Speaker 0 | 00:05.023
Welcome everybody back to Telecom Radio 1 and we are continuing our series dissecting popular IT nerds and today I’m very happy we’ve got Aaron Siemens on the show and this is right before you’re taking off to go to Mexico so hey man thanks for giving me a few minutes here before you actually you know go to have some fun in the sun hopefully here.
Speaker 1 | 00:28.659
Yeah fun in the sun. Well, you know, I’m glad to be here. It’s nice to give back a little bit of knowledge for people that are trying to come up in the ranks and even people that have been there for a while.
Speaker 0 | 00:38.926
Nice, nice. So, Aaron, you’re IT manager at Yokohama Industries. You guys manufacture basically car housing parts. Maybe give me a little more detail there on what you guys manufacture. But the main reason why I like having you on is manufacturing. You know, you guys have a lot of… I would say, I don’t want to say you guys are in a legacy mindset, but manufacturing in general in America has a lot of legacy systems just due to the nature of the business itself, right? Because you’ve got a lot of moving parts. So typically, I would say you have legacy systems that you are upgrading. Would you say that that is true or not true?
Speaker 1 | 01:20.342
Yeah, I think that’s true. I think some of the problem is that, you know, the margins when it comes to manufacturing can be awfully tight. So there’s no real good way to justify the cost for, you know, why do you need this IoT on this system? Or why do we need to replace this 60-year-old server or whatever? You know, I’ve seen all kinds of things from DOS still being used to, you know, old Windows 3.1.1 stuff. And I think that’s kind of the mindset that comes in is like, you know, it’s not broke, don’t fix it. And the cost to replace. can be fairly expensive.
Speaker 0 | 01:58.605
Yeah, yeah. So, and I find that, you know, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Obviously, there’s this fine line there between these sinking industries of the world, for example, Sears or other businesses that fail to innovate. Clearly, technology is a driving force in the business world nowadays. So. And the reason why I really am fascinated with mid-market IT in general is because you guys, you’re not really small business and you’re not enterprise. So you don’t have all the money in the world, but technology can be a significant driver as far as driving the business forward. And then here you are, the IT director with your small staff supporting hundreds of people. How do you make that argument? Or I guess, what are your thoughts on the, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it? And how are we communicating, say, to upper management stakeholders? How are we taking over in this age that’s changing very, very fast where we have to be very competitive from a technology standpoint?
Speaker 1 | 03:07.188
Well, I think there’s a balance. I think there’s a balance between if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. And also, you know, moving the business forward. You know, the things in my career, IT over the last 20 years has changed quite a bit. It went from being the guy in the walled up room where they slid food underneath the door at lunchtime and no one talked to you, and we just went around and fixed things. My computer broke, my emails broke, my mouse doesn’t work, and things have evolved to where I see more drive in the business. Everything’s connected. I can’t go on the plant floor. anymore without having a machine, a CNC machine or something that’s connected to the internet. That, you know, we have someone from Asia getting in to do remote support on something. So, you know, there is a balance between it’s not broke, let’s not worry about it. And then there’s bleeding edge, you know, in the mid market is very interesting. It is challenging because like you said, you know, I don’t have, my budget doesn’t have the millions of dollars to just go. spend on a new server or anything like that and yet we’re also not startup to where we don’t have any money and so you have to try to make things work and I’ve been both well I’ve been more startup and then moved up and you know that’s that is a struggle I think one of the things that you and I talked about before is you know we’re not good at marketing you know IT is not good marketers of what they want You know, we’re all very analytical. We’re tech geeks, you know, so it gets difficult for us sometimes to bridge the gap between what we think. the company needs and what the company actually needs or how the business grows. Something as simple as, you know, we need a new server. Okay, you know, you go in for the budget meeting and we need a server, cost 30 grand we’ll say. Why do you need a new server? Well, because, well why? Well, because it’s slow. Well, why is it, you know, it goes on and on and we aren’t good at explaining it. We know that something’s going to happen. but we can’t translate into business that our business piece so i think that’s part of the gap that means that you know i’ve tried to build a bridge in my career you know you go in you don’t say that hey um we need the server because it’s slow it’s okay so in manufacturing world we have a server um i’ve been running the statistics on it you know i’ve got my baseline And I’ve seen over the past few months as we’ve added people, we’ve added machines, that those reports that you ran now instead of being a minute, you know, are now four minutes. And then that four minutes needs to go to somebody else, and that report goes to somebody else, and that report goes to somebody else. And by the time you’ve done it at the end of the line, you know, you’re one day out. And what’s that cost of business? So then we start putting that into dollar cents and say, hey, you know, if we’re… down or if it were delayed by these five minutes then it’s going to cost us you know sixty thousand dollars and that’s just one plant that can spread it across all the plants now starts paying for itself let’s break that down for a second i’m just curious because i
Speaker 0 | 06:34.992
like that you said a lot of times we’re very analytical and i find sometimes people get stuck in the engineering mindset where we’re trying to fix a singular problem we’re trying to fix like you said like you know, we need a new server. That’s the problem. How do I fix? We need a new server. And when in reality, maybe we should be thinking more of, you know, like what’s the goal of the business, which sounds crazy because we’re trying to replace a server. What do you mean? Like we’re trying to fix the business. So what’s the goal of the business? And I’ve seen a lot of people find money in other areas to fix the broken server. So I don’t know if you’ve ever, I mean, do you have any examples like that? Well, Hey, we found over here that, you know, we’re getting ripped off on. sip trunking or MPLS is, you know, maybe we should, you know, the old what is it, Rob Peter to pay Paul or something? I don’t even know what that saying is. But is there any of that going on?
Speaker 1 | 07:30.469
Well, there is. You know, I don’t even want to talk about MPLS stuff because it’s four-week fences and outdated, I think.
Speaker 0 | 07:39.917
Yeah. I love when you talk about that.
Speaker 1 | 07:42.259
I love when that happens. It’s horrible. But, you know, I have an example. Actually, it’s a good one because we just did it Friday. So as we talked about before, you know, we’re moving from IBM Notes to 365. You know, that cost is not cheap. You know, it’s a scripting base. It’s going to cost us more money.
Speaker 0 | 08:02.542
OpEx versus CapEx, for sure.
Speaker 1 | 08:04.623
Yeah, and so all that goes on. You know, we’ve had notes for years, and, you know, now we just pay support, and so it’s cheaper. So how do you market that, and how do you bring that? to the business and say, hey, we need to do this. So let’s take aside all the extra stuff that comes with 365 with teams and other really cool things you can do, integrations with other applications, that. We’ll just set that aside, not even talk about that, because that’s just an add-in. If you get to the nuts and bolts of it, the way I approached it was if we move to 365, it takes our Lotus Notes off-prem, because right now it’s on-prem. It adds security for us. which is a byproduct of moving it. But it frees up our MPLS lines and our internet line where we have text-to-text scans to other facilities for our ERP. So as we moved it off, we no longer have all that email traffic coming in to our corporate office. So that frees up through play. Not only that, it also frees up our MPLS lines because we don’t have all the email coming through. the MPLS lines back and forth.
Speaker 0 | 09:12.651
One less layer.
Speaker 1 | 09:14.373
And there’s other stuff internally in our network that was not quite correct that was causing issues as well. So even though we’re spending the money to move it, we get the benefit of a faster ERP. We have faster reporting now. Our SQL server is able to handle some of the data a little bit better. And I think it’s overall. And that’s kind of how I marketed the change. was like, you know, we’re not just, we’re not doing this just to do this, but every little thing we do causes a ripple and affects multiple things. So you may think that I just want this new switch because I want a cooler or whatever. Well, no, we’re going from, you know, a one gig. connection between switches to 10 gig. That’s more throughput. That’s faster data feeds back and forth between endpoints. That means faster transactions. People aren’t waiting for things, which means they’re able to go produce more parts in a quicker amount of time.
Speaker 0 | 10:15.448
And in reality, you’re also much more scalable as a business as well. I mean, you can scale a lot faster. You’re flexible in the future for growth. You can even downgrade as well. The whole move, add, change, delete. process, all of that really frees up your time to be it frees up your time, period. It just makes your time that much more valuable. It’s one less stupid silo for you to manage. I would assume managing 365 is much easier than managing the notes, I would assume.
Speaker 1 | 10:48.934
It’s legacy, not a lot of people know it. 365 is a little easier. to do with the integration between other systems. And that’s the thing about getting to the legacy stuff as well, is that the integration that we have now, we’ll say Azure AD and new software. Instead of having users that have six different passwords they have to remember, we link it all up with single sign-on, and guess what? You have one password you have to remember. So it reduces my cost from an IT labor perspective. because I don’t have all the people, you know, logging tickets saying I can’t remember my password. Can you reset this password?
Speaker 0 | 11:30.465
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 | 11:31.105
And all that.
Speaker 0 | 11:32.226
The annoying ticket, I mean, you can’t, you just can’t be the glorified ticket taker. That’s really what we need to get away from. You need to be the visionary and not be taking tickets.
Speaker 1 | 11:42.270
Yeah, but there’s a fine line between the visionary. You know, I’m a very service-oriented person. So, you know, I want people to log their tickets. I don’t care if it’s, you know, my paper, well. If it was internet connected, my, you know, my stapler doesn’t work. You know, I, for me, for me, from an IT director perspective or a leader in the organization, it’s something that may be benign to a user. If I have seven or eight users having the same problem, it’s probably something a lot bigger.
Speaker 0 | 12:15.691
Yeah. Well, I guess I’m just talking volume in general.
Speaker 1 | 12:20.094
I understand.
Speaker 0 | 12:21.551
Um, what about, uh, just since we’re on this subject, what about, um, the ease of mobile integration and security? What about the difference there? Are you less secure now? More secure from your point of view? Easier to manage security?
Speaker 1 | 12:36.935
We’re more secure. Um, you know, the way things were configured, you know, it’s slightly embarrassing. Um,
Speaker 0 | 12:46.057
nevermind.
Speaker 1 | 12:46.577
Yeah. Now that we don’t have, and it’s not, you know, I’m. I’ve only been here a year, so a lot of this stuff is just fixing stuff up. Things other people didn’t know.
Speaker 0 | 12:59.984
To be honest with you, that brings us to the next topic anyways, which is IT and transparency. I guess how should we communicate that? That kind of doubles over into the security world as well because security guys really have it tough. because really all they can do is try to protect the environment. And when something goes wrong, it’s their fault. So if from a transparency standpoint, it’s very, very important. What do you, I mean, how do you feel about that in general?
Speaker 1 | 13:28.900
Well, I think I’m huge on transparency. I think that’s one of the biggest change that I brought to the table in IT is the whole transparency piece. That is one thing that I think IT leaders need to be on the top of is the lack of transparency. I’ve always gone with the ideology that, you know, it is what it is. And if it’s not right, let’s change it and try to do the right thing every day. You know, IT can be a strange world to business leaders. And the more transparency you give, the more trust business leaders have with you and your team. You make a mistake, you admit it, along with how you fix it, how you’ll prevent it from happening again. And you move on.
Speaker 0 | 14:11.257
And the other thing is, the other thing is, is a lot of business leaders. aren’t dumb either. The other thing is, is just the fact that everyone has so much technology and has so much of their fingertips nowadays. The truth is our end users are getting smarter and smarter and our end users are using applications and we’re getting kids. I mean, I just know from my own kids and I know how my own kids hack the home system. So, and I know how my own kids hacked my own cell phone and changed Siri to match their voice so that they could use my cell phone and unlock it. So that was a funny one. The point is, is people aren’t, people are pretty smart and they’re going to find a way to get done what they need to get done. And the question is that transparency is going to create that more open, I guess, more open line of feedback so that we don’t have people doing stupid things on the network.
Speaker 1 | 14:59.946
Well, that and we also, it gives a comfort level for users. You know, like you said, you know, users, the new generation of users aren’t dumb. You know, they’re very technical, technology savvy. So, you know, when we have a major issue here, sometimes a minor, I create a PowerPoint presentation and here’s what happened. You know, it may be colorful pictures or whatever, not too technical, but some people like it. Some people ignore it, but they have a better understanding of, hey, this is what happened. Oh, wait, I shouldn’t put this in. So now I know, and now I know why.
Speaker 0 | 15:36.440
What’s your overall temperature check on end users in general? How do you take temp checks? How do you communicate with them? Do you have any best practices there or little tricks or anything that you do to stay connected with end users so that it’s not this weird other language between the two?
Speaker 1 | 15:54.714
Um, so one of the things we do for our temperature checks is, you know, we do surveys, you know, random surveys through whether it’s our service desk system, um, or, you know, uh, another survey that’s a blanket out to the, you know, uh, to the masses of how well are we doing, you know, just three or four questions. Yep. Um, use that. Um, a lot of it is how much shadow IT you have. You know, if you have a lot of shadow IT, you’re not doing something right. Yeah. If you have very little, you’re probably doing it right and people trust you and people are coming to you when they have problems. When I first started here, there was a lot of satellite. Now we have very little. When someone has an issue or a project, they get IT involved from the beginning, not after the fact. They don’t come and say, hey, I’ve got 10 copiers that just showed up. You need to get those set up. Now we’re talking because forces, what copiers do you need? you know, what service or what different applications you want to use with it, those types of things. So we’re ahead of the game now. So and by being able to do projects and the completion successfully gives us even more power in IT to do what’s right for the business and get the money.
Speaker 0 | 17:17.145
Yeah. And just out of curiosity. From all the surveys that you’ve done, is there any one particular theme or thing that came back from the end users that you were like, oh, wow, that’s interesting? Or how they said it or the verbiage or the words that they used? Is there anything that pops out?
Speaker 1 | 17:37.847
No, honestly, there’s not. I mean, sometimes we do well, sometimes we don’t. There’s always one or two users that you can never please. Yep. And there’s ones that were, I don’t want to say enemies of IT, they’re now, you know, we’re besties, you know, because they have a better understanding, you know. And it goes back to going to have the transparency and be able to explain, you know, the marketing piece of, this is how this one little piece that we’re going to change affects the company as a whole.
Speaker 0 | 18:11.220
Gotcha. Okay, so here’s the big one. The big one is… By 2020, I can’t remember what the statistic was, but it’s something like it’s over 80% of IT directors are going to have to have a certain level of business acumen in order to be really prepared for the future and the job of either IT director, obviously CTO or CIO. So I guess my question to you is, are the majority of IT professionals who we used to just slip food under the door to that hit out? you know, we’re hiding in the server closet. Are the majority of IT professionals, in your opinion, willing to shoulder the responsibility of technology driving the business? In other words, are they ready for MBOs? Are they ready for, you know, management by business objectives and having numbers attached to them? Or is that going to be too big of a burden for the more analytical and engineering kind of mindset people? Are we ready for this?
Speaker 1 | 19:17.474
That’s a hard one because I think it depends on the individual. I think there’s room in IT for everybody. There are people that are just… I see it on my team. I see people that are very much analytical. They don’t want to manage people. They don’t want to be part of the business. They just want to do coding, all they want to do. I have others that want to help and they want to learn more about the business and what to grow to help grow the business. I think there’s room for everybody. One of the reasons why I went back and got my MBA is because I’m seeing, like we talked about earlier in our conversation, is that in the last 20 years, things have changed. We’re not under the door. We’re not in that server room fixing things. We’re at the table now with other directors and CEOs, CFO, board of directors, helping to drive the business. How do we get ahead of the market? How do we get ahead of our competitors? And a lot of it’s with technology. How do we make things more efficient?
Speaker 0 | 20:20.205
I think it’s actually a very, very powerful mix. Because… An IT director or a very analytical or engineering-minded person with an MBA can make decisions from an analytical standpoint without putting emotions to it. Where obviously you’ve got a lot of business leaders that are very, very emotional and maybe sales-driven, where it might be the complete opposite of making decisions from a very… Yes, we’re making decisions from a numbers standpoint. Obviously, numbers drive the game, right? but from a much more calmer, maybe analytical standpoint where we, you know, think before we, I guess, take aim and then fire the, you know, all those old sayings. So I think it’s a very, very powerful mix. And the ones that can do that are going to grow very, very fast in the business world.
Speaker 1 | 21:17.412
Yeah. And I, you know, I agree with that. You know, I’ve been told that IT is sometimes the impetus of change in organization because we touch. Sometimes we can’t work in silos while other departments and stuff always tend to work in silos. We have to touch everything. From a quality application to our ERP to whatever, we touch all the departments. So we have the knowledge to go and say, you know what, you want to do this? You need to be talking to this department over here because they have the tools. Even between locations, we go and see. Hey, you know what? Mexico is doing this. This is how they came up with their labeling system. Probably something that we should be doing, you know, at this other location.
Speaker 0 | 22:01.159
Yeah. And I don’t know if you’ve ever read the book Rocket Fuel. If you haven’t, you might like it. But to every visionary in a business, there’s got to be a really good integrator as well, right? So you might have this crazy visionary that’s all over the place. And quite frankly, you can’t run a business today without having a thousand systems all integrated together, driving it forward. So, yep. Very exciting. So, Hey, um, it has been a pleasure. I am very, uh, this was a fun one. Uh, I hope you have fun down in Mexico. And I mean, if you’ve got anyone mesh, want anyone message to send out to, you know, your other it directors out there that are listening, that can either, you know, grab some piece of some valuable piece of information from this show, what would it be?
Speaker 1 | 22:46.969
You know, just be open and honest with the business. You know, if you make a mistake or you can make a mistake, That’s up and move forward. That’s probably the biggest thing. That’s how you instill trust in the business and that’s how you get in more and help grow the business. Stay trusted.
Speaker 0 | 23:05.187
Yeah, and stay transparent. So, Aaron Mann, thank you so much for being on the show. Have a great evening and a fun time down in Mexico.
