Speaker 0 | 00:02.197

Welcome everybody to Telecom Radio 1. Today we have a very special guest on the show, Bill Klayman. And I have been tracking you down for weeks. We have missed appointments. I’m just so happy that I finally have you on the show today. CTO with MTM Technologies, big MSP, started out in Connecticut. Bill, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 | 00:24.355

It is an absolute pleasure to be here, Phil. And I’m glad we finally like the time and date to talk. I’ve been definitely looking forward to this. So many wonderful things to talk about in IT today. I can’t wait.

Speaker 0 | 00:34.873

I’m going to try. We’re going to try to niche this down. It’s hard to do. But before we do that, I’m going to stick you with a tough question. What’s the biggest obstacle you’ve ever had to overcome in your life? It doesn’t even need to be IT. It could be I lost 100 pounds. It could be anything. What’s the biggest obstacle that you have ever had to overcome, period?

Speaker 1 | 00:54.558

That’s a really great question to start off with. And I like that you… say you know doesn’t have to be IT um you know first of all I think something I learned throughout my life I’m sure everyone can agree with this and you listening everyone’s fighting a battle right everyone’s come overcome something really major and I think for me one of the biggest obstacles that certainly I overcame and it was probably most of my family is really helped me define myself and understand more of the world and appreciate everything so much more but basically when I was younger we and my family left a collapse government in the Soviet Union, Ukraine specifically. We were basically stateless refugees, didn’t have a passport and you know we lived between Austria and Italy for quite some time until we finally got a visa in the United States in the early 90s to literally come to this country and build a life, you know, successful life nonetheless between my brother, my mom, my dad and the rest of my family. and get this opportunity to do some just amazing things in this wonderful nation. And honestly, the biggest obstacle and the biggest factor to overcome was the unknown, the uncertainty, and you constantly having to tell yourself and support the rest of your family that you can overcome, you can persevere. And that on the other side of all of this darkness is gonna be something amazing and wonderful. And then to be honest, the reason that’s the biggest obstacle that I’ve ever overcome is that Honestly, anything after that, anything after having to sell your home for pennies, pack up just a backpack and a couple of toys and just a couple of little items with yourself and get on an airplane and a train and live abroad and finally come to a country that’s accepting you. Everything else kind of seems a little bit easier. So I think, honestly, Phil, that’s the biggest obstacle that we overcame. Honestly, there’s a lot more to the story, but it helped define who I am. It helped me see things in a completely different perspective. And.

Speaker 0 | 02:53.044

helps me keep keeps me energized man just thinking about you packing up toys man it’s gonna make me cry because i got seven kids in box with you oh man yeah how old were you when that happened started to pack up and leave right around 889 um so i must have been six or seven years old or so i still remember quite well i

Speaker 1 | 03:12.172

remember living abroad and uh just again i remember having just a couple of literally almost nothing to take with ourselves and we had to sell everything for pennies just like i said because everything was basically worthless when the economy collapsed um but yeah i mean anybody listening right you’re thinking about your own challenges i mean literally you’re put in a position where pack one backpack you’ve got 500 bucks and you’re leaving the country good luck to you and that’s that’s the situation and it was it was one hell of a level of obstacle to overcome man oh man do you remember what toy you packed yeah yeah actually surprisingly enough i do uh if you remember You know those little green soldiers that we’ve got here in the States? That’s kind of what I pack. Just a couple of little toy soldiers. Maybe I had a couple of little cars. One of those old school Soviet feel cars that you could throw off a building and it would be fine. I actually still have those, believe it or not. We still have those from when we came here in the States. I know they’re pretty well preserved. They’re old school Soviet cars in an old… I got T25 pink, I can’t even remember what it was, but it wasn’t much, but it held up, at least it held me through for a while.

Speaker 0 | 04:27.523

When you say stuff like that, there’s little to complain about. There really is, man.

Speaker 1 | 04:32.386

I’m telling you, I’m sure there’s other folks here who have amazing obstacles that they’ve overcome, they’ve overcome as well, just know that that kind of stuff helps define you and makes you stronger.

Speaker 0 | 04:44.656

Well, we have to segue to IT stuff. Okay. And you have a pretty extensive background. I’m not going to go through all of that, but I did, you know, I, I can’t remember how I stumbled upon you, but there was a podcast, another podcast that I listened to with you on it. And you were talking about IT leadership. And it’s something that needs to happen because, A, technology is the driver of business now. Right? Everything, so much can happen. I can run my whole business from my house. I could run my business. You know, it’s funny I say this because I say, you know, I can run my business from a Starbucks in Russia. I say that a lot. But there’s a big weight on IT directors. shoulders. And obviously, even in the LinkedIn community, there’s tons of recruiters recruiting for IT all the time, and they’re constantly looking for the right person. So I want to talk about your, you spoke a lot about being an architect, building IT architecture. And what’s the difference between that and the typical IT director role? What’s the kind of paradigm shift there?

Speaker 1 | 06:00.653

I think it’s important to start here. At MTM, like you mentioned, I’m the CTO, which is an amazing job. I absolutely love it. I get a chance to interact with our engineers, our architects, our customers. I get a chance to go out and do really technical whiteboarding sessions and explain some of these most complex topics to a point where business leaders can understand. I promise this is to a point. I am a millennial executive. I am. It’s pros and cons. to that as well right sometimes it’s easier sometimes it’s harder but in that role I’ve seen a lot of different kinds of shifts happen so if you’re listening to this podcast and hope you’re paying attention because I know we like to multitask I’m gonna give you some really good advice especially it doesn’t matter how old you are these perspectives are literally the DNA and the architecture of what can make you successful in this world so there’s a really interesting report from Gartner that said that By 2020, 100% of IT rules are going to require, and follow me on this, at least an intermediate level of proficiency when it comes to business acumen. So developing strong business acumen in IT is basically the prerequisite to effectively shifting from an IT focus, which is from optimizing IT operations, to effectively driving the business and valuing growth and creating valuation around growth. At the heart of an effective IT… strategies communication and a clear link to vision strategies and plans and this desire to drive behaviors in the workforce to contribute more beyond just IT to create business outcomes so I’m gonna give you a little story Phil and everybody on the line here I’m gonna tell you guys how to think like an architect and this is basically see the big picture and keep this in the back of your mind as I tell you the story so I was working with an architect who just got in this position recently, and we were on a call. I was actually sitting in an airport maybe 30, 40 minutes before my flight, just finished up a little bit of a lunch. And he called me. He’s like, Bill, I’ve got this job. I’m working for a very big partner in bar, and they’re coming and telling me that they want me to build a security architecture for an application environment with an Azure. And he was stuck. Do you know why he was stuck, Bill? Because he couldn’t. wrap his head around which application to work with so he kept going back to his directors and saying well which application are you trying to secure and their response they’re like well that’s not the point we just want to create a security architecture best practice around let’s say any kind of application but just as an example wordpress wordpress sitting in azure so this architect is like oh i get it totally follow you came back and literally wrote a security architecture around you guessed it, WordPress. So when he was given those blinders, right, that railway system that he could only go in one direction, he was doing great. Through that engineering mentality, give me a problem, a very specific problem, and I’ll be able to solve it. Well, on our call, he expressed a little bit of dismay because his manager said, this isn’t really what we asked for. We asked for any kind of application that could fit in Azure. And again, he was stumped. And my conversation then was this, stop thinking of it as just one. singular application break it out see the big picture what are the components of Azure what are the components of security with an Azure right with it that network security whether you’re creating a silo within storage maybe you need a specific API that will isolate data within a certain segment maybe you have to restrict how information is flowing the point is it’s not just one app it’s one infrastructure so his challenge was to take those blinders off stop seeing the request as a one-to-one but really more like a one-to-many so in this kind of world that we’re talking about an IT director oftentimes might focus on a given problem at hand or maybe multiple problems at any one given time but what an architect does remember what I saw earlier see the big picture oftentimes engineers and people who are often working on problems immediately fixate on an issue or a point or uh you know something they need to fix and then they get so bogged down in that they forget to see other elements how does it impact for example users or maybe a different location or maybe it impacts a different part of the environment and to that extent you need to be able to stop pause yourself understand everything that’s going on and when you do that when you slow your brain down and when you really take into consideration everything you begin to think like an architect you begin to think of variables you begin to understand dependency what might happen to a different part of your environment and here’s the thing as an architect it’s okay to ask those questions hey can we bring in the storage team because if I design this kind of architecture I’m not sure how it’s going to impact for example performance or IO hey we’re going to get the voice team in here because I’m not sure what the quality of the call is going to be going to this remote location we might need some kind of WAN optimization technology. You don’t have to be an expert, but you need to know the pieces and components that touch what you’re actually designing. So again, the biggest element here, the paradigm shift is to go from seeing a singular vision to the big picture. And I know it’s kind of hard to understand and grasp, and maybe some of the folks listening to this, they’re not going to get it immediately. But when you, you know, listen to the podcast 15 times over, or if you want to listen to it one time, that’s… the only thing you take away from this if you want to be an architect and progress yourself from just being beyond an IT director and engineer ask yourself whatever new situation comes up okay am I focusing on one problem or am I seeing the big picture hmm

Speaker 0 | 11:51.497

this is the first podcast where I’ve been taking notes I’ll be honest I miss and I need to go back because I missed something what was it the intermediate business acumen Gartner percentage again. Like what was the, what was that percentage? Like I need to know that number.

Speaker 1 | 12:10.829

100% of IT roles are going to require an intermediate level of proficiency in business acumen. And that’s, Bill, that’s not easy to do, man. We had a really great meeting with Cisco one time when they came into our office and it’s like, how do we create more built claimants? And this is not, please understand, not to, you know, make my head any bigger or floss up any collar. It’s. how do we create people who can take the language of business or vice versa the language of technology and translate it be able to explain why that green blinky thing is going to make the business 10 million dollars not just what it can do you know sort of in general uh and and that’s the important part here i think we as architects and you know millennials and you know gen x or the new the i gen whatever you want to call it that the younger generation was coming in after us The important part here is to be able to act as a mediator and a translator of technology. I mean, that’s another thing that architects do. And the best ones out there, the absolute best ones, and this is not a knock on anybody out here, are those that take the time to understand business as well as IT. And this was a personal journey that I went on understanding the environment. Phil, I got an MBA alongside a network engineering degree alongside another master’s in information security. And those business courses, Phil, were some of the hardest ones I’ve ever taken because they forced you to think differently. They forced you to think around the business, the user. How do people interact with technology and business and marketing? And that ultimately allows you to see things from a really different perspective. Maybe it requires you to take a class. Maybe it requires you to take some kind of a certification course. But doing the status quo isn’t going to make you any better. Obviously, you have to think a little bit differently. But again, having a… strong business acumen, being able to explain complex IT topics to not just business people and executives, but to your users, create champions out of those guys. That’s going to make you successful and certainly a winner.

Speaker 0 | 14:11.887

I was actually thinking of this. I was daydreaming about this in the car on the way back from jujitsu this morning, which was how would you hire a really good business consultant? And I was thinking, well, first of all, We’ve got to take them and we’ve got to throw them into a retail store and make them a store manager. And they’ve got to deal with all the crap of hiring people and people quitting on them. And then they’ve got to manage this P&L and they’ve got to have a district manager over them. You know, just harping on them on every little detail of the profit and loss statement and what gross margin is, what all these different things are. And they need to get through that really in-depth confusion and thrown to the fire stage. Then we’ll take them and throw them into an entry-level sales job and make them go hit 55 doors a day and get rejected every day. And then what we’ll do is we’ll take them in a helicopter and we’ll drop them out of the plane somewhere with a parachute. and to a country where they then have to get back to the United States with $500. Yeah. And then they’re going to have to go get their MBA, I guess.

Speaker 1 | 15:19.987

Which,

Speaker 0 | 15:22.229

you know, I’m going to skip ahead. We’re going to get back to the stylist thing. And the only reason why I say that is because you have a lot of schooling behind you. You have a lot of certs and certifications. I want to ask you. Do certifications matter later on? Like, do certifications matter right now for you? Should they matter?

Speaker 1 | 15:46.942

Okay, you’re going to get too pronged after here. First of all, yes, they matter. Second of all, don’t cheat to get them because people like me, other experts in the industry, they’re going to find out quickly and it’s going to be embarrassing. It really will. So that means don’t be afraid.

Speaker 0 | 16:01.746

Let me ask you this. Let me ask you a different way. Do renewing the certifications matter always?

Speaker 1 | 16:08.540

So, yes, if you’re in the engineering or architecture field, getting your certifications around things like health, visualization, security, whatever your field of expertise is, yeah, you’ve got to keep those active and you’ve got to keep them current. You know, for anything, the classes allow you to understand what’s changed, what’s new. Listen, if you don’t get up to date with that stuff, the little details, the minutiae of an architecture or technology are sometimes what’s really important for an organization. I’ll give you a really simple example. In a Citrix environment, you can do simple things like session pre-launch and session lingering. So if you’re working with a, let’s say, a healthcare organization that knows it’s going to get a set of doctors that are going to come in at eight o’clock in the morning, 500 of them, you can do something like pre-launching a set of 500 instances of an application so that when a doctor comes in, boom, it’s available to them immediately. You don’t have to wait for that stuff to provision. You wouldn’t have to… know that potentially if you didn’t take the courses and if you didn’t study the material maybe if you didn’t take take the exam or maybe you would know about it but you wouldn’t know how to deploy it so your lack of a no further education or not getting that cert can actually not just negatively impact you but negatively impact your customer because you’re not leveraging the full power of the technology that you’re you know you’re working with so I do definitely recommend that now to that extent when you start climbing the ranks when you start becoming the director of EP Even in the CTO role, I still have certs, and I still have certs that I’ll renew. Everything from Cisco to Citrix to Cisco Meraki, for example. I have active and valid certs and licenses that I absolutely still leverage. And I can still go into the technical councils. I’ll still go to classrooms. And it’s kind of weird because everyone announces themselves, you know, I’m an architect. I’m an engineer. I’m an architect. I’m an engineer. I’m a director. I’m a CTO. And they’re like, what the hell are you doing here? But it’s a passion to stay geeky, a passion to continue to understand the intricate workings of technology. My personal advice, everybody, don’t lose that. Don’t lose that passion. Don’t lose that drive. And certainly don’t lose yourself in the world of business alone. I think technology has so much to offer just in general. But just to come back to your original question, yes, I think getting started and renewing them is important. Because at the very least, studying the course material is going to give you a chance to understand new releases, new updates. And here’s the thing. When you learn that. stuff you can call the customer back get all jazzed up and excited and be like hey I just found out there’s this amazing feature in the software platform you already own it all you do is come out and deploy so not just that and you’re not only creating value you’re also getting yourself services dollars so there’s a lot of value above and beyond just getting a cert

Speaker 0 | 18:53.237

I guess kind of where I was going with that is obviously there’s a lot of very talented people out there that are going to say I don’t have the certifications but I can’t get hired or I can’t do this but I’ve got but I know how to do X, Y, Z. I guess that’s kind of where I was going with that one. At the same time, would you really want to go to the doctor and have him do surgery on you, and he hasn’t done any form of continuing education for the last 20 years?

Speaker 1 | 19:20.068

Let me so I think it’s important to point something out. And what you’re talking about is experience, right? Somebody comes to me and says, I’ve got experience in doing this. I’m really freaking good at it. I don’t have any certifications. Will you hire me? So I want to point this out to you. There’s three elements, in my mind at least, that I’ve seen impact how people get hired, and that’s experience, attitude, and aptitude. In, I would say, legacy organizations that are bigger, maybe potentially a lot more rigid, setting their ways and managing people, again, you know who I’m talking about. Big company, many divisions. Sometimes it’s a challenge to cater to individuals alone. They don’t care how old you are. They hire. and aim to get candidates which can quote unquote get the job done. those cases experience that’s your number one right your job is straightforward can your experience get the job done simple as that they might not care if you have a certificate or not they’re gonna hire you for your existing skill set that’s it from there your aptitude you know as far as you know how can you conform to the business or adjust think your team player you’ll be there and your attitude is actually the least important because this don’t cause any trouble you’ll be alright as long as your team player and follow the rule I’m seeing change is is actually something fairly drastic along long lines of many organizations again maybe not some of those bigger rigid ones but mid market large that’s certainly in the startup phase attitude aptitude that finally experience so your attitude is actually one of the bigger things that are going to get you hired not just can you do this but are you excited more than just making a dollar are you driven to succeed are you have you have a positive attitude and then aptitude is really important because that What is your capability to learn? Your ability to cross-train? Are you going to be able to take on more roles? Are you going to be able to have an aptitude towards learning that allows you to be moldable and become an excited team member? And then finally, believe it or not, is experience. It’s still very important, but fluid organizations that are ready for today’s digital economy, they won’t retire for experience alone. I need to make that clear. They’ll want a positive attitude. and the capability to learn and then the ability to evolve the experience is where it all happens so again old school experience aptitude attitude some of the new things that I’m seeing more on attitude aptitude and then experience so just because you have all of these certifications you know doesn’t mean you’re going to get a job at a company that you really want my recommendation is to keep up to date make sure you have an attitude that’s that’s you know open and very positive

Speaker 0 | 22:04.786

have a willingness to learn and evolve and then your experience to be able to speak for itself awesome now perfect segue to the silos okay because you’re going to come into a company you could be first of all i’m a startup guy i love growing markets i love growing i just love growing companies such as me um the old massive bureaucracy i just don’t survive in the burgh probably why i’m probably where i’m at right now um but you come in you talked a lot about not being a fan of silos is what I think you said. So talk to me a little bit about, you know, silos and I guess silos versus strategy. I guess that would be IT strategy and where various different people, you can get stuck in a silo in one of those big companies, and maybe you’re stuck in a silo. And then all of a sudden they say, hey, the CEOs, he’s gone, he’s out. You’re the, you’re the, or you’re the CTO now, go.

Speaker 1 | 23:02.198

and you’ve been stuck in a silo the whole time and you manage by silos so please tell me about silos um you know the the challenge with silos um there’s a lot of challenges with silos i mean if you manage titles properly uh you know imagine like a perforated gate right where your water is able to flow easily in and out instead of maybe like a like a locking system within like a canal or a channel or something that you know has to open up completely so there’s some barrier but your organizational structure and people are still able to flow easily throughout the company I really think that’s the ultimate goal that you’d want to get you if you’re having to compartmentalize some of your business so I’m just going to give you that perspective next week I’m one of the keynote speakers at Atcom data center world in in San Antonio one of the things I’m going to talk about is actually silos between IT facilities teams and business teams and where old-school mentality was go to your room, go do your job, go plug in the networking cable and we’ll be all set is absolutely not how we can be thinking about IT business and people in general today because what happens in those situations is oftentimes miscommunication, misalignment and beyond anything else a misunderstanding around what we’re trying to do within the company. So, for example, you know, an IT person might try and deploy something, a piece of technology, without really understanding what it’s going to do to the user or the business. The removal of silos allows members of an organization to really flow a lot more easily throughout the company, interact with users, business segments, for example, you know, do a day in the life of an administrator or a doctor or a nurse, for example, to see how they interact with things. Listen, obviously you can’t… you know have a functioning business without some element of uh of i want to say rigidity but a structure let’s call it structure um but i wouldn’t call structure the same thing as a silo um the danger with silos is that we get those blinders put on us right we focus only what we do our own little world and oftentimes forget what other people do in our business the importance of their role and oftentimes we find ourselves to be quote-unquote so busy that we think that other people in the company aren’t busy because they’re not within my style right and there’s there’s a whole bunch of complexities that can revolve around that my biggest recommendation in working with that is either you know be the actor of change and be the one that can see into multiple business units. I mean, that’s something that I do within my role pretty much every single day. But the most important thing is that, you know, you don’t lose focus of what is happening within your organization. And this could be between executives, business leaders, IT professionals. Take the time to go talk to your users, your business people, because, you know, oftentimes architects, engineers, IT managers are focusing just on their IT environment. And guess what, Phil? you don’t actually walk over to the manager’s desk or the business leader and say, hey, what problems have you had the last week? Or what issues are you working through that you just sort of ignore, you hit next, and you just only tell us about it? Because what happens is that unless it’s a major, major issue, a lot of users don’t tell you about it. And that is a loss of productivity and disenfranchising from the IT environment. Remember what I said earlier, create champions, fight for you and those people will become your you know your secondary IT folks are gonna they’re gonna help you position new technologies and new solutions so when you break that barrier and work with users you absolutely help remove those silos or something that certainly take it make them a lot more malleable a lot more you

Speaker 0 | 26:56.024

know easily to manage give me so this is kind of like the hospital where the doctors the doctors don’t talk to the nurses and the nurses don’t talk to whatever And they don’t talk to the IT guy. And I have seen this in a very large hospital network where they rolled out an entire brand new EMR system. And with the EMR system came all kinds of new, like, wireless wheel-around carts and all kinds of stuff. And I just so you know, I come from a family of all doctors, right? Like, everyone in my family, like, forever has been a doctor. I think my brother and I are the only ones that went into business, right? Even my sister’s married to an anesthesiologist and she’s an RN and it goes on and on and on. So, and then my dad just had a second hip replacement. He’s 82. Long story short, I’m in the hospital. I’m watching this right in front of my eyes roll out. And I’m watching all this brand new equipment just sitting in the corner. And I start talking with the nurse, like, you know, like, hey, like, you know, what’s going on? Like, why can’t you just, you know? put my dad’s patient information in here, they’re like, oh, they rolled out this new thing, it’s just not working out, no one understands it, blah, blah, whatever it was, it was clearly a communication and a ease of management type of use, it wasn’t even a training on how to use computers, because I would say that, you know, most people know how to do that general stuff nowadays, but I could see it unfolding right in front of my eyes, so there’s really no point to that other than, you know, a failure. aspect, right? That was like, you know, a silo failure, I guess. Give us some tips and some tricks. And I asked that because I know where I’ve done a large hosted VoIP rollout and it went great. And then we married video conferencing and screen share collaboration to the VoIP. And then we were, you know, tying in various different APIs. And then… what I noticed was that particular CTO did a lot of survey monkeys. He would constantly send out survey monkeys and get, you know, and get like, you know, at first it was, we love VoIP. And then it was, we don’t like it. And it was like, well, what happened? And what happened was is when we decided to marry the, you know, the old video conferencing platform and combine it. And now you had this kind of weird myriad, like middle party app that people just hated. But the point was you survey monkey. Do you have any other great tips or tricks for? people kind of collaboration or any ideas like what do you do or like what can we tell people to do to help you know give them some just brainless like hey just do this this is simpler and this will help you start to get the idea of you know breaking the silo so

Speaker 1 | 29:40.668

uh first of all uh i i applaud the survey monkey idea uh and second of all we do it at mtm technologies we recently released a uh a new uh you know workspace as a service if we’re going to define it that’s fine, it’s called Anywhere App. You can go to Anywhere App and check it out. But first of all, we did a SurveyMonkey of our internal people, our architects, our salespeople. anonymous SurveyMonkey nonetheless and we asked them what do you think about this what are some of the challenges what can we make better what’s the selling cycle look like is it a push or a pull and and listen people responded we got really really good data and amazing feedback okay who is there getting the message or here we need to make some improvements so getting a chance to poll and query your audience your sales people your engineers all for it that is it’s a brilliant way to get insight into what’s actually happening within your environment or with a solution or practice now going back to your original poison question as far as you know working with technology and making sure there’s a good use case let’s let’s look at it from a really cool perspective analog and digital in the analog days Phil I would go to you as your IT manager I would say Phil here’s your laptop it weighs eight pounds it’s got a scutty port in there a floppy drive this is your piece of technology you don’t have a choice all the apps that are installed there are your apps you’re gonna have to work with this that’s it you’ve never touched this before you don’t even know what the hell this is you’re like all right great this is this is what i’m going to show this brick is going to be my my new device in today’s world in the digital world that’s much different so i’m laughing because that’s the i’m laughing because that still happens it does it really does and we’re trying to break the paradigm so through that point um today we do it mt and certainly what I’m hoping to see other people do as well is that we’ll go to Phil and we’ll sit down with him and this would be something an architect would do by the way and they say hey Phil just tell me what you do every day tell me how you show me how you log in and you’ll say maybe well I don’t have a I don’t have a corporate PC and a good architect and IT guy will say you don’t you don’t need one just just tell me do you open up Chrome when you start your day do you go to like you know is it easy you pull up a portal and in the digital framework We design solutions and access methodologies around the user’s most comfortable way of computing. So maybe they have an iPad. Maybe they have a Surface Book. Maybe they have an Android device. The point is we’ve come so far in technology, like VMware, Citrix, and cloud, fast applications, that we can deliver contextually pretty much anything to anywhere. Who are you? Where are you coming in from? What data are you accessing? Do you have authority to access this data? Has your device been registered with the company? Do we need to segment or geofence this data if you’re outside of a building or a state or a county? There are so many contextual success and delivery points today that it is fundamentally different than just giving somebody a laptop. Because today, a successful IT person and architect can design an environment around the user’s tools. how they access technology and allow them to leverage these kinds of things to be as fundamentally productive as possible. I want to go back to your original story, Phil, because I thought it was amazing. We did this project with a health care company out east, and they came to us and they said, MTM, we’ve got a problem, right? We have these workstations on wheels, just like what you described, and we don’t think the doctors are using them. In fact, we’re not really sure where they all are. So we put these Bluetooth beacons on them. and a whole bunch of them. We found all of them, put a big bunch of all of them. And we put up a tracking algorithm. But we were actually able to map out the entire hospital environment. I could see the rooms, the architecture, all of that. And after a few months of working and collecting data, do you know what we found? We found like six of them sitting in an abandoned bathroom. We found like a whole bunch of them on one floor. We found that like two floors didn’t even have any of them. And it was-Unbelievable. Two of them that had to still be logged in from previous doctors’information were like, why didn’t this even log out? So we gave them so much data. And again, the problem was because they deployed technology without really understanding the user. So what happens now in that same example, what we would do is we would go to the doctor, the nurse, the practitioner, whoever, and say, show me what you do. Tell me how you log into your, do you like to swipe the card? Do you want to maybe like a biometric reader? How quickly do you want to swipe? start to interact with the patient you know do we need to pre-launch applications for you are there is there like one or two that you will always always have open when you walk into a room because we can do that now in that sense we always start with the business the user how they interact with technology and so we build around it that’s what we do and that’s the fundamental paradigm shift and difference and what I want everyone to take away from this is that before you position a server or piece of storage or a root infrastructure or VoIP system, find out how they do business, find out what their most natural way of doing business is. And that means like how they compute, access the internet, whatever the case might be. and do your best do your very best to build around that architecture to never deprecate performance or user access but to always accelerate the business well again it’s going to bring me to another point i’m putting together a specific think tank for

Speaker 0 | 35:26.242

stuff like this there’s no there is no harm in asking for help either right because you know even even like voip for example like Not everyone has, might not have the experience that you have, right? Not everyone might have the experience in every single layer of technology. It might be a three-man department running 500 users. I mean, I see it every day. I see two guys in charge of five, 600 users for, you know, and that’s not, that’s not easy. So they can’t do all of it. There’s no problem with, I mean, obviously that’s what I do, right? I go in and I do a needs assessment. assessment and I ask all those questions like how did the sales guys work where do these people work where they work um it’s amazing eventually you know that that bluetooth model is awesome eventually people are going to be wearing iphone watches as well I mean I know that’s already happening in healthcare they’re already tracking people they’re already tracking you know heart rate monitor they’re or it’s in a it might be a um like an elder care facility and we’re putting an iPhone watch on someone so we know that they wandered down the hall at two o’clock in the morning or that their heart rate went up or whatever it is. But even just the general business sense, Phil Howard, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon. You’d need to take a nap right now for 35 minutes and then you need to wake up and drink a cup of coffee and then go back to work. This is the difference. I think this is, again, one of the greatest things about our country and how we do business as well is and what’s going to change in the future. and getting away from that industrial model of doing business. It’s just a great conversation that I could really go off on a lot of tangents there. I want to ask you one more thing. What? It has to be one thing, okay? It can’t be one thing. I want you to give one piece of advice to anyone out there that may be in a growth position. They may be new to an IT director role. They may have just been promoted to their first kind of C-level executive. leadership role in

Speaker 1 | 37:31.372

IT or technology what’s your one piece of advice always think outside the box you know let me let me let me change that always see the big picture which sort of is a deviation of what I said originally always work to see the big picture that’s gonna prove useful in so many different areas of life because it’ll always allow you to become a firefighter it’ll always allow you to sort of pause a crazy situation. I mean, if you’ve got kids, obviously you can understand, or if it’s even an emergency situation. You know, I spent eight and a half years of my life when I was younger as a lifeguard responding to crazy things that happen at a big suburban pool here in Chicago. But if you just pause and not react instinctively to, you know, an immediate situation, but like understand and assess the situation, I guess that’s a good way of putting it. It’ll go a long way. So in your jobs, in your roles, as you try and grow, work with different businesses, always try and see the big picture. So if someone asks you or you’re in a business meeting and say, you know, my server is behaving poorly. Don’t just ask, do you have enough RAM or what kind of CPU do you have? You know, maybe ask, oh, how are users accessing it? What are users doing today? Maybe you’ll find out that most of them are trying to access a legacy infrastructure. from new kinds of applications where now you’re not just solving a slow server problem now you’re solving a business situation where even if you fix that well how do you know if you fix how the users are actually in the environment right did you actually take a look at the rest of the architecture so as you’re developing your i.t role whatever the situation might be whether it’s an issue with an employee or a customer or a business problem pause you know sit back in your chair drink your coffee or tea or whatever and just just work to see the big picture Try to abstract it and you will find yourself doing this in life, whether you’re, again, with family or kids or an emergency situation because it’ll help you calm down. It’ll help you respond more effectively and really will help you impact more people. I mean, that’s the biggest piece of advice I can honestly give anybody is to take those blinders off and pause and try and see the big picture.

Speaker 0 | 39:47.682

Respond versus react, man. I’ve given plenty of… Early morning sales speeches about 10 years ago on responding versus reacting, taking the emotion numbers into it. I want to ask you back for part two. And the reason why I want to ask you back for a second podcast is because we have not gotten to the second half of my questions. And that is how. And this is a long one, right? And this is how after you’ve done and gathered all of this information, how do you sell the rest of the staff on it? I think it’s fairly self-evident because I think after you’ve done all of this, they’re going to see your value, but you do need to present after that. And that’s where your past business management and presentation skills. And I noticed that you have a bullet point called the psychology of the buyer. There is going to be a point you need to present. to the board. You need to present to the business how all of this fits into the big picture. And that’s what I want to talk about on a second podcast, if you’ll do it.

Speaker 1 | 40:50.966

Yeah, so I’ll tell you what, I’ll give you a little tiny preview of what we can potentially talk about. So imagine a giant organization, manufacturing, big, big, big company, global, one of our customers, and made effectively a decision to move away from Microsoft and go to Google. We’re talking like Google Apps, Chromebooks, for example. And we’re talking about a shift away from traditional office products, Windows applications, Windows operating systems, for example, to give all of these users, like manufacturing, sales,

Speaker 0 | 41:23.799

a Chromebook. Let me ask you a question. Even Microsoft Word and Office, you’re going to go to actual Google Docs?

Speaker 1 | 41:29.683

Oh yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. You want a story for part two, that’s going to be the nexus of what we’re talking about. How to convince a global… fortune-sized organization to move away from a technology they’ve been using for a long time microsoft to google and here’s the thing we did it successfully uh you know there was certainly bumps in the road we had to convince not just executive people but pretty much across the entire board but i’ll i’ll shut up there because i want to i want to save the media parts for uh the second part of our conversation so going google and how to convince a fortune size organization on how to do it there you go

Speaker 0 | 42:07.362

Wow. Yeah. I’m already thinking about it because, uh, cause I use Google for everything, but I pay for, I pay for Microsoft office because I’m not messing around with Google sheets, but, uh, but every now and then I have to, Hey man, it’s been a great conversation. Very eyeopening. I think, uh, I mean, people are crazy if they don’t, if they don’t listen to this, people are going to love this. Um, really thank you so much and look forward to having you again in the future.

Speaker 1 | 42:35.802

It was my pleasure. Thanks everybody for listening. You can find both Phil and I on the wonderful area of social networking. So find us, connect, be social.

Speaker 0 | 42:46.810

Yes. And just, that is a good point. If people did want to reach out to you, what’s the best way to do that?

Speaker 1 | 42:53.376

You can find me on LinkedIn, Bill Clayman. It’s pretty straightforward on there. This is going to sound awful, but you’re more than welcome. Just Google my name. You’ll see a whole slew of articles and white papers. places where I’m going to be presenting. Maybe I’ll be in your corner of the world. And then obviously, if you find me on Twitter, my handle is quadstack. So like a quad bike and then stack. So quadstack. And then if you remember, you can ask the story of where that name came about. It’s actually kind of funny. It has actually something to do with my immigrating here from Ukraine. But we’ll get to that in the next podcast. So again, find me on social media, LinkedIn. I do have my own Facebook news site if you like, but again, LinkedIn and Twitter are the best places to get ahold of me.

Speaker 0 | 43:38.531

Bill Klayman. Thanks, man. You’re the man. Take care.

Speaker 1 | 43:40.573

Pleasure. Thanks, Bill.