Speaker 0 | 00:09.607
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, finally, finally, I tracked this guy down and get back on the phone with him, Colin McCarthy. And the reason why this is near and dear to me, and I’m going to use, if you allow me. I’m going to use your LinkedIn banner as the cover of this podcast episode, because you have a very streamlined monitor, the most streamlined I’ve ever seen, a state-of-the-art headset that looks identical to the one that I used at Quest Wireless when I was working in their call center, which they’re no longer a company. And Joe Naccio, I think was his name, obviously went to jail for anyone that knows telecom history. Very… very, you know, that’s not the usual thing in telecom, people going to jail or, you know, anywho, let’s just start off with this great picture. I mean, first of all, you’re kind of a big deal. You know, give me an idea of, you know, why don’t we just start off with, you know, your VP of global IT out of New York. What does that mean for you where you’re at? And then we’ll talk about the picture. Then we’ll talk about the picture.
Speaker 1 | 01:25.186
Okay. So yeah, thanks for having me on. Yeah, I’m the VP for Global IT for Essence, an advertising agency, part of GroupM, part of WPP. And I guess my day job is providing the IT infrastructure for 2,000 employees, 20 plus offices globally around the world, giving people laptops, office internet connections when we used to have offices. dealing with all of the internal infrastructure, meeting rooms, whatnot, and managing all the tools that they use now that everybody, like the rest of us, is working remotely. So we are on Google Workspace. We’ve been on Google Workspace since it was called Google Apps for Business. Thankfully, Essence was on the Google domain before I joined back in 2010. So that’s sort of what I do, provide work with a team of 14 colleagues. We provide them with all of our users with the tools and the hardware that they need to do the jobs to service the clients that we have.
Speaker 0 | 02:37.620
Quick question to that. Are you like a full Google shop? Do people have Excel and Word or are they using Google Docs? I’m just curious.
Speaker 1 | 02:46.528
No, no, we’re not 100% Google. We do use Microsoft Teams quite a bit. Okay. Google is one of our clients, but then we have other clients that are on different technology stacks. Our parent company is very Microsoft-based. So we’re sort of Jack of all trades, master of most. So there are some people in our organization that, if they’re serving a particular client, will operate solely within the browser and use no other application as opposed to Docs and Gmail and Google Meet. But… We’ve got some clients that like to use Zoom. So we give 20 or so people a Zoom license. We have a large client that likes to use Microsoft Teams. So that whole group there have access to Microsoft Teams and we schedule calls using the platform that the client likes. You can’t really dictate what the client needs. Everybody needs to be flexible in using a wide range of tools in this day and age. But yeah. People do have Excel on their laptops. Excel still works for some jobs. I know Google have actually made it easier to migrate your, what’s it called, visual basic scripts into App Script within Google Sheets. I think there’s a new plugin that helps that. So I would hope that our reliance on Excel for some data processing would slowly die away. But, yeah, we are. I would say we’re in 90% zero trust beyond core browser-based operation.
Speaker 0 | 04:24.914
Very nice. And I only ask selfishly because I am stuck in the world of obviously supporting thousands of end users at various different companies using all different kinds of platforms. So then I’m stuck myself with every platform. How do you manage that with 2,000 end users? How do you manage your applications? I don’t think I’ve ever really asked this, but how do you manage…
Speaker 1 | 04:49.339
Through a philosophy called sass ops, which is a very good segue. Yeah, we use some tools with APIs. A lot of this can be automated for license management, provisioning, changing admin settings for different applications. We can do it from one admin panel that we have in a tool called BetterCloud, bettercloud.com. They’re one of the pioneers and still probably the only true, real… cross-platform SaaS management application. But we’ve been using them to manage our G Suite domain since 2014. And then when they started to do integrations with other applications like Office 365 and Azure AD and Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, Lucidchart, LastPass, we were able to plug all of the management of those applications into BetterCloud. And then we have workflows to onboard people. And more importantly, in this day and age, to off-board people, to remove that license from an application that somebody had access to, to free it up. So that’s how we manage it. I can talk about that subject for hours and hours.
Speaker 0 | 06:13.772
Maybe we would do that. But then considering that I’m a managing partner at Converge Network Services Group and AppSmart secretly on the backend, AppSmart would probably want me to say, hey, take a look at our platform and could you please add… tear it up and tell me what we need to do here. But that’s another subject. I’m primarily a telecom guy. So it’s not the end of the world if you manage your apps through however you do that. No, more fascinating is where you came from and what were you doing in this picture in front of, again, the streamlined monitor? What were you doing on that day and who took a picture and why were you just like, hey, look at me?
Speaker 1 | 06:58.061
So I took that picture probably on one of my last couple of days of that company. That was a company, this was probably taken in 1998. And I’d worked for that company for, I think, six months. And I was leaving to go. to leave and come back to the US. Obviously, I’m originally from the UK, but I had a summer job working in a summer camp, which I very much enjoyed. So I was working at this outsourced IT help desk company called ICL down in Sitcup in Kent. And there I had a really nice computer. I think it had a 17-inch monitor, very nice. High resolution was 800 by 600. It was really good. Might have even had 8 megabytes of RAM, I’m not sure. Yeah, we used to… I started on the CompuServe help desk, so I spent my days and my evenings, because I used to work long shifts, I used to take double shifts to save up my money to travel, taking telephone calls from users based in the UK and Ireland. And… asking either billing or technical support questions for accessing the CompuServe network. At the time, most of that just involved reinstalling the Windows 98 TCP dial-up networking application. That would fix most of your problems. But yeah, I was second line there. So that’s why I was sitting at that desk with my little Plantronics headset.
Speaker 0 | 08:43.677
It’s a sick headset. What were those pieces of paper hanging down? Scripts, like shortcuts? Do you remember? Press F1, press F2?
Speaker 1 | 08:58.226
I worked for this help desk for a couple of winters. And I know the next winter I was working there, they had all of these charts around the office. And those pieces of paper there were probably call stats and the number of calls. of calls answered within 60 seconds, which I think was the SLA. It didn’t matter if you put that person on hold for five hours, as long as you answered it within 60 seconds, I think that matched it or met the SLA. But I realized that nobody ever looked at any of those pieces of paper. So I used to print out my own and I had a pie chart. I don’t know, I had a bar graph that was completely estimated. was a bar chart of the number of red cars that I would see go past the window. And I had a giant pie chart that just said, this is a pie. it looks like a chart. I posted them up in the little corner that I was, and they were up there for about six weeks before anybody actually realized that I put up some joke posters. The business wanted to put those stats out for the employees and obviously for the managers walking around thinking, oh, this is impressive. But nobody was really taking any notice of it.
Speaker 0 | 10:16.176
There’s quite a bit of… wisdom in what you just said and what you used to do. Wisdom from the standpoint of, well, what kind of data goes into a system? What kind of data do you track? And how do you get people to really care? Because if they don’t care, the data that’s going to go in anyways, just some fudged numbers. What kind of data do you use on your team to drive success? And since you used to just put up a piece of paper that said, this is a piece of pie, and this is the number of red cars that drove by, how do you get people to care?
Speaker 1 | 11:01.106
That’s a very good question. I’m very fortunate to be in a small team. There’s only 14 of us around the world. And also, a lot of us have been part of this team, and we’ve grown together. I started at Essence in 2010 when I was the first full-time IT support person. My three IT managers started as IT support engineers back in 2013, and their careers have progressed and they’ve grown. Everybody else has been with us for sort of two or three years. I think it’s giving them a sense of purpose and ownership. We have a ticketing system, but And I like to have as few tickets open as possible. But I don’t badger the team with fancy charts and sticking to an SLA and gamifying, answering tickets and closing tickets and having an MVP of the month or the week, which I know the application can do.
Speaker 0 | 12:20.415
IT directors hate that. They hate that. They hate gamification. The gamers, like honestly, like some of the biggest gamers hate gamification. Most of the big MSPs that I deal with, like we might be looking at, I don’t know, some new contact center or something like that. And, you know, the sales rep or whoever will be like, and you know what’s really great is you can create gamification, you can create competition or anything. They’re like, no, I hate that. Don’t ever talk to me about that again. And that might say something to do with your ability to build comradability.
Speaker 1 | 12:56.604
Yeah. You know, we’ve always, going back to the comment of being, you know, jack of all trades master of most, we’ve never siloed people into, you know, you’re just the exchange engineer. You’re just the file server engineer. You’re just the, you know, the backup guy who. takes the tapes to an unknown location every month. You know, we’ve always been, obviously, like every sensible organization or IT team, we operate on the principle of least privilege. So, you know, not everybody is a super admin, but we’re very open in the access and the information that we give. You know, I have heard of horror stories of, you know, Some IT managers don’t want to give up any control and don’t want to grow their team members and want to sort of restrict them and want to keep that control for themselves. And thankfully, in managers like that, we’ve been very lucky and we’ve taken on those good staff from a bad manager and they join our team and they’re able to grow and spread their wings and really develop. So we…
Speaker 0 | 14:12.426
How do we spot that person? Just real quick, how do we spot that guy? For everyone out there listening and maybe a non-IT person out there listening who’s rolling their eyes and like, oh yeah, how do we spot that guy?
Speaker 1 | 14:28.193
The guy who’s…
Speaker 0 | 14:29.494
The controlling guy. The controlling guy.
Speaker 1 | 14:31.515
How do you talk to the controlling guy? Because they never take a vacation. If they do take a vacation, they have to work during the vacation because they’re the only ones that can do certain tasks. And they would be the blocker in the business. oh, this can’t be done until Bob comes back in two weeks because he’s the only one that manages that platform. That’s broken. There needs to be checks and balances for how changes are made. Depending on the size of your organization, you can have a proper change advisory board that meets weekly or monthly or quarterly or daily. It all depends on the size of your organization, I think. But yeah, it would be the control aspect that they don’t want to use, that they limit their staff and they don’t give them the ability or a testing environment to play around in and break.
Speaker 0 | 15:37.830
For smaller companies that might not have that, I think that could happen easier for a company that has maybe, say, 200 to 600 employees. I would think they could easily get stuck in that situation. Yeah. Never takes vacations. We’ll just use that as the number one red flag.
Speaker 1 | 15:56.024
Yeah. Yeah. And doesn’t relinquish control or share information with his, you know, with, I would say he’s, it’s a terrible, a terrible slip of the tongue. They, you know, he or she, whoever they are.
Speaker 0 | 16:12.091
Oh, 98% of your industry is men.
Speaker 1 | 16:14.552
I know. I know.
Speaker 0 | 16:15.753
No, no, I know you’re doing the right thing. I’m saying, I’m saying you’re doing the right thing. I’m just being factual. And I don’t know why that fact is. And we’ve talked about that before. And I’ve had, and we’ve had this conversation before. And I, I wonder, I just wonder why. Maybe it’s because back in the day, you know, women are cooler and there’s more nerd guys. This is being very stereotypical. This is me really thrown out, you know, but you know, who knows why? Like how? Okay. So back to Plantronics headset with 17-inch monitor, whatever it is, how did you get there? What were you playing with? What was your first computer device or what got you so excited and had so much fun? Because we can all think of that job that we had that got us really kind of addicted to working in technology or however you want to talk about it. But we can remember that job that was the first job that was like, wow, it’s just fun. I’m assuming you had fun there.
Speaker 1 | 17:21.861
Yes. Yeah, yeah, I did.
Speaker 0 | 17:23.382
You’re not working double shifts. You don’t have fun and love putting that headset on and talking. Honestly, I remember working in a call center. It was one of the best jobs I ever had.
Speaker 1 | 17:33.930
Yes. Yeah. I did really enjoy it. I worked with a great line manager, desk manager. I can tell her. a story about. Unfortunately, I can’t remember their name because it was like 20 odd years ago. I would love to tell them where I am now and thank them for their guidance. So I started off, I guess my first computer back in the UK in the 1980s, got it in about 1983, 1984, was a ZX Spectrum, which a lot of English kids, well, A lot of English people in their 40s or 50s would have grown up, probably if they were at a ZX Spectrum, where you’d put the audio cassette in and press play, wait 20 minutes, and it would make funny sounds. And if you were lucky, Manic Miner would start running on your computer, or Hungry Horace, or Pac-Man, or another game. Then I went to… an Amstrad 1640, which was a 286 IBM compatible computer. For my 18th birthday, my parents bought me a hard disk. It was 20 megabytes and it cost 250 pounds, but it did mean that I could install Gem, which was the graphical user interface on top of DOS onto the hard disk so that when the computer booted up, I didn’t have to put in three floppy drives just to get to the GUI.
Speaker 0 | 19:10.317
Hmm. That’s the best answer I’ve had of 88 episodes. That’s the best first computer story I’ve had. It’s going to be hard to top that. It really is. I, in fact, I need you to, after this and for everyone listening to this, by the way, right now, I forget to do this all the time is take a quick break and say, if you like the show at all, please go to iTunes. And I say iTunes, but obviously if you’ve got a Droid device, I still need you to go to iTunes. Sorry, because somehow that’s what really rates top technology podcasts. And I need you to search Dissected Popularity Nerds, scroll down and give an honest review of this show, please. With that being said. Colin, I need you to send me the bullet points of all of that equipment and software, whatever it is, because I’m going to put it in the summary of the show and I have no clue what you just said. Other than DOS and 286 and 20 megs hard drive. Other than that, I have no… And Pac-Man, I don’t know who Horace is, but I’m going to play that on some sort of, I don’t know, what do we call that? Emulator? I’m going to be downloading that immediately after this and we will be experiencing that. Okay. Keep going. So, but why you got all these computers to begin with? What drove it? I can tell you for me, it was Jim Sims, who was this kid that like, you know, he had like magazines, PC magazines. And I was like, dude, like I’ve got an Apple 2C. Like what’s all this like, you know, PC stuff. Oh, look, you can order this and build this part and put this in. I was like, wow. And I think as humans, we really love customization and being able to upgrade and do stuff like that. So that’s kind of what got me hooked.
Speaker 1 | 20:58.115
Yes. Yeah. You know, and then from, I guess, 97, when I got my first, wait, I did get a 2.8, no, I bought a 3.86, I think in 92, 94. But then in 97, I splashed out like 800 pounds, which is in today’s money, it’s, you know, 1,100 US dollars.
Speaker 0 | 21:20.688
It’s like a MacBook Air.
Speaker 1 | 21:22.190
Yeah, it was a P166, so a Pentium One 166 megahertz with I think four megabytes of RAM and Windows 95 on it. And that machine did get loads of additions, additional hard disks, sound cards, loads of other bits throughout its life.
Speaker 0 | 21:47.108
I remember Sound Blaster or whatever, I don’t know what the version was. You used to go to Radio Shack and buy Sound Blaster in a box and then put that card in.
Speaker 1 | 21:55.754
Yeah, I think when I had the 386, it would have been in the mid-90s. I went to my local computer store and they just got in the Creative Sound Blaster. I don’t know if it was the original Sound Blaster or the Sound Blaster 2. And it could do like 8-bit sound. And it cost like $200, 200 pounds. I’m like,
Speaker 0 | 22:13.406
oh my God,
Speaker 1 | 22:13.926
that’s an awful lot of money. money and it’s so amazing you can get this sort of sound quality for your games. So much of what we have today is just taken for granted. Certainly back in the day when you were looking to buy your first computer, you were really reading out the pros and cons of a CJE monitor versus an EGA monitor. One was like 320×240, the other one was 640×480 resolution. And we’d do so many more colors, but it would be so much more expensive and you’d only have so much money to play with. The questions.
Speaker 0 | 23:02.728
Okay, I still don’t know if that…
Speaker 1 | 23:09.328
You wanted to know.
Speaker 0 | 23:10.648
Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean? Like I just, like I easily get stuck back in the old days because I really, I never get tired of it. I really don’t. I don’t even get tired of talking about Betamax. I still think that’s amazing. It’s like old people talking about, I was around when the TV was invented and you know, I’m telling my kids, like I remember when the microwave came. Like the microwave.
Speaker 1 | 23:28.916
Yeah, Betamax, so Betamax as they pronounce it in the UK was what my father had. It was the better platform. Michigan. I studied television and audio systems engineering at college in the UK and learned all about the different formats and phasal turn at line, PAL and NTSC and all the different formats. In the UK we also had the V20, no it was the B2000 by Philips which was based on the audio cassette where you could actually turn the VCR cassette round and get done all the time but it never really took on. I think it was popular, may have been popular in Japan.
Speaker 0 | 24:06.240
It’s all marketing people’s fault. You know what I mean? It’s all based on how good a job you guys do over there. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 24:11.743
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, obviously Sony won with VHS because of their access to video rentals and the movie studios. More things came out on VHS. So that’s how it became more popular.
Speaker 0 | 24:23.872
True. First movie I rented. I’ll never forget. I don’t know if it’s going to make a big deal. Did you guys have Sears over there? Did you guys have Sears? Was it that big? No.
Speaker 1 | 24:32.718
It doesn’t get bigger. Other department stores.
Speaker 0 | 24:35.080
So it’s like, you know, whatever the stupid department store is, it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. But I rented Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on Betamax at Sears. It was just weird. You know, like there’s, they’re selling lawnmowers next to you and you’re going to the parts counter, renting a Betamax video that came in this. brown hard plastic case. It was like some kind of crazy, anyways, wild.
Speaker 1 | 25:03.649
The first film, talking about films, the first film that I remember seeing on Betamax was Convoy.
Speaker 0 | 25:13.096
Wait, Convoy like the trucking thing? Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 25:14.637
it came out in 1978, Convoy with Kris Kristofferson. Burt Young, I’m just reading the Wikipedia page. It’s absolutely brilliant. If you’ve never seen Convoy, it’s still one of my favorite films. It’s got the best soundtrack as well.
Speaker 0 | 25:31.476
Look, man, if it was good enough to make it to some sort of tape or rental process back then, it had to be good. Kind of like Rambo 2.
Speaker 1 | 25:41.621
Yes.
Speaker 0 | 25:42.782
You know, whatever that was. That wasn’t First Blood. That was like Second Blood. Whatever it was. I remember lines down the street. around the corner to get into the movie theater to see Rambo. Like a line forever to get into the movie theater. Then the VHS came out, microwave popcorn, and that was it. No one has any clue. Now you just look at it, just watch it real quick on your phone. Well, I don’t know if we really got to the essence of why you got into technology as opposed to…
Speaker 1 | 26:15.727
Let me give you the quick 30-second… Yeah, yeah. a reduced version of what happened. So after college, I ended up working in a supermarket. I had a part-time job. They said, do you want a full-time job? I said, yeah, sure. I’ll take a full-time job. I could do it for a couple of months. About four years later, I found myself the assistant manager of one of the largest stores in the UK. Enough said.
Speaker 0 | 26:35.377
I already know. I already know the nightmare. When people ask you, you’re living the dream, you’re like, yeah, I’m living the nightmare.
Speaker 1 | 26:44.244
Yeah. And it was… keeping my car running and giving me some money. But it wasn’t, and obviously I didn’t want to do that forever. And I kept fixing like the office printer or the store printer and fixing the registers and doing stuff on their computer system and realized that that’s what I wanted to be doing as opposed to selling frozen peas and restocking the bread and milk aisle. So I left that company, went traveling around the US for… Six months, worked in a summer camp. When I came back to the UK, I applied for a help desk job doing billing support for CompuServe. This outsource company, ICL, hired me because it was like, you know, you’ve got great customer service experience. We can teach you the technical stuff. And there I was. And the funny story with my really good line manager, who I miss and I can’t remember his name. When I started at the desk, I’d been there for two weeks, and he walked over to me and he handed me an application form. And he said, did you see that we were advertising for a second line permission, a second line position? I said, yeah, I saw the advert. He said, well, here’s your application form. I said, I didn’t apply for the second line position. And he said, I know, here’s your application form.
Speaker 0 | 28:10.412
So I have a much better story.
Speaker 1 | 28:13.326
I filled in the application form and like a week later I was second line, much to the annoyance of all the other people on the desk that had been there for a lot longer. Because I was a new older guy who turned up and within three weeks had already been promoted. Yeah. In that picture, I was in the second line part of the desk answering calls. When I left, the line manager was like, you could have been third line, you could have been running the whole thing if you wanted it to.
Speaker 0 | 28:46.636
What made you leave?
Speaker 1 | 28:51.459
Life? I kept leaving. I kept working there in the winter and then leaving. I ended up working for the summer camp for seven summers and thoroughly enjoyed it. And then in 2003, When I came back to the UK, I didn’t want to go back to the telephone help desk. A friend of mine who worked in a secondary school, like a high school, he was the IT manager of that school. He needed somebody to install wireless networks in some of the primary schools, like the kindergarten schools that were associated with this larger school. And he was like, oh yeah, I can do that. I can run cable and install access points. I did that for about six months and then started to do some other sort of contract work for some of the schools and then found myself getting a full-time position in a school in South London and then quickly changed to a different school. and stayed there from 2004 to 2010. I was the deputy network manager of a… At the time, it was a large network where we had 800 students, so there was like 800 user accounts and about 400 or 500 computers and sort of about 10 or 15 computer suites they had. It was quite a technology-savvy school in South London. That was very interesting because you basically have 800 hackers on site trying to get elevated privileges on Windows XP. We experienced that problem where NetSend, does anybody remember NetSend, which was a part of Windows XP before it was patched by Microsoft, where you could do a NetSend message to any IP address or a range of IP addresses. and it would pop up a message on that person’s screen. That was the sort of things that we would discover and then have to patch. So we got very good at testing, deploying a build and testing it and user account permissions, making sure the kids couldn’t do anything. And you’d always make friends and stay in touch with the very, very clever kids who would play that. where they would find a hole and they would let you know where the hole was so that you could patch it.
Speaker 0 | 31:24.723
Absolutely. I’ve got a guy, I think it was Roland Hornblower. Some kid hacked the network and created some kind of web proxy and did something like this and was getting ready to go to some disciplinary committee or something. He’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Stop, stop. I’ll talk with him. I’ll talk with him. It takes him out to lunch, gets him a… chimichanga and a burrito or something. He’s like, how’d you do that? Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 31:53.694
yeah. And I’m very happy that one of the students… So while I was at the school, I actually taught the Cisco networking course. I used to teach CCNA. One of the students now works for us and he’s now our cloud engineer, doing a lot of stuff in G Suite, Azure, AWS, and playing around with APIs an awful lot.
Speaker 0 | 32:25.454
Yes.
Speaker 1 | 32:29.057
So yeah, it’s been a good journey from that old picture of me sitting in front of a CRT to now sitting in this virtual environment that we now are in with spending all of our day on. Google Meet or Zoom or Microsoft Team video calls.
Speaker 0 | 32:56.808
Enough of that. Let’s cut through. Let’s cut. You know, I could talk about this stuff all day and I realize I’ve spent way too much time on this and you have way too many cool stories. That might have to like pull you in for like three more podcasts. You mentioned last time that certain things are better. It’d be better to have a crack habit, quote. Yeah. I think it was something to do with VDI and VMware and Citrix. Better to have a crack habit. So hold that thought. More importantly, running into people that don’t turn on their camera. Why is that important?
Speaker 1 | 33:35.692
So yeah, I’m a very big supporter of turning on your webcam if you’re on a video call. You know, we, maybe in the organization that I have, I’m in. Essence has been on the Google stack for a long time. So we’ve had access to Google Hangouts and video calls and always done video calls with our clients. And I know for a lot of organizations, it’s something that they’ve only adopted in maybe the, certainly in the last year, but maybe before that, not so long. And they’ve often transitioned from a telephone conference call service to a video service, whether it be Skype for Business, heaven forbid, or Microsoft Teams or Zoom or WebEx or whatever. If we were physically meeting, us having this video call, like we’re on a video call at the moment to do this, us having this video call should be no different to us being in the physical office together and sitting down across a desk and having a conversation. And if we were in a physical office today together, I would not walk into that office and then put a bag over my head or for you to sort of hide behind a book so that I couldn’t see your face. So why do that when you’re on a video call? And I know that, you know, initially there’s been a, people felt uncomfortable about their backgrounds or their working environment. You know, every platform does virtual backgrounds. Every platform allows you to blur. And everybody’s in the same situation, whether they’re, you know, in their untidy basement. Like before Google Meet allowed to do virtual backgrounds, every daily call I was on, everybody in the company saw my very untidy. basement where I work. They saw the old refrigerator behind me and the wood paneling.
Speaker 0 | 35:34.895
I’d prefer that. I would prefer that because it’s just more entertaining.
Speaker 1 | 35:43.400
I was clicking the robot and I was going to try it.
Speaker 0 | 35:46.081
I would prefer severed heads. This is much better.
Speaker 1 | 35:51.124
There’s workout equipment.
Speaker 0 | 35:53.225
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 35:55.166
For those listening in black and white behind me, is my workout bench. It’s a pub which has got old clothes and some camping gear in it.
Speaker 0 | 36:05.433
There’s a ton of mirrors for some reason.
Speaker 1 | 36:09.376
There’s this horrible popcorn ceiling. There’s a map of Pennsylvania and a map of…
Speaker 0 | 36:16.661
This is much better. This is creating rapport. See, this is great. This is much, much, much better.
Speaker 1 | 36:24.266
I think virtual backgrounds like With a click of a button, I can be at one of my favorite beaches down at Cape May. Yeah, exactly. At the bottom end of New Jersey.
Speaker 0 | 36:32.277
You could be on the moon underwater. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 36:34.438
And I’ve got a Star Trek background. I’ve got a Star Trek shirt. I’ve dressed up like I’m on the bridge of the Enterprise. It allows for a bit of creativity and personalization. That’s why I think we should turn on our cameras.
Speaker 0 | 36:49.322
You have a better story. Can we get to the real story? You had a call with an important vendor. as the story goes.
Speaker 1 | 36:56.585
Yes.
Speaker 0 | 36:57.545
So let’s get to the why this is so important.
Speaker 1 | 37:01.488
So there was one vendor. This is why I’m so passionate about it. There was one vendor that I had a call with and the calendar invite just said me and Bob were having a call. And we jump on the Zoom call and I noticed the Zoom name that he’s joined is obviously a meeting room. It’s not his personal account. It’s a meeting room.
Speaker 0 | 37:26.707
It’s like Denver, like Denver 101. Yes.
Speaker 1 | 37:29.830
Yeah. And I’m like, Bob, turn on your camera because I know as an IT professional, your IT department has spent a lot of money fitting out that room with a camera, speaker, and a TV and everything. So let’s utilize it. Can you please turn on your camera? And. After a little bit of a pause, he begrudgingly turned on his camera. Lo and behold, in this meeting room, it was not just Bob. It was 12 other people who were there listening in on the call. And I was like, oh, hello, everybody else to play one-on-one with Bob.
Speaker 0 | 38:06.148
That is crazy. What did they say? Did they say anything? Did anyone smile or say anything?
Speaker 1 | 38:13.894
It was a call about…
Speaker 0 | 38:15.683
It was a vendor problem.
Speaker 1 | 38:16.824
It was a vendor problem call. So it was like, oh, great. Here are some other people that I can, you know, that should be the right people to solve my problem. So it was like, yeah, the SVP of product and, you know, the CSM. And it wasn’t just my account executive. So I was like, ah, these are the people behind you, Bob, that are sitting on the sofa just listening are the ones that I need to be talking to.
Speaker 0 | 38:42.225
That’s really weird. That’s really, really weird. Because I would think for a guy with a two-foot-long beard that has supported IT directors for over two decades, I would think it would have been in Bob’s best interest to say, we’re going to roll out the red carpet for you. We’re going to do everything we can. We’re going to try to fix it. blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m bringing everyone that’s important, all the C-level executives and bringing them into a meeting. And we’re going to meet here on this day and time. Why did he not do that? Do you think they didn’t care? They didn’t want to be known. Don’t give out my email address because I don’t want this guy calling, calling me. Why?
Speaker 1 | 39:27.469
I’m not sure.
Speaker 0 | 39:28.689
It’s weird.
Speaker 1 | 39:32.012
It must be something just to do with the culture and it’s the status quo. If… If you join a company and nobody else is having their video on, you’re not going to turn your video on. So I think the leaders of that company or the existing employees need to set the standard for everybody else. And I think we should be doing business face to face. We should be looking at each other because you can gain a lot more about how your presentation and your status call is going than not seeing the other person’s face. I know that my colleagues who have done pitches for new business where the client doesn’t turn on their camera, they hate it because their camera will be on. Obviously, I’m talking about pitches that have happened in the last few months because you can’t do them on site. And this is the wonder of modern technology is you can still pitch for new business and have these great discussions using video conferencing technology. But obviously, some people aren’t using it to its full effect. So colleagues of mine who have been pitching for new business, the client, potential client doesn’t have their camera on, they have no clue how their presentation is landing. They don’t know if the client is engaged. Like, I don’t know if you’ve wandered off at the moment and are going to get yourself a cup of tea or a glass of water, but I’ll just carry on speaking. And I think if you have that camera, you can see if your team members and your colleagues are engaged.
Speaker 0 | 41:20.358
Eye contact is important. Zoom definitely does measure. Zoom has a lot of different AI type of stuff that shows how engaged the person was. Were they watching the PowerPoint? How it shows when they’re not looking at the camera? Different things like that, which are kind of helpful.
Speaker 1 | 41:37.232
Right. Yeah. And you can tell if your colleagues are otherwise engaged or distracted. If they’re. looking at another screen or typing at stuff. The one thing that our company does, one of the consultant trainers that we have, he’s very good at telling everybody to turn off all of their email notifications and close their inbox and actually look at the screen and be engaged in the training and the discussions that are going on as opposed to trying to be involved in multitasking. Yeah, multi-task. You can’t be involved in leadership development and writing a client document at the same time. So that’s the one thing that we do get from video communication. It doesn’t matter what platform you’re using. Obviously, I have some preferences over which one I use. But it doesn’t matter what technology stack you’re on. If you’re on Office 365, you can use Microsoft Teams. If you’re on Google. You can use Google Meet, but a lot of people would choose best of breed. So they might be on Office 365, but decide to use Zoom for whatever capabilities are in Zoom that aren’t being met in Meet for them.
Speaker 0 | 43:01.672
Let’s go down the line for the benefit of listeners. If they’ve made it this far and we haven’t put them to sleep because their camera’s off and we don’t know, let’s just go down real quick do’s and don’ts, anything that you could tell someone that would help them. So, um… what’s worse than having a crack habit, what security needs to be seamless, zero trust environments, browser-based things. Give me like your top three, like top three best tips from, you know, just give me the top three. What can we give to somebody that’s very helpful? Like the thing that’s like, Phil, like I did this and when I did this, honestly, it just made my life so much easier.
Speaker 1 | 43:45.366
Okay, so let me just address the crack comment, which was from a previous conversation that we’d had. That was about my fear of investing in VDI, whether it was Citrix or VMware. Those licenses were very, very expensive. And I think once they’ve got you, it’s very difficult to leave. So yeah, that was relative to that comment. Three top tips.
Speaker 0 | 44:17.530
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to just throw Crackhabit out there in your name in the same sentence at the same time. I can see why that might concern you. But what’s the solution there?
Speaker 1 | 44:30.494
The solution is, back in the day, I loved to install applications and I loved to rack servers. Installing applications, patching applications, and installing servers. doesn’t scale well, doesn’t scale quickly, and it doesn’t scale cheaply. We have done well by leveraging Google Workspace as much as we could, or Google Apps for Business back in the day and G Suite before that. We always deployed SaaS-based applications. So I will pay a subscription, a monthly subscription for a user, anything from Bamboo HR for our HR, HR IS system, Lucidchart for flowcharts and diagramming tools. Anybody should have the ability to use whatever the software that you deploy in your company on any device. So if you’re always fixed to installing Visio or installing Office applications and being reliant on VPN connections, then you’re really limiting the flexibility that your staff have because you’re tying them to a corporate laptop all the time, which is great for… That is great because that does allow you to have some control over that corporate laptop. You can say what versions it is running, but that doesn’t scale very well and it doesn’t give the end user the flexibility. To really succeed, I think, in the future and to scale well, you’ve got to be agile. You’ve got to be using the internet as your network. You’ve got to be following the BeyondCorp. zero trust business model or network model. Google have just released the Beyond Corp Enterprise, which will give you additional tools and functions to do that. The one thing that we really utilize, we use it on Google Workspace, and I’m sure there’s a competing SKU and product on Office 365, is we use context-aware access, which is one of my favorite things out of the Google Workspace. enterprise SKU. So for all of our Google accounts, we make people sign into the Chrome browser, it pushes out an endpoint verification Chrome extension, stores a little app on the computer that you’re using, whether it’s a corporate machine or a personal machine, and it validates that device. So based on policies that I set, it will say whether you can access our corporate data or not. So I’m authenticating the user and I’m validating how the user is accessing our data as a… opposed to the corporate machine that they’re using. Because using only validating that the corporate machine is safe is an antiquated way of working. Because people can use, you’re on office 365 or G suite, they can access, you know, your company data from any device. So you should be securing that. So you secure the account. So I enforce, you know, a minimum version of an operating system. I don’t allow windows seven or windows eight. It’s got to be a modern version of wind, a patched. a recently patched version of Windows 10, it’s got to be a supported version of macOS, et cetera, and it’s got to be on an encrypted hard disk. If you meet all of those criteria, then yes, on any device you can access our data. That would be the one big thing that I would want people to take away is don’t think, oh, I’ve got a corporate network, I’ve got a corporate laptop, I’ve got a corporate VPN connection. you know, we’re going to do okay. Doesn’t scale well, isn’t particularly secure, people will find ways around it.
Speaker 0 | 48:27.683
Especially with BYOD and…
Speaker 1 | 48:31.584
Yeah, BYOD, Shadow IT, you know, if you restrict your stuff and say, you know, you’ve got to connect to the file server. to access the documents, they’ll go, oh, that’s too much hassle. I’ll just sign up my own Dropbox account and then I’ll start sharing documents with my colleagues by Dropbox because then I can use any computer and any internet connection and I don’t have to worry about the company VPN connection because that’s too slow and it always disconnects me and then I lose access to my documents.
Speaker 0 | 49:00.474
And sales guys are notorious for that because they’re just going to do whatever they can to get it done.
Speaker 1 | 49:06.319
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 49:07.640
or any arrogant person in the organization.
Speaker 1 | 49:11.281
Yeah, so as an IT professional, you’ve got to be, it’s a delicate balance between securing everything and providing everything. So you’ve got to provide the best breed tools for your staff. You’ve got to be open to adopting the tools or securing the tools that they want to use. or providing justifiable reasons why it can’t be used and valid alternatives. I think if you can do that as an IT professional, then you’ll succeed and also the company will succeed as well. Your colleagues will be, your employees will be able to collaborate quicker, they’ll be more productive, they’ll win more contracts, they’ll make more customers happy, more clients happy, etc.
Speaker 0 | 50:03.198
So we’ve come so far on this call. And obviously that kind of gets to the security being more seamless. So we don’t really need to speak to that. The zero trust is kind of a more seamless, scalable. Not that it’s perfect, but it’s, from your perspective, better. I’m just going to say thank you for being on the show. I think this has been outstanding. A lot of fun.
Speaker 1 | 50:35.533
Well, thank you for having me. It’s been great to tell my story of how I got here and a bit of where we’re carrying on going.
Speaker 0 | 50:44.860
Oh, I know what it was. Do you get more respect in the United States? I joke around with all my friends with UK accents. I’m like, you know, we just need to put you on this thing because people are just going to respect you more because you’ve got… an accent. Okay. And quite frankly, you say rubbish instead of trash. You’ve got other vocabulary. You just seem more refined. So people are automatically going to trust you for absolutely no good reason whatsoever.
Speaker 1 | 51:14.962
There have been moments where I have received a little bit, I have received some privilege that come in, in the United States that comes with having an English accent.
Speaker 0 | 51:26.208
So there it is.
Speaker 1 | 51:26.968
I try and I do not abuse it. but I do use it to get an extended late checkout when we’re in a hotel.
Speaker 0 | 51:37.517
Oh, that’s excellent. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 | 51:39.679
Thank you.
