do you say? Do you, you know, after a week of looking at things, you, you bring a. you know, a PowerPoint presentation to executive management and say, Hey, look, here’s what I see. And I need your help with this because this is the problem and this is where I can take it. And I need your support.

Speaker 1 | 25:35.149

So, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a little something like that, but it’s more about, I mean, it’s after a week, that’s kind of hard. I mean, you can, you can see, you can identify what’s broken in the department, but what you really want to get is the feedback from your end users. You really want to know what’s. how the company perceives IT. You wanna know those standpoints because, and that’s why documentation is key, so that you have that log. In the instances, like for example, this email, I actually had to go around and schedule time with major stakeholders and people that ran departments to really kinda get the feedback. And that’s how I start any kind of roadmap. I mean, that’s how I know what I’m gonna see. start what’s going to be my initiative i really don’t have fun you know i’ll have initiatives handed down by my cio as far as but what i really need to get into the week find out where i need to work first um that’s i’m always going to ask the end users what’s the perception of it because that’s that’s

Speaker 0 | 26:37.347

the most important thing and that’s how a structure of the plan of attack how about like um how about like surveys and stuff like that do you do a lot of surveying or anything like that keywording and then kind of taking those keywords and filtering it and bucketing it into various different segmentations and silos?

Speaker 1 | 26:55.059

You know what, in an ideal setting, right? Yeah, that’s totally great when you have a process that automatically sweeps off every three tickets or four tickets, you get a quick survey. That’s awesome, but you got to remember that you are sometimes dealing with end users that have no set level of expectation around anything of IT. So it’s gonna be a lot of engaging them one-on-one And I did I did that I would go to a location and I schedule a few people I’ll be there for like a few days and I want to teach everybody and understand what’s going on every location has a different type of Feel and and persona like the ball people in Boston are totally different people in New York and they’re pretty You know the same issues. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 27:41.611

come on

Speaker 1 | 27:46.074

You really want to understand what’s the concern at that location.

Speaker 0 | 27:51.337

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, gotcha. Yeah, so that’s great. Basically, obviously take their feedback. And again, it’s about serving. It’s not about just fixing a problem and fixing broken. So it’s awesome, man. Hey, it’s been great having you on the show. I really appreciate it. No, just for, again, you had a mentor. and I haven’t run into many IT managers that have had mentors, but if you had any one piece of advice or major piece of advice for the other IT directors and mid-market IT directors that are listening to the show out there and possibly in a situation similar to yours, like in the past, et cetera, what would that be?

Speaker 1 | 28:36.025

Sometimes I try to run to the finish line. that change is going to take some time that even though you might be making progress and it’s not visible to you that that is that you are making an impact you know within ic and it’s always kind of you know you just staff right i mean i have i have some folks that uh some guys that have stuck with me throughout the years that it’s really really it’s kind of nice to be able to give them a call hey i got a role for you and they would jump it real quick so you know say oh yeah oh yeah Um,

Speaker 0 | 29:15.474

so that’s a whole nother podcast that we need to talk about how to hire, how to hire and how to know whether your guy’s ready to jump ship immediately and doesn’t even care that he’s at your place.

Speaker 1 | 29:26.240

Trust me. I, you know what I mean? But, um, I, I have very, very, very little turnover if ever. So, uh, and that’s, yeah, teach the staff well.

Speaker 0 | 29:35.345

Yeah. Yeah. That’s great, man. Well, Hey, I really appreciate you being on the show. It’s, uh, it’s Friday when we’re recording this right now. So I hope you have a great weekend. Um, And then I hope to have you on again in the future, especially if we want to talk about that staffing thing, because I think that’s a subject that really just hasn’t been tackled yet.

Speaker 1 | 29:54.078

Trust me, anything you need to know, I’m more than happy.