Speaker 0 | 00:09.646
All right, welcome everybody. Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have PJ Wei on the show. And it’s kind of special because the only other person that calls me PJ, PJ, is my father. And so he calls me PJ. You’re called PJ. And it’s another Phil. We have another Phil on the show. This is, you know, that’s always a special plus. It’s always a special plus, you know, when you get two Phils together, especially two that have been called PJ and are called PJ. And the other thing that I’ve noticed that’s very special about you also is there is something on your LinkedIn profile that looks almost identical to a Starbucks mug that I also own with coffee in it. And I have a stack of Starbucks coffee mugs that from various different cities that I collect that tend to collect on the bottom of my car on my desk stacked up. So anywho. And the other thing that’s interesting is you have like 9,351 followers and I also have 9,000 followers. So the parallels here are scary. It’s scary. I don’t know if anyone else is excited, you know, and you have a beard that’s coming in also. That’s scary.
Speaker 1 | 01:24.160
you know half half gray i have a beard that’s half gray so look at this can get any better i know right well what’s funny about it is the um the fact that you collect those mugs i i i started that probably about uh i would say four years ago my wife and i started making a bunch of trips got a chance to travel so i was you know everybody would like knickknacks or or or magnets for their refrigerator i collected months i thought yeah you know it’s kind of a unique idea again Always, I have this cabinet that’s full, full,
Speaker 0 | 01:59.595
full of these mugs. I don’t know what to do with them. Yes, and they’re useful. It’s a useful collection hobby. You know, it’s not like, although if I start making fun of gnomes, someone’s going to get mad at me, so I don’t want to, like, lower my listening base or something. Now, here’s the thing, though. The difference is, like, you really are in technology. I kind of pretend to be in technology, but you really are in technology. You’re the director of IT at… Northern Arizona University, you’re in a much warmer, I’m assuming much warmer area than me. And what got us connected was this discussion of ethics and technology. And it’s such a wide, I mean, if you even said that, would anyone even know what we’re talking about? And I think it really relates more to data, the collection of data. What are we doing with data? And I can’t remember if it was you or someone else that told me to watch that new Netflix documentary on the Facebook thing. Why can’t I remember it right now? My brain, I need more coffee. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 03:02.199
I can’t think of it either, but that’s fantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 03:05.760
you know, so the whatever dilemma or whatever it is, but the social dilemma, social dilemma. There we go. Came back to me. So what is ethics? in technology or is there even a, is there even a, there’s no book really written about this. There’s no, or there probably is, but what are we, what are we talking about?
Speaker 1 | 03:27.950
Yeah, good question. You know, I mean, there are, there’s, it’s funny because in healthcare, there’s a lot of ethical standards about behavior, practice, what to expect from your physicians or healthcare workers. When it comes to police officers, same thing, law enforcement, firefighters, you know, we have, we have a certain ethical standard, which we expect. their behavior, the things that they do, the way they act. Technology, we have a couple governing bodies that are really guidelines, but there’s not this deep expectation, I think, across the board for most IT professionals. And it’s kind of, it’s not just the IT professionals, but technology is in the hands of everybody. So ethical behavior isn’t just a standard by which a practitioner in the…
Speaker 0 | 04:16.620
career field of technology to be recognizing and understanding it it could be something that people in general have a proper behavior and understanding of ethical behavior and technology um it’s beyond law i mean it does exist in certain fields so we’ve got HIPAA guideline compliancy we’ve got SOC 1 SOC 2 we’ve got different PCI compliance we’ve got things like that But do we have anything that says IT director got fired and he stole all the passwords and won’t give them back and disappeared off the face of the earth? Right. We don’t have that asterisk. So what are some of the areas you think where people, well, I guess, what are some of the areas that we need to be more ethical in? Or at least have some standards, I guess.
Speaker 1 | 05:00.798
Well, I think part of it would be helpful, more from an educational standpoint, I think, for most of our society, of understanding ethical behavior with technology. Just because we have the ability to do certain things, does that mean that it’s ethical to do that? And I could point to several different things in today’s environment. You know, when we talk about ethics, it’s a good way to put this. It’s the expectation of behavior and what people do with information. Because technology isn’t about just a piece of hardware. It’s actually about the data and what it represents. Things like the social dilemma that you mentioned earlier, that’s a great point to are we acting ethically with the data that we have access to. In today’s day and age, we have situations where we have a pandemic, we have concerns over health care. But when we’re asking people to… self-identify or even beyond that, we’re asking institutions to start protecting others by disclosing personal data. You know, I could use an example, a very generic example. If you talk about a classroom, a classroom has 30 students in it in a K-12 district. Suddenly, they’re back in class and the teacher says, hey, one of the students in here currently ill so make sure when you go home tell your parents and get checked out and every looks around the room realizes that Donnie’s gone well is it Donnie what ethical standard have we just practiced about privacy and that person’s safety and well-being because you know in today’s age you have fear you have panic you know and it’s not just students but it could be the parents behaviors that become dangerous so we have to have ethical standards about how we communicate and what what it means to have somebody’s privacy. And I can point to other areas of ethical behavior. You know, we talk about the digital divide. Everybody hears that term. The digital divide means the have and have nots of technology. Well, I think it’s further than that now. I think it’s a lot deeper. It’s not just about hardware and access to the internet and access to connectivity to your schools or to your healthcare, but it’s also about the digital divide of ethical behavior. We tend to grow up in circles of what is the normal practice inside of one home isn’t the practice inside of another home, yet we suddenly thrust everybody onto one platform or one environment that works for communication and proper behavior and proper standards of communication that an ethical barrier tends to get broken, if not a social barrier. So how do we overcome that? It becomes a bigger obstacle, I think.
Speaker 0 | 07:57.346
Hmm. And I mean, there’s a lot of, give me some more examples. I like the, well, that’s a school example. I saw, I did a show with Mike Auerkirch a couple weeks ago on security and how to help. But you know, the less, how did we put it politically correct? The less technically adept people, you know, manage security is how we put it politically correctly. But he’s saying. You know, I went to go just like order a pizza today. And now all of a sudden I’m getting text messages and emails from them because they collected my information at the kiosk. But did I double opt in for that information? You know, there’s another example right there.
Speaker 1 | 08:41.284
Yeah, absolutely. And from a privacy standpoint, you know, I think the pandemic has really caused, it’s really drawn to light. Standards that would people that are leaders that have leadership roles with technology. They have to be the guardians of that data Just because they’re their superior or supervisor Manager president whatever asked for specific pieces of data There has to be some kind of second balance about what are you doing with this data? Why the question of why to be we can use why as a standard. There’s a great book that By Simon Sinek called start with why And really, if you look at that, that’ll answer a lot of ethical questions. Why are we doing something? And when we identify what that is, if it seems to be a good goal, a noble cause, what types of balances have we then put in place to make sure that it maintains just that? We can’t let the proverbial meaning out of the bottle just because we want to do something. Because once that information is out there, what else can be done with it? how does that get released we have to protect these two people and individuals
Speaker 0 | 10:01.384
This is getting back to why it directors are a technology minded leadership people or nerds, as we might call them. And I mean that in the, in the non, the non geek squad way, because someone got mad at me the other week and they’re like, you know, you know, if they want to go work for the geek squad, you know, they’d like whatever, you know, something like that. When I was like, you know, and I mentioned dissecting probably their it nerds. And he, he compared me to the geek squad, which is quite defaming. Now I’ve completely lost track of where I was going with the ethics thing. Anyways, back to the start with why. There’s another thing that backfired on me because I love the why question. And my kids know it too. So if I just tell them no, they’re like, why? It kind of backfires on you. Like, why? Now I’m going to give you the what, what, why. Well, the reason why is because. But oh, now I just remembered. See? This is why IT directors, technology leaders, and those should maybe be the fearless leaders of our new world. Because I believe that in the 80-20 rule, I believe that 80% of society is totally screwed up and unable to make ethical decisions whatsoever, let alone vote. And people are going to get really mad at that because we’re kind of, you know, biologically driven by desire and to… meet our own needs. So putting this data in anyone’s hands with what you can do with it, it’s hard to expect the mass of society that’s trying to, whether it be crime, the corporate ladder, survive, sell another burrito so their business doesn’t go out of business or another pizza or whatever, to not use your cell phone number to send you a coupon.
Speaker 1 | 11:50.631
Right. Right, and it’s funny because, you know, so one of the things that recently happened, you know, it’s ironic how the awareness of people is developed around a lot of times emotion rather than logic. Behaviors are patterns of something we desire rather than is this the right thing to do sometimes. And it’s funny because recently… Elon Musk had tweeted about this cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. And what was interesting about that is if you watch the Twitter channels and just observe, I mean, don’t participate, just see how people react. We’ll have some people that are supporting it because they understand that there’s some relevance to the topic of cryptocurrency. We’re going to have others that find it offensive that he’s using, quote unquote, his power. his authority or leadership, right? The vision that people look at him with some trust and maybe another way to get him, and they think that he’s abusing his power to make such a comment about supporting something. Well, for a paid endorsement, they’d be fine. Nobody would have an argument. Nobody would say anything bad about it because it’s a paid endorsement. But because he has an opinion, suddenly people find it to be just a question of ethics. Could he be doing that? Well, that’s a start, right? We’re scratching the surface of what is an ethical decision and what was the intent behind it. So once you have to go back to why, why did he say it? If he wasn’t doing it for an unethical purpose, but he was doing it because he’s trying to promote a concept or a thought, well, then he’s doing what he’s doing. What is not a bad thing, which is challenging people’s status quo concepts. Whereas we talk about, we’re going to require… X behavior or X purpose, but there’s no real why as to what’s the end goal? When are we, when is it, is it proper for us to mandate such things? What happens to the data about people and their behavior? I mean, I know that institutions, counties, counties today and across states. are collecting data on their citizens about their behaviors, their patterns, where they’re going. The internet has been just collecting data about traffic flows, capturing how many people are gathering in a specific location. Well, isn’t there a degree, where is the degree of oversight to say what is the intent of this, that we’ve designed this tool and technology for and are we using it for that explicit purpose or do we have another intent? You know, and not everything is mysterious, obviously. It’s just, are we really evaluating it properly? So it’s a matter of not, the technology’s neutral. Technology doesn’t do anything for us until the person behind it actually does something with it. So we have to have some kind of expectation of ethical standards. from one another. And I don’t know that that’s communicated in social media. It’s not necessarily communicated in schools. It’s not part of our dynamic as a society sometimes.
Speaker 0 | 15:12.671
People might just have to choose to go off the grid. How did they know during spring break where the COVID breakouts were happening? How did they know where people were congregating? How did they know that? Yeah. GPS cell phones from cell phones. And at what point did someone say that’s okay to do that? They just knew they just couldn’t do it.
Speaker 1 | 15:39.850
And should we, and who has the authority to allow that is the question. You know, I actually, I’m fortunate I get a chance to speak to another university. And one of my subject areas, we talk about ethics specifically in technology. And it’s the matter of who owns your image even. I mean, just having that conversation. Boy, I only get a week to talk about that in that course. And I really could build probably a good eight-week course specifically on who owns your image and what ethical rights do they have to your image? What have you signed off on just by simply being inside of a building? What detectives do you have for your data, your integrity?
Speaker 0 | 16:22.734
I didn’t sign a model release form. Yeah. Why do you have my, we had that all the time at Starbucks. I remember people would have to sign model release forms if you had some picture at like an event or something, but no one’s doing that anymore. They probably are like, you know, big corporations, but the majority of people are not, you know, memes. How do we control the meme generation? Like I generate memes and I just hope that maybe someone doesn’t have a copyright on something. I try to find him on like Twitter or something like, Hey, do you mind if I use this for me? And he’s like, yeah, sure, man, go ahead. But you know, for the most part, there’s a ton of that going on too.
Speaker 1 | 17:02.358
Yeah. I mean, there’s, there’s, there’s a ton of art, art sites that are out now that use NFT tokens to help authenticate the originality of the art. Well, it’s interesting because some of the art that you see is really another image that’s been popularized and, and does not have a copyright on it. So suddenly somebody is going to put an NFT token assigned to it. And maybe they now are the proprietary owner of that image. Kind of interesting to see where that could change as well in the future.
Speaker 0 | 17:35.707
Let’s hit the opposite here because we were talking about this also. What about places that don’t have internet? And we were talking about delivering education to places without the internet. Yeah. Well, you know, that’s like a whole nother thing. Like, like here, we now want to deliver you this problem. We want to deliver you the ethics problem where you didn’t have it before. So there you go.
Speaker 1 | 18:01.643
Yeah. That’s one of the challenges. Um, so I, I do live in Arizona and rural, rural Arizona parts of rural Arizona are some of the most unique experiences I’ve ever had in my life to understand the challenges for the economy, um, the family dynamics. cultural acceptance. You know, there are some very unique needs inside of rural America and trying to get rural areas connected to a fiber backbone to get them connected so they have access to the internet on a regular basis. I mean there are many areas around here which are very underserved and have no means of real immediate connection to the internet. So How do you, when we have an expectation that you can’t go to the DMV without going through the internet right now, or you can’t communicate with your physician without having the internet, is that an ethical behavior? Are we just putting an expectation of what technologies are convenient for a majority of populace and then setting that as a standard when really we’re forgetting about the people and parts of our country that need a different form of connecting? they need a different form of communication panels. And I don’t think that’s a, that’s always an afterthought too. It’s a matter of, well, let’s worry about the 80%. We’ll get the other points done later. It’s ironic because it’s almost a hypocrisy in one conversation, but compared to another, we expect everybody to follow this, but we can’t deliver this for everybody anyway. So it’s… It’s a challenge. And then trying to get, once that connection does exist in those rural areas, that goes back to a new digital divide. It’s not just the divide of they don’t have the technology, but once the technology is delivered, are they prepared to operate in an environment where people are not necessarily acting with the best interest of the individual on the other end sometimes?
Speaker 0 | 20:02.190
Hmm. So it’s almost like a public end user. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a group of public end users and how do we educate them?
Speaker 1 | 20:09.952
Right. How do you, how do you help get them up to speed on who to trust and who not to trust, what you should be disclosing, what you should not be disclosing. When you click that little, I agree button, do you really know what that means? Do you know what that’s doing for you?
Speaker 0 | 20:25.356
I’ve had the pleasure of traveling, you know, I’ve had the pleasure of traveling to other countries that are. I would say not as advanced or not as rich, say, as the United States, but very advanced from a governmental technology deployment standpoint, where it’s just expected that everyone has a cell phone. For example, parking tickets, speeding tickets, you ran a red light, all of that is delivered to a cell phone. Instantaneously, you get a fine. If you run a red light, sorry, takes a picture, sends it to your cell phone. you’ve got a fine you must pay that fine or you cannot travel or do this or do that until you’ve paid this fine i’ve seen that work very very well especially it’s like speeding cameras i’m just surprised we don’t do that over here maybe it’s we just still want to have i don’t know police officers police officers sitting in a squad car to you know pull people over and give them a ticket but i think that’s like a easy technology thing that would scale back a lot would eliminate all kinds all forms of maybe potential discrimination if people are worried about that because a speed camera a speeding camera is not going to discriminate just gives you a ticket and that’s it and it certainly costs a lot less i don’t know just going off on a tangent made me think of of technology and some other countries just i mean i don’t give you a choice you know because it’s not maybe it’s not a uh i don’t know it’s just like some countries just say no this is how it’s going to be and you must register your license this way everything goes to your cell phone if you don’t have a cell phone too bad go get one
Speaker 1 | 21:58.506
Well, sure. Sure. And, you know, I think what’s interesting about this conversation is, you know, I wish there was a really good solution to point to to say these are great examples of best use cases. And technology doesn’t always have a one size fits all, depending on the environment that it’s in.
Speaker 0 | 22:15.797
It definitely,
Speaker 1 | 22:16.338
you know. Yeah, I just hope it’s challenging. I hope it’s nothing else that our conversations today gives a chance to maybe challenge people, think about it, talk about it with their peers. Maybe think about their… their own practice. I mean, you know, I’m very fortunate in the role that I have and the team that I have around me are amazing people. What’s great is there is this same sense of ethical standards behavior when somebody’s asking for information, are we asking the right questions as to what do you plan on using this for? What do you need out of it? And why are you asking so we can help you? We can better equip you with the best information to keep you safe and when you’re collecting, or whether we were collecting data on safe.
Speaker 0 | 22:59.523
So you’ve probably been through, I’m assuming you’ve been through a lot of changes over the last year, A, being in education, being in technology, COVID-19, people working for students have to be educated from home or remote classes, etc., etc. What was the biggest challenge you ran into from an end user training standpoint? and end users being a aka students or teachers and and how to use new technology that’s that’s a great question you know um everybody has to learn how to adapt to the environment a little bit um i think i think the challenge was um
Speaker 1 | 23:43.696
historically so in my career i had an opportunity to work as i mentioned trying to help develop technology in rural parts of the country rural parts of arizona specifically that delivered solutions to the end user. The challenge that I faced at that time was the adoption as a voluntary basis. I think this situation has forced people into, this isn’t voluntary anymore. Your options are either do it or don’t. There’s no, well, it’s not even an option. You have to do it because we aren’t having classes in person. We are not allowing people back inside of these buildings. We are not allowing. So I think the- I think the greatest challenge was the acceptance of something that’s being forced upon, if that makes sense. It’s not that they didn’t want to, it’s just there was some resistance. Well, it’s resistance. It was resistance and somebody that’s done something for so long in a certain way, suddenly being told they have a new format that they have to deliver, train, educate, experience. There were hits and misses. I think that was a struggle for both the faculty and the staff and for our students. All of them had various degrees of success and challenge. Um,
Speaker 0 | 25:04.338
did you, did you start with why?
Speaker 1 | 25:09.802
Well, yeah, you start off with why you had to do this. Um, and a lot of it was driven on this. This is not meant to be a statement, honestly, politically or specifically about the pandemic. I think in general, there wasn’t enough information and people making best guesses what they had. So. The why was we think rather than we know. It was a lot of conjecture and a little bit of fear in some cases versus certainty. So we tried to err on the side of safety and cost and created environments which were much, much different experience for everybody involved. And, you know, from a technology standpoint, we had to worry about security, scalability, accessibility. functionality, can it handle the traffic because we went from a platform where a certain percentage of our traffic was online during certain courses of the day to exponential growth of traffic throughout the day. So there was a lot of technical challenge we had to overcome.
Speaker 0 | 26:20.346
Bottlenecks.
Speaker 1 | 26:22.487
Yeah exactly and we went from staff that were 100% on-site for 10 to 12 hours a day to 80% being offsite, 80% working from home or remote. So you have the new dynamic challenges of how do you stay connected to your team? How do you stay connected to one another? Do we communicate effectively? You know, and whether that’s through the different platforms that are available, that was another challenge because everybody had something they liked to use. Everybody had their own preference of stuff, right? Nobody wanted to use the same… hot sauce or ketchup or they all wanted something different and something unique that created a huge huge dynamic of challenge because in the end you give me an example i need an example so you know not to call out name brands whether that’s uh a zoom call or
Speaker 0 | 27:23.134
whether that’s zoom teams or slack or whatever yeah all that variety
Speaker 1 | 27:30.336
The faculty member was comfortable in one format, so they would use that one format for all of their classes. However, you have a student that has five or six classes, they have five or six different instructors with five or six different platforms and delivery.
Speaker 0 | 27:41.401
Oh, so annoying.
Speaker 1 | 27:43.161
That becomes a challenge for the student, right? And it’s not the point to any challenges. I think it’s about awareness because we all get stuck in our own little view and our own myopic challenge. that we’re addressing the one thing that we need, whereas somebody like the students are facing the challenges on multiple fronts. So that was a bit of a challenge, I think.
Speaker 0 | 28:06.070
I love that you said that. I love that you said that because how many students are dealing with, and I’d probably be one of those teachers. I’ll just be honest with you. I’d probably be one of those, you know, oppressive, follow my rules teacher that would be like, look, you will. buy, you know, elements of style. You will write your papers like this. You will only use Slack. You will, you know, I can see that, you know, and if you’ve got that teacher that’s like, you know, everything will be on time. I don’t care what has happened. You will automatically fail if you do not bring me this this way. I’ve heard every excuse. You have teachers like that and there’s students that sink or swim in those classes and then you’ll have another teacher that’s, you know, maybe more, I don’t know. reasonable. That becomes a significant technology challenge. And I think the learning experience here, because I do want people to take something away from this, the learning experience is that it’s okay as an IT leader and IT director to say, there’s no turning back. This is the system. This is the system that’s being implemented and you must use it. And there’s no way around it. And I see it in hospitals and I see it in other industries where they spend millions on, we’re going to bring an Epic, right? Is there really any turning back? No, there’s no turning back. And the doctors give them the most pushback or whatever, because they’re the highest in the hierarchy. They’ve gone through the most schooling. They’re the most arrogant of the people and they’re the least apt to. Probably use it. They’re like the last ones to come on board, you know, like being dragged over the finish line They will use epic. They will not use a sticker on a manila folder anymore, you know, whatever it is And there’s probably some teachers like that.
Speaker 1 | 30:04.601
Yeah. And the environment, you know,
Speaker 0 | 30:08.783
my daughter. Just real quick. I mean, just state the point. Like, it’s okay for IT to say, no, we’re not using. I don’t know. I don’t want to say we’re not using Slack because there’s people that love Slack. We’re using SharePoint. You know, you know, we’re going to use this and that’s it. Sorry. And I need your backup, Mr. President. I need the backup from the president of the company. I need you to back me up 100% all the way, because otherwise it’s going to be like Armageddon.
Speaker 1 | 30:39.206
Yeah, you know, I think that’s kind of a role of technology leaders that really, in my career, I’ve seen a big change in the way technology leaders have been viewed. You know, the CIO as a title, just to have that opportunity to actually sit with a president or to sit with… the owner of an organization versus years ago many institutions that worked for they only had a director with a fortune 500 company they had a director of it didn’t have a cio so when when decisions were made related to technology they were not necessarily given technology wasn’t given input they weren’t given the opportunity to make a recommendation or to help facilitate some of that conversation Mostly because I think, and that’s one of the challenges today, that everybody still has technology in their hand. A lot of people do. And it’s all around them. So they feel, look, I’ll give you an example. I talk to people that I appreciate sports. I’ll talk to somebody and say, oh, what do you do for a living? Oh, I work in technology. Oh, well, my phone. Yeah, I don’t work in that technology. Right? Or my phone. Yeah, I don’t do that.
Speaker 0 | 31:49.822
I’m a doctor. I’m a doctor. You know, I’ve got this weird thing with my knee. Well, I’m a urologist.
Speaker 1 | 31:56.465
Exactly. It becomes very generalized still. But I do think that the greater respect and ear for what technology leaders know and understand when it relates to business, the end users, consumers, privacy, ethics, data management, all of that, that matters. And it is important for any technology leader to have the ability to say yes or no and agree and disagree, but present the why. Explain why it does or does not make sense. And know your audience is always important because if you’re talking to a C financial officer, well, I’m going to tell you this is going to cost us $1.2 million. If I do X, it’ll cost me $800,000. And the $1.2 million, believe it or not, is going to be a better investment in the long term because, and explain it. You can’t just stare at it as dollar-to-dollar value sometimes in those conversations. You’re talking to the president of an organization, you need to know the audience and what his or her interest is. Is that individual really interested in growth? Are they looking for stability? Are they looking for recovery of their current environment? How do they pull it back to where it needs to be? All of that type of information will… change how you communicate a solution to a challenge. And that’s where, when it comes down to the students, from my experience, it’s not just the technology in the classroom or the delivery from the faculty members, but it’s also we have to be a little more comprehensive in understanding what their experience is. Because many students that go to university have gone, have chosen a university, hopefully because they like the campus, they like the experience, they want to have a specific quality of life in that. knowledge gathering, right? They want to have some exposure to something where today that takes it away. And not only that, but sometimes they’re penalized. In some institutions, I know some universities have students back on campus and this goes across the state, just from different counterparts and friends. The students are not allowed to leave their dorms if they don’t have, if they haven’t already scheduled the use of their restrooms. They’re not allowed to go to the cafeteria if they haven’t planned the hours so they can keep control of how many people are in there. Is that an experience somebody wants to have? I mean, for that matter, they’ll probably work from home if they’re not actually able to attend and to face penalties of being suspended or expelled because you don’t have a mask walking across campus to your next class.
Speaker 0 | 34:37.649
What about the other way around? I’d ride it the other way around. What about the ones that are so happy doing school from home now and don’t want to go back to have to be on campus?
Speaker 1 | 34:44.853
I think that’s a big challenge. for universities exactly so I think that’s going to be a big that’s a big question that a lot of I’ve seen in circles trying to take on as a challenge what is it what does it look like next year what about the year after that will the students come back And to what degree, depending upon the flexibility and what the environment looks like.
Speaker 0 | 35:05.995
My daughter’s 16. She’s taking college courses. She just got her license. She’s killing it. And like just the other day, she got a note. She’s like, Dad, I don’t know if they told me like they’re probably going to open up campus and like I’m going to have to go to campus. Like, well, she never got never, never signed up for the courses to begin with the expectation to ever go to a campus. You know what I mean? Like she’s taking courses. Like, like. who knows an hour away she’s only 16 you know i mean doing really well in the courses they’re like well we might open up the campus again well can we just keep doing it the way we were because that’s working out just great uh right and you know it’s
Speaker 1 | 35:45.526
funny because we people should relate also to their personal experiences on some of these things because it’ll help understand that they’re not they’re not in a unique situation many people are struggling with what this is going to look like
Speaker 0 | 35:56.398
Do you have communication? It’s different. I’m thinking back in college, right? Like we had like analog phones. We had like, you know, type in the button and press send and nights and weekends, minutes and everything like that. It was a joke. Does school now have the ability? Does the IT department have the ability to easily communicate with all professors and all students?
Speaker 1 | 36:18.472
I think for the most part, it has improved. Yes.
Speaker 0 | 36:22.450
Is that an ethical question? That’s another thing too. How can IT communicate with me? What if it was, could you communicate with all the teachers and say, hey, look, we’ve got a significant problem here due to COVID-19. Half you guys are asking your students to use Slack. Another third are asking them to use this. One person say use Dropbox. The other one’s using a Facebook group. The other one’s using, I don’t know, Snapchat. uh this is a problem we need to unify somehow uh can you do you have that type of voice can you ask those type of questions um many instances so me me specifically or or i’m
Speaker 1 | 37:04.988
just curious like yeah you i’ve got you on the well you’re here right now live so yeah you yeah i think uh we we do have input that’s the value right we we do have the opportunity to get the right years of people and and just have the conversation initiated and kicked off. I think that’s part of the culture of where I’m at. I know that there are different institutions, different cultures, and different behaviors, and they may or may not have as much an opportunity or influence to be able to make those types of a statement or to be able to make that kind of a suggestion. And I think that’s what it is. That’s about culture. That’s really about the culture of an organization and whether that’s higher ed education or a manufacturing facility. You know, I loved working for, I worked for a Fortune 500 company in a manufacturing facility and the difference of mindset and activity seems extreme side of the spectrum of where higher ed is based in general. Higher ed is a slow boat to turn on things because they’ve done things a certain way for a very long time. And manufacturing had to adjust to different changes in the environment, different relationships, you know, supply and demand.
Speaker 0 | 38:23.150
Well, money’s on the line. Money’s on the line in manufacturing.
Speaker 1 | 38:28.274
We had something to do, and it was, when does this got to be done? Well, next week. Oh, wow. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 38:34.799
So why do we treat education the same way? We don’t treat education the same way because it’s not like a swim. It’s not a survival.
Speaker 1 | 38:41.923
Yeah. It is a lot different inside of it. It’s a lot slower, a lot more methodical. Honestly, there’s a lot more politics involved with higher education, to be blunt. It does create some challenges. Ideally, it creates a healthy conversation, though. I know in certain institutions it may not. It’s hard to paint higher ed as a universal paintbrush. Same with… Fortune 500 companies or other businesses. I think every one of them is a little unique in their own way, but it’s about good culture. If you have a good culture, you can pretty much manage it well. And once again, a good culture when it comes to managing a challenge is different than the ethics conversation again, right? Because the intent of an action, there’s usually unintended consequences from an action you’ve taken. If you haven’t considered what those might be, or you’ve at least ignore them, well, then you’re really in for a challenge in the future.
Speaker 0 | 39:47.896
Yeah, the ignoring will always find a way to root its ugly head at some point. It’ll come up.
Speaker 1 | 39:56.419
It does. It absolutely does.
Speaker 0 | 39:59.812
After you’ve forgotten that you’ve ignored something, that’s when it’s going to show up.
Speaker 1 | 40:04.814
Well, that’s funny. You and I have had this conversation, I think, since November. We’ve had to prompt it around a couple times. So much has happened even since then, right? I mean, everything from the presidential election and what’s happened on social media to conversations about behaviors of somebody like Robin Hood that’s made the news. Where are the ethics for those institutions? Where are the ethics for those? Where is the ethical behavior of a standard? Whether, you know, addressing legal, not legal, constitutional, not constitutional, it’s a matter of what’s ethical? Did we practice good ethics in any of this?
Speaker 0 | 40:42.710
Well, I asked you before, do you think it’s too late? It’s too late. It’s grown. The animal’s grown too big. It’s just such a wild. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 40:51.514
that’s such a good question. You know what? I’m going to. I’ve got something here that I wrote down. It’s funny. I wrote this down today because something you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 0 | 41:03.687
and by the way, while you’re finding that you’re the only person that I’ve ever heard mentioned the word conjecture, which is probably in my top 10 most favorite words. I’m serious. You said conjecture. How many people use that and even think about that, even know what it means, right? Because our society, is fueled by conjecture. We’re fueled by conjecture. Twitter, fueled by conjecture. An opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information, right? Incomplete information. We are a society of opinions, and we feel that we have a right to our opinion. And I think you should take your opinion and put it in your pocket.
Speaker 1 | 41:48.342
Yeah, it is. And it’s a difficult spot to be, right? Because everybody… Everybody wants to be right.
Speaker 0 | 41:54.780
You know, and so many things, so many decisions are made based on what? Conjecture.
Speaker 1 | 42:01.663
Yeah. But I do want to touch base with what you mentioned about, is it too late? You know, it’s funny because I was listening to Duncan Wardle speak, and he said something that I wrote down, that creativity, intuition, curiosity, and imagination, those are portraits. They cannot be programmed into any AI. The thing is, all four of those have one thing in common. And this is my opinion. All four of those have one thing in common. They’re not logical, right? Creativity isn’t a logical process. It’s this, we move with a behavior or we like the way we think about it. Intuition, it’s kind of our gut feel on something. It’s not logical. We just know that somehow this is… there’s something wrong here. We’re not there, or there’s something right about this.
Speaker 0 | 42:55.177
Is it based on data that’s been inputted? Is it based on historical data that our human bodies have acquired over time? And that’s why we have a certain intuition about it. Is it based on, you know, creativity? Does that come from a, like, did we come up with this creative poem because we’re trying to solve a problem based on data that was input? I mean, you know,
Speaker 1 | 43:17.366
well, and that’s like curiosity, imagination. The thing is all four of those, also prove that we’re products of our environment. That if we’re not put in an environment where we’re allowed to be those things, then we’re not going to be. And that goes back to our ethical behavior. Our ethics is not something that’s tangible. And all of those points do go back to the conversation of maybe AI is too late. Well, AI isn’t ethical. It just does it. It does yes or no. It’s input, output. There’s not a lot of logical, there’s not a lot of… emotional connection to an action that it’s taking. An emotional connection to what it’s taking. So is it too late? You know what? I think unless people start realizing that we’re not robots and that we should be making better ethical decisions rather than something that just feels good. An ethical decision is not always easy. Sometimes it’s very, very hard. And it’s the right thing to do. It’s just very hard to do it.
Speaker 0 | 44:18.050
It should be an argument against atheism. I’m not trying to get religious on this, but I’m just saying, otherwise the code would correct itself. Through an evolutionary process, our code would get better. Maybe some people are saying that it is, but maybe the code will just miraculously be better. It’s been super good having you on the show. A lot of fun talking about ethics. And if you had any, you know, one piece of advice to deliver to people out there growing up in the field, we didn’t get to really talk about where you started up in technology and, you know, what devices you were playing around with. But if you had a piece of advice for, you know, other IT directors, leaders out there, maybe people struggling with getting people to buy into.
Speaker 1 | 45:09.086
the plan because we didn’t tell them it has to be this way what would that piece of advice be um funny because if you hadn’t said we didn’t get a chance to talk about where i started i think the one thing that influenced me to make me think about some of the things i’m doing is i had really i had really good unknown mentors people that i never told they were my mentor but i picked up what was good and i left what was bad and i tried to apply those you principles to my behavior, my actions, the way I talk to people, the way I treat others, the way I communicate to my team. I think,
Speaker 0 | 45:48.837
you know, so what was something then, this is going to go on now, what was something that you learned that, because that is a theme, that is a theme that has come up quite often on the show. And the theme, honestly, that’s come up a lot is that the majority of people that I’ve had on the show. If I ask them, did you have any great mentors? The majority of them say no. Some have said yes. So what is one of your biggest, say, learning moments or takeaways that you’ve taken from a mentor that you would not have just kind of maybe self-discovered?
Speaker 1 | 46:22.877
Oh, man, that’s a good question. Wow.
Speaker 0 | 46:26.680
See, that’s creative. But that came with data that you just input into my brain.
Speaker 1 | 46:32.666
I think, you know, that’s a really good question. I think it was trust. I think the trust to succeed and the trust to fail and then to learn from those mistakes, right?
Speaker 0 | 46:42.771
Trust the process.
Speaker 1 | 46:44.572
Yeah. I think that was probably one of the key things. I had some Ken Sweet was really my first IT director, and he’s a fantastic human being. I was so young, and I didn’t know much about IT, and he trusted me. He brought me in to say that I knew one specific area. I knew one specific tool and I was the only one in that business that knew how it worked. So he trusted me to come in here to figure it out and then train others and then learn more about other technologies, other solutions. And it was just that intrinsic trust of, hey, how are things going today? It was a quick check-in. It was never oversight. It was never overlording somebody. It was really this trust of, if I had questions, I could go to him and ask. And it was… a respectful response. It was never, uh,
Speaker 0 | 47:34.350
So what was it like before that then, if that’s something you learned from a mentor, what would you learn before that? Don’t trust anyone. I mean, don’t micromanage, you know, let people, let people learn on their own, that type of thing. Like,
Speaker 1 | 47:47.374
Yeah. Before that experience, I think it was a lot of, um, there was also a sense of you did things because you had to not, not because you it was the right thing to do or um you had like a job you had like a very clear job description i come in i do this like a robot exactly don’t step on other people’s toes whereas whereas i i’m still in the mindset where nobody’s gonna step on my toes if they’re helping me understand something they’re they’re making me better at it how is that a bad thing you know um it was very people letting people step outside of the box maybe
Speaker 0 | 48:26.450
It almost sounds like let people step outside of the box. You don’t have to just clock in and clock out and do one job. And that’s a huge thing in it. It’s a huge thing for it leadership because it’s not just keeping the blinky lights on. Like, no, you should help grow the business, help solve problems, help teachers not use 15,000 different apps and annoy, annoy the crap out of students. You know, you can go beyond the emails working today. And we’ve eliminated the tickets in the system.
Speaker 1 | 48:55.066
Yeah. And, and, and it is a, is a business of, you can’t really have an ego either because there’s somebody that knows way more than you do in another area.
Speaker 0 | 49:04.573
Oh man. There’s a lot of guys, it guys with egos. That’s a tough one. That’s a tough one. They won’t admit it. They won’t admit it. Outstanding, sir. Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 | 49:19.385
No, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. And I appreciate the questions and the opportunity to talk with you. I hope you and I get a chance. to do that again, even offline.
Speaker 0 | 49:26.031
Absolutely.
