Speaker 0 | 00:00.080

depends. I mean, I’ve come into solutions where folks are like, I want to go all cloud. I want to get rid of all my on-premise stuff and go cloud because that’s the, you know, that someone talked to about it. And then when we run the numbers on it, we say, listen, you can do that. But you’re going to waste a ton of money that you’ve already put into your investment.

Speaker 1 | 00:28.612

Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. We have an oldie but a goodie, Michael Moore, back on the show. And today we’re talking about, let me clear my throat, things that IT should be doing to people. I just like that. How could, you know, things that we should do to people, you know, like we should really be, you know, they always say when you’re selling, and especially when IT is selling to upper. management that selling is not something you do to someone. It’s something that you do for them. But I’m going to challenge that and say that these are things that we need to do to people. We need to go around. We need to ask the right questions and we need to, I don’t know, prod. And well,

Speaker 0 | 01:22.481

sometimes they just don’t know. They don’t know what they don’t know. Right. And, and we need to let them know that we need to inform them.

Speaker 1 | 01:29.147

We do. We need to tell them, um, you are not smart. You do not know what you’re doing. You have no clue at all how technology works. That is why you enter in these tickets into my system that drive me up the wall. That’s what I’m thinking inside my head, but I’m not going to tell you that. that’s not really true we don’t do that i’m just trying to add some flavor trying to add some flavor to this show we should have a section called craziest ticket you’ve ever seen before we get into in depth here what is the craziest ticket you’ve ever seen oh man that’s a great one uh you Funniest.

Speaker 0 | 02:12.710

You know, I think the funniest wasn’t a ticket, but rather hardware that came back that contained a live animal in it. Oh,

Speaker 1 | 02:19.016

that’s nice.

Speaker 0 | 02:21.459

I think when you when you get back a server, I was actually, we used to get these servers back, we used to have like computers that were all these servers that were like at each location, we had like 900 locations, right? So. uh you know on more than one occasion we’ve gotten back you know we’ve gotten back to computers with live animals and them and or dead animals right um at that point um and i’m assuming it came back not working and that was why it was getting sent back exactly right um this one has a bug in it not really that it doesn’t help i was on a call one time where um and this is earlier on when i was uh on that help desk back about 18 years ago um uh you know i was uh chatting with a um a client and and they said hey listen uh internal client right and i said hey listen um uh you know we got this issue with this uh with our server and stuff like that i’m like all right let’s well let’s go ahead and take a look at the server if we can’t and they’re like well we have to wait a second and i said why do we have to wait a second to take a look at the server like can’t we just go there like uh you’re doing something like what’s going on and they’re like well uh someone is in there and i’m like i i still i still understand uh Is it like only one person can fit in the room? And they’re like, sort of. And then all of a sudden I heard a flush and a door open. And then I said, is your server in the bathroom?

Speaker 1 | 03:47.250

And they said, yeah. Right next to the shower.

Speaker 0 | 03:52.713

Yeah. Let me take a look. Let me take a quick, like a little note on this. Because when that server comes back, I don’t want to be the one that handles it.

Speaker 1 | 04:03.479

Oh. That is so true. The memes are not, they don’t make the memes up for no reason. Like with the fire extinguisher thing above the server room closet, that was, that does happen. It is happening. No, it’s not. It’s happening right now. Okay. Things we do to people in IT. Let’s talk about. things that IT should be doing to people, the questions they should be asking. And how do you do it on your own? Maybe what’s, we call this a value discovery, discovery questions, things that important questions people might not be asking or important questions that if you want to grow up in IT, these questions might make you look like a big deal.

Speaker 0 | 05:01.828

Yeah, this is true. I actually kind of like how you’re phrasing this because it’s correct. A lot of people don’t know what they don’t know. And how do you speak to executives? How do you speak to business leaders that don’t speak tech, but you have to get across very, very important information so that they can make experienced solutions and informed decisions on how to do IT?

Speaker 1 | 05:30.275

So. First question. There’s so many. Let’s think of the general overview. How about, it’s got to be something to do with technology vision or digital. Nowadays, it would be digital transformation. But what would the, what would your, if you had to go into a place and start, you got a new IT job, so to speak, you come into the company or you come in for an interview. And they say, what questions do you have for us? What do you ask?

Speaker 0 | 06:06.473

So the first thing I’m going to ask is tell me about your business and what you do. How do you make money? What’s important to you? I want to understand how that business works, right? Because that makes all the difference in what’s important from IT standpoint. And, you know, I don’t even need to talk about IT at the moment. I just need to talk about the business and how it works. If I don’t understand the workings of the business, I don’t know where. They’re going to want to put their money, invest their money. And I want them to talk. I want them to tell me what their pain points are, what’s going on with their solutions, what they’re upset about. I mean, a lot of times folks get upset about IT, but they just keep it inside because they don’t know how to explain what’s causing them pain, discomfort, irritability here. uh with these solutions you know uh they want to do things but they don’t know how to do them and they don’t know uh where to even begin uh and sometimes they don’t even know where to actually how to how to verbalize it right is there any common themes that come up yeah um you know you’ll have i mean so lots of times uh folks get upset uh because small problems don’t get fixed little small tiny things, right? Sometimes it’s the lack of functionality of the solutions that they purchased that caused them trouble. Other times it has to deal with, you know, I want to, I’m not getting, you know, I’ve purchased things, I’ve gotten things, and I’m not getting what I want out of them. Other times they’re just scared to death that their IT solutions are going to go down, or they’re not secure, and they’re going to get hacked from ransomware or other. types of threats out there, right? I mean, those threats are real and a lot of other items and stuff are real. So, you know, it could run the gamut on things. You know, it’s easy to kind of walk in and go, okay, what are your pain points? What’s going on? And stuff like that. What’s hard to do is then take all those and, you know, identify which ones you should work on first, right? Because it could be that the CEO is upset that they can’t get. Gmail or some other solutions to do some specific thing that it can’t even do, or it needs a third party app to do, right? I mean, it could be very simple, but they might not know that there’s other solutions out there. They may not know that they’re wasting money by having duplicate solutions. There’s all these different items and stuff that take it taking place. They might not even know. that they’re not secure and uh the people that they’re doing business with uh um may need them to be so um there’s a lot to it that um runs the gamut that they might not even understand that they’re having trouble with um and they also may be wasting a lot of money it depends i mean i’ve come into solutions where folks uh um are like i want to go all cloud i want to get rid of all my on-premise stuff and go cloud. Cause that’s the, you know, that someone talked to him about it. And then when we run the numbers on it, we say, listen, you can do that. But you’re going to waste a ton of money that you’ve already put into your investment. In fact, if you want to go cloud, we can do that, but we need to create a plan so that you can utilize the investment you’ve already done. And then also transfer, start transferring into the cloud. and migrating that way that way you’re not wasting any on any investments you’ve already done uh but you’re um you’re starting to move in the path and direction that you want to go uh um and uh and you’re not gonna eat up all your budget while you do it so um There’s different solutions and cloud may work for some folks, it may not work for others. On-prem may work for some folks, on-prem may not. I’ve worked with many different companies and some were hybrid, some were all cloud, some were all on-prem. It just depends on the business and what they need and how they want to operate. It depends on where their staff is located. you know where um how they interact as a company how they collaborate i mean all these different uh uh different features and and uh of the business and how they operate as a business uh come into play and uh i was actually just talking to somebody uh um at the job i currently work at and uh we were talking about uh implementing a new solution and uh as they were talking to me i said guys i said before you know before we do anything related to technical why don’t we just sit down and talk about the workflow and how it works? And what I want you to do is don’t even think about inserting any technical thing in here, right? We’re moving information around. That’s what IT does, right? So I want to know how the information would move around regardless of what technology we put on there, right? And then once I know that, I can put the right technology in place to make it work, right? So So That’s one way I would come across and tell them that.

Speaker 1 | 11:29.689

Here’s what I have so far based on the bullet points that you fed me. One, the first one you already gave us, tell me about your business and how you make money. Then you said the little things. So my first question that came to mind was what little things annoy you about your technology or your current technology? Lack of functionality. What do you love? And what do you hate about your current solutions? Oh, paranoia about IT going down. Let’s just, let’s do some things to them here and really make them even more paranoid. What happens?

Speaker 0 | 12:11.248

I can tell you, I can talk to that piece, by the way. We can have a more in-depth discussion on how to reduce that paranoia and actually turn it into actionable projects.

Speaker 1 | 12:22.366

And hopefully increased budget. What happens if we can’t communicate for one hour? How about that? Or a day? Oh, hacked. Let’s really make people scared here in compliance. What happens? Go ahead. Go, go.

Speaker 0 | 12:42.491

I know. It’s going to say, here’s a solution. Here’s an exercise I used to, I like to do with folks. Because. This is what happens if you get somebody that is just all over the board and wants everything and stuff like that, you know, and that’s, I mean, it’s fine. But you want to, you know, prioritize that work and have them understand what’s critical and what’s not critical, right? And sometimes they’re like, well, I don’t know how to define what’s critical and not critical. What I usually do is I say, okay, close your eyes. Now, imagine everything’s down. What would be the first thing you want to bring back up? And then you keep going from there. And it’s a, it’s a scenario in which they go, oh, right. And then they start to actually think about, well, how do I talk with my employees? If everything’s down, how do I, um, how do I talk to my clients and how do I ensure that them that we’re working on this, you know? And so then they start to kind of work through, uh, you know, what’s important to them. And then once we can get that information down, then we can start to go, okay, let’s start to put some redundancies, some. high availability in place wherever we need to make sure that if you do have systems that go down, you can access the ones that are critical quickly and you bring back up and communication. I love that question that you just put there because that’s an important one.

Speaker 1 | 14:04.471

How about this? Since hacking might be a paranoia, what happens if we leak customer data?

Speaker 0 | 14:14.994

Oh, that’s a great one. That’s a great one.

Speaker 1 | 14:17.315

That’s what you, I mean, you fed it to me. You said, you know, do our customers care? What happens if we leak all of our customer data and it goes viral on social media?

Speaker 0 | 14:28.059

Know what customer data you’re storing and whether you’re storing it in the right place. Do you know where all your data is? You know who has your data?

Speaker 1 | 14:42.422

Well, I know that Google told me my data was leaked in our recent, my passwords were leaked in a recent data breach and that I should change my password. I’m just going to act as the CEO here. By the way, has Google ever told you that your passwords have been leaked in a recent data leak? That should be a question. Okay. Yeah, what is the password policy? Do we even have one? That’s going down a deep security dark hole that we don’t have time for. How about this? This is just a thought. What do we pay our people? Because whatever our… average hourly rate salary however we want to do it divided by number of people divided by number of months this is like the like the famous little roi cheat sheet thing does that help break it down to the more minute monotonous value of it that we can then add on top well what if you just gave me an extra dollar per hour per employee for every hour of the day that they work. And we give you this. I don’t know. I’m just, I’m just thinking of other, you know, budget tricks that we could do.

Speaker 0 | 16:06.403

We know that, we know that, you know, you should be in between two to 3% of your budget being spent in IT. I mean, that’s essentially that, you know, most folks you’re going to find in that, and that can fluctuate depending if you’re doing strategic IT projects, right. And you can categorize that out of the, out of a different bucket just to make sure if you go over. But you’ll find that a lot of folks are spending even less than that on their IT. And I’ve seen folks spending less than 1% on their IT budgets. And you got old computers that are not being recycled out. You’ve got solutions that are running up on their time. I’ve seen people running on operating systems that, you know, are about ready to die and they don’t and they’re not supported and they and they have no, no idea what to do if it did go down. Right.

Speaker 1 | 17:08.644

And is that two to three percent like internal IT? And is that for a specific industry that you’ve been working in in the past? And I only ask because if you asked Amazon what their IT budget is. Or if you asked Facebook what their IT budget is, or if you asked, you know, John’s tire barn, what his IT budget is, you’d get clearly two different answers. So is there a specific field? Are we talking manufacturing? Are we talking? And what if we bump that? What happens if we do bump that number from two to three percent to four to five percent? What happens?

Speaker 0 | 17:44.958

Well, this is a good point. And you’re going to run into this, right? Because some. some solutions, some businesses have solutions that require more IT than others. I agree. You’re going to have that, right? This is a general, if you don’t know your IT budget, it shouldn’t be around this. You can go above it. You can go below it, depending on the type of business. I mean, some companies just don’t require a lot of IT for what they do. And in that case, their budget is going to be much smaller. But the majority of businesses, you know, should be within that 2% to 3% range for their IT. Now, where that can jump up is if you are doing strategic IT projects or you’re doing a focus on improving your IT security or working on a transforming, like I said, digital transformation of your business, then you’re going to be running these strategic projects. What I would suggest, though, is if you are doing these strategic projects and you are a business executive, in charge of the budget, right? You should be categorizing these strategic projects in a different bucket than your general IT budget. These should be tracked and separated separately. That way you can also track, you know, any of the improvements, strategic improvements that you got from it and ensure that the project was worth your investment.

Speaker 1 | 19:15.572

Is there, back to the many people hate this statement, many people love it, you don’t know what you don’t know. What happens if they don’t change? Or they don’t make any changes, or they don’t make any improvements? What happens?

Speaker 0 | 19:44.472

So how I usually do this is what I do is I will throw out an overview of their technical solutions, right? Here’s what you have. And I’ll do it at a very high level so that they can see all the products. And I literally put images of the products with lines connecting to where they go. And that way they can see their entire IT. Most people, when they see this one pager of what they have from an IT perspective, go, oh, like they don’t, they usually don’t see the IT. They look at it. They go, it’s a bunch of computers. I don’t have to, I can’t see this. Right. Once you start to connect the dots so they see what they have, then they can start, then they start to visualize it. And they can say, oh, I understand what I’m seeing. I can visualize what’s happening. And then what I do is the next slide. you know, will show all the risks that come with that overview. So I will throw things, red arrows to things saying this is, you know, this computer is only one computer and it’s seven years old and it’s the only, it’s running your most used critical application. And if it goes down, you’re going to have to order a new computer, reset it back up. It’s going to take about two weeks to do this so that they understand, oh, man, this is a risk. And so I identified all those risks on that same page, right? I put short blurbs as to what they are, and then I talk about them as they pop up, right? So I’ll get one animation, talk about it, another animation, pop it up. By the time I’m done with the risk, right, they’re, like, engaged, and also the paranoia is going crazy, right? But. But that’s mean we don’t want them to be paranoid. So what we do is we then take that concern.

Speaker 1 | 21:37.714

Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 21:37.874

we get concerned. Right. And we take those concerns and we say we can fix this. And this is how we fix it. Right. Because you don’t want to walk into some place and give a bunch of concerns and then walk out the door. Right. The idea is here’s your concerns, but also here’s how we can fix them. And there’s multiple ways we can fix them. But here’s how I would suggest based on what I know so far. Right. leave room for flexibility that way you know because they might have different they might be like listen we’re going to move off this application in six months anyway so that’s not really a concern for us okay good then we don’t need to worry about that what new application are you going to use and what are you going to do with it right so it it allows us to have that conversation and understand the business and understand where it’s going and that way we can design update fix solutions uh for what for what they have and stay ahead of them rather than just responding to what what issues they have. The risk that, see, now they have the risk, the next big question that they always ask me is, what do I do first, right? Because I’ve got all these concerns now, I see that you, how you want to handle them, but what would be the first one you would imagine, right? Because I only have so much of a budget, and I don’t know, you know, what I should do first. And this is where, you know, you use your risk calculation doing the risk impact. So the what the impact would be if the actual problem happened and multiply that by the probability of it happening and do it on a one to five scale or one to 10 scale. You can actually calculate this out and actually numerically identify the, you know, the risk based on.

Speaker 1 | 23:19.978

What do we call that? Your impact probability number? Like, what do we call that? Your IPN? Let’s just what do we call that?

Speaker 0 | 23:26.880

Yeah, I mean, you’ve got your risk impact. uh, uh, one to five or one to 10, depending on how you want to do it. And then the risk probability, the probability that, that, that will actually happen. So, so you could be like, um, I’ll give an example. So, uh, let’s say a server’s like seven years old, right?

Speaker 1 | 23:44.284

So,

Speaker 0 | 23:45.465

uh, it’s running a, uh, uh, it’s running very little things that would make any impact on the business, right? So the risk impact would be like a one or a two at the, at the very most, right? but the probability of it happening is like uh if we’re on a five one to five scale it’s like a five so you know you five times one is five so there’s your uh there’s your probability there’s your number right now let’s say that the um let’s say let’s flip it around let’s say that that is a super critical server right and it’s seven years old and the chance of it going down is like a five And if it goes down, it’s going to take down their major application. So it’s like a five. So five times five, right, is 25. And that would be a higher on the scale now, right? But you could have something like it’s a critical application, but it’s running in a cloud and it’s also backed up. And so the risk of it going down is like a one, right? But it’s a five. So now that’s a five. So. you you just keep multi you do this you know multiplication and if you want to you know like i said you can change the score just make sure you’re you’re consistent with the scoring uh one to ten or one to five and you could score all these out based on what you know uh and and then be ready for them and say well look at it you can even you can put this a nice little table to love it right risk impact probability make the scoring and just say this is what i see based on here this is the um this is the prioritization of all the highest risk highest risk number gets taken care of first yep you And that will help that actually will help them. But one thing we will-It’s like a decision matrix.

Speaker 1 | 25:33.005

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 25:33.766

Correct. And one thing you should know about that though, is if you’re going to hand that to somebody, the next question that you’ll get is, what is this going to cost me? Right? Yeah. So you don’t have to have all the answers to it, but you need to have a generalized cost. And you’re going to say, well, I can estimate it’s going to cost you about so much. Make sure that your estimate is higher than- what you would what it would be so that way when you come back with the actual estimate it’ll be lower than that um and and then the next question they’re going to ask ask you is how long is it going to take to get this done right because they’re going to be concerned about it and then you also same thing here estimate the timeline based on what you know make sure you take into consideration their holidays your holidays add a 20 buffer and give them give them that feedback uh and if you know all this stuff going into it and you’re able to present this information then you’re going to be much, then you’re going to have a much more of a chance to be able to get these things completed and done. People want to know that you know what you’re doing, you’ve assessed what they’re, what that’s going on, you’re able to provide adequate cost and timeline information to them. And if you know all this stuff up front, and you’ve already given them the prioritization of it, they’re like, okay, well, then this is a kind of a no brainer. We’ll just, let’s, let’s start with the highest one and work our way down the list. And, and this is a, you know, I’ve done this now with several, several companies. And this is a, this is a tested method of being able to execute the projects you want to execute. Now you got to know you’re going to have to be flexible, because you’re going to, they’re going to hit you with things that you didn’t expect. Like I said, applications that they’re probably want to go away from. You know, they’re going to they’re going to be engaged now and they’re going to want to ask about, well, what if I move it to the cloud? What if I do this? What if I do that? And so you’ve got to be ready to make some judgment calls on on the call and also anticipate some of those. And if you don’t know the answer, tell them you get that one. Don’t give them an answer that’s incorrect. Let them say, hey, listen, well, you know what? This is new information to me. So I have to go back and research it. But I can I can do that and I can get back with you in a few days. with a cost estimate and timeline.

Speaker 1 | 27:59.209

So we’ve got a risk impact probability. We’ve got a cost and timeline plus or minus 10% to 20%. What do we want to call that? Contingency factor.

Speaker 0 | 28:17.322

Yeah. There’s unknowns in projects you’re going to have to account for.

Speaker 1 | 28:22.585

And what other… What metrics could we measure or provide insight into? For example, opportunity for growth and efficiency metrics.

Speaker 0 | 28:36.743

It’s so funny because that’s on my notes right here is the, is a lot of like other items can use metrics to identify what else you can do for them. So it’s like you read my mind.

Speaker 1 | 28:46.207

Well, everyone wants to show me the money. Michael. Right. Show me the money, not show me the cost. Show me the money. You know what I mean?

Speaker 0 | 28:55.471

That’s the question, right? Is. why should you do this security thing, right? It’s not going to bring me any additional revenue, right? Well, that’s when you want to talk to them and say, well. you’re right it won’t bring you an additional revenue unless you’re doing you want a new business i’ve had clients before that want to do business with the government and they don’t have the proper security to be able to do it let’s say they sell arms and stuff and need to be uh um a default you know uh compliant right um there is there’s a um you know a bunch of different i mean the government’s increasing all that uh you know out there you So there’s other things too. I mean, you work with healthcare companies, they’re going to want a higher level of security. So this is where understanding the business comes into play, right? What, who are your clients? Who, you know, who do you do business with? That’s a justification for sometimes whether or not they need to secure this data. Also, what happens if you do have a leak of data? What happens if you do get hacked and you have to report that? That’s a huge PR concern. It’s a business loss potential. And also, you know, you may have to, depending on what happened, you may have to supply. folks with identity theft solutions, which is an additional cost. Are you ready to eat that cost? Also, do you have insurance to help prepare you for that? There’s lots of different ways that you can talk to them about that and be able to kind of explain what the financial consequences are of that and what the PR. to their company and to their clients are having that stuff locked up. Right.

Speaker 1 | 30:45.495

What is, just out of curiosity, what is the largest group of end users you’ve ever overseen?

Speaker 0 | 30:57.100

I worked in a company. So internally, I handled all of their end users, which was about 12,000 end users.

Speaker 1 | 31:07.536

And the reason why I ask is as a successful IT director and leader in the, I would call that nearing enterprise, really mid-market commercial space. What is the, where’s the bleeding happening and how much money? This stuff costs money, but how much money have you been able to find and or move around slash free up? Is there any tricks of the trade there?

Speaker 0 | 31:41.983

Yeah. So I once was, and I won’t name the business, right? But I once had a business approach me and say, hey, listen, we need to clean up some cost, right? And this wasn’t recent. This was a while ago. But we need to clean up some cost and we need your help. doing it, right? So it’s okay. And we went in and we went through all of the, and the way to do it is to go to accounting, find out everything we’re paying for and who it’s being charged to, right? And go through each application and figure out whether or not it’s needed or not needed, whether or not it’s a want, you know, what does it do for the organization? Are you getting your money back for it? And really challenge each person in the organization to think about whether or not this solution is a solution that is nice to have, or if it’s a solution that’s needed, and that pulling that solution out would reduce revenue, would reduce security, prevent clients from having a feature that they like. There’s so much to think about in that.

Speaker 1 | 32:59.670

What about just paying too much money? What about just market benchmarks and just paying too much money for some things? I mean, I do this. I’ve been doing this all day, every day for, I don’t know, the last couple decades. And even, you know, just with the Microsoft price increase coming up in March, it’s going to be a 20% price increase across the board with required one-year agreements. And if you want to stay in a month-to-month agreement, there’s going to be another 20% price increase. So that’s 40% right there if you want to keep your month-to-month Microsoft agreement in a 20% price increase. And many people might not know this, and this is just some industry knowledge for anyone that’s listening out there and may or may not know about the Microsoft price increase going up. You could save yourself that price increase by signing up for a year prior to March. but that price increase is going to come no matter what come next March. And if you’re not ready for it, you could see as high as a 40% increase out of nowhere, at least for a month, because you might be on a month to month Microsoft licensing agreement right now. So there’s things like that stupid stuff, or you might just be paying 50 cents too high or a dollar too high for a license or something like that here and there. Are there any other, I mean, that’s kind of what I’m getting at. Is there any, like, what about just. general auditing and general, Hey, let me just look at all your crap. And why do you have 50,000 POTS lines? You know, uh, something like that, you know, this elevator is not even being used anymore,

Speaker 0 | 34:36.044

but you know, what, what just happened, right. We, uh, a whole bunch of companies went remote, uh, right. And they bought up whatever they needed to, to get their, to get their clients to be able to talk to them, their folks, to be able to work from home. and communicate and all that stuff right and uh i know how many people purchased solutions uh that are redundant you know uh essentially i mean i’ve seen people uh with full microsoft subscriptions running slack right and i’m like i love slack it’s a great solution but you have teams why aren’t you using teams that’s included with their Microsoft, right? Or other way around, right?

Speaker 1 | 35:15.349

PowerPoint or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 35:18.271

It’s like, you have to identify what the duplicate feature set is, what you’re using it for and whether or not you need to, need to have it. Duplicate technology is, accounts for a huge portion.

Speaker 1 | 35:31.240

I can tell you right now that there are, I wish I could just press a button and and have this data but how many people do you think are both using microsoft teams and zoom simultaneously oh i i guarantee you it’s a huge amount it’s there it’s numbered and it’s just a matter of why but why the question is why and that’s a huge question and there are some reasons right yes you may have some folks that uh um

Speaker 0 | 36:07.802

prefer they their clients perversely right yeah so so instead of you know using whatever uh teams or or google meet or or anything like that they may actually like zoom and want to use zoom for their client base great you know what then you can you identify how many people are external to clients and buy just those uh licenses for them you don’t need to buy the whole organization right so A lot of this is a case-by-case basis, and once you find those specific reasons, you really ought to challenge, too, and be like, okay, but let me ask you a question. Do you think you’re going to lose a client over using Teams or Google Meet?

Speaker 1 | 36:49.046

I can I don’t know, but for the small licensing fee, they’re probably going to say we’re not going to chance it. But what you don’t need is duplicate across the board for everybody the other thing you don’t need just another tip for anyone out there if you’d like to know how to do this happy to help you free of charge the um you do not need to pay full price for microsoft team’s voice licensing that is one thing that i saw happen very quickly especially with the pandemic was quickly voice-enabled teams just just pay for the licensing okay so that’s eight dollars for phone system twelve dollars for us-based calling twelve dollars for international calling times a thousand right yeah three thousand minutes so if you go over that i can’t but that’s just an astronomical price that is a i i’m just telling you right now it’s it’s i can easily promise you 50 to 60 less just to show you how to use microsoft’s enterprise number one direct routing partner so that you don’t pay those licensing fees um just tricks of the trade things like that again that’s that’s definitely uh you don’t know what you don’t know and also how to avoid all that powershell work that you probably did that was a nightmare or if you’re getting ready to do that um Happy to show you how to avoid that PowerShell stuff. Why should or how often should people either get, whether it be IT director getting a third set of eyes on something, you know, creativity, is there time? For this and having been in the trenches for years, how often, just because we’re all human, does IT leadership take a step back and really do the leadership work, the visualization, the goal planning, and the strategery, should we say, of doing this? you know really kind of like a a self-assessment slash audit and would it be helpful to have a a third party take a look at it for you and ask people and do the assessment whether it be to save

Speaker 0 | 39:46.748

time energy or be non-biased and let me run with this yeah because i got so many I got so many things on this. Okay, so first and foremost, it’s not done as often as it should. I know this because I’ve spoken to multiple businesses that have never seen this and they had internal IT. And then also on top of that, I’ve spoken to several smart and talented individuals. Who, you know, have been unable and frustrated communicating and talking with their executives or talking with other business leaders and not being able to explain to them, you know, what they need to get done and how to prioritize it and all that stuff.

Speaker 1 | 40:30.322

So that’s huge. It’s huge. Just that one little piece, people that are frustrated and unable to speak with executives, I call that selling IT to upper management, getting a seat at the executive roundtable, convincing. key stakeholders, that IT is not a cost center, and that we’re a business force multiplier. All of these different themes that come up quite often on the show, it comes up on almost every show. And IT directors being frustrated. So what do you mean? Like providing them ammunition, shotgun shells in their shotgun that help them sell IT, the statistics, the metrics. Basically everything that you kind of lined out earlier, which was, and if I’m looking at my list, the risk impact, probability number, all of these different things in a spreadsheet, et cetera.

Speaker 0 | 41:20.543

So remember when I talked about business leaders not seeing visual of what they have, right? They don’t see the risks. They don’t see the visual. They only, they’re like, why should I look at this? I have IT, right? They do. But the problem is that. IT needs business and business needs IT. It’s a joint partnership, right? And what you need to have the business leaders understand is their objective is to tell you what’s important from a business perspective, what makes you revenue, what you can’t have go down from a business perspective, not from an IT perspective. Our job as IT is to make sure that based on the business objectives that they’ve given us, right? that we make them run as secure and stable as possible without killing the budget, but also making sure that those things stay up and running so they can sleep at night. And so what usually the disconnect in the communication is the IT folks don’t know how to translate the IT of their job into business speak and vice versa. The business speak is not somehow getting back to the IT team. Either they’re not included in meetings or there’s a bunch of shadow IT going on. Or, you know, they just don’t. They think that IT knows everything at all, everything. And they don’t and they’re not part of the business. So this frustration can happen from just a lack of communication. Right. And in fixing that communication, I’d love to say it’s easy, but it’s not right. It requires. you know, first you have to lay this out the way I’ve said, and you need to give it to somebody that has some authority, right. And have them work with you to bring it up to the executives. If that’s the case, if you have a straight path, the executives, fantastic. Now I’ve seen this happen where we’ve explained this out to folks and the executives still didn’t believe it. So the next option was, was the third party. We ran a, we had security folks come in and and we gave them all the info. and said, here you go, right? And we’ve had third-party auditors come in and we welcome that as well. We give them all the information that they need to show that there’s risks in the organization and they love it. Auditors and security guys, they love when they get this information because you’re basically doing the work for them, right? And once you give them this information, they will write it up and they will send a… fundable executive summary report over to the executives. And if you’ve been saying this over and over to them, if you’ve been harping on this, and all of a sudden they get a third party that says the same thing, they now have two people telling them from different sides of the business here that they need to get this thing fixed. And so that may, and I’ve seen it happen before, it’s all of a sudden, you know, it’ll be their idea. It’s fine. It doesn’t matter whose idea it is. It’ll also be the executive’s idea. And you’re like, fantastic. I think that’s a great idea. Let’s go ahead and fix it. It’ll be cost as much and it’ll take this much time.

Speaker 1 | 44:48.864

Excellent. I’m lost in deep thought. Lost in translation came up with the cliche, but came up with the business to the IT leadership. How? As an agenda, if someone was to try and attempt to do this on their own, how long does… A risk impact probability number, an opportunity for growth number, and in general, with contingency factors, we could call this an IT roadmap slash visionary for the future, getting numbers from the CFO, i.e. costs that we’re paying right now for things. How long does a audit like this take and how much time should someone… put aside to do this exercise?

Speaker 0 | 45:50.345

So it can be lengthy and it depends on how detailed you want to go. But there’s things to look for that can kind of do it. The way I kind of look at it is I had a general project that I would go through top to bottom through the entire infrastructure stack, the application stack, and I would go through this entire thing and I would just look at I would look at the age of systems. I would look at where the data was being kept, whether it was secure or not. If you’re an internal organization, you already have IT tickets. I would pull inside the IT tickets. I would look to see what projects I had done already for them, what that translated into. So we could say we’ve done prior projects and we had this. I’d look at the service tickets and say, okay, is there any, how many, you know, I’d classify them and say, you know, here’s how many are network related. Here’s how many are computer related. Here’s client related ones. Right. And then you go, what am I doing for you? You know, and you, usually you see a pattern and, and, and that will help you kind of, you know, you know, use the metrics to say, Hey, listen, you’ve got this much going on with your network. So all the stuff that we’re doing for you is basically trying to fix your network and I look at it and the networks is this old right and you’re using all these old things on top of that you’re spending way too much money on it. And so we can reduce your cost. We can reduce the amount of time so your folks need to call into the help desk which just means that they can do work instead of calling us right and we can, you know, make sure that you get these projects that done that will prevent any future issues from happening so you guys don’t have people sitting around. not using their computers and not working. Right. So, which is a huge productivity loss. I once had an organization that was having a problem with their, their call center going down. Right. And I told, and I, and they asked me how much it would be to, you know, to, to fix it. And I told them it would be $200,000 to fix it. Right. And they said, and they balked at the cost. They said, absolutely not. I’m not going to do it. And I said, well, Just to make, just so you know, every time it goes down, you lose $50,000 an hour. So you want to rethink that, right? And I gave them the productivity numbers and everything that I had already pulled from them. And really quickly, I was given, you know, more money than I asked for to fix the problem.

Speaker 1 | 48:30.015

What’d they have for, what’d they have for contact center software?

Speaker 0 | 48:35.066

It was, I thought it was a via at that point,

Speaker 1 | 48:38.367

which I would have guessed that I would have guessed.

Speaker 0 | 48:41.088

It wasn’t the problem. Actually, the funny part is, is there, it was actually their underlying network was the issue. It wasn’t set up for a, it wasn’t set up to like what happened is if one switch went down, like 50 computers would go down and there would be no, you know, it would all of a sudden take down another switch on top of it right afterwards. And

Speaker 1 | 49:02.678

Sounds like a weird hub, no disaster. It actually doesn’t sound that way.

Speaker 0 | 49:07.660

The rip and replace of the network.

Speaker 1 | 49:09.460

Okay.

Speaker 0 | 49:10.801

It was an acquisition, I think, that we had. So we just basically ripped and replaced the network, and it worked fine after that.

Speaker 1 | 49:18.844

I’m assuming you’re willing to provide services or help people that would be willing to reach out to you and ask, hey, can you help me do this? Can you help me take a look at things? And… What would they get from you? I’m assuming I like this one page overview, which is always nice. Like a report here, give this to your CEO and see what he says. And with bullet points and this, and I don’t know. And then here’s our risk impact probability number, bullet point number two, they get a risk impact probability number and CEO might say, what the heck is that? And then an opportunity number with potential. money to be made or lost or however you want to say that and then visual slides that are, I’m assuming, keep it simple, stupid, but impactful and tell a story of where the business’s IT currently stands.

Speaker 0 | 50:25.191

Phil, I like how you said tell a story because that’s exactly what I used to tell the folks that, you know, when I would do this. I said, if, you know, they would come to me and they would create a presentation and I’d look at it and I’d be like, what’s the story? What’s the narrative on this? What do you want me to do? Right. I go, cause that’s what the, you know, an executive is going to look at. They’re going to want to go, what is this telling me to do? Right. And if you don’t have that narrative down and you try and you try to give a presentation that you, you’re supposed to be guiding the person, you know, like a story to try and get them to do or realize something that they need to get done. And if you’re not telling that story correctly, if you don’t know your audience and know how to tell the story as well to that specific audience, then you’re not going to get. anything accomplished.

Speaker 1 | 51:12.153

I saw a very interesting statistic today and that’s why I brought it up and this was it’s almost unbelievable but the statistic was the more technology let’s just call them sales people the more technology sales people talk about ROI and start focusing on ROI the probability of a sale goes down by 20%. It goes down, meaning that, and then it was talking about the people that tell a story and the people that ask about, you know, the business vision and where the business is going and the people that can tell a story and link that to the business, the probability of technology implementation goes up, meaning The numbers are boring, I guess. I don’t know. Or the numbers are too engineering or the numbers are too lobotomized. Whatever it is. And it was basically talking about how people buy on emotion. They make a decision based on emotion and then they back it up based on facts. So first of all, everything that happens has to happen based on emotion attached to the business and the vision and the dreams and all that type of stuff. And then it gets backed up by the ROI model. But Most likely just an assumption. And this is, you know, I guess we could call this, um, um, prejudiced. This is prejudiced to it. People. I am being prejudiced to it. People. My assumption is that a lot of it guys are scientific analytic. Um, on the engineering edge of things and may not know how to deliver a story.

Speaker 0 | 53:14.560

Yeah. No, you’re correct. And, and, uh, it’s funny, uh, my, if you had to go back and look at college for me and you said, Hey, what do you, you know, you know, I asked people, I said, what do you think my best, um, grades I got, what subject, my best grades I got in college, where did it come from, right? Most people would say math, right? Oh, you must have been great at math. And I said, no, I was actually really bad at math. In fact, I even switched majors from college in engineering over to college of business because they had less math, right? I was actually great at English and writing.

Speaker 1 | 53:59.256

So ironic. I was pre-med. I was a biochem dual major. Wow.

Speaker 0 | 54:09.540

Good.

Speaker 1 | 54:10.621

Yeah. I dropped out and I joined the creative writing department. But I mean-And I’m in technology. Like what?

Speaker 0 | 54:24.907

You wouldn’t think it. Because I can tell a story and write a narrative that takes people from one thing to another. I once was helping somebody edit one of their papers for college. And they gave me this thing to write on. And it was on women’s studies. Right. So obviously, I’m not an expert. Right. At women’s studies. But I read through their paper. I made my edits for them and were able to suggest where they would, you know, where they would improve. And they went through, because regardless of what you’re writing about, it’s all about telling a story, right? So I explained to them that there was no cohesive. narrative based on their women’s studies. They didn’t tell me anything about it. They were just kind of regurgitating, you know, special, basically regurgitating what the book said about it. I said, you need a theme, you need to understand what you’re trying to get across. Right. And so I suggested a few themes for them. They selected, you know, certain themes. And I’m going to go with these. And they went ahead and rewrote the paper. I edited it again, and they submitted it. and they they i mean they were like the professor that got it was like let’s not make any changes it’s fantastic and it’s a perfect track right i would uh i would love to just write headlines for a living if i could just write headlines for a living that popped that popped you know i mean like this headline would be like why

Speaker 1 | 55:59.522

it took a man to i took him why it took a man to fix the women’s studies like you know it’s like what oh crazy everyone’s gonna go hang me you know i had some like i had some just really great headlines and i just sometimes i just sit down and i come up with these headlines for stuff that’s not even not even my industry not even in my industry you know it was like one was like you know my my number two romantic technique to fire up your marriage and make her come back for you know you know something like that i was like trying to think like well what’s the number one technique what’s the number Uh, any who, um, there is a technique by the way, if you guys want to know, um, if people want to reach out to you, what’s the best way to reach out to you? And I’ll put links in the, for everyone out there listening, I’ll put links in the, um, on the show page and everything like that. But what’s the best way to reach out to you?

Speaker 0 | 56:57.084

Sure. I mean, you can, uh, uh, folks that want to do that, they can reach out to me through, through LinkedIn and let me know, uh, that they heard. heard about me on your show and that they have questions and then we, we can talk from there, but that’s better. I would just say, you know, LinkedIn to contact me through there.

Speaker 1 | 57:11.493

I’ll put Michael Morris, LinkedIn link in his bio of this show, click on it, simply DM him. Can you help me put together a one page overview, summary, risk impact, probability number, opportunity number, PowerPoint slides, et cetera. Tell a story. Can you make me look awesome? And not rip me off, but make it worth my while. And, um, you know, we’ll go for there. And the, I would like to say I promise, but I’ll never promise certain things, but I would, I would imagine it would be a highly worthwhile to make yourself look like a big deal so that you can deliver an effective, um, and take a bunch of, I guess, you know, I guess the time off your table. of you know doing these audits and everything but take full credit for yourself you know sounds good you’re like a go you’re like the it ghost writer you’re the ip the it one page overview risk impact probability number ghost writer you know we should put together a quiz for this that’s gonna be my next idea so it’s funny you’d say that because i once

Speaker 0 | 58:21.020

created uh um it security policies and procedures and wrote a whole uh a whole thing on those and uh had to give them to my uh one of my uh uh it uh managers of that

Speaker 1 | 58:31.546

point so that they could put their name on it so yes i am it classic classic reminds me of a post i wrote just a few days ago that was i was stabbed in the back where that guy took all the credit but okay doesn’t matter move on the

Speaker 0 | 58:47.497

uh no it didn’t really it was just something that came to mind i can’t imagine as long as they keep me around and want to pay me we’re good to go yes yes i don’t need the credit i know make sure i i get paid and we uh And we can keep pushing the company.

Speaker 1 | 59:01.823

It’s an important, that’s an important piece. And that was another thing that, interesting headlines that came up again the other day, is if I said to you, you know, how to, you know, I’ve got all the money in the world, you’ve got the best group of friends, you’ve got, you know. All the free time. You don’t have to worry about money. You’ve got a happy career, family, healthy. You’ve got extracurricular activities. I do. And what do you do next? Right? That’s, I think that that’s what everyone’s chasing. I think that that’s the imaginary dream that everyone’s chasing and everyone’s being sold on. This is getting a little. deep for dissecting popular IT nerds. I believe that that’s the dream. Everyone’s being sold and everyone’s chasing, but not everyone can achieve that and not everyone can get that. So Why chase it like a gerbil running in a wheel forever? Why not just take advantage of the time that you have? To me, time is the most valuable resource. In my life right now, time is the most valuable resource. If you’re starving and you can’t find any food and you’re trying to put food on the table, then that’s like the Pavlov’s… Like… hierarchy of needs or whatever that is. But the time is such a valuable resource. And I believe that that’s something that you can help offer people as well as to help pull stuff together because and make sense of things and deliver and make something easier and make selling IT easier to someone and helping break things down. And a lot of times it just takes, it takes that outside person to take a look at it. I love it when people you I have all kinds of different coaches, but we’ll call you a coach. We’ll call you the IT coach. There’s not an IT coaching industry. There’s all this crazy, I’m going to be a life coach. And I always look at that like, how are you a life coach? I look at some people, I’m like, you can’t be a life coach. You’re 25 and you still live at home in your mom’s basement. You can’t be a life coach. Get out of here. I’ve had people say that. I’m sorry, I’m going on a rant here. But you can have an IT coach and you can have. An IT mentor and the whole point of a coach is not necessarily that they’re that they’re better or anything Sometimes it’s just a third set of eyes and someone to ask the right pointed questions That help guide you I need it all the time I’ve had people say because I’m all over the place, you know, like should I send out an email today? Should I do this? What should I do for the podcast? How should I promote it? How should I do this? And there’s like a thousand different people always Hey, let me sell you this and let me sell you that. And you get a thousand questions every day, just like it directors get a million vendor calls all the time that sometimes it takes the right person. And I’ve had some really good, some really good coaches. And I had one coach that just said, look, Phil, just a, keep it simple, stupid and focus on just LinkedIn, focus on just the podcast. And if you’re going to reach out to people and email doesn’t work in the IT industry because it just doesn’t work and things go to spam and you get IT guys get barraged with stuff all day long. Send them something in the mail. Isn’t that amazing? Send them something in the mail. It’s just like, you know, if you got a bulky package from dissecting popular IT nerds and it didn’t say anything on the outside, but just had your name and a marker on the outside. And I am sending those out to some very select people, very select people. Would you open it?

Speaker 0 | 63:05.978

Yeah. You know, you’d be surprised how well that works. In fact, one of the businesses I used to work with were the people that created that, that printed all of those things for different companies and shot them out. and they were highly successful business uh um they had to make some changes post-covid yeah right um because their their business model changed about um the uh but essentially they were you know they loved it and and and people love getting things and going look at this is a drink the carrier that I drink you know thing I could yeah maybe and all this type of stuff and it’s got your name right on it I mean You know, what’s funny is when I,

Speaker 1 | 63:49.384

when I do the cool swag, it’s gotta be cool. Like every now and then people send out like a five terabyte hard drive or they send out something really crazy. I’ve asked them to you guys. They’re like, I wanted this really bad.

Speaker 0 | 64:01.450

It’s amazing. You bring this up though, because this works internal to organizations as well. When I came to the organization I’m at right now, we had to kind of do a rebrand of the, and I just, second time I’ve done this in an organization rebranded the IT support, right? um people were just calling people just a couple different people to get the solutions done so what i did is i created a thing i created a um you know i named it uh um in this case it’s named tech mate right um another one i did before we called tech force and so um people now had a thing and a logo i would i work with the marketing department to create a logo on it so uh um so that they folks can go oh okay we have a logo of something We know where to go to submit a ticket to get help, to get that service. And we actually have it branded now. So it’s a thing. So then if I send out notifications, I send them out as TechMate. They’re like, got it. It’s an entity. It’s a thing.

Speaker 1 | 64:58.484

It’s not just another line item. It’s not just a line on your email thing.

Speaker 0 | 65:04.807

And it’s a big difference. And it’s like, hey, open a TechMate ticket.

Speaker 1 | 65:08.208

It’s a CheckMate, but TechMate. I like it.

Speaker 0 | 65:10.489

It is. It’s one of my favorites. Great, great team that came up with that name. And I can’t take credit for it. They did a great job. They came up with the name. They came up with the logo. It was keeping tech in check.

Speaker 1 | 65:22.355

If you call or reach out or DM Michael Moore, we will brainstorm the rebranding of your IT department at no cost. We’ll come up with some crazy thing. And they’ll be like, Phil, no, that’s not going to pass HR. No. So it has been a. A pleasure having you on the show as usual. And thank you for providing a treasure trove of bullet points and questions that people can ask. It has been outstanding. Thank you very much.

Speaker 0 | 66:00.370

Always a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1 | 66:01.791

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. If you like this or any other episode, make sure you rate it and share it with one of your friends. And remember… When it comes to IT, you always need to be dissecting, analyzing, and improving.