Vice President of Information Security & Technology at Nascentia Health in Syracuse, NY & CTO at Inizio Technology Consulting Awarded the 2016 CNY Business Journal Finance and Business Executive of the Year award in Technology for my efforts as an IT professional and educator at the Utica School of Commerce. MBA in Technology Management BS in Business Administration Featured on “Dissecting Popular IT Nerds”
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3 Key Takeaways
Episode Show Notes
Transcript
Speaker 0 | 00:09.546
All right. Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we are talking with Joseph Chevret. Joe, you know, people call me Philip every now and then. It always sounds funny because I’ve been called Phil for years. Welcome to the show. You are IT Director at Nascentia. health and if i understand that correctly you guys do home health care yep uh we do home health uh visiting nursing um you know it’s pretty much keeping people alive and safe that’s got to be fairly challenging nowadays or there’s got to be at least there’s gonna be some technology involvement with that how did covid affect the technology level there well
Speaker 1 | 00:52.720
luckily we were already really remote um you know vpns uh mobile devices so we’re pretty technology technologically advanced so when cobit hit it wasn’t more it wasn’t really an overhaul it was kind of a pivot so we just took what we were doing already and you know uh kind of expedited that and made it bigger so a lot of people working in the office we do have you know relatively large office staff we assigned them laptops sent them home and they were able to connect that day so there we really didn’t see much downtime um and it’s helped us quite a bit so i know a lot of other health systems were really struggling to meet that need.
Speaker 0 | 01:32.321
That’s cool. And even ability to serve, I don’t know, people working at home and everything. Was there anything that, was there anything considerably that changed or that, that made something easier? You guys were already set and kind of ready to go, but was there, is there any outstanding factors?
Speaker 1 | 01:51.209
I think the hardest thing for most of our staff or remote staff was connecting their home networks. making sure that they were secure. So we wrote up a whole new remote user guide to help people walk through common issues that they might have. We ended up, you know, a lot of calls that we weren’t used to saying, hey, you got to call your ISP for this, your internet service provider. It’s not something that we can fix right away. You know, I think the hardest part for us in IT was my staff not being able to walk over when there was an issue. You know, you can’t just pop over and take a look and see someone’s computer and see. you know, what they’re doing wrong or their caps lock is enabled.
Speaker 0 | 02:31.699
So it’s actually a great subject because we, I haven’t tackled, I’ve been working on a product that we could deliver like an affordable product that we could deliver to people that are working from home to provide, you know, QOS, maybe some sort of security edge route or some sort of SD-WAN piece that would provide, you know, secure kind of cloud access, I guess. But. fascinating. What were the number one issues? Well, number one, number two, number three, what were the major issues that you’re running into where they had to call their, whether they had to call their ISP, whatever it is, but what were the main issues that people are running into with their home networks? This will be helpful. What can we bang out? Like, let’s bang this out.
Speaker 1 | 03:16.986
The number one issue was people didn’t know their wifi password. That was biggest by and large is, oh, well. my computer has been hooked up to my wifi for 10 years and I don’t know the key anymore. Like, okay, but we can’t help that. That was the biggest issue.
Speaker 0 | 03:32.695
Like stick a pencil in the back of the router box and reset it and go.
Speaker 1 | 03:37.697
We had a couple of those. Yeah. There was a couple of times like, okay, well how many, how many devices do you have? Or do you have a bunch of smart devices? Do you have 19 televisions are hooked up to this thing? Okay, well, get ready to go run around the whole, the whole house. Or, you know, some people. they were actually new to the wireless. Some people didn’t have Wi-Fi, which blew my mind. I’m like, it is 2020 at the time it happened. And I’m like, you don’t have wireless in your house? Like really? Nope, you just have cable TV. Oh boy. So a lot of people had new routers that they had just set up for the first time. So getting them to understand what Wi-Fi was, you know, these people who are just used to coming into work and log into their desktop and going on with their day. what blew my mind as well you know um it happens yeah yeah some of those people some of those people we were able to get uh cell phones and you know they can go into wireless hotspots to connect that way but it was a lot of training and i think it was really good for my staff as far as a end user perspective to really see where everybody lies like understand those nuances in skill set whereas you know you come from an it background and you have this level of technical skill and then you have to work with somebody who is so not tech savvy which is nothing against them you know it’s that’s just not their job so being able to bridge that gap I think that really helped my guys with their customer service abilities not that they were bad by any means before they were awesome
Speaker 0 | 05:06.607
um but that’s what’s by and large the biggest issue that had there had to have been some great laughs there just had to have been not not at other people’s expenses of course but there had to have been there had to have been like this guy’s living off the grid this guy’s off the grid so if they had cable television did they at least have like you know dial up what they have how were they connected at all they just had they had their iphone that
Speaker 1 | 05:35.451
That was it. They had their Samsung, whatever smart device they had. They just had that. That was their portal to the world. It almost makes me jealous. Like, I’m a big fisher. I love going on my boat. And I’m like, man, I wish I could consciously unplug that much.
Speaker 0 | 05:49.979
Yeah. Yeah, because even when you’re out on the boat, yeah, you should leave the phone. I don’t. That always reminds me back in the day because I have kids. Yep. I just can’t imagine not being able to not get a hold of my kids and not know where they are. And I think back to my childhood and my mom used to just let me and like Mika Tornikowski walk down into the woods to like, you know, three, five miles into the woods, walk around the pond, like even camp overnight. Like with no contact whatsoever.
Speaker 1 | 06:31.102
Yeah, growing up. I grew up in the early nineties. We, uh, we had four wheelers, we had bikes and we’d go all over the place. And my mother would essentially kick us out in the morning and be like, okay, go do something for the day and go, don’t come back to the streetlights come on. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 06:44.030
And when I got older, snowmobiles, yeah, it was snowmobiles, dirt bikes. Jeez. It was walking through the woods with shotguns, like 16 year old kids with shotguns. I mean like what?
Speaker 1 | 06:57.120
Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s crazy. I mean, now you can’t even fathom that. Thank God.
Speaker 0 | 07:02.599
it’s ridiculous i mean i i miss those days you know not just being disconnected but at the same time if that was still the world i probably wouldn’t have a job so this is this is great so number one was forgetting wi-fi password number two was just no internet at all that’s amazing what there’s got to be something that was actually like somewhat it challenging yeah so the the most difficult part i say for our users
Speaker 1 | 07:32.547
Not so much for us in IT, it was VPN, the virtual private network, is making them understand that they need to have their VPN enabled in order to get to the resources that are housed in the data center. You know, so that making them understand, hey, you need to open up this highway if you want to access your data or you need to access these levels of, you know, these programs or whatever. That was a big disconnect with some of our users. They just didn’t understand what the VPN was until we trained them on it. And then they understood, okay, when we put it in layman’s terms of, hey, you need the highway to connect back. Okay, that makes sense. So I would say that was the most difficult piece from a technical perspective.
Speaker 0 | 08:17.497
So they needed to know the why behind IT. That’s interesting. Some people don’t need to know the why. They’re just like, okay, I’ll do it. But they needed to know the why. How did you do that training? How did you send that out to the masses?
Speaker 1 | 08:33.490
So that was included in our new user guide. We really would take a lot of one-on-one calls. We set up kind of a hotline, a work-from-home hotline that our users could call anytime they had issues. And then we had one or two dedicated guys. If that’s their job for the day is to work on that hotline. They know they’re going to be running into some real novel issues. so we made sure you know that they were equipped and they had their team behind them um luckily we didn’t have to go out to anybody’s homes and help them set anything up but you know that was offering that level of support the direct level of dedicated support to them as well as documentation was able to kind of get them over that hump and to the point where they learned okay you know now i understand what to check and what’s going on um all our devices have native vp But when they did drop off or you pass a reset and you have to enter it in, you enter it in here and not there, they happen from time to time.
Speaker 0 | 09:31.890
I want to ask you what you did for phones.
Speaker 1 | 09:35.032
So we have a mobile device management system. We have an Android system for all of our field users. So we were able to get our hands on a bunch of Samsung. There were S10 devices and S9s. And we were able to twin those to people’s extensions and then deploy them out that way.
Speaker 0 | 09:53.439
You said twinning. You don’t have Mitel, do you?
Speaker 1 | 09:56.303
Nope. No, we use Avaya.
Speaker 0 | 09:58.928
Okay. Do you still have an Avaya PBX or is it some sort of hosted?
Speaker 1 | 10:04.717
It’s a PBX. So it’s, well… It’s actually a hybrid. So we have a server in our data center as well as a hosted backup server in the ISP’s cold mode.
Speaker 0 | 10:17.472
Are you guys a Microsoft shop for Teams and stuff like that?
Speaker 1 | 10:20.934
Do you use Microsoft? Oh, yeah. We love Teams. We were using, I don’t know if you know, Novell. We used to have group-wise email. We had Novell Messenger for the longest time. Yep. And, you know, we got Office 365. We love it. we rolled out Teams right before COVID hit, but now we use it constantly. We use it for everything from documentative, intense messaging. That’s a fantastic program.
Speaker 0 | 10:46.470
It is. I do think it’s going to take over. I do believe. If I had to, if I had to, you know, if there was a gun to my head, I guess I’d go Microsoft as what’s going to, you know, after the dust clears and all the telecom providers kind of disappear over time, I think it’s going to end up being Teams. You, do some consulting on the side.
Speaker 1 | 11:08.363
I do.
Speaker 0 | 11:10.165
And I believe that most IT managers, leaders, CTOs, CIOs should do something on the side because I think there needs to be some sort of, and I don’t know why you do it, but for me, it could just be money. It could be because you love technology. For me, I believe that having some sort of… form of residual income or nest egg or other form of income is a smart thing to do. So just curious what kind of consulting you do on the side and why you do it.
Speaker 1 | 11:46.228
It’s mostly cybersecurity and infrastructure. I do a little bit of business analysis, a little bit of marketing, kind of a whole mixed bag, but mostly it’s cybersecurity. Most of my clients are either government or municipalities. they’ll hire me to come in and do uh cyber security education uh what is phishing talk about hacking and all that stuff do it for their staff and then uh my other clients are infrastructure clients so mostly small businesses will help you know all they got is a a little uh we’ll call spectrum router or modem and that’s all i have and they don’t really understand you know what av is or why they need some type of firewall how easy it is to break into their system um so I kind of do run the whole gambit there. I try to stay out of the big stuff. I don’t really go into GDPR, GCCI or anything like that. Mostly small to medium sized businesses that I can help out. And I do it really for three reasons. The first is it’s kind of where I got my start in IT. I started off as a printer technician years ago, and we can get into that later. The second really is to keep myself abreast of everything that’s going on in the environment. in technology as a whole because being in healthcare isolated the HIPAA and you’re isolated all these you know specific rules and regs you have to follow and then you kind of lose sight of everything else in the environment in the industry so if I’m working with an insurance client you know I have to understand the insurance side of money working with a banking client or finance client I have to understand the FS rules you know it kind of keeps you sharp and it keeps you looking at things from different perspectives. Oftentimes in my full-time job, I say, Hey, you know, I did this for a client three years ago, let’s try this. And it really helps you later on. And I think really everybody should do at least, well, at least in IT, some level of contracting, even if it is being a printer tech, you know, it helps you to really understand the technology that’s out there. And you never know what’s, how it’s going to help you later on.
Speaker 0 | 13:55.306
Yeah. Great answer. The Which leads me to, I forget to do this all the time. I do need to take a, it’s not really a commercial break, but I do need to remind people that I need you to go. If you like this show and you like what Dissecting Popular IT Nerds is doing, the main way that podcasts gain traction is through Apple podcast reviews. So if you could be so kind to Google Dissecting Popular IT Nerds and go to Apple Podcasts, scroll to the bottom and give us your honest review, please. We do want your honest review. And we did make the top 40 podcasts of 2021 that are a need to listen to. The link is on the website in one of our last episodes. So if anyone really wants to see us actually growing, that’s there. So moving on. What was your first computer?
Speaker 1 | 15:01.316
A Compaq. I don’t even remember the model number anymore. We bought it, my father bought it in the year 2001, I think it was. It had 32 bags of hard drive space.
Speaker 0 | 15:21.054
Nice.
Speaker 1 | 15:22.635
And we used to play, I think it was Swingo, on some old little system, but I was too young to remember that. But yeah, that was our first home computer. The first computer I took apart, My father was a police investigator, and I decided when I was about 10 years old or so to take apart his investigation computer. Police department was not happy about that.
Speaker 0 | 15:50.592
Man. What was it like growing up in that house? Stressful?
Speaker 1 | 15:57.477
Yeah, it was a little intense. He was, you know, he was an investigator. He was also an interrogator, so getting in trouble was… It was kind of intense. He’s mellowed out over the years,
Speaker 0 | 16:08.383
but he’s always a great dad. No complaints. Well, my brother’s the fire chief, so he can be a little bit intense too. I love that. We get in trouble, you go through a full interrogation. Look, I know people very, very well. I do this for a living.
Speaker 1 | 16:29.036
Yep. I remember when I was little, I was like maybe six or seven. I told him that, you know, if he did something, I was going to call the police. He looked at me and was like, I am the police. I’m like, shit. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 16:46.244
Oh, man. So we have a section of the show called That’s a Stupid Thing. What is one of the dumbest things that we’ve seen nowadays in technology come up that you can think of?
Speaker 1 | 17:04.096
So, like What a user’s doing? I don’t know,
Speaker 0 | 17:10.341
it could just be any stupid thing Anything you saw and you’re just like That’s a stupid thing
Speaker 1 | 17:18.048
Oh gosh
Speaker 0 | 17:19.869
I have to think about that one I mean,
Speaker 1 | 17:23.813
we might have already covered it Yeah, there’s plenty of things
Speaker 0 | 17:28.925
I mean, just the fact that someone doesn’t have internet is interesting. That might not be stupid. That might be a really smart thing.
Speaker 1 | 17:35.767
I would say, I mean, it’s a cliche answer, but, you know, people writing down passwords, putting up most notes on their monitor, like that seems pretty stupid. People clicking on Nigerian print schemes, pretty stupid. Most of my answers are going to probably be around security. But a lot of times we take these, you know. people having caps locks and not realizing these caps locks and getting really mad and frustrated that i team because they can’t look into their computer you know those are the stupid things we see all the time but they’re not necessarily stupid because you got to remember you take it from the person’s point of view you know i mean we weren’t always tech savvy so i try to remember back to before i was in it uh you know how much how little i knew so you know you always try to harken yourself back to those times um and you can use them as learning opportunities. So we knew this last pass as a password manager. So somebody that gets caught violating a policy by writing their password down, be like, hey, you shouldn’t do that. Here’s a really easy way to keep everything safe and in one place. And then you introduce them to that. And they’re like, oh, wow, that is much easier than writing something down on a post-it note.
Speaker 0 | 18:46.894
But I’ve got to keep my one master password somewhere. So I’ve got to write that down on a post-it note.
Speaker 1 | 18:53.996
Yeah, you’re going to. you could always have that you always have those people that you know they’re just they’re just i i don’t want to call them luddites but they are very just resistant to change or don’t understand that the controls put in place shouldn’t be bypassed no no they should not i think um actually i’m sorry i just thought of something uh for the stupid thing um because of cobin so people are trying to clean their devices more often. And right after the onset of COVID, we started having laptops coming in with broken keyboards. And we’re like, wonder what’s causing these things. They’re all going bad at the same time, or there’s a bad batch, but no, they’re different batches. So we asked people, what causes? We go, well, I was wiping out a computer with a Lysol wipe, and all of a sudden my keyboard stopped working. And we’re like, did you turn it off first? No. the Lysol liquid was seeping into the system board and causing the keyboard to fry out. So I guess that would be the stupid thing.
Speaker 0 | 20:04.150
That’s good. Someone told me the other day they had someone store a bunch of tablets in a shoebox with a cover on it and they drilled holes in the side to plug in the tablets and it like burnt the building down, heated up overnight and burnt the building, or at least a good section of the building. That was a good one. We should make a top 10 list of stupid things that will help you with technology. 10 stupid things that… we do as humans that will make your technology life easier. For example, is the cap locks on? They don’t write these scripts for no reason. I always use Comcast. I guess I’m going to use Comcast again. When you call Comcast and they’re like, is the power on? You’re like, yes. Look, first of all, yes, the power’s on. I’ve already cycled the router. I’ve already done this. You already know all the questions they’re going to ask, but they do ask those questions for a reason because someone is sitting in there with the router unplugged.
Speaker 1 | 21:11.727
The tower’s on, something like that. Yeah, we have seen those before.
Speaker 0 | 21:20.234
So if you had one piece of advice for anyone out there listening, IT directors, whatever it is,
Speaker 1 | 21:29.538
what would that be well i’m currently going through a hiring phase so i’m going to focus on that um i would say that understand what you can coach and understand what you can teach somebody versus what their incoming skills are so i currently am looking at multiple no i.t background would it be great to have somebody come in with an it experience that can fill that role tier one tier two health desk girl absolutely But is it necessary? What can you teach? I can teach technology all day long. I can teach somebody how to troubleshoot DNS issues or how to troubleshoot hardware issues. I can’t teach a personality. Especially in healthcare, you need somebody with a good personality in order to bridge the gap between the empathetic nurse and the technical IT person. Having a personality of someone who might be a waiter or a customer service rep or a call center rep can go leaps and bounds because a lot of times, you know, these calls you get are, you know, user error. And it’s not the fault of the user. It’s just not there every day. So if you’re able to communicate better, it doesn’t matter what your technical skills are. So from an iron perspective, you know, look at that person without the experience and look at them, look past that and look at their personality and see, you know, how is this. person going to fit my culture because what i’ve seen over my years in it is there seems to have been a disconnect between culture and technology especially in the it department if you’re running a health desk those two are the same because a lot of times when you breed a good culture and you breed your uh your help desk to be personable to have empathy with people who are struggling you’re going to end up having less irate people you’re going to end up having fewer calls because as people are going to want to learn from somebody who is, you know, a pleasure to talk to. It’s like back in high school, if you had a really crappy professor in high school versus a really great professor, you, I guarantee you will have learned more from the better professor than you did from the worst one. So I guess that would be my overall advice is don’t discredit somebody because of the lack of experience.
Speaker 0 | 23:48.565
Yes. You brought me back to high school. I almost had a nightmare. I had a daytime nightmare. It would be great if we had all passionate teachers that made us love getting up and going to school in the morning. That would be revolutionary.
Speaker 1 | 24:10.577
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 24:11.597
So, yeah, if you call the help desk and that person on the other line is joking around with you and making you laugh. That’s very valuable.
Speaker 1 | 24:22.539
Absolutely. It’s emotional intelligence that we’re now learning about as managers and directors, how important it is. I always try to treat my guys fairly. I don’t treat them like they’re under me or they work for me. We work as a team. We always support each other. And I think that’s super, super important is having that emotional. intelligence to understand where people are coming from. Because later on down the road, that’s going to help you out. Because when, you know, when crap hits the fan and you need somebody in your corner to help you out, whether it be a crisis scenario, whether you need, you know, even personal advice, whatever it is. You’re going to have that individual who may not be your friend. You’re not going to go out and have a beer at the end of the day, but you’re, they’re going to understand you at an emotional level versus just a, you know, the traditional boss subordinate relationship.
Speaker 0 | 25:19.416
In the, in the healthcare world. I don’t know about your healthcare world, but the healthcare world, I grew up in healthcare. I grew up in my father’s doctor. He’s a. He’s an MD, he’s a urologist. My uncle is an ophthalmologist. My grandfather is a pediatrician. Even before him, he’s some doctor. My sister is an RN. Her husband is an anesthesiologist. It goes down the line. It’s a very higher, I’ve known there’s a pecking order. In the hospital, there is a pecking order. There is the doctor, there is the nurses, there is all the way down to like the janitor. And it’s almost like a caste system. in the hospital. And what’s it like in the IT world being in healthcare? Do you notice that? I mean, you guys are in home healthcare, so it’s a little bit different. I would say it’s much different, but I would assume you feel it somewhat. Like how does upper management recognize IT as a cost center still? Or are you guys more than just a cog in the machine?
Speaker 1 | 26:26.947
Well, they are. We’ve finally had them realize that IT and information security is not only a cost and it’s a necessity. We’ve explained that you’re investing in your risk mitigation. You’re not investing money just in case something happens. It’s not just a simple security, but we’re mitigating the risk of a $10 million cyber attack from the security side specifically. Form a… IT perspective, we are in a cost center as much as we can help optimize and improve productivity. The more you optimize and improve productivity and reduce utilization or increase utilization, reduce the amount of hours you spend working with patients, the more money you end up making. So if we can prove, say, hey, you know, we can do this project, we can move this item, we can improve this, and it’s going to cut down on our clinicians’work by seven hours a week, that’s a real savings right there. So it’s, I’ve noticed there’s been a shift. I’ve been in healthcare for about four years or so. Before that I was in aviation and before that I was in higher education. So as my IT career progressed, I kind of saw that change. Whereas IT was a true cost center was, Oh, well, we got to buy this because we need the technology and, you know, to really getting a seat at that, you know, that executive table, being brought into the. senior leadership meetings and having them understand that we need to involve them in order to make this project succeed. Right down to something as simple as like user access roles for a third party system. IT has experience in that. They can help streamline that. So you’re not wasting 30, 40 hours, you know, giving access to each specific person. You know, we can help structure and streamline things. So at least at Nesentio, they’ve done a great job of really including us and understanding the need and the value of the organization that we bring.
Speaker 0 | 28:31.864
Is there a certain responsibility of IT to push themselves forward and show that ability to streamline and optimize productivity? And is there any, I mean, don’t you think you need to really be up in their grill almost? Like if you work in an organization where IT is a cost center, I think there’s a… opportunity for it to show that ability to streamline and optimize but you’ve got to be up in people’s grill you’ve got to be there like in meetings you’ve got to be asking questions getting involved and showing you know asking absolutely yeah no you need to include yourself um it’s not something that if if
Speaker 1 | 29:04.947
you as an it director currently work in a place that sees it as a sole cost center they’re not going to just one day have an epiphany and say hey we need to start including bob in these meetings you need to force yourself in there you need to make it known that you and i did the same thing when i started you know at first it was it was seen as a cost center but when i started i came in i started reducing costs i started optimizing they’re like oh wow you know we can leverage this opportunity if you have the ability and you can see opportunities you know go after them pursue them and bring them to your chief operating officer your cio or ceo whoever you report to the president you know go through and say here’s what i can do you know if you involve me more we can do this business. You have to prove your worth just like any, you know, any place it’s, it’s not going to come by you just sitting behind a desk and writing Excel formulas. It’s just not going to happen.
Speaker 0 | 29:57.928
I like that Joe, uh, been a pleasure having you on the show. Uh, thank you so much for offering your advice and story. Uh, I would love the if you do come up with the top 10 stupid things that will make people’s lives easier, we could have that, you know, like don’t check your caps locks, do this, do that. Maybe there’s like a useful list that we could put out there for people to, to deliver. So again, thank you so much for being on the show.
Speaker 1 | 30:25.286
Yeah. Thanks a lot, man. I appreciate it.
Speaker 0 | 00:09.546
All right. Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we are talking with Joseph Chevret. Joe, you know, people call me Philip every now and then. It always sounds funny because I’ve been called Phil for years. Welcome to the show. You are IT Director at Nascentia. health and if i understand that correctly you guys do home health care yep uh we do home health uh visiting nursing um you know it’s pretty much keeping people alive and safe that’s got to be fairly challenging nowadays or there’s got to be at least there’s gonna be some technology involvement with that how did covid affect the technology level there well
Speaker 1 | 00:52.720
luckily we were already really remote um you know vpns uh mobile devices so we’re pretty technology technologically advanced so when cobit hit it wasn’t more it wasn’t really an overhaul it was kind of a pivot so we just took what we were doing already and you know uh kind of expedited that and made it bigger so a lot of people working in the office we do have you know relatively large office staff we assigned them laptops sent them home and they were able to connect that day so there we really didn’t see much downtime um and it’s helped us quite a bit so i know a lot of other health systems were really struggling to meet that need.
Speaker 0 | 01:32.321
That’s cool. And even ability to serve, I don’t know, people working at home and everything. Was there anything that, was there anything considerably that changed or that, that made something easier? You guys were already set and kind of ready to go, but was there, is there any outstanding factors?
Speaker 1 | 01:51.209
I think the hardest thing for most of our staff or remote staff was connecting their home networks. making sure that they were secure. So we wrote up a whole new remote user guide to help people walk through common issues that they might have. We ended up, you know, a lot of calls that we weren’t used to saying, hey, you got to call your ISP for this, your internet service provider. It’s not something that we can fix right away. You know, I think the hardest part for us in IT was my staff not being able to walk over when there was an issue. You know, you can’t just pop over and take a look and see someone’s computer and see. you know, what they’re doing wrong or their caps lock is enabled.
Speaker 0 | 02:31.699
So it’s actually a great subject because we, I haven’t tackled, I’ve been working on a product that we could deliver like an affordable product that we could deliver to people that are working from home to provide, you know, QOS, maybe some sort of security edge route or some sort of SD-WAN piece that would provide, you know, secure kind of cloud access, I guess. But. fascinating. What were the number one issues? Well, number one, number two, number three, what were the major issues that you’re running into where they had to call their, whether they had to call their ISP, whatever it is, but what were the main issues that people are running into with their home networks? This will be helpful. What can we bang out? Like, let’s bang this out.
Speaker 1 | 03:16.986
The number one issue was people didn’t know their wifi password. That was biggest by and large is, oh, well. my computer has been hooked up to my wifi for 10 years and I don’t know the key anymore. Like, okay, but we can’t help that. That was the biggest issue.
Speaker 0 | 03:32.695
Like stick a pencil in the back of the router box and reset it and go.
Speaker 1 | 03:37.697
We had a couple of those. Yeah. There was a couple of times like, okay, well how many, how many devices do you have? Or do you have a bunch of smart devices? Do you have 19 televisions are hooked up to this thing? Okay, well, get ready to go run around the whole, the whole house. Or, you know, some people. they were actually new to the wireless. Some people didn’t have Wi-Fi, which blew my mind. I’m like, it is 2020 at the time it happened. And I’m like, you don’t have wireless in your house? Like really? Nope, you just have cable TV. Oh boy. So a lot of people had new routers that they had just set up for the first time. So getting them to understand what Wi-Fi was, you know, these people who are just used to coming into work and log into their desktop and going on with their day. what blew my mind as well you know um it happens yeah yeah some of those people some of those people we were able to get uh cell phones and you know they can go into wireless hotspots to connect that way but it was a lot of training and i think it was really good for my staff as far as a end user perspective to really see where everybody lies like understand those nuances in skill set whereas you know you come from an it background and you have this level of technical skill and then you have to work with somebody who is so not tech savvy which is nothing against them you know it’s that’s just not their job so being able to bridge that gap I think that really helped my guys with their customer service abilities not that they were bad by any means before they were awesome
Speaker 0 | 05:06.607
um but that’s what’s by and large the biggest issue that had there had to have been some great laughs there just had to have been not not at other people’s expenses of course but there had to have been there had to have been like this guy’s living off the grid this guy’s off the grid so if they had cable television did they at least have like you know dial up what they have how were they connected at all they just had they had their iphone that
Speaker 1 | 05:35.451
That was it. They had their Samsung, whatever smart device they had. They just had that. That was their portal to the world. It almost makes me jealous. Like, I’m a big fisher. I love going on my boat. And I’m like, man, I wish I could consciously unplug that much.
Speaker 0 | 05:49.979
Yeah. Yeah, because even when you’re out on the boat, yeah, you should leave the phone. I don’t. That always reminds me back in the day because I have kids. Yep. I just can’t imagine not being able to not get a hold of my kids and not know where they are. And I think back to my childhood and my mom used to just let me and like Mika Tornikowski walk down into the woods to like, you know, three, five miles into the woods, walk around the pond, like even camp overnight. Like with no contact whatsoever.
Speaker 1 | 06:31.102
Yeah, growing up. I grew up in the early nineties. We, uh, we had four wheelers, we had bikes and we’d go all over the place. And my mother would essentially kick us out in the morning and be like, okay, go do something for the day and go, don’t come back to the streetlights come on. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 06:44.030
And when I got older, snowmobiles, yeah, it was snowmobiles, dirt bikes. Jeez. It was walking through the woods with shotguns, like 16 year old kids with shotguns. I mean like what?
Speaker 1 | 06:57.120
Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s crazy. I mean, now you can’t even fathom that. Thank God.
Speaker 0 | 07:02.599
it’s ridiculous i mean i i miss those days you know not just being disconnected but at the same time if that was still the world i probably wouldn’t have a job so this is this is great so number one was forgetting wi-fi password number two was just no internet at all that’s amazing what there’s got to be something that was actually like somewhat it challenging yeah so the the most difficult part i say for our users
Speaker 1 | 07:32.547
Not so much for us in IT, it was VPN, the virtual private network, is making them understand that they need to have their VPN enabled in order to get to the resources that are housed in the data center. You know, so that making them understand, hey, you need to open up this highway if you want to access your data or you need to access these levels of, you know, these programs or whatever. That was a big disconnect with some of our users. They just didn’t understand what the VPN was until we trained them on it. And then they understood, okay, when we put it in layman’s terms of, hey, you need the highway to connect back. Okay, that makes sense. So I would say that was the most difficult piece from a technical perspective.
Speaker 0 | 08:17.497
So they needed to know the why behind IT. That’s interesting. Some people don’t need to know the why. They’re just like, okay, I’ll do it. But they needed to know the why. How did you do that training? How did you send that out to the masses?
Speaker 1 | 08:33.490
So that was included in our new user guide. We really would take a lot of one-on-one calls. We set up kind of a hotline, a work-from-home hotline that our users could call anytime they had issues. And then we had one or two dedicated guys. If that’s their job for the day is to work on that hotline. They know they’re going to be running into some real novel issues. so we made sure you know that they were equipped and they had their team behind them um luckily we didn’t have to go out to anybody’s homes and help them set anything up but you know that was offering that level of support the direct level of dedicated support to them as well as documentation was able to kind of get them over that hump and to the point where they learned okay you know now i understand what to check and what’s going on um all our devices have native vp But when they did drop off or you pass a reset and you have to enter it in, you enter it in here and not there, they happen from time to time.
Speaker 0 | 09:31.890
I want to ask you what you did for phones.
Speaker 1 | 09:35.032
So we have a mobile device management system. We have an Android system for all of our field users. So we were able to get our hands on a bunch of Samsung. There were S10 devices and S9s. And we were able to twin those to people’s extensions and then deploy them out that way.
Speaker 0 | 09:53.439
You said twinning. You don’t have Mitel, do you?
Speaker 1 | 09:56.303
Nope. No, we use Avaya.
Speaker 0 | 09:58.928
Okay. Do you still have an Avaya PBX or is it some sort of hosted?
Speaker 1 | 10:04.717
It’s a PBX. So it’s, well… It’s actually a hybrid. So we have a server in our data center as well as a hosted backup server in the ISP’s cold mode.
Speaker 0 | 10:17.472
Are you guys a Microsoft shop for Teams and stuff like that?
Speaker 1 | 10:20.934
Do you use Microsoft? Oh, yeah. We love Teams. We were using, I don’t know if you know, Novell. We used to have group-wise email. We had Novell Messenger for the longest time. Yep. And, you know, we got Office 365. We love it. we rolled out Teams right before COVID hit, but now we use it constantly. We use it for everything from documentative, intense messaging. That’s a fantastic program.
Speaker 0 | 10:46.470
It is. I do think it’s going to take over. I do believe. If I had to, if I had to, you know, if there was a gun to my head, I guess I’d go Microsoft as what’s going to, you know, after the dust clears and all the telecom providers kind of disappear over time, I think it’s going to end up being Teams. You, do some consulting on the side.
Speaker 1 | 11:08.363
I do.
Speaker 0 | 11:10.165
And I believe that most IT managers, leaders, CTOs, CIOs should do something on the side because I think there needs to be some sort of, and I don’t know why you do it, but for me, it could just be money. It could be because you love technology. For me, I believe that having some sort of… form of residual income or nest egg or other form of income is a smart thing to do. So just curious what kind of consulting you do on the side and why you do it.
Speaker 1 | 11:46.228
It’s mostly cybersecurity and infrastructure. I do a little bit of business analysis, a little bit of marketing, kind of a whole mixed bag, but mostly it’s cybersecurity. Most of my clients are either government or municipalities. they’ll hire me to come in and do uh cyber security education uh what is phishing talk about hacking and all that stuff do it for their staff and then uh my other clients are infrastructure clients so mostly small businesses will help you know all they got is a a little uh we’ll call spectrum router or modem and that’s all i have and they don’t really understand you know what av is or why they need some type of firewall how easy it is to break into their system um so I kind of do run the whole gambit there. I try to stay out of the big stuff. I don’t really go into GDPR, GCCI or anything like that. Mostly small to medium sized businesses that I can help out. And I do it really for three reasons. The first is it’s kind of where I got my start in IT. I started off as a printer technician years ago, and we can get into that later. The second really is to keep myself abreast of everything that’s going on in the environment. in technology as a whole because being in healthcare isolated the HIPAA and you’re isolated all these you know specific rules and regs you have to follow and then you kind of lose sight of everything else in the environment in the industry so if I’m working with an insurance client you know I have to understand the insurance side of money working with a banking client or finance client I have to understand the FS rules you know it kind of keeps you sharp and it keeps you looking at things from different perspectives. Oftentimes in my full-time job, I say, Hey, you know, I did this for a client three years ago, let’s try this. And it really helps you later on. And I think really everybody should do at least, well, at least in IT, some level of contracting, even if it is being a printer tech, you know, it helps you to really understand the technology that’s out there. And you never know what’s, how it’s going to help you later on.
Speaker 0 | 13:55.306
Yeah. Great answer. The Which leads me to, I forget to do this all the time. I do need to take a, it’s not really a commercial break, but I do need to remind people that I need you to go. If you like this show and you like what Dissecting Popular IT Nerds is doing, the main way that podcasts gain traction is through Apple podcast reviews. So if you could be so kind to Google Dissecting Popular IT Nerds and go to Apple Podcasts, scroll to the bottom and give us your honest review, please. We do want your honest review. And we did make the top 40 podcasts of 2021 that are a need to listen to. The link is on the website in one of our last episodes. So if anyone really wants to see us actually growing, that’s there. So moving on. What was your first computer?
Speaker 1 | 15:01.316
A Compaq. I don’t even remember the model number anymore. We bought it, my father bought it in the year 2001, I think it was. It had 32 bags of hard drive space.
Speaker 0 | 15:21.054
Nice.
Speaker 1 | 15:22.635
And we used to play, I think it was Swingo, on some old little system, but I was too young to remember that. But yeah, that was our first home computer. The first computer I took apart, My father was a police investigator, and I decided when I was about 10 years old or so to take apart his investigation computer. Police department was not happy about that.
Speaker 0 | 15:50.592
Man. What was it like growing up in that house? Stressful?
Speaker 1 | 15:57.477
Yeah, it was a little intense. He was, you know, he was an investigator. He was also an interrogator, so getting in trouble was… It was kind of intense. He’s mellowed out over the years,
Speaker 0 | 16:08.383
but he’s always a great dad. No complaints. Well, my brother’s the fire chief, so he can be a little bit intense too. I love that. We get in trouble, you go through a full interrogation. Look, I know people very, very well. I do this for a living.
Speaker 1 | 16:29.036
Yep. I remember when I was little, I was like maybe six or seven. I told him that, you know, if he did something, I was going to call the police. He looked at me and was like, I am the police. I’m like, shit. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 16:46.244
Oh, man. So we have a section of the show called That’s a Stupid Thing. What is one of the dumbest things that we’ve seen nowadays in technology come up that you can think of?
Speaker 1 | 17:04.096
So, like What a user’s doing? I don’t know,
Speaker 0 | 17:10.341
it could just be any stupid thing Anything you saw and you’re just like That’s a stupid thing
Speaker 1 | 17:18.048
Oh gosh
Speaker 0 | 17:19.869
I have to think about that one I mean,
Speaker 1 | 17:23.813
we might have already covered it Yeah, there’s plenty of things
Speaker 0 | 17:28.925
I mean, just the fact that someone doesn’t have internet is interesting. That might not be stupid. That might be a really smart thing.
Speaker 1 | 17:35.767
I would say, I mean, it’s a cliche answer, but, you know, people writing down passwords, putting up most notes on their monitor, like that seems pretty stupid. People clicking on Nigerian print schemes, pretty stupid. Most of my answers are going to probably be around security. But a lot of times we take these, you know. people having caps locks and not realizing these caps locks and getting really mad and frustrated that i team because they can’t look into their computer you know those are the stupid things we see all the time but they’re not necessarily stupid because you got to remember you take it from the person’s point of view you know i mean we weren’t always tech savvy so i try to remember back to before i was in it uh you know how much how little i knew so you know you always try to harken yourself back to those times um and you can use them as learning opportunities. So we knew this last pass as a password manager. So somebody that gets caught violating a policy by writing their password down, be like, hey, you shouldn’t do that. Here’s a really easy way to keep everything safe and in one place. And then you introduce them to that. And they’re like, oh, wow, that is much easier than writing something down on a post-it note.
Speaker 0 | 18:46.894
But I’ve got to keep my one master password somewhere. So I’ve got to write that down on a post-it note.
Speaker 1 | 18:53.996
Yeah, you’re going to. you could always have that you always have those people that you know they’re just they’re just i i don’t want to call them luddites but they are very just resistant to change or don’t understand that the controls put in place shouldn’t be bypassed no no they should not i think um actually i’m sorry i just thought of something uh for the stupid thing um because of cobin so people are trying to clean their devices more often. And right after the onset of COVID, we started having laptops coming in with broken keyboards. And we’re like, wonder what’s causing these things. They’re all going bad at the same time, or there’s a bad batch, but no, they’re different batches. So we asked people, what causes? We go, well, I was wiping out a computer with a Lysol wipe, and all of a sudden my keyboard stopped working. And we’re like, did you turn it off first? No. the Lysol liquid was seeping into the system board and causing the keyboard to fry out. So I guess that would be the stupid thing.
Speaker 0 | 20:04.150
That’s good. Someone told me the other day they had someone store a bunch of tablets in a shoebox with a cover on it and they drilled holes in the side to plug in the tablets and it like burnt the building down, heated up overnight and burnt the building, or at least a good section of the building. That was a good one. We should make a top 10 list of stupid things that will help you with technology. 10 stupid things that… we do as humans that will make your technology life easier. For example, is the cap locks on? They don’t write these scripts for no reason. I always use Comcast. I guess I’m going to use Comcast again. When you call Comcast and they’re like, is the power on? You’re like, yes. Look, first of all, yes, the power’s on. I’ve already cycled the router. I’ve already done this. You already know all the questions they’re going to ask, but they do ask those questions for a reason because someone is sitting in there with the router unplugged.
Speaker 1 | 21:11.727
The tower’s on, something like that. Yeah, we have seen those before.
Speaker 0 | 21:20.234
So if you had one piece of advice for anyone out there listening, IT directors, whatever it is,
Speaker 1 | 21:29.538
what would that be well i’m currently going through a hiring phase so i’m going to focus on that um i would say that understand what you can coach and understand what you can teach somebody versus what their incoming skills are so i currently am looking at multiple no i.t background would it be great to have somebody come in with an it experience that can fill that role tier one tier two health desk girl absolutely But is it necessary? What can you teach? I can teach technology all day long. I can teach somebody how to troubleshoot DNS issues or how to troubleshoot hardware issues. I can’t teach a personality. Especially in healthcare, you need somebody with a good personality in order to bridge the gap between the empathetic nurse and the technical IT person. Having a personality of someone who might be a waiter or a customer service rep or a call center rep can go leaps and bounds because a lot of times, you know, these calls you get are, you know, user error. And it’s not the fault of the user. It’s just not there every day. So if you’re able to communicate better, it doesn’t matter what your technical skills are. So from an iron perspective, you know, look at that person without the experience and look at them, look past that and look at their personality and see, you know, how is this. person going to fit my culture because what i’ve seen over my years in it is there seems to have been a disconnect between culture and technology especially in the it department if you’re running a health desk those two are the same because a lot of times when you breed a good culture and you breed your uh your help desk to be personable to have empathy with people who are struggling you’re going to end up having less irate people you’re going to end up having fewer calls because as people are going to want to learn from somebody who is, you know, a pleasure to talk to. It’s like back in high school, if you had a really crappy professor in high school versus a really great professor, you, I guarantee you will have learned more from the better professor than you did from the worst one. So I guess that would be my overall advice is don’t discredit somebody because of the lack of experience.
Speaker 0 | 23:48.565
Yes. You brought me back to high school. I almost had a nightmare. I had a daytime nightmare. It would be great if we had all passionate teachers that made us love getting up and going to school in the morning. That would be revolutionary.
Speaker 1 | 24:10.577
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 24:11.597
So, yeah, if you call the help desk and that person on the other line is joking around with you and making you laugh. That’s very valuable.
Speaker 1 | 24:22.539
Absolutely. It’s emotional intelligence that we’re now learning about as managers and directors, how important it is. I always try to treat my guys fairly. I don’t treat them like they’re under me or they work for me. We work as a team. We always support each other. And I think that’s super, super important is having that emotional. intelligence to understand where people are coming from. Because later on down the road, that’s going to help you out. Because when, you know, when crap hits the fan and you need somebody in your corner to help you out, whether it be a crisis scenario, whether you need, you know, even personal advice, whatever it is. You’re going to have that individual who may not be your friend. You’re not going to go out and have a beer at the end of the day, but you’re, they’re going to understand you at an emotional level versus just a, you know, the traditional boss subordinate relationship.
Speaker 0 | 25:19.416
In the, in the healthcare world. I don’t know about your healthcare world, but the healthcare world, I grew up in healthcare. I grew up in my father’s doctor. He’s a. He’s an MD, he’s a urologist. My uncle is an ophthalmologist. My grandfather is a pediatrician. Even before him, he’s some doctor. My sister is an RN. Her husband is an anesthesiologist. It goes down the line. It’s a very higher, I’ve known there’s a pecking order. In the hospital, there is a pecking order. There is the doctor, there is the nurses, there is all the way down to like the janitor. And it’s almost like a caste system. in the hospital. And what’s it like in the IT world being in healthcare? Do you notice that? I mean, you guys are in home healthcare, so it’s a little bit different. I would say it’s much different, but I would assume you feel it somewhat. Like how does upper management recognize IT as a cost center still? Or are you guys more than just a cog in the machine?
Speaker 1 | 26:26.947
Well, they are. We’ve finally had them realize that IT and information security is not only a cost and it’s a necessity. We’ve explained that you’re investing in your risk mitigation. You’re not investing money just in case something happens. It’s not just a simple security, but we’re mitigating the risk of a $10 million cyber attack from the security side specifically. Form a… IT perspective, we are in a cost center as much as we can help optimize and improve productivity. The more you optimize and improve productivity and reduce utilization or increase utilization, reduce the amount of hours you spend working with patients, the more money you end up making. So if we can prove, say, hey, you know, we can do this project, we can move this item, we can improve this, and it’s going to cut down on our clinicians’work by seven hours a week, that’s a real savings right there. So it’s, I’ve noticed there’s been a shift. I’ve been in healthcare for about four years or so. Before that I was in aviation and before that I was in higher education. So as my IT career progressed, I kind of saw that change. Whereas IT was a true cost center was, Oh, well, we got to buy this because we need the technology and, you know, to really getting a seat at that, you know, that executive table, being brought into the. senior leadership meetings and having them understand that we need to involve them in order to make this project succeed. Right down to something as simple as like user access roles for a third party system. IT has experience in that. They can help streamline that. So you’re not wasting 30, 40 hours, you know, giving access to each specific person. You know, we can help structure and streamline things. So at least at Nesentio, they’ve done a great job of really including us and understanding the need and the value of the organization that we bring.
Speaker 0 | 28:31.864
Is there a certain responsibility of IT to push themselves forward and show that ability to streamline and optimize productivity? And is there any, I mean, don’t you think you need to really be up in their grill almost? Like if you work in an organization where IT is a cost center, I think there’s a… opportunity for it to show that ability to streamline and optimize but you’ve got to be up in people’s grill you’ve got to be there like in meetings you’ve got to be asking questions getting involved and showing you know asking absolutely yeah no you need to include yourself um it’s not something that if if
Speaker 1 | 29:04.947
you as an it director currently work in a place that sees it as a sole cost center they’re not going to just one day have an epiphany and say hey we need to start including bob in these meetings you need to force yourself in there you need to make it known that you and i did the same thing when i started you know at first it was it was seen as a cost center but when i started i came in i started reducing costs i started optimizing they’re like oh wow you know we can leverage this opportunity if you have the ability and you can see opportunities you know go after them pursue them and bring them to your chief operating officer your cio or ceo whoever you report to the president you know go through and say here’s what i can do you know if you involve me more we can do this business. You have to prove your worth just like any, you know, any place it’s, it’s not going to come by you just sitting behind a desk and writing Excel formulas. It’s just not going to happen.
Speaker 0 | 29:57.928
I like that Joe, uh, been a pleasure having you on the show. Uh, thank you so much for offering your advice and story. Uh, I would love the if you do come up with the top 10 stupid things that will make people’s lives easier, we could have that, you know, like don’t check your caps locks, do this, do that. Maybe there’s like a useful list that we could put out there for people to, to deliver. So again, thank you so much for being on the show.
Speaker 1 | 30:25.286
Yeah. Thanks a lot, man. I appreciate it.
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