Speaker 0 | 00:09.682

All right, welcome everyone back to Telecom Radio 1, and we are continuing our series dissecting popular IT nerds today. Very happy to have Brian Martinez on the show. Brian is from a place that’s near and dear to me, Colorado, lived there for 14 years. had at least half of my children there, which was, well, almost half. It was at least three kids there. So Brian, hey man, welcome to the show. Great to have you on there. How is it out there today?

Speaker 1 | 00:39.575

Yeah, it’s beautiful out here. I want to thank you for having me on. It’s a beautiful day and, you know, typical Colorado weather, always see the sun, which is great.

Speaker 0 | 00:47.717

Awesome. So you’ve got a lot of experience, man, but like most people, we all, or most people that got into IT or technology at some point, it starts off, it starts off somewhere, man. So what’s your, I kind of like the theme of what was your first computer, which is something that I’ve been asking a lot of people lately. And believe it or not, some IT guys didn’t even have a computer. But what about you? What was your first computer? Did you have a first computer? And how did you get into this whole, this technology thing or this nerdy thing we call IT?

Speaker 1 | 01:18.625

Well, my first computer was an Apple II. And then I got an Apple IIe. And then I was very excited to build a 386 computer. So, I’ve been in IT since the inception of the computer. I started taking my parents’electronics apart, and that’s kind of where it got me into IT. I think,

Speaker 0 | 01:38.867

I remember, you know, it’s funny you say 386, because I remember building, I remember building my first 386 as well, and getting all the catalogs in the mail, and looking at all the various different, you know, like, I want a tower, or I want a half tower. And I remember… I remember building my own computer myself. Is it a similar story for you getting all those catalogs in the mail and just, you know, looking over them for hours?

Speaker 1 | 02:00.077

Yeah. You couldn’t like go to the regular store and buy parts. I used to order stuff from a catalog and it’s probably the same when you’re thinking it’s called computer shopper. And it was like a phone book. Some of it in black and white, some in color. And the color ads would always catch your eye. You’re like, oh, this case would be great. This power supply. And I used to spend hours looking at those.

Speaker 0 | 02:22.763

Yeah. So you’ve got really, I mean, you’re working on a standardized process right now for increasing really IT. I think, first of all, standardized processes are very, very important, but standardizing anything in IT or any type of process is important. But you’re touting and have experienced and actually made this happen, an 80% increase in efficiency across the board at… numerous companies by doing, by basically standardized process. So maybe just speak for a few seconds about that and how you are measuring really increasing efficiency in the IT department. And that’s so important in the mid-market space or at least mid-market companies, mid-market IT, because often we’re trying to do a lot with less or a lot with very little, or we have limited staff. So being efficient and getting as much done. as we can. Obviously, it’s very important to the business. It’s important to getting more done and supporting our end users to do their job and make the company more money, ultimately making everyone more happy as well. So maybe just speak for a few seconds there on what you’ve noticed or a story or taken something from complete chaos to clarity.

Speaker 1 | 03:47.079

Yeah, basically… I joined a company and they had over 6,000 computers and they had a limited budget for people that managed the whole gamut of things. So the biggest thing, I started the basics and basically the biggest thing that I’ve seen is keeping track of what’s happening. So I was able to, you know, every place I’ve gone, and this has kind of repeated itself over and over, I’ve dissected the… the problems, the issues, and what’s happening. And without a good service desk, that’s impossible to do. So what I’ve been doing, you know, start from ground up, figure out what would be the best service desk for that area of business. So what I would do is take a service desk system, develop it, and you’re able to get huge paybacks by implementing a service desk. Because for one, you’re supposed to, I mean, you’re able to track issues. You’re able to track reoccurring issues, track assets, track money, what you’re spending on, how much time the technicians are spending on specific tasks. Um, that kind of came about because in a current, in a situation I was in, I would have people, uh, stop the IT technicians in the hall and say, Hey, can you fix this for me?

Speaker 0 | 05:14.255

Let’s give it, can you give me like a specific example there? Because there’s, I mean, obviously this can go far and wide. So let’s, let’s just go through like a typical, like, Hey, fix this problem. So. So we’re talking no help desk or no basically system or really major process that was in place. And you’ve got basically what it sounds like trial by fire or drinking from the fire hose IT way of, or actually you said almost like a janitor mentality of like, hey, can you come, you know, clean up on aisle six type of thing? What were one of those things that maybe someone would be stopped in the hall for?

Speaker 1 | 05:50.051

Oh, you know, it was, there’s examples I can think of. You know, there’s system down. situations, IT technicians walking down the hall, someone will stop them and say, hey, my mouse doesn’t work. Can you fix this for me? I’ve got a report to get out. And obviously, you’ve got to weigh what’s most important when you’re dealing with issues. So in this particular example, the technician went off and fixed this person’s mouse without any kind of tracking. And what I’ve noticed is a lot of, unless you have a good system in place and processes and procedures, it ends up being support by favoritism. or support by relationship versus support by need and support on business importance.

Speaker 0 | 06:33.285

And that actually has drastic effects on the culture of a business.

Speaker 1 | 06:37.849

Good time effects. So, you know,

Speaker 0 | 06:40.852

what I think… Favoritism, obviously, favoritism or, God forbid, nepotism. But yeah, that would have a huge effect on the culture. And then with no way of tracking it or no way of knowing, how do we even know whether… XYZ IT guy is even doing his job or doing his job effectively.

Speaker 1 | 06:58.625

Yeah, and then you also end up fixing the same thing over and over because there’s no paper trail on what the technician’s doing. It’s also new knowledge sharing, which is another big key aspect of putting in a good service desk. You know, someone would go fix something and then someone else, another technician would go fix something, the same thing. spending the same amount of time figuring out what the core issue was when you could have shared the information and solved the issue very quickly.

Speaker 0 | 07:30.229

Yeah. Yeah, the numbers must be astronomical. Just out of curiosity, this sounds so, this just sounds elementary, like that you would, but how many businesses do you think actually don’t have this type of process in place still?

Speaker 1 | 07:47.053

Well, I did computer consulting for over eight years and I can tell you, numerous, numerous of them do not have a system at all like this. It’s the last five big projects I took on, there was no system. So it’s very common. And I think the biggest thing is getting the executives to see the importance of putting in a system like this. The biggest thing is culture change because everybody wants things, you know, quickly. And everybody thinks their priority is most important.

Speaker 0 | 08:20.031

Everyone wants to feel special or doesn’t want to lose their special status if they were favored. I got you.

Speaker 1 | 08:28.457

Yeah, exactly. I mean, like I said, it comes down to they like working with this person because this person’s pleasant or whatever, as opposed to maybe this person’s a little more difficult to work with. But they’re just as important to the company and just as an important person. But the technicians will tend to go to where they enjoy or it’s the easiest situation to be in.

Speaker 0 | 08:49.711

So let’s talk about this storm of putting in a ticketing system, I’m assuming more than that, but tracking service help desk. We’re going from complete chaos and again, drinking from the fire hose, fix it as it happens type of thing, refix it again with no sharing of knowledge. Give me kind of like a picture of what did we end up with and what were the areas that we solved? And how did it look kind of after the fact?

Speaker 1 | 09:22.616

Well, what we ended up with after a big culture change, which is, you know, a big part of it, that’s actually harder than the technical piece. So we end up with having people putting in requests for a specific item. It’s logged in a category. You can set them up whether you want to or not based on time, how much time it is to fix it. And then you’re also creating a knowledge base of the issue. So over time, you start developing all this data that you can crunch numbers on. So, for example, I was able to go back and look at technicians’performance and see that this particular technician only did so many, it only resolved so many issues. as opposed to these other technicians that have done tons of issues. Then you can drive down and see what type of issues the particular technician was working on and figure out, you know, why is this guy not performing? Were they harder issues? Was it a training issue? You know, get down to the core problem. In addition to that, you can also track how many times the issues are occurring over and over and over. So you got these big old data queries that you can pull any number of different information. You know, is it the same machine happening over and over? And then, you know, is it the same users? Is it a training issue? Is it a hardware issue? There’s a lot of things you can track. And then what that helps you do is start doing predictability on, OK, now we know that, you know, this process is going to run. We better be ready to handle. you know, a certain situation, maybe a hardware, software flaw or something, a custom software, you know, it’s going to happen. Or, you know, this particular person’s working, you’re going to have issues because they need more training or they haven’t developed the skills they need. All these matrices, you can go down and drill down a hundred different ways. And that’s what I did. And that’s where you get your efficiencies in time, money. it all rolls back to being able to support more with less.

Speaker 0 | 11:37.662

Well, you know where to invest. You know where to invest in new technology where that’s going to fix a problem. You know where to invest in labor or where to invest in training for either IT help test technicians or if it’s training for even end users in general because you can see the trail, the paper trail. Now, is there any particular ticketing software where… or anything like in general that you particularly like more than others? Or is it kind of a, there is no one size fits all. It depends on the situation.

Speaker 1 | 12:11.905

I think it depends on the situation and it depends on the culture. I’ve worked at places where people like to log into the ticketing system and put in their tickets and see it in a web form. And then I’ve had other people that they don’t want to deal with that. They just want to be able to type an email and send it to help us say, Hey, this blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’ll, translate it into a ticket. There’s other systems that you can call in and it’ll record the number and record the issue and put it in the system. So it all depends on what your needs are, what your budget is. I always, I’ve been in several situations where you start off with something very inexpensive and then you prove it’s worth and say, Hey, if we upgrade this, it can integrate remote support in it. We can do inventory. We can help the accounting team with their asset management and, you know, costs and asset control for taxes and all that. And it just depends on, you know, what kind of budget you have and what kind of culture you have.

Speaker 0 | 13:13.736

To talk about the culture just a little bit, give me some of the, what was some of the pushback? What was maybe a moment in time where you had a significant, where you can remember there was a significant issue or pushback in the culture? And how did you overcome that? What was the, what was the challenge? And what did you do to overcome that?

Speaker 1 | 13:35.060

I think the, uh, you know, several, several things come to mind. Uh, a lot of it, all, most of them, uh, go back to time. They don’t have time to do a ticket. They don’t have time to, they’d rather see you in the hall and stop you real quick.

Speaker 0 | 13:49.332

No time to send an email to help desk at help desk.com.

Speaker 1 | 13:53.355

That’s where that, that worked in really great. It’s just, we’ll just send a quick email. What it does is it logs it on our side, and then we’re able to send them status reports saying, hey, your computer or whatever it is, is not being fixed because we’re waiting on a part. So what that eliminates right there is the finger pointing game that I’ve seen so many times. Like the example I gave before about the technician being stopped in the hall. You would have client and user say, well, I told, you know, John. that did to fix this, you know, months ago. But then on the other hand, you would also have the clients on the other end said, well, I told IT about it when I seen them. So there was no paper trail as to time, did they really do it? And then, but on the other flip side, you’d have the technician say, oh, I already fixed that. But no one ever got any communication that it was fixed. So it eliminates that big circle of problems.

Speaker 0 | 14:49.441

So communication in general. Is some of it just giving people the why around it too? Because I know, first of all, I’ve been a young, immature person years ago. And when I first got started, when I first got started… Well, when I first got started, I was at Starbucks and we had a help desk and you’d call the help desk and they would fix it. And there was just no other way to do it. You had to call the help desk and guess what? They fixed your problem. And that was just part of the system. And surprise, surprise that, you know, Starbucks has a, you know, very standardized process in place. Of course they do. And then I remember working for various other companies moving on in the future, various different startups, Cisco startup, like we talked about last time, where… you know, the sales guys thought that they were, you know, the Kings, right? So it was just like, you know, just fix my computer. Even if I threw it out the door in a fit of rage and my laptop smashed on the ground, like I just need a new one. I need it right now overnight. You know, so there’s that type of mentality as well. So was it a matter of giving people the why around it? Look, here’s, here’s what I need to do. I need you to enter a ticket. And the reason why is so we can track it and fix your problem and stop this insanity. Was there any of that communication to upper management or, you know, like how did that conversation happen, I guess?

Speaker 1 | 16:08.748

Well, it was pretty blunt to upper management saying, hey, we’re losing money. This is why. And I was able to go back and give them actual data, which they were really surprised about. But when it comes to the end user, it’s more about developing a relationship and showing them that if you do this, I can support you better. I can make sure that we. get these addressed every single thing as opposed to you forgetting you told me or you’re you having an issue and and not reporting it because you know you totally forgot about versus my team saying oh you know john john’s not important right now we can handle him later so they never pass it on to other technicians that’s another thing is you never there’s it’s a big information sharing system on all sides so what were some of the numbers that you brought to you

Speaker 0 | 16:58.575

When you say we’re losing money and some of the numbers that you brought to, some people say executive management, key stakeholders, the man, what were some of the numbers that, you know, we were able to pinpoint or show? Like, where was the loss? Where was the bleeding happening?

Speaker 1 | 17:18.509

So a lot of it had to do with system downtime. I was able to show, hey, we were down in this particular area. These people are standing around. you know, the same issues happening over and over. The people before that were just going in and fixing it and not keeping track of it. There’s other areas where they would just go in and replace parts randomly without having any record. The other big thing for me is I was able to say, hey, we did, you know, 6,000 tickets during this period of time, and here’s what we did. And a lot of that stuff… never got reported and never got accounted for. And you can tie all that back to money. And then the other big piece of it is the preventative piece of it. So everything went from being a fire drill to not being a fire drill. So we were able to look at different aspects of different computers, different servers and whatnot and say, you know, this is failing over and over and over. It’s time for replacement, time for an upgrade, which will ultimately, yeah, you spend money up front, but you save downtime, you save salaries, you save. you know, customer frustrations and so on.

Speaker 0 | 18:31.218

So what does, once you free up all that time in efficiency, what does the IT department look like after that? And was it like, hey, you know, was it staffing decisions that you were able to make better now? Did we keep the staff the same way it was? Was it, hey, we’ve got more time now to actually… invest in technology to drive the business forward versus the technology is a cost center mentality what does it look like after the fact when you do you know gain efficiency and start doing things in a um

Speaker 1 | 19:09.661

in a very strategic manner i guess well i guess it might again analogy it’s it went from working on the engine as a car is going down the highway to being able to pull the car over into the garage and work on it So in a lot of these cases, yeah, exactly. In a lot of these cases, people, you know, none of the maintenance was done on machines. None of the patches, none of the updates needed to be done. No hardware upgrades, you know, no management of storage. So all that, so our focus went from, you know, emergencies, emergencies, to being proactive, to making sure the system’s running as efficiently as it possibly can. And… doing preemptive planning for strategic reasons.

Speaker 0 | 19:54.605

Okay. Give me, what’s, give me some kind of secret for the listeners out there. Is there any kind of… We all have our own things that we do that I call tricks or tactics, whatever it is. Everyone has something they just do that’s special or unique to themselves that can be shared with other people that can be carbon copied and done anywhere else. Is there any particular tricks? I don’t care what it is. Obviously, mine’s telecom. Mine’s like, hey, make sure the phone’s plugged in right. But is there anything particular that would be very helpful for any of our listeners out there?

Speaker 1 | 20:31.874

I think the biggest thing is to keep in mind that anytime you get a response with something being wrong, it’s always the Internet’s down. And I think the biggest trick for me is not to overreact and think the whole Internet’s down. Check that particular person first. I’ve seen, you know, mass chaos in a lot of environments when they say the Internet’s down. So people start, you know, technicians automatically take it as, you know, the Internet’s down versus, no, that computer. the NIC card’s not working on that computer or someone unplugged it.

Speaker 0 | 21:04.765

You’re saying that one person basically cried wolf or started a fire and it reverberated through the entire organization. So now they’re resetting routers and doing major things versus checking that individual unit first.

Speaker 1 | 21:15.594

Exactly. And if, if you don’t put a stop to that and, you know, control that, then that, you know, everybody’s been in this situation. Oh yeah. The internet goes down every other day. It really wasn’t the internet. It was that person’s computer, but yet. the voice travels on that the internet was down. So everybody thinks, yeah, the internet was down.

Speaker 0 | 21:34.839

But it was just a network issue.

Speaker 1 | 21:35.740

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 21:38.360

All right. Well, man, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s surprising to think that there’s a lot of people out there that don’t have a really, I guess, in-depth or fully mature ticketing system in way of managing. managing tickets on a day-to-day basis. That’s, it’s, it’s shocking, but it happens out there. And, uh, by doing that and by bringing in a, when I say like a strategic or a very, um, standardized ticketing process, um, the business will function better. And that’s just in, that’s in general as well. It doesn’t have to just be in IT, any standardized process, um, In any business, if you look at any great business in general, everything is standardized. And, you know, I hate to bring in this very classic example of McDonald’s, but everything in McDonald’s is standardized. And that’s why they did so well. Right. And it’s the same thing. And it’s the same thing with IT. We can’t just, you know, fly by the seat of our pants and fix things here and fix things there. There has to be a very standardized process. And the more we refine that, the more efficient we’ll be. And… have more time to drive the business forward and waste time on labor and tracking down wires and looking in closets and fixing mouses.

Speaker 1 | 23:01.682

Yeah. I think the biggest thing is standardization and a central repository. So that way, you know, people can have information all in the same place versus, you know, this technician’s inbox, this technician’s inbox. So yeah, it’s very important. And that’s why these bigger companies are successful because it’s cookie cutter.

Speaker 0 | 23:20.814

That’s awesome. So Brian, thank you so much for being on the show. Anyone that wants to, you know, reach out to Brian does consulting, also an it director and a CIO as well. Anyone that wants to reach out to Brian, you can find him on LinkedIn. And obviously Brian, thank you. Thanks again, man. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Speaker 1 | 23:40.664

I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on.

Speaker 0 | 23:42.705

Yeah, man. Take care.