Speaker 0 | 00:04.962

All right, everybody, welcome back to Telecom Radio 1 and the new series, Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I don’t know if I can call this guy a nerd, though. I really think that would be a bad idea because he really, he heads up the Hells Angels division of IT. Not really, but today we’ve got, we’ve got… Brent and Chuck on the show, man. Hey, thanks for being on the show. You’ve got a great past, man. You’ve got some great experience here. Obviously, Harley Davidson was one of them, man. And I like to start off the show, if we can, with a PG-13 story or just some sort of good story from the past. It doesn’t really have to be PG-13. I guess we could go above that and I could beep out some things and edit out some stuff that maybe the LinkedIn censors might get me. But anyways. Man, welcome to the show. Why don’t you start off with, just give us a good story, man.

Speaker 1 | 01:00.716

Well, you know, Harley was a great company. I always say it was a great ride. I was there for about four and a half years. And, you know, I’m a guy who really likes, I like to tell it black and white. You know, this is the way it is. And I tend to be pretty colorful in that as well. But, you know, it was great while working for Harley. It was just, you know, it’s a lot of… folks who really love to ride and I think that’s something maybe even our customers didn’t quite ever understand. I mean, we were riders ourselves. So there was that mentality as well. So, you know, they could get pretty colorful. They could get, you know, you talk about, you know, PG-13. I mean, there was conversations that could get pretty interesting because it’s just a lot of it’s that mentality and, you know, those kind of people that are very passionate for the bike, passionate for the brand and for what they do. So, you know, it made a lot of things interesting, you know, the projects and the conversations. And I was working on the, you know, the HD Connect program. And that was, you know, that was great. They just talked about that, released that not too long ago.

Speaker 0 | 02:08.036

So tell me a little bit about that. Kind of, you know, refresh me because I’m not, you know, obviously I work across many industries. So give me, you know, give me the background on the HD Connect and what it was. Was it a rollout? What does it look like?

Speaker 1 | 02:21.945

Yeah, so it kind of started off right. So the live wire, the electric bike, very important for Harley-Davidson. It’s a key component in their strategy. They really get a different level of customer. You’ve seen the things in the media and the news around motorcycle riders are decreasing. We’ve got millennials. We’ve got folks these days who… They just don’t ride. And my personal belief on that is, you know, they didn’t learn to ride a bicycle. You know, kids today, you know, they ride, they play video games. They don’t ride a bike. So making the connection between, you know, two wheels from, you know, pedaling to power, maybe is where there’s a thing. So in the live wire, you know, the electric bike, I think one of the key things with that is, you know, you don’t have to shift it, right? You know, for those millennials and then, you know, the new folks out there riding those clutch things. scares them to death and we’re gonna be by a bunch of millennials right now you really you know it’s well it’s just what it is but I mean they don’t they don’t know how to you know drive a six-disc so they tend to have a problem sometimes on the bike so funny is it’s electric it’s green it’s doing all the things you know you want but you know within that there’s a there’s a user experience we have right now so if you’re you’re charging your bike somewhere at a you know a charging station it’s how does my mobile app show me you know that it’s charging how do i understand the battery level what do i you know what’s the whole experience with that so the connected um you know the hd connect was was part of that how to deliver um you know what the bike you know the brains of the bike uh new to you know to that customer cc that all the time you know uh vm’s done it with onstar you know other people have done it well the challenge is you don’t have a lot of um footprints on a motorcycle it’s uh you know not a lot of space to put

Speaker 0 | 04:14.024

you know those cool gadgets and the technology and uh and then you know there’s just a lot of things about it that are different so a lot of similarities but then also a lot of differences so it was fun i’m looking at this bike right now it’s actually really really sweet um i don’t know if i’d get made fun of for riding this bike and showing up you know at some biker rally or something like that but i actually want this bike looking at it it’s a pretty sweet bike i’ll tell you what it’s the fastest bike i’ve ever been on i mean so you know it’s twist and go so you know you’re not shifting

Speaker 1 | 04:43.140

through the gears. You’re not, you know, it’s like the old Tesla, you know, you see the YouTube videos and they’re beating, you know, some pretty substantial muscle cars in the quarter mile. It’s the same thing with this bike. It’s the bike that the, you better be able to hold on if you want to push that throttle because it’ll give you one heck of an experience so it’s fun by this thing’s amazing um how much do i need to pay to go pick one of these up we’re way off the subject on i.t right now but i don’t care how much you know i think the i think those models are just under 30 grand or so so you know there’s a lot of uh there’s a lot of stuff in them right now and that’s the hurley quality you know a lot of a lot of things behind them so we’ll have to see how that market you know continues on i know some others are doing electric bikes and do a little differently.

Speaker 0 | 05:28.107

So I know you’re over at Ortho Clinical Diagnostics right now, which is a totally different environment. A lot of times I like to focus on end users. So I’m assuming IT directors have all different types of end users. If you’re in construction, you get a different type of end user. If you’re in trucking. you know, you’re dealing with truck drivers using mobile phones and various different tablets and things like that. So you had a different flavor of end user. What was the end user flavor over, like you said, colorful people, however you want to describe it over at Harley. But what was it like, were there any, you know, butting heads with end users or any tricks to maybe communicating with end users, whether it be, I don’t know, dealing with email phishing or something, whatever it is you guys are rolling out. Any… What’s your approach with end users there?

Speaker 1 | 06:21.384

My approach is pretty consistent. It doesn’t really matter who the user is. I think probably the longest thing I’ve done in my career, probably one thing I probably did the most or the best or whatever, is enterprise architecture. I’m a big picture thinker, so I’ve got to understand the overall landscape, what it is we’re trying to do. I’m a guy that’s going to talk to you about business capabilities. and the strategies and what are you trying to achieve and those sorts of things. So I tend to have those conversations with business users, doesn’t matter about what, because technology, when you talk with end users and business folks, a lot of times they use IT as just an execution engine or whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish. And there’s not a lot of times a partnership, an overall long-term strategic partnership. So I tend to try to turn those conversations around to young people. what are you trying to do? What do you want to be when you grow up? And so beyond that, I’m a guy who likes to have very black and white conversations around, well, this doesn’t fit the strategy. This isn’t what we’re trying to achieve. We don’t have the capabilities to do these things. So I set those expectations very clearly up front. We talk around what we can do, what we can’t do, what we need help doing. and just kind of throw out all of those things that tend to cause issues down the line. So I’ve always been a big picture thinker, and I try to help our business partners do the same and understand that IT can really play a role in that, which is something that a lot of tech professionals can’t do because they’re focused very intently on the technology component. And from my perspective, the technology is the easy part. It’s almost the afterthought. So I know I kind of glaze over when I start hearing these very technical conversations and blah, blah, blah, I just can do this. And it’s just another technology. I buy technology all the time. I’ve got thousands of vendors out there that do this and do this. And that’s generally the easy part. But what is it you’re trying to do? What is it you’re really trying to get out of this? What are the conditions of success and business goals? Is it revenue generating? the cost reduction, there’s all of those things. And then we, then we work backwards.

Speaker 0 | 08:48.495

I love that. I’m fascinated with the, all of the ideas around a partnership. In fact, I mean, I’ve, my program’s called the partnership method. So I think in the idea there is taking technology and bridging the gap from kind of the, you know, we’ve got a lot of engineering mindset. type people where it’s like, you know, what’s the problem? I will fix it. Right. And that oftentimes is the problem in it of itself, because it’s not just a problem and how to fix the problem. It might be much more global. It might be much more have to do with the partnership and how is it going to affect the business acumen side. And just because you’re fixing this problem might be very kind of one, uh, one side or kind of tunnel vision type way. So I don’t know if that makes sense to you, but maybe speak a little bit more around your, how do you view your philosophy with vendors? Because one of the things that annoys me the most is one-sided contractual agreements. And I think you find that a lot in the voice and data industry where I come from, where you’ve got, well, it’s just, I’ve got to go buy a Comcast circuit and there’s nothing I can do except, you know, deal with this necessary, I don’t want to call them Comcast and necessary evil because they’re a huge vendor of mine and I love Comcast. But a lot of times you find telecom agreements being one-sided. So how do you deal with that from a kind of partnership perspective? Because I believe we need to bring… bridge the gap and create those partnerships so that you always have someone there that cares about your business, your unique culture, and what you’re trying to accomplish from a business acumen standpoint. So, sorry, that was a lot of information. Let me summarize. How do you get these technology-minded people that the conversations you glaze over to think more from a business acumen standpoint? And does that mean they have to partner with the right people?

Speaker 1 | 10:45.359

Yeah, so I, you know, if someone were to ask me, you know, one of the biggest challenges, you know, that I have seen in the, you know, the tech business, you know, in my past, you know, I’d say the past 10 years or something is, you know, you talk about contractual and you talk about partners and that sort of thing. You know, my story is, you know, we’ve got a lot of the big vendors out there, you know, you take the SAPs, the world, you know, the sales forces. you know, the IBMs, Oracles, whomever, and they all now play within a lot of, you know, the same spaces. And as a company, like when I worked at Harley, you know, one of the examples I’ll give is, you know, there was, you know, you had a business capability to provide or you had something to, you know, to produce. You know, we had a, we were lucky, Harley was very lucky from, you know, a lot of, you know, those key strategic partners, those, you know, big, big name vendors. great products, you know, we had them all. And there was a lot of overlap in what they could all provide and what they could all do. So it became this interesting thing where you’re trying to build out an enterprise architecture, you know, or solve a solution or a landscape kind of issue. You know, which one of these do I use? Because SAP and Oracle and IBM and whomever else, they had, you know, overlap in the functionality. So it became this, well, you know, what’s the best? contractual relationship we have and what’s this and what you know how do we make these things tie together so it became you know really interesting um you know to solve those kinds of problems with you know the landscape that we had because i could do it i could i could solve one problem uh seven to ten different ways and um so so it became yeah what’s uh what’s the practical terms and do we own this already you know it became really interesting with that and it’s um I thought some of the partners, if there’s some partners out there that could really understand what others were doing and what their competitors were doing, it’d probably make things a lot easier for us IT guys.

Speaker 0 | 12:51.613

Yeah, well, I can tell you that person definitely exists. It’s me and all my colleagues in my company. But yeah, there’s definitely some areas where partnering makes your life easy. And I think what you were speaking to there even is… beyond the IT sprawl. Sometimes there’s the IT sprawl and we’re just trying to eliminate. But like you said, when there’s overlaps, what are the key APIs? You know, who’s going to provide better support? Which company is about ready to, you know, go out of business? I think another good example is maybe a lot of Microsoft products and you might be dealing with, you know, O365. I don’t know the last time you had to do an O365 migration. but you know some people have some people take that approach as i’m going to call microsoft support direct and deal with them and quite frankly no you’re not that’s just not going to be a fun experience and there’s a lot of other niche providers out there rack space actually happens to be a great one at providing oh three sixty five support and i’ve seen you know other small companies provide that support support and people just move licenses over to Rackspace, for example, and all of a sudden, now you’ve got an enterprise level support team supporting your O365 and you’re not calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SANT. So I don’t know if that’s a good example, but that’s kind of how I saw it.

Speaker 1 | 14:19.949

Yeah, you know, like I said, there’s a lot of folks out there who, you know, do things very well. There’s a lot of overlaps, and it’s not as much of, well, I need to go to this person to do this or this person to do this. It’s, you know, which one do I pick, and do I go all in with one, or do I look at the best of breed? You know, there’s a lot of different ways. That kind of thing is why, number one, why you need an enterprise architecture, and number two, it’s sometimes what makes it a little more. complicated to sell.

Speaker 0 | 14:50.761

Awesome. So why don’t you just take me into your current position now, because obviously you’ve got a lot. It sounds like you have. Is your team now bigger or smaller to the one that you had at Harley?

Speaker 1 | 15:02.644

You know, I think Ortho overall is a little smaller company. They’re a carve-out from Johnson & Johnson owned by Carlisle currently. Yeah, I mean, a little smaller. but I think more focused, more focused on what they’re trying to do. So that’s kind of fun. I moved into the supply chain and operations team and that’s fun. I’ve done supply chain over the years, started doing supply chain back when I was at a utility company, just doing B2B and EDI kind of things. And that was fun. So I’ve always stayed in touch with supply chain, but it’s kind of interesting to focus on that domain. and really learn more of the depth. I think sometimes in the enterprise architecture role, you’re touching on a lot of things from a 30,000-foot level. So now I’m down probably more in what we call the steeple level, the moon level, steeple level. So I can really see how things are working with that. I’m working in relationship management. And that’s one of those things that is sometimes a challenge for IT people to do. you know you got to understand that the relationships are what everything is really about uh you know how do you work with your business partners how do you work with your internal i.t relationships and and that’s uh you know it’s one thing like pretty you know some of my success in my career is you know i’ve been able to figure that out uh you know how to develop interpersonal relationships those skill sets and you’ll find that from any you know the gardeners and out of the world if that’s what makes a good enterprise architect but it’s you know it’s just what makes a good practitioner of i.t in general, is how to understand what those are and build those.

Speaker 0 | 16:50.542

Yeah, that’s great. A lot of times we talk about, you know, what does it take for an IT person to grow in their role? Yes, the certifications are important. Yes, the education matters to a certain degree, depending on where you’re applying. But these type of soft skills and interpersonal relationship skills, I think that’s important. I don’t know if you can really go to school for that. I mean, yeah, you could. I mean, you know, we can send people to, I don’t know, Franklin Covey or, you know, Stephen Covey’s courses. We can send them to Tony Robbins and all these various different things. I don’t know if there is a Tony Robbins of IT communication. That’s actually an interesting idea. But any, you know, any, if you had a best practice there or one thing that someone could walk away with, you know, whatever that is, is there something for our listeners out there listening right now that they can take from you and say, hey, wow. I never thought of it that way. Here’s something that I can go back and implement and do. And it doesn’t have to be around the end users or leadership. It could be around anything,

Speaker 1 | 17:48.371

actually. Yeah, there’s a lot of things. But, you know, my challenge for IT professionals, and this is one thing, I have a daughter who’s now in IT. She’s a big data person, did a lot of math and statistics in college. And, you know, so we got a lot of chance to talk about that. She actually had an internship at Harley-Davidson. really interesting to have your daughter you know working in the same department and a lot of those same meetings together in some cases it was it was really uh you know really kind of interesting thing but you know what i would try to impress upon her was you know how you know it wasn’t as much about the technology and i think i said this earlier on in our discussion area the technology is only the easy part but no i go back to you know one thing sorry you know harley was a great company did a lot of things you know the reason they’re successful is because the way they operate you know they’re normal And they had this program we call Value Behavior, and that’s what we as employees live by. There were certain things around us, and we had raters who would rate us on this yearly and give us this feedback and scoring kind of thing. And it was simple things. Are you honest? Do you deliver what you’re supposed to do, what you say you’re going to do? It’s all of those things that really were so important. It was really based around that, and that was really something to aspire and to live through. I think I maybe heard the part where my daughter was doing an internship with the… uh, wherever at the company, you know, in IT, when I really got a chance to focus her and say, you know, look, it’s, you know, not always about the latest and greatest technology, you know, it’s about whether or not, you know, people want to work with you. You know, there’s a big difference in that, you know, you could be the most technically correct, uh, you know, guru, uh, beast, uh, kind of person, but, you know, at the end of the day, you know, if they don’t trust what you’re going to do, if you don’t have the communications, if you don’t. you know, follow through, you know, eventually they’re, they’re not gonna, you know, you’re, you’re gonna lose that connection and you’re gonna, gonna, gonna be out.

Speaker 0 | 19:58.744

It’s like they say, when you go in and interview, you’re really in the other person’s other side of the table is thinking, do I want to work with this person? You know, there’s a lot of truth to that.

Speaker 1 | 20:06.688

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 20:07.308

And the one thing that’s, um, the one thing that good companies do really well is help people become better people. So, you know, a lot of stuff that we don’t get in schooling growing up, which is one of my, one of the reasons why I actually homeschool my kids is they don’t teach kids how to be necessarily responsible or understand how to choose their response to life and they’re responsible for themselves, responsible for their actions. What do you care about? What type of person do you want to be? What are your values? You know, what is your vision or, you know, what do you at least see yourself doing over the next? whatever it is, five years or 90 days, what do you actually want to accomplish? How are you tracking that? And how is that affecting the people around you? And every time you open your mouth, right, that one of the things that gets us in the most trouble is every time we open our mouth, what does that say about us? So all that, you know, within a larger company obviously affects so much. If you love coming into work, man, that’s probably one of the greatest things ever, if you love coming into work. And unfortunately, there’s, you know, the bureaucratic sprawl. Um, I wish I could say that. everyone loved their job in the world and didn’t feel like they were being abused by the bureaucracy.

Speaker 1 | 21:19.431

Well, you got to love your work, and I always have. I love both aspects. I say both aspects. You got the technology piece, which is, that’s probably why we all got into this, right? I always say I’m a geek, an IT geek, and I use that humorously, but it’s the part. I own all the latest stuff I’ve got. I got to go buy it when it comes out. I mean, I get that. But at the same time, there’s a reason we do that. It’s the people, and it’s what we’re trying to achieve. It’s what’s the goal for the business, and that’s fun. When you see profits go up, revenue up, strategies realized, that’s what really keeps you going to work. And I’ve had some great runs and worked with some great companies, and it’s been fun.

Speaker 0 | 22:06.704

Those I find to be the two biggest things nowadays. At least two biggest themes that IT needs to be taking on is really that interpersonal drive and then the business acumen piece of actually being able to drive revenue versus being a cost center. Ben, it has been a pleasure having you on the show. This is actually a lot of fun. You should have never told me about that bike, even though I should be up on this type of stuff. Because I like the idea of this electric bike, even though… um, it does take me away from, you know,

Speaker 1 | 22:40.207

you know, I think we’ll sell out of them. So if you want one, I’d say you probably need to go sign up for it. You’re pretty popular.

Speaker 0 | 22:47.591

The next 30 grand is going over here. Uh, so, so, Hey man, I appreciate it. Uh, thanks for being on the show. I hope you have a great day and, hopefully we can have you again on soon here.

Speaker 1 | 22:58.678

Thank you very much.