Speaker 0 | 00:09.623

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today we have Justin Smucker on the show with us from AFNI. You guys do, I mean, really a large contact center, which excites me. So I’m not going to try and be selfish here and talk about that all day. We’re going to steer away from that. And what I want to do first, Justin, is A, introduce you to the show. But you, last time when we were talking, you were talking about really a huge disruption in the industry right now. And I’m going to let you speak to that in a moment. But first, tell me, what was your first computer and how did you get started in anything like technology?

Speaker 1 | 00:57.340

So, well, thank you for the introduction. Hello, everyone. My introduction to computers probably happened a lot later than most. It was actually when I first walked into college. I went to a DeVry University outside the Chicago area, and I literally changed my major the day I walked in. in and signed up for classes and went into telecommunications management.

Speaker 0 | 01:32.246

That’s awesome. No one does that. Everyone should do that. Everyone should do that. But most people going to college, like you said, actually, that probably is very, very typical. Most people going to college because you have to go to college because that’s what we’re told we have to do as a society. And that’s what we do. But anyways, so what made you change right away? This is a really cool story.

Speaker 1 | 01:56.704

I really, honestly, something just spoke to me, you know, waiting in line, you know, seeing all these other kids and stuff. And, you know, I mean, it was, I was signing up for electrical engineering otherwise, which, you know, another great field. But, you know, there’s a billboard for all the different, you know, majors that you can sign up for. And there it was.

Speaker 0 | 02:21.128

And was there anything, you know, anything that was like, man, I just love computers. I remember this from a kid or I remember this that sparked my interest. Like, is there anything that’s like nostalgia or anything like that?

Speaker 1 | 02:32.057

I mean, it’s, you know, my grandparents had a Commodore 64, but you know, that went, you know, a long ways, uh, you know, a way before I went to college. So I never really had anything to really kind of grasp onto. And it was this kind of one of those, you know, gut decisions that I went with. And here it is, close to 30 years later. Oh, gosh. And this is what I’ve done in my career, really, has always been around IT and IT management. So my first job, so I’ve got to kind of continue into my first job because I moved away to go to school and I wasn’t going to, I had to be able to live. in the suburbs. And so I got a job in a call center and as an agent and probably not the best agent, you know, it’s, you know,

Speaker 0 | 03:31.819

fun job though.

Speaker 1 | 03:33.279

Right.

Speaker 0 | 03:33.979

Working in a call center, working in a call center is very, I don’t think people know it’s a very fun job.

Speaker 1 | 03:40.881

And this is back in the day too, before, you know, the internet really burst and, you know, like everything that you ever wanted. online, you know, in PDF form that didn’t really exist. So the company I was taking calls at was a literature distribution center. So they’re running printers out the back and mailing stuff out, you know, prospectuses for mutual funds and white papers for semiconductors. And, you know, so these are the things in the Australian tourist commission, these are all things that, you know, I’m taking calls for. And after about two, three months, um, you know,

Speaker 0 | 04:15.202

so give me an idea. Let’s just talk about this for a second. This is just fun. people’s first jobs this this might be the new theme that i’m going to go with from now on is like what was your first job um i’ve always worked in restaurants and fry cooks and working in a kitchen so those jobs always really you know they’re like they’re just really not that great you know they’re grind jobs you know and then i got a job in a call center and Most people that are working in a call center right now might be laughing at me, but I absolutely loved that job. So what did they do? Sit you down like, hey, here’s some training or read this script and then we’re going to send you this and that. I mean, what did it look like for you? Here’s a headset. Do you remember the first call you took?

Speaker 1 | 04:53.665

First call? No. I remember that everything was on green screens. And, you know, so things would, you know, they had this little. I don’t know, LED screen on top of the monitor and it would pop up a, a DENIS number. You’d have to enter your DENIS into the green screen and then it would pop your, you know, the script up that you’re supposed to go through.

Speaker 0 | 05:16.010

The inbound call, like, so the call, the inbound caller ID DENIS, and then you’d enter that in and then it would pop like an appropriate script for that or what, or was it like. Yes.

Speaker 1 | 05:24.054

And the way that we were, you know, set up, we had, you know, I mean, granted this is a while ago, so everything was gated. And so. You know, I would be gated for, you know, the Australian tourist commission, um, you know, uh, gosh, I can’t even remember some of the mutual funds anymore.

Speaker 0 | 05:40.000

So multiple calls, like multiple different inbound, like craziness.

Speaker 1 | 05:44.222

Yes. And yeah, you know, a commercial would pop for, you know, call 1-800-Australia, boom, you know, and you know, we’d have a red light go on and everybody would just, you know, be pounding the keyboards and stuff. So, you know, I lasted at that for. Probably six months, they realized that I was going to school to learn technology. My first couple of classes were on all analog stuff. And so they quickly realized that my time on call center floors probably should come to an end quickly. And I went from being a call center agent. to running the ACD.

Speaker 0 | 06:33.540

Nice.

Speaker 1 | 06:34.380

So it was a…

Speaker 0 | 06:35.741

And for anyone out there, you know, IT directors out there that don’t have a lot of telco, what do we call these acronyms, you know? ACD, automatic call distribution. So anyways, go ahead. So they basically took you off of like dude answering the phones and said, okay, now run the actual PBX and the whole distribution of call flow.

Speaker 1 | 06:58.825

Yes. Nice. All the routing.

Speaker 0 | 07:01.886

And it’s not like it was like a nice, slick, easy-to-use interface with widgets and everything back then. Like you said, the internet had just come about, so it was probably like a lot of syntax codes and craziness.

Speaker 1 | 07:13.191

And this was a very old, antiquated system in and of itself for being the mid-’90s.

Speaker 0 | 07:19.113

Must have been a Nortel.

Speaker 1 | 07:20.894

Rockwell Galaxy 7.

Speaker 0 | 07:23.795

So… LAUGHTER

Speaker 1 | 07:26.285

I have to go up into the data center to go enter commands, the proper syntax, as you said, on teletype machines. So it was just bizarre. We worked with Rockwell. They helped us be able to pull data off of the phone system every night at midnight and whatnot. So that was really kind of my first step into… systems. I wasn’t even in IT yet. I was still attached to the call center. I did that for about 12, 18 months and then started doing… I was a network technician for the next couple of years until I graduated. So it was a great company. I really enjoyed working there. I enjoyed everything about the job and being able to support the call center. And when those bursts would happen, they were exciting. Everybody was engaged. I really appreciated that time. So kind of a long way to say that I was probably a junior in college by the time I actually bought my first PC, which was a Gateway 2000.

Speaker 0 | 08:38.953

That was a big deal back then. Those computers, I mean, they must have sold so many of those.

Speaker 1 | 08:42.975

Oh my gosh, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 08:47.137

That was like my dream computer, I guess, when I was in. Let’s see, what year was that when you had that?

Speaker 1 | 08:54.405

The Gateway, I would probably say about

Speaker 0 | 08:58.068

97. All right. So I was a junior in high school or something like that. And I remember someone having that and I was stuck with my 386. I don’t even remember what the brand was that I ordered from the magazine. Anyways, side note. By the way, that Rockwell Galaxy 7, I’m trying to find that online right now. How do we spell that?

Speaker 1 | 09:20.046

Just as it sounds. Rockwell. R-O-C-K-W-E-L-L.

Speaker 0 | 09:24.851

Galaxy. We got to get a picture of this for the cover of this episode.

Speaker 1 | 09:29.075

So it literally, they, this is what I was told. And this was, you know, back in mid nineties. This was a more modern version of the very first ACD that they had on exhibit in the Smithsonian.

Speaker 0 | 09:46.945

Yeah, I mean, I’m literally seeing black and white pictures of like, you know, like operators talking on the phone. And that’s in like Wikipedia is coming up with ACD and stuff. So I’ll research this and find it. So anyways, first PC, Gateway 2000 Pentium.

Speaker 1 | 10:03.813

Yeah. So it was a Pentium. Wow.

Speaker 0 | 10:05.974

And windows, did it, but did it boot automatically or did you have to type in win.exe and hit enter from DOS?

Speaker 1 | 10:11.578

No, it actually booted up. Wow. It was probably, it had to have been 95.

Speaker 0 | 10:20.064

So no one has any clue. Oh, awesome. What do you mean? What do you mean win.exe? What’s auto exec bat? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Okay. So awesome. So keep going. So now you’ve got this in college, you can now do word processing. Awesome. Dot matrix printer, I’m assuming. Did you have a dot matrix?

Speaker 1 | 10:40.078

Yeah. You know, by that point, you know, I was deciding that the burbs were too boring and I didn’t want to spend all of my time in computer labs. So a buddy of mine and I roomed up and got an apartment down in Wrigleyville. And so I was driving an hour to and from work and an hour to school.

Speaker 0 | 11:00.896

That place is crazy, by the way. I’m from Massachusetts and we’ve got baseball fans, okay? We’ve got Red Sox fans, okay? But Wrigleyville is like a circus to me. Like when I went there, I was like, this is crazy. I thought people after a Red Sox games were nuts. I was like, well, you guys have batting cages and you just have crazy stuff going on there. I felt like I was in Dick Tracy in real life.

Speaker 1 | 11:26.813

It’s wonderful. I can’t wait. There’s actually a hotel there now. So as soon as I get tired of the heat down here, one of these days, got to go up and go catch a game and actually relax back in the neighborhood for once. It’s been a long time.

Speaker 0 | 11:44.538

So let me try to get on topic here because I’ve had a lot of coffee to drink today. Last time we were talking about a huge disruption right now. I want you to describe that. Because when I talk with some, I was actually talking with an IT director today and he said, yeah, he said the same thing. There’s a huge disruption right now and we’re all going to be out of jobs. And I was like, what are you talking about? I was like, you need to take that on. You need to be the leader. It has nothing to do with that. It means they’re all going to have more jobs. It means you’re going to be in much higher leadership position. You’re going to have to have a significant level of business acumen that you… that you may not have right now. And maybe that’s why he thought, you know, people were going to be out of jobs or something. Maybe it’s just a level of business acumen that IT directors don’t have and are afraid of. I don’t know. But what’s your opinion on it? What’s this huge disruption? And I think it’s obvious, but I want to hear from your point of view.

Speaker 1 | 12:41.684

Absolutely. You know, to me, the big disruption is around DevOps and the shift of culture and really creating a lot more orchestration and automation. and really changing the face of engineering, of IT engineering. And everybody’s always had scripts to help them out here and there and stuff, but especially if things continue to move more and more cloud, and as clouds expand into multi-cloud, and everybody’s environments keep going broader and broader. The level of work really changes and the expectations from the business has started to evolve. And without that kind of adoption of this new culture, I really fear that… To me, it’s not necessarily directors, but if directors aren’t pushing their engineers to adapt to this change, then… they may be caught in the disruption.

Speaker 0 | 13:54.713

So talk to me about adapt. Are you saying not be IT engineering as a mindset versus a job? Or IT engineering, not tunnel vision, but broader vision? What’s the adapt? What’s the adapt? What’s the, how do we, how are we going to adapt?

Speaker 1 | 14:18.945

I think it’s all in the approach of what needs to be done. And it’s the actual facilitation of what we’ve all learned in ITIL from 20, 30 years ago and how to facilitate that in that continuous improvement, the continuous delivery, continuous testing of your environments as you make changes. How can you roll that out? How can you make sure that… What you did roll out was successful. Did you meet those goals?

Speaker 0 | 14:53.054

What’s successful like to you?

Speaker 1 | 14:56.336

on meeting the objectives. So you have to have, what are the acceptance criterias for what we’re aiming to go about to make whatever-Let’s use an example.

Speaker 0 | 15:07.865

We got to whip out an example here, a case study, so to speak. We need to talk about a specific example here, what the objectives were, how did we know whether we were successful or not, and how did we even choose the right objectives? I mean, sometimes it might be even as deep as saying, what should our objectives be?

Speaker 1 | 15:27.656

You know, it all kind of depends on what the processes are within the department. And, you know, kind of trying to speak a little bit more outside of the DevOps, you know, but it’s still one in the same. So, but in, you know, and let me be upfront too, you know, we’re still going through our own culture change. You know, we haven’t fully adopted DevOps, but, you know, this is a part of our path. This is part of the direction. that we want to go in. So we’re on this journey now. Sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 0 | 16:02.589

I just want you to paint a vision for me of, you know, what would happen if you didn’t do this type of thing? What does it look like in some organizations that may not be doing this that you can see right now as it’s happened? I mean, was it Toys R Us? Was it Sears? What are we doing? Where’s the failure? What’s the vision? What would it look like?

Speaker 1 | 16:26.480

So, okay, let’s use a Toys R Us as our example. And I’m using, I’m going to have to go completely hypothetical, but, you know, because I’m sure that these aren’t their problems, but, you know, they could have been. And here’s how we could, you know, but at least, you know, who’s one of the biggest competitors that Toys R Us had? Amazon.

Speaker 0 | 16:49.115

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 16:49.735

Amazon basically drove them out of business.

Speaker 0 | 16:52.017

Exactly.

Speaker 1 | 16:54.198

How are they ever to keep up? If they didn’t have some sort of model that allowed them to deliver updates to their website, because who are they competing with? The brick and mortars help bring them down. But if they were able to get out in front of a delivery model to have a whole new face of their company online, expectations of delivery times from their business saying that we need to do this in… you know, three months, you know, all right guys, go ahead. Well, if they actually had something where, you know, the, you know, the, the more minor, I mean, that’s more, you know, broader vision kind of goal, breaking it down into bite, more bite-sized chunks. How are we going to accomplish this? Setting up the criteria, what’s accepted, what isn’t, and, you know, pushing it through your tools that you use to automate.

Speaker 0 | 17:56.548

Okay. Because when I was using this example with my kids the other day, trying to explain, I was trying to explain at a very simple level what a stock is and ownership in a company. And they’re like, well, why not just buy stocks? And I was like, well, you have to choose wisely. I was like, because if you bought Toys R Us, you’d be done. And they’re like, what? Toys R Us? I was like, yeah, think about it. I was like, you’ve got stores everywhere. You’ve got money on the shelf. You’ve got toys on the shelf. um, that you could buy maybe from Amazon for cheaper. So then people buy them from Amazon and then you’ve got toys sitting on the shelf that aren’t popular anymore. So now you’ve got things that need to go on clearance. So you’ve lost money on that. Not to mention the fact that you had to ship it from somewhere, put it on a truck, bring it there and hire an employee to put it on the shelf and then hire an employee to take it off the shelf. And then you got to pay them. I was like, whereas what does Amazon have to do? Drop ship to one like centralized, you know, distribution facility. Um, and on-demand ship the product when it’s asked for to where it needs to go. I was like, you’ve cut back on all that. They’re like, well, you got to pay for the warehouse. I was like, so does Toys R Us and many more.

Speaker 1 | 19:04.663

So I don’t have the actual research to back this up, but one of the things I’ve always been told about Amazon, do you know how many changes they make to their website a day?

Speaker 0 | 19:17.546

I have no clue. I just know that 48 cents of every dollar is spent on Amazon. Something ridiculous. It’s over 40 cents.

Speaker 1 | 19:26.163

What I was told is that there are over 100,000 changes to their website every day.

Speaker 0 | 19:33.348

Wow.

Speaker 1 | 19:35.709

Do they have a developer per change? Probably not. Do they have a team per change? Because that’s effectively what you’d have to have. You’d have to have your developer. QA tester, you have to have your deployment engineer to, everybody has to touch that code before it goes out. You know, this is how Amazon is able to disrupt. They’re making changes at such a breakneck speed. And I’m not trying to get to, you know, an Amazon speed. You know, I would be happy with, you know, a couple changes a week at this point, you know, as opposed to, you know, I mean, it’s we’ve all been in the places where it may take six months before we have enough developed to be able to have a release. I think it was the way that Toys R Us operated. It was more in that six-month space.

Speaker 0 | 20:35.799

Can we provide some clarity? I don’t think they were on a six-month space. I think they were on like a five-year pace. I’ll just be honest with you. I think it was more like five years because anyone can get something done in six months can get something done pretty fast. But can we provide some clarity around here for some other IT directors, other people in your position that are listening to this? What can they do? Is there any way that they can look at their business environment through a different lens and or any roadblocks that they might be experiencing that they need to hurdle or knock down?

Speaker 1 | 21:12.125

I think trying to find as many as of examples of what to use as a you know a target or what to aim towards as possible. There’s a lot of research that’s out there on DevOps you know that will be able to help find where, you know, basically where the constraints are. You know, it’s being able to look at where, you know, where your throughputs are and how much you’re able to push through. Is that enough? Is that enough for, you know, for where your business needs to go? I think we talked about the Gretzky quote.

Speaker 0 | 21:57.830

Go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 21:58.650

If you want to be a good hockey player, don’t skate to where the puck is. Go to where the puck is going. We need to work with our business leaders, identify what their targets are, maybe help structure some of those targets and improve those ideas together collaboratively and work towards delivering a solution or a series of solutions. for enabling that business vision. I think that as time goes by, you know, the time to delivery is only going to increase those, you know, we’re going to have shorter and shorter periods of time that IT leaders are going to have to show results.

Speaker 0 | 22:49.705

So how do you feel about purchasing equipment? In other words, how do you feel about the cloud versus purchasing equipment, hyperscalers, stuff like that? Do you have any opinions there? And I’m only thinking of that because I can think of numerous examples going on right now where people have examples of, well, let’s turn up this hyperscaler or let’s use this data center for this, but that’s going to cost us, I don’t know, $20,000 to $30,000 a month, where we could just go purchase this equipment and it’s going to cost us. you know, so much less. I’m assuming that these are some of the decisions that would come up as far as scalability and growth is concerned.

Speaker 1 | 23:32.385

Yeah, without a doubt. You know, one of the, I try to remain agnostic as possible in that kind of decision. I, after running ACDs, I’ve got 10, 15 years experience managing data centers. So, you know, that’s, you know, you’re, you’re touching on, you know, one of, you know, my true prides and in my experience. And, you know, so right now I’m at a point where I have to be able to balance, you know, the, that, you know, that expense upfront, or maybe we lease it or whatever that we can draw it out. But if I have a way to control how much load activity is actually taking place on you know i mean you know we wouldn’t we regardless it’s going to be virtual right we’re going to run it as hypervisors we’re going to be you know all vms maybe as docker containers but you know to be able to have that ability to throttle down when you don’t have that demand but also you know if your business peaks for some reason and you know your you know, it’s the middle of the night and you’re sleeping and it’s something that we see it’s the middle of their day, something pops and you’re not there. to increase the throttle on your equipment on-prem. If that’s the kind of scenario, I would say that, you know, it probably makes more sense to go to a cloud scenario for something like that. And everything else is kind of gray.

Speaker 0 | 25:21.827

I don’t know. What’s the everything else that’s gray? That worries me. But, um…

Speaker 1 | 25:27.192

Well, I mean, it’s, you have to dig in further is all I really mean to say. And not necessarily, you know, it’s not a black and white cut and dry kind of answer.

Speaker 0 | 25:33.795

No, there never is.

Speaker 1 | 25:35.976

You really just have to kind of evaluate and, you know, evaluate your workload. You know, who are your, your, your key partners and who are you saddling up with and what do they have to offer? These are all key, you know, pieces of information to be able to make decisions.

Speaker 0 | 25:55.487

What about competition?

Speaker 1 | 25:59.800

Hopefully you can get to that business outcome before they do.

Speaker 0 | 26:03.302

I mean, do you have a way of, I mean, how much of a pulse do you have on your competition and kind of what they’re doing? And maybe some of their, you know, just their operations, their developments, that type of stuff.

Speaker 1 | 26:19.454

So AFNI really focuses on differentiating ourselves from our competitors. A lot of our competitors with the same clients that we have, a lot of the big six are mixed into that. But I kind of view those as a little bit more of those more low-budget call centers. And they may be able to stand up 20,000, 30,000-seat call centers in a heartbeat. But are they increasing? the customer’s satisfaction to our client. That’s where we really differentiate ourselves. So our market is, you know, a lot smaller. It’s a lot, you know, we don’t fit that, you know, the…

Speaker 0 | 27:16.787

The warranty replaced my cell phone market.

Speaker 1 | 27:19.788

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 27:20.769

Yeah, gotcha. I hear you. What do you do? What’s your philosophy on team management or leadership piece? So you’ve got someone that might, maybe they just want everything to stay the same. Maybe, you know, I just want to come to work. I just want to do my job. And, you know, that’s it. But how do you encourage this kind of like open-minded, more creative thinking, I guess? And I’m asking that for some people that may not have thought, that may not have thought of something. Is there any like aha moments that you’ve had any moments where you’re just like, this really, this really struck me. This really made a difference.

Speaker 1 | 28:10.916

You know, that’s something that we are going through right now. And you know, it’s, uh, you know, I wish it was something as easy as snapping your fingers and everybody has bought in. And that’s certainly not the case, especially the people that um, may have a lot of experience, um, you know, and the it’s, and it’s a challenge. You’re absolutely right. It was a great question. Um,

Speaker 0 | 28:41.011

and I’m not a big Gary Vee fan. I’m really not, but I do agree with some of the things you said, and that is, uh, just fire them immediately. It was like, you know, just basically like get rid of, get rid of bad attitude right away. Get rid of people that don’t understand the culture and don’t get it. Um, But I guess the question is, how do we first communicate that culture to begin with? Like, what’s your idea of a good culture?

Speaker 1 | 29:07.450

One that embraces different ideas. That, you know, it doesn’t just say no to every first comment. That, you know, so it doesn’t have to be combative to try and implement a new idea. Just to have a new concept. you know, to bring about DevOps. It’s, you know, there has to be openness and people have to feel comfortable making mistakes. You know, that’s one of my biggest things in leading, parenting, teaching. I always say, make new mistakes, you know, learn from those, you know. experience is the name that we give to our past mistakes.

Speaker 0 | 29:55.282

I think the key, I think the key thing there is learn because everyone makes mistakes. And I had someone tell me a long time ago, you know, coachability is the biggest thing I look for in a employee, team member, partner, whatever it is. It’s just coachability because someone that can’t be coached or can’t be, you know, can’t, they can’t learn from mistakes or they can’t grow. And that’s just so important. I think that’s a great point, great piece of advice. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. It’s been a pleasure. If you had any one final message to deliver to the community out there, just other fellow peer-to-peer IT directors, what would that be?

Speaker 1 | 30:44.216

Always try to always be always… Learn, you know, learning is a continuous process in and of itself. And try to, you know, stay current with events and, you know, changes in the industry. You know, it’s, we’ve seen nothing but change in our experience. And I imagine, you know, what we talked about today is certainly not going to be the last.

Speaker 0 | 31:16.157

So it’s certainly something we hear a lot. about we hear that’s not a um it’s a saying that i think that someone would say in every industry right stay on top continuous learning right like you would never go to a doctor that does not stay up on you know like my dad my dad um he’s 84 and he retired really a couple years ago and he’s a surgeon a urologist of all of all things too and i you know i asked him like dad you know why’d you retire because i could just tell he didn’t want to right he’s like ah well People look at me and they see an 82-year-old guy and they’re just thinking, you’re not operating on me. But there’d be no way that he could go with just the information that he learned back in whatever it was, the 50s or whenever it was that he was going to medical school. However, when life and death isn’t on the line, I think you can get lazy. And I think it’s definitely something that… People, we say you got to continually educate yourself, right? But sometimes it can be easier said than people actually do once they get kind of complacent and they get set in their career. So a very good point. Justin, thanks so much for being on the show, man. I really appreciate it. And I look forward to talking again soon when you’ve made a significant… change that has disrupted the marketplace.

Speaker 1 | 32:51.208

Absolutely. I look forward to it, Phil. Appreciate it.