Speaker 0 | 00:09.606

Welcome everyone back to Telecom Radio 1 and I am probably going to change this radio show, podcast, whatever we want to call it, to dissecting popular IT nerds permanently. We’re going to do that change. Today we’ve got with us Sean Granger on the phone. from the public sector of IT. So, Sean, your official title, Senior Level Public Administrator with Expertise in Project Management, IT Solutions, and Community Partnerships. And we’re going to talk a lot about data today. But before we officially started recording here, we were talking about P&Ls and line items on the P&L and how you don’t have as much flexibility being in the public sector with your… budget. It’s kind of like, what can I do with what I’ve been given? Because it’s, I mean, I guess it’s essentially government. So you really, people are slicing and dicing and giving you what money that they can, and you’ve got to do as much with it as you possibly can. Is that, is that a fair statement?

Speaker 1 | 01:15.919

Yeah. So the way it works is we do our fiscal year starts, most local government starts in July 1. And So basically, starting in December, we start advocating for our various departments. So in IT, we’re, you know, I’m, well, I start probably in August saying, hey, you know, this is what we need to do next year. And we kind of advocate. Then January, we come out and we do, we put out our budget and we say, hey, this is all, this is what I need, right? In the past, so I worked for… the city of West Covina.

Speaker 0 | 01:56.252

And if you don’t mind, let me just kind of ask, because there’s things that pop out to me that I think are interesting. Because you said advocate, and then we advocate. So it’s literally like politics, like IT politics in local government, local state and local government.

Speaker 1 | 02:08.797

Right, right.

Speaker 0 | 02:09.738

So when you advocate, how well, you know what I mean? It’s kind of like, how good are you at advocating to get what you want? You know what I mean? Like, what does it look like? Is it like, you know, are we in a ring of, you know, a ring here of fighting out for, you know, battling with other people that, you know, want. I don’t know, a soda machine or something? Like, what are we dealing with?

Speaker 1 | 02:27.306

Right, well, not soda, but like street cleaners or street trimmers or, you know.

Speaker 0 | 02:32.871

So chainsaw versus server.

Speaker 1 | 02:37.014

Right. We’re in a fixed budget. We don’t, cities don’t typically go up or down. I mean, our budget is fixed and lately with housing, it’s kind of gone down. And so. So it isn’t like business. I used to work in banking, and it’s like, well, we’ll just ask for this. And they could borrow if they need to this year because we’re going to make X amount next year.

Speaker 0 | 03:09.034

Or just decide to give you more money because IT might make the company more money. They can’t just decide, hey, we’re going to give you more money because this is a great idea. You’re stuck with one.

Speaker 1 | 03:19.438

Right, right. And even when I do… because there are some projects that we make money at, but that doesn’t come back to IT. It comes back to the general fund, and then it goes to the next year. Everyone advocates for their own space.

Speaker 0 | 03:39.704

So I just want to highlight, this is the most perfect example of IT needing to do more with less. It’s not like there’s a way of getting out of this. Like you really have to do more with less.

Speaker 1 | 03:56.106

Right. Right. You’re, you’re, you’re, and it’s,

Speaker 0 | 03:59.427

or with what you got, you have to do, you have to do as much as you can with what you’ve got. So the more we can do, the better. So anyways, sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 04:08.771

Yeah, no, it’s perfect. So that’s, so we advocate, um, and, and, uh, and then we come up with our budget. Um, when I got, Last year, it was kind of like a simple way to explain it is everything was in IT was done in buckets. So if you want a computer, that’s a bucket. If you want internet, that’s a bucket. And so they just said, okay, for the year, you need 20,000 and that’s it. The problem I saw with that, and I had experienced previously was that when you do the bucket model, you’re basically When they cut it, they said, well, you just need half of that. There’s no real world tangible, like, oh, this equals that. So what I did was I turned my… budget into line items. Every single expense I put in a line item so that when the cuts happen, you have to look at it. Yes, and it’s there. And we cut every year. There’s always something that happens. But they know exactly what they’re not getting. So for example,

Speaker 0 | 05:23.615

is email a line item? What do you guys do for email? It is. Are you guys a 365 shop or what do you guys do?

Speaker 1 | 05:30.522

Yeah, I converted it to 0365. And that’ll kind of go back to our old, like, doing more with less.

Speaker 0 | 05:39.905

So there’s like a line. So they know they can’t get it. So they know if they cut that, the email goes away. This is genius.

Speaker 1 | 05:48.009

Right. They could, but they know the consequence. So anything’s possible. Anything’s possible. So they, so, you know, and sometimes it’s services. So that’s key because also everything gets talked about, everything that we’re spending money gets talked about. And then I also can, when I throughout the year cut, when I self-cut items that I realized, you know what, because I’m always looking for redundancy, that is, hey, this thing we can… we can do the same thing with this other product that we have. Or this product improved, right? And now Microsoft has added something that totally replaces this other product we’re getting. So we can do away with that.

Speaker 0 | 06:38.498

So that’s going to be happening. Like in my world, it could be voice. And if you do Microsoft right, if you do 365 right, you could pay $4.95 per user for your voice seat and pay a penny per minute. or you could actually pay the ridiculous Microsoft fee of $12 for local, $12 for international, $8 for the phone system piece. And now you’re at like $32 for something that you have to manage yourself. But anyways, I just had to throw that in. I was doing that. No,

Speaker 1 | 07:10.937

it’s perfect. It’s perfect. Cause that’s, that’s what we do. So that’s, that’s key. So that’s how I do in budgets is, is basically I make sure that every little thing is accounted for and And that way it puts the onus of the services on management to know which services we can and cannot provide.

Speaker 0 | 07:36.043

So I’m calling this the ultimate cost center, and I’m taking these notes down on a napkin right now that has multiple notes on it that I have folded in multiple different ways. And I’m doing that in the theme of doing more with less and making sure that I use a napkin for multiple different things.

Speaker 1 | 07:54.465

Very good. We use paper many times here for many.

Speaker 0 | 07:58.786

Okay. So let’s talk a little bit more about just, you know, I call this like, I’m going to title this show, the ultimate cost center. Because one of the themes of the show is really not treating it as a cost center. It’s treating it as a revenue generator or a force multiplier. As I heard someone say the other day, it’s not just, just not coming back as I talk with, we talk about this so much. So This is the ultimate cost center and there’s really not much you can do about it. And we will get to like how you do generate revenue and some other really cool ways here in a second. But so what are some of the, you know, line items on the P&L? Would you say that most IT directors or IT managers have a certain level of experience with a P&L or know how to read a P&L? And why putting line items on a P&L are so important?

Speaker 1 | 08:51.543

I would say. No. Yeah. I wouldn’t say that it’s across the board.

Speaker 0 | 09:01.037

And I don’t want to say that this is, the reason why this is key is because you’ve been kind of, I don’t want to say forced to do this in the public sector, but for someone that might not be in the public sector, that’s not really kind of, I don’t know, pigeonholed into creating these buckets for everything. It might be an eye opener for someone. To say, well, hey, what does my company’s P&L look like? And what can I do to maybe move costs around or do more with less here? It might just kind of open the eyes a little bit for some people that haven’t done that. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 09:36.971

well, so you have to think of it differently. So the old school way was when I got into this business was you would do the buckets. And there were reasons why you did the buckets. And it was you wanted to kind of hide. You’re not hiding money, but not that you’re stealing it, right? But you just wanted to put them away for emergencies. And so by doing buckets, you kind of have a vague notion of this is how much I need. Right. And then you kind of move stuff around and that’s kind of the old school way of doing things. But we’re basically operating on dollars. Right. So like I don’t have like if I doing the old school way, you’re going to get cut. Right. I think that a lot of IT managers, private, public, are still, you know, they still come from my generation, right? So they’re not in their 20s, they’re 30s and above. And they’re still with a lot of people who have that mindset. I can’t do line item because that’s going to tell people exactly how much I need. And what about emergencies? I need the…

Speaker 0 | 10:53.144

So it’s kind of like the… It’s it’s kind of like the the paving and the roads type of thing like like why are we repaving this road? That was like perfectly fine. Well, we’ve got to spend this money because if we don’t spend this money, we won’t have it next year That’s the old square. That’s the old school way,

Speaker 1 | 11:10.541

right? Yeah, and a lot of people still do that but but the thing is that the car reality is to change and so like the key that that really kind of brought this to me as I started in the early 2000s, I started taking ITIL classes, which is kind of IT analytics. So how to run IT better with analytics. And so I really got into data in the early 2000s. And that’s when I realized, you know what, I can actually calculate even emergencies. I can tell you how much on the average in the last 10 years, the city has. to stand on emergencies. So I can have a line item that’s, hey, this is how much we probably need for emergencies. Is it possible that we have a major catastrophe and it goes over the budget? It’s possible, but…

Speaker 0 | 12:07.738

It’s also possible that you don’t have any disaster. It’s also possible that everything is perfect.

Speaker 1 | 12:11.019

Right. Right. So you can, by using data, and the data is so out there, I mean, public data, everything I do is out there in public. You can, I mean, you can find my salary, or you can find my… Like, all my emails, everything is out there, right? So all this data is out there. But the problem is people have not been using it. And it’s not because they don’t want to. It’s just they don’t know. One, they don’t know that would help them. Two, they don’t know how to get it. And three, once they have it, they understand they need it and they understand how to get it. They don’t know what to do with it because they don’t understand. They don’t have any systems or anyone that works.

Speaker 0 | 12:53.845

analytics on staff so they’re just gonna and there’s the 80 20 rule too there’s the there’s the i i just don’t care principle as well um well yeah unfortunately that’s just a fact of life that you know uh but there’s some people that you know i’ll do what i i’ll do what i can to get by because no one’s really asking any questions but um yeah well and you have people in different segments of life i mean we we run into that we

Speaker 1 | 13:22.577

There’s a lot of resistance to data also because, look, I may be retiring in five years. And why should I totally start on this new concept that I don’t understand? Can’t we just like pass the buck in five years?

Speaker 0 | 13:37.986

It’s scary if it’s not scary.

Speaker 1 | 13:39.186

I get it.

Speaker 0 | 13:42.068

No, it’s real scary. Like, you know, hip replacements, for example, right? Like my family, we’re known for like hip replacements, right? So there’s like a lot of ways, new ways that you can do a hip replacement. So why are like, you know, 50 doctors in my area still doing it the old school way. And there’s only one guy that’s doing like a, what is it? Posterior versus anterior or something hip replacement. And it’s just because, Hey, this is how I have done it forever. And you’re going to tell me a doctor to do it a different way where I might screw up.

Speaker 1 | 14:09.478

Right. I actually, my, my daughter, my, my kid is going, um, getting braces. Right. And we found. We went around and I did my research. I went to different places and we figured out, okay, what are the different kinds? And we found one person who was doing in a city near us that was doing it in a wholly new way than everyone else. It takes less time. It is less painful. It’s less costly. Everything about it is better. But there’s only one person doing it. Right? So it changes hard.

Speaker 0 | 14:56.398

Yes, changes. It will die hard. it’s just reality. Okay. So I love this. I mean, the data driven concept, what else are we, you know, so any other like tips or tricks or things that you’ve been doing, you know, so we’ve got these, this line item really line item. It has, has helped you. Well, it’s helped people make decisions to not take stuff away from you. I guess. How, how has it helped you to get new things or how do you know? We’ve, we’ve, I get that you’ve moved some things around, so we’ve got some new products or things or ways that we can do things that integrate. I guess it would be integration would be the word there.

Speaker 1 | 15:39.624

Yeah. So using the data, so one of the first things that came in, we had no geographical information system, GIS, that was here. So basically, what I’ve… What I did was I went and once I cut down the line items, I was showing them, I went to management and I showed them how much they were spending on GIS that they weren’t using because no one, they didn’t have anyone on site to use it. They just didn’t know about it. So I took that line item, I cut it up and I said, these are programs that are using that are buying that no one uses. Here’s programs you’re buying that is outdated. And then. the facts are wrong. We’re getting complaints from fire departments, can’t find a street. The other thing about doing public work is this is all real world stuff. Everything’s based on real people doing real stuff. So we have fire engines going down the street, they’re using this data, but the street is wrong because the data hasn’t been updated. So they can’t figure out how to get there. Right. Or they can’t figure out how to get there. So… These are things you have to… You have to have good data. You have to know that you’re using data. Some of them, when the data didn’t work, what they would do is they would just draw maps and then draw on them when they found the figs. I mean, it was just… So I came in, I showed that, and they said, that makes sense, but they still don’t get it. I still don’t understand. So I… reached out to some of the colleges and I said, okay, look, I am not an expert at this GIS system, but I’ve worked for a decade in them. I’ve partnered with people that are high level, very… So I kind of know what can be done. I just don’t know how to do it. So give me some of your students, tell them I will give them opportunities to come here and do things that you cannot do. to like at a school, they’ll make a big difference and they can put it on their resume and you…

Speaker 0 | 18:03.122

Real life experience. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 18:05.543

Yeah, and you’ll transform the city.

Speaker 0 | 18:08.324

Now, hold on. We got to back up here a little bit, just a little bit. Because I want to ask you, first of all, does this even fit into your job description? Like if you just showed up to work every day, What’s your general job description? Is it, hey, let’s get into GIS, let’s do all this, we can transform all these things, or is your job description, hey, make sure people can send and receive an email, make a phone call, utilize the communication systems, and does this fall within your job description?

Speaker 1 | 18:42.938

So the way I see it is, first and foremost, I’m a public administrator, so my job description is…… serve the community first and the city basically the city staff so the any any way that we can serve the to um our community then that’s within my job description now do

Speaker 0 | 19:11.173

they they don’t lie i mean basically it’s not in your job description though it’s it’s really not you’re just saying this is what it should be you’re saying this is like well higher road right higher road but our you

Speaker 1 | 19:23.587

In public service, they would have a hard time. So their get out of jail card at the end is always, and other duties as needed. That’s on the list. So basically, they have a whole list of things they like because they think they’d like that. The reality is if you’ve ever looked at any city job posting, unless it’s someone who, unless it’s not HR doing it, unless it’s… with someone in IT, most of the time, it’s kind of crazy, because it doesn’t really match what real world. needs are okay um but but yeah so it’s it’s not necessarily like something and if you were coming in and punching the card yeah you you um i you know there would be a person if someone basically just wants to come in and get a paycheck um just you know you’re probably not going to do this you probably also would be better served by working at a bank or working someplace that i guess my opinion is

Speaker 0 | 20:28.480

There’s a lot of people complaining about job satisfaction and there’s a lot of talk about where, I mean, this is something that the point is, is this is, this is like real unselfish IT where you’re serving. This is where IT can really serve and make a difference because, and I’ll let you speak on the GIS stuff further and the internship program, which is awesome, is that actually all the work that you’re doing is affecting It is affecting the public community. It is affecting the community. And it’s benefiting all of the departments. It’s probably benefiting all the departments more than it’s even benefiting your department because in the end, your cost center budget is going to get cut. And you’ve got to now fight for your line items. And yet here you are at the same time, really giving back to the community. So the point is, it’s kind of a double-edged sword where look at how much it is really making a difference and why are we cutting your budget? Right. Why is your, well, we should be throwing money in your budget in your case. But, but, um, anyways, uh,

Speaker 1 | 21:36.421

because we got to change the culture of that because the culture is let’s dip into it, but the, but, but your point is well taken. That is exactly the, the kind of right now we’re still looked at as a piggy bank, right? But the, But by doing this and kind of changing the culture, one of the things that happens a lot in cities is IT will be stuck in another department. It’s not its own department. It’s a division. And it’ll be in parks or it’ll be in finance a lot. So one of the things I advocate for is move it to central. It doesn’t have to be its own department, but it should be in a central department. under the CMO, the city manager’s office, or maybe city clerk, but it should be a central office so that you’re not beholden to any one department because IT should serve the whole organization, whether you’re private or public, it should serve the whole organization.

Speaker 0 | 22:41.987

Yeah, if it was under parks and recreation or something weird like that, it would just be weird.

Speaker 1 | 22:46.451

Yeah, and it is. In some cities, it is. And so there’s a weird cultural… thing that happens when that goes on. So, but yeah, so that’s, I mean, that’s a good point, but I think that, so with the GIS, that’s kind of a good example. So that was, there wasn’t, there was no need, no one saw a need to do this work. No one saw a need for the interns, no one saw a need to change anything.

Speaker 0 | 23:15.539

Explain GIS to me real quick for people listening.

Speaker 1 | 23:18.161

So GIS is basically like digital map making. And like I said, I’m not a GIS technician, but I use it a lot. And it basically is everything that we do is spatial. So, you know, park, that’s in a space. Fire, that’s to move in spaces. The police is in space. You know, everything is about where things are, you know, how big they are, how everything is. So GIS is basically a whole bunch of… Imagine a bunch of maps, right? I think it was started in like the 60s or 70s. And the big company is Esri up in Redlands, California. But they basically made computer maps. But then they realized, you know what, you could make a computer map and you can overlay another computer map that has different set of data on it. And what will you find? Well, what’s crazy is, let’s say you… do a hydrant map a fire hydrant map and you overlay a map of wreck well if you have all the data of your fire hydrants and which ones are broken which ones work ones don’t then you you overlay a lot of um like a accident map on top of it you might find that strangely enough a lot of the fire hydrants in high accident areas are getting hit by cars and that’s why they’re not working um You just, I mean, we, people that have been using this, there’s a bunch of cities, the bigger cities like New York, LA, Long Beach. Riverside has started making, Riverside, California is making big ones, Camp City, Tampa. I know of a lot of them I’ve met because we meet at some of the conferences. They’re starting to realize that by using this map data, we can figure out relationships that we never knew existed. So if we could stop people from having wrecks. Not only would we save people from the car, you know, we make that intersection more safe. I’m like, there’s that fire hydrant right there that we have to fix every year that we stopped having to fix. Like, it’s these weird things that you, that are, you just don’t know. Yeah, you just don’t. So that’s what GIS does. It gives us a whole new view. One of the newer things we’ve been doing is making storage.

Speaker 0 | 25:54.339

Maybe this is obvious, but. But here’s the key piece.

Speaker 1 | 25:57.220

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 26:00.241

If you stop fixing the fire hydrant, if you don’t have to fix the fire hydrant 50 times, you have that money back. Right. That money comes back. Right. So you’re affecting the budget again.

Speaker 1 | 26:13.907

Right.

Speaker 0 | 26:15.308

Yes. But we want to know that if we cut that area of the budget. Right. If we cut the area of the IT or the data-driven, if we cut that area of the budget, then you’re going to keep paying for that fire hydrant.

Speaker 1 | 26:27.453

And numerous other things. One of my interns recently did a fantastic, I said, okay, I have this idea. Do this. Because this is kind of how I work. I’m like, okay, I have this idea, but you’re the expert in this area. Figure out how to do this. So we said, go find this data. So she was able to match data of, because we have data of… building that’s taken from like Google Maps and some other and it tells us exactly how big buildings are right then we’d mask that data with what the permits are for that lot of land and we were able to find over 150 spaces in our city that are incorrectly permitted so someone bought a house they may have torn down the house and they build up an apartment complex but they never told anyone. The city didn’t have any technology to figure it out. No one noticed. And for years, this apartment complex has been there and never paid the city.

Speaker 0 | 27:38.895

They paid for a permit for a fence. They paid the permit for putting up a wooden fence in a backyard, but it’s really like a 28-story apartment building.

Speaker 1 | 27:49.901

Yeah, or a duplex. People have built houses. They… They just built it. Like they just had extra land. They just built this house there and there was never a permit. Right. Those are the things. It sounds crazy, but we thought we, I mean, as soon as we did the numbers, I was like, we just found 150 spots that we got to go and inspect.

Speaker 0 | 28:12.136

And what, and just out of curiosity, how much money would that be? I mean, do you have any idea like what that added up to? I mean, Because you’re not going to fail because, hey, you never passed the electric. You never passed the, you know, whatever, this, this, this, and this. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 28:24.984

Right. So each one of those probably is about $1,000. So if you average, it’s about $1,000. $150,000. Yeah. So it’s not small. And some of them might be much more. And if it’s a commercial site that’s been running a business for long, you know, there’s penalties. So there’s all this, you know. That’s quite a bit of money. Yeah, but our thing is not so much. It’s also about, like, how do we recapture and make sure everyone’s doing, you know, doing what they’re supposed to be doing. We’re able to capture lawns. So the other is just having those inspectors. So now instead of inspectors going, okay, actually a better example is the. There was a fire company in Utah that was inspecting their fire hydrants, right? And they were sending out a fireman who gets really well paid. And those firemen were not able to do all of them in a year, so they had to send out more firemen. Those people are well paid. What are they doing? They’re driving around for over a year. Well, you know, if you count all of them. Just look at a fire hydrant, click on it. check it, and then leave. They used the GIS mapping, and they were able to map quicker routes. And so they were able to do the same thing with one person in six months. no longer, they also added some other tools, so they no longer had to use a firefighter, they could use someone who was just trained with the tool. So it didn’t, they were able to lessen the cost and just make it, and I’ve actually heard of another space in which they basically used the map so that it would alert, like when they’re doing, the firefighters are doing their rounds, it would alert them when they’re near a fire. fire hydrant and if the person was there they were able to inspect it like take a you know minute or two to inspect it they would do it while they’re you know coming back from fighting a fire and that they they said that saved them a ton of time because they they just kind of did it in the route and this this cis system was able to alert them that the fire hydrant was near them and it was able to map them all and then to tag them as they got inspected. So throughout the year they were able to get everything once by just stopping on the way home. So there’s a lot of ways you can use GIS. We had to do redistricting. So one of the beauties was because I had started this program when When the, in the redistricting process, you have to have very accurate maps, but we just have, it just so happened, we had been creating these maps just as proof of concept to management to say, Hey, we can do this. Yep. And when they had to have them, they were already there. So they never, you know, cities never know when they’re going to need something, but but it’s fundamental to their work. It’s just hard for people who come from, who have been doing this for 30 years to kind of get their brain around data and that really what they’re doing is data analytics, not you’re not just doing forms and…

Speaker 0 | 32:21.052

You kind of searched it. I mean, you kind of found the, I mean, you have it kind of in you naturally, right? But I think from a more simplistic standpoint, it’s really more the idea because, A, let’s be honest, you had a bunch of interns do this for free, which is genius. Right. And it’s great for them and it’s fun for them and it’s real life experience for them. And we all know that whatever we learned in college, when we get in the real world, it’s absolutely not like that whatsoever. And then you learn, then you have to learn by doing. So. But here’s the thing. I mean, I guess the real point is, is to ask the right questions. I mean, I think that’s what it comes down to, right? With your departments, looking at departments, how do you get involved with these different departments? Because for you to even know this building permit thing to begin with, it had to start with a question and you had to ask the right question. So how did we go from, I mean, you’re involved in IT, what does that have to do with building permits? And again, I know it’s a catch all in the public sector that’s like, hey, you know, it’s a It’s just like maybe a small business or a startup where you wear multiple hats. But how did you think to ask that question to begin with? Or did someone bring up that problem? Or were you guys sitting in a meeting and are people asking what kind of problems can IT solve? Or are you bringing that up? Is that the key?

Speaker 1 | 33:46.202

So another experience I had was the last city. I worked for the city of Pasadena previously. And one of the, I got lucky. I got lucky. I was in the right place in the right time. I went to the ITIL training. We were able to create a service center there that we then converted into a 311. And the team was excellent. And we started doing conversions of centralizing all of IT, right? Because we all believed in we got to centralize IT. And all the departments, and Pesky is big. They don’t just have braids. you know football games but they they there’s some people with money there some people have money yeah right in a lot of big companies so we started going to each of the um departments and i was the one that kind of got in with every department and one of the things i got from that that we were we were i was my purpose was to learn how to merge their i.t with our i.t right so i was just there for technical but one of the things i got from that was I wish I had been doing this when I was still in banking because in banking… We didn’t sit with, the customers came to us and said, I need this. We figured out what the best this was, and we gave that to them. That’s how it worked. But I think if I went back in time, I would tell them, stop. You need to be part of that department. So I learned that from Pasadena, which is I sat in the department, I sat in the meetings. As the IT manager, well, I was the task. I was not the manager there. When I became the IT manager here in West Covina, I cooked that. And so I sit in the meetings, I meet with the directors, I meet with the people so that I understand what do they do. Because it’s really, really important for IT to understand all the processes. You could go back to Frederick Taylor of measuring how fast you’re shoveling coal, but that’s not… The problem is really the piece that they missed. in the scientific method is that the human part. And so that’s the big key with the IT is, are you going in as an IT manager, going into these departments, you’ll learn what their processes are, you’ll hear them complain, you hear them, I mean, half the time they forget I’m even there and they’ll talk bad about IT and oh, I can’t believe they’re doing this.

Speaker 0 | 36:22.884

You know, what’s something bad? Let’s hear something bad. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever had ever heard said about IT? This is good.

Speaker 1 | 36:28.529

Oh, no, there’s a lot of bad stuff. Okay,

Speaker 0 | 36:35.695

PG 13 rated.

Speaker 1 | 36:40.219

Now, a lot of times, you know, they, a lot of times what I hear is, they think we’re trying to put them into doing something. And that’s not really the case.

Speaker 0 | 36:51.748

Like restricting or locking down.

Speaker 1 | 36:54.651

Right. Or, I mean, why do I have to change my password? You’re making me do this. You’re making me use this program. I don’t want to use this program. I wanted to use the old program. You’re making me do this. And so one of the things I, you know, when I hear that, like you said that, you know, there’s a lot of different reasons people don’t want change. But I’m able to kind of focus on those folks and say, okay. And I send my interns, or I send, and we haven’t even talked about how cities are just cutting IT staff drastically. Hopefully that’ll change, but that’s one of the things I have to do. So I send my interns to meet with them and say, okay, just sit with them. Anything that they have a problem with, I mean, I do not care about computers, keyboards, or mice. That is not my job. My job is to make their work. faster, better, easier. My job is to make them easier. And if they’re complaining because they think we’re making their life harder, then there’s a communication, something’s going wrong. So that’s what I’ve done. And that’s how I find these things. I was in a meeting this week. And so what’s funny is I realized because I had taken my kid to a park, And when she was playing soccer, I saw that there wasn’t any video cameras there. So I had one of my techs, I said, okay, one of your new projects is going to be, let’s inventory all the cameras, find out which ones work, which ones are connected, who’s monitoring, we need to make sure that we have everything ready. Well, they go to a meeting, department head meeting, and all of a sudden, the park director is saying, you know, I’m going to meet with the police and these cameras are just not working correctly. I was like, oh wait, now this is good because we’re already working on solutions with this need.

Speaker 0 | 39:01.761

They said that they were working with police, which is interesting too.

Speaker 1 | 39:04.983

Yes, and not include me.

Speaker 0 | 39:06.963

And who knows how many side roads and various different things that could lead to… I mean, clearly the police department has a… 15 audio video sales guys in their office, like talking to them about something. And then they, then who knows what could happen. And then they come to you and they say, Hey, by the way, we just bought this stuff. Can you install it?

Speaker 1 | 39:27.070

Well,

Speaker 0 | 39:28.831

by the way, I’m just curious, could that happen?

Speaker 1 | 39:30.791

No, it happens a lot. And I bet a lot of people listening probably are going, that is, that’s what happens to me because the old school way is very like, um, they would buy something and they just bring it to you and say, here you go, support it. That’s how IT used to be. I mean, that’s 90s IT, right? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 39:49.965

How do we prevent it?

Speaker 1 | 39:51.246

It still happens.

Speaker 0 | 39:52.607

It absolutely still happens.

Speaker 1 | 39:54.207

Yeah, it still happens. But that is the wrong way. I… As much as I preach that you have to bring IT, when you think about something that has anything to do with process, anything, literally any meaning you have at this point, I think should involve someone with a stake in that understanding of IT. Bring them in. I’m happy to stay late to their meetings and sit there and say, okay, how can we help you improve this? This week, I found out about a new software that went out for bid. And first thing I heard about it, well, it’s already gone out for bid. They’ve already just… What’s the requirements they’re asking for? Well, wait. Now I’m going to scramble to figure out, do we have enough service space? Can we get this? How does this software work? I don’t know which one is going to win, but I can look at all the bidders and say, okay, well… If this one wins, I’m going to need this. Did you stop it?

Speaker 0 | 41:01.860

Are you telling me once something goes out for bid, that’s it? There’s no like, hold on, let’s pull back the range.

Speaker 1 | 41:08.583

Ours are formal bids. So once it goes out, that’s a cultural thing. And I talk to a lot of people that are in my position. It’s getting better.

Speaker 0 | 41:21.931

I have a big thing with RFPs. I hate RFPs. I have a huge thing with it. A lot of times the RFP might be written from someone that doesn’t understand the industry or doesn’t understand, you know, I mean, you could write an RFP for a phone system, for example, right? And it was written from the perspective of someone that’s only ever understood on-site PBXs, right? Like with no understanding that like maybe there’s a cloud thing or maybe we write an RFP for replacing the email server without any understanding. This is like an extreme example, right? I don’t think this would happen. Let’s write an RFP for replacing our email server. And, you know, why would you do that?

Speaker 1 | 41:59.399

They could put an RFP and that specifically states what kind of, you know, vendors, like, or what kind of manufacturers they’re looking for. Right. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 42:11.388

And if they miss something, if they miss a whole group of vendors or a whole specific area of technology, they get my, hey, we need to, you know, we need to. The server needs to have this much RAM. It needs to have this much space. It needs to be able to have Microsoft whatever XYZ loaded on it, whatever the bullet points and details are, and then they’ve completely missed the entire aspect of, say, hey, why don’t we just migrate to 0365? Do you think something like that could happen?

Speaker 1 | 42:38.966

Oh, yeah. That’s an extreme example. It happens all the time. That’s ridiculous. In government, it still happens. It’s so bad. It still happens all the time, every day.

Speaker 0 | 42:47.109

It’s terrible.

Speaker 1 | 42:48.906

the thing about that is that that’s i mean that’s probably a whole nother topic but it is the we we they they need to um in government that we need to reform that because it’s um i’m sidebarring this i’m very ocd so i’m going to sidebar them okay government um where were we sorry so but you know but basically the the you know the having the data that is key and that’s, that’s helping me. Um, and, and, and I’ve gone out and I used the, one of the keys to me.

Speaker 0 | 43:27.301

Oh, I know what it is. I’m so sorry. And I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I do want to hit back on, back on the jumping back into the conversations and grab in and saying, Hey, I’ll stay late. I’ll go to the, the police department meeting and all these things. I want to ask you this cause I want to bang this out right now. Cause I used to have people say, look, I want to keep it simple, stupid. I want to have the top three questions and the top three questions are just going to absolutely open up the person. I used to tell people like, Hey, if you want to break down barriers first, get someone smiling. It’s a famous, it’s a Zig Ziglar thing. But I figure if you get someone smiling, if you get someone smiling, they break down like, Hey, you got them smiling. Okay. Like I don’t care what it is. Just whatever your thing is to get someone smiling, to break down that barrier. Great. That’s the first thing you do. But what are maybe the top three questions of the top three things that any IT director out there can do? Um, what would you say top? best three questions that they could ask or that you might start with to create this type of open ended this this open conversation um first ask their name so that always helps but then three i’m

Speaker 1 | 44:34.578

hoping they know oh go ahead yeah the really you need to know what are their needs you know what do they need what what are their pain points so what are your What do you need? What are your pain points with going on right now? And what are your wants? Like what do you wish could be happening? Once you start with what they think, then you have to sit in and you have to observe because anyone who’s done a survey will know that you ask the same question in different ways and you can start getting to the actual truth. And so I usually ask what they think. What do you need? What are your pain points? What are the problems you see? And then what do you want? What would you like in the future? And then I sit down and I watch every process and document what their processes are. Like one of the things that I did, which I was unsuccessful to get them to spend the money to fix, but here’s the process. So we had our field guys that fixed the roads. We, when I, years ago, I went and watched the process. The process was, they came in the office in the morning, they got a piece of paper that told them a problem or an incident that they had to go fix. They drove out, they fixed that problem, they came back, they wrote down on a piece of paper how they fixed it. And that person, then they picked up another piece of paper and then they went back out to fix it. So that’s one thing where I was like, well, why are they coming back to get their work? Why don’t they just stay out there? What if it’s like five feet away, they have to go fix another pot hole, and you could have just told them to go down the street. That was one. But the other thing was once they handed that piece of paper with all their notes on it, a person would type it into a system, one system that was like their work system. And they would print that out then that person would go to another computer that had another system with their imagery

Speaker 0 | 47:05.723

And they would type everything into it’s making me tired just listening I mean, I’m like I’m like, I’m already like I get it. I get it.

Speaker 1 | 47:14.307

It’s like just like Why and and and so I said, oh I can fix this I can make those systems talk We can give them cell phones and and the folks that were here years ago. They’re no longer here, so I’m free to say. But they said, oh, $15,000 is too much money for that. I’m like, well, I think you’d save a lot more.

Speaker 0 | 47:38.590

Yeah, exactly. You paid this much an hour. And anyone that knows anything about rest organizations, I mean, your largest controllable cost is your labor. And if you can control labor, and honestly, IT can’t be that big of a… Well, I guess all of IT in general would be. I know communications is usually 1% or less of the entire P&L, yet that itself affects or effects, whatever one I’m supposed to use here, affects the labor so much. So just to kind of pull it all together here, I’ve been doing a ton of research, just data-driven research myself that I haven’t shared with you yet, with specifically IT directors in the mid-market space. space that are trying to do more with less, which is actually exactly what we’ve been talking about here. And the, it’s, it’s, I, it’s funny because your second question is my first question. And I’m not saying that you even have to do these in any particular order. You said, you know, what, you know, what do you need? My first question is, what are your pains? What’s your single biggest frustration? What’s your single biggest frustration or problem, right? Because people know what that is. That’s what’s making your life miserable. And everyone loves to talk about that. And my first question is, can I ask your advice? Because everyone hates surveys. No one wants to take surveys. Unless maybe, you know, like I don’t take the survey after I go to Chipotle about my burrito. I don’t. I know they want that information, but I just, I’m not going to take that survey. But if they asked me, can I ask your advice on how to make better burritos? I probably would answer that one, to be honest with you. And if they asked me what my single biggest frustration is with walking through the line there, that’s when I don’t get my burrito made. the same way every time. So I guess that’s just my own little piece there is, can I ask your advice? I think people respond to that one.

Speaker 1 | 49:33.004

Yeah, no, that’s a good.

Speaker 0 | 49:38.006

Can we end with, can we end, because I could talk all day, to be honest with you. Can we end with the coyotes? Can we end with the coyotes? Because that to me was a big story. How does, what does coyotes and in your job have in common?

Speaker 1 | 49:53.882

Yes, well, so the… Basically, the issue with the coyotes is we had a lot of folks reporting coyotes attacks. We live near, our city is near some mountains. We’re actually not that close, but we’re close enough. And so after we had California fires. The food source was limited, so we got a lot of coyotes in town. So we’re getting a lot of reports that, hey, my dogs are getting attacked, my cats are gone, a lot of that. And what are you going to do about it, right? Well, there was really not a, I mean, what are we going to do about it, right? So what we did do, though, was I have interns, I have GIS info, and we can make something. that can help people help themselves. So we created, basically what we did is we created a coyote map and we created it so that it’s interactive and people can go to our map on the city website and they report attacks. They tell who, what got attacked, was it the dog, the cat, or did they just see a coyote walk by? It could be anything that they see, they can put on this map. Well, Then other people, they go to the map and they’re saying, okay, I’m walking my dog. Oh, wait, I’m not going to go down that street because, you know, John just saw a giant coyote down there. So they’ll walk their dog a different direction because they can look at this map. So we basically created this and it lessens the calls because now people are kind of helping themselves. They’re helping their neighbors. They’re reporting the coyotes and now their neighbor is figuring out where to go and go. And that lessens the impact.

Speaker 0 | 52:00.291

It cut back on phone calls.

Speaker 1 | 52:02.793

Yeah, it became less of an issue. Because now, what did they want? People wanted to feel safe. They wanted to know where the coyotes are. They wanted to be able to kind of take control. The city doesn’t have the resources to have people walking around with coyotes. signs saying coyotes here. So this is the, what we’re doing is empowering the people to basically police the coyotes themselves and to give the information to everyone else.

Speaker 0 | 52:40.049

There’s actually a lot being done with that with emergency response as well for like emergency situations so people can text things and you can have little blips.

Speaker 1 | 52:47.852

Right. We partnered with Waze to do almost the same thing with traffic. So we share our information with Waze. So if you drive through a city and use Waze, you’ll actually see city data where we’re sharing it with the Waze. And that helps us too because we can look at Waze and say, hey, there’s a giant accident. There’s like 100 people reporting an accident here. Even if we haven’t gotten that call yet, we could send a unit out to check it out.

Speaker 0 | 53:20.111

Yeah, that’s cool. So you had like an API in with them.

Speaker 1 | 53:24.890

Yeah. So there’s a lot of things, you know, everything we do is trying to empower people because we have less resources, but you know, this is our community. We really want to make sure that we, you know, these are things I want. I want to know that coyote is not going to eat my dog. So,

Speaker 0 | 53:44.235

so I mean, I guess at the end of the day, it’s about unselfish it getting involved. asking the questions and getting involved in various different departments and, and asking the right questions. Um, and then using, uh, in your case, um, Dave data-driven analytics, um, by asking the right questions to make a very significant, uh, return, um, return on investment or, or plan or, or planning and savings across the board, not, not, not only savings, but really, um, back to that force multiplier of getting more done with less. So you shouldn’t have to get more done with less, by the way. You should just get more, period. But not only do you get done more with less, it spreads, that mentality spreads across, can spread across the organization based on how we use technology and data.

Speaker 1 | 54:40.982

Yeah, no, it’s true. You got to, the data helps us do more with less. But it also helps, you know, it helps us prove the point, like this is what we need to do. and we set up policies because we have the data. Parts, the day of the pretty PowerPoint chart’s kind of gone. We really want actual data, stuff that’s been analyzed, that yeah, there’s correlations, there’s cross-tabulations of this and this is real stuff. The old days, we just gotta move to the next, and that helps, we know what we really need to do.

Speaker 0 | 55:26.532

It’s not assumptions and general hype.

Speaker 1 | 55:29.633

Right. Yeah. And a lot of people still, you know, and I bet a lot of people, especially in IT managers, public, private, are still like, well, they think they need this. I mean, I know of a case where they bought 60 virtual desktops because they thought that’s what they needed, right? And those desktops are… still in itself just collecting dust because they actually didn’t need them and they didn’t really have any use for them, but they just heard about virtual dust dust and they just thought that they needed. They didn’t have any data. They just felt.

Speaker 0 | 56:14.216

Feel, felt, found.

Speaker 1 | 56:19.440

I’m not for that.

Speaker 0 | 56:21.561

Feel, felt, fail. Man, this has been a great… Absolutely, this is one of my favorite shows, I’ll be honest with you. If you had one message to deliver out there to the community of data wolves, what would that be?

Speaker 1 | 56:43.147

Well, it would be that, you know, really the people that are working in data, I mean, that’s the future. And if you’re not working in data, you should check it out. so much amazing stuff people are doing in this in the realm and they’re solving real world problems it’s not just like oh i’m thinking about this it’s not just like you know ideas this is actual like using data to drive and to better our communities and figure out what we actually need um which in the end saves us time money um and work you know i don’t i i My goal, going back to how people think IT is making their lives harder, my goal is to make them easier. I hope they feel like they love coming into work because they hardly have to do anything because IT has made everything so easy for them. That’s my goal. And the community feels it.

Speaker 0 | 57:47.856

That’s the dream IT job. You can create it. You know, don’t just wait there. I think, well, honestly, man, you’re an inspiration for all the IT directors out there that are drudgingly going to work and being asked to fix the, someone told me one time they’re asked to fix like the hand dryer, which is that, which is fine. It’s, I mean, it happens, right? Like in your case, like it might be, well, how many times did we fix the hand dryer and why? But, you know, no problem. So you’re an inspiration, man. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Speaker 1 | 58:21.837

Thank you for having me. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 58:23.478

yeah. It’s been excellent. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

Speaker 1 | 58:26.739

Thank you.