391- Become A Pleasantly Persistent Piranha w/Devon J. Delano

Phil Howard: All right. welcome everyone. Devin. Welcome. And is it Delano? Am I pronouncing that right?

Devon J. Delano: It's Delano with a long a Delano.

Phil Howard: Delano so that's actually a great segue to your first computer. How'd you get started in this? What's your role? What do you do? do you herd cats on a daily basis? And how did you get started in this world of it? What was your first computer? Let's go with that.

Devon J. Delano: the first computer probably realistically, was the TRS eighty. If we're going to talk real computers.

Phil Howard: RadioShack,

Devon J. Delano: Yep, All in one monitor keyboard extravaganza, with maybe twelve K of Ram or whatever it was. five and a quarter inch floppy drives. Yep. Big platter disks. Yep. That that was my first one. What.

Phil Howard: Are we doing that except, like, right, fourth grade papers.

Devon J. Delano: Well, you. That was my first machine that accepted basic, if you remember. Basic, ten print. Hello. Twenty. Go to ten. execute, run bat. And then you got high all over your screen and then super awesome. if you added the tabs, you could get it tiered across the screen. So it looked like it was scrolling, all the cool stuff. Yeah.

Phil Howard: Maybe get a magazine with some, some different programs. You could type into it and make it do stuff.

Devon J. Delano: Yeah. And my father, who was a school teacher, sixth grade school teacher for the longest time, actually subscribed us to a newsletter. And, I coded basic games, which is really exciting when you write three thousand lines of code, and then you got to go figure out what your syntax error is. so? My father was an English teacher, so it wasn't exciting. Like I didn't get to talk about cool science and stuff. but, he would always tell me that I was using the wrong past participle when I was speaking with a group versus, singular or plural, and, that's the wrong tense of that verb, son. so yes, it was that's what it was like having a great English teacher.

Phil Howard: Okay, So we've got the history. It's a good history. How did you end up where you are though?

Devon J. Delano: So that natural progression of course into that to to say the Commodore sixty four, the Apple two. the first IBM PC. Then I started building them myself. back when a four gig Ram stick was was really cool and a fourteen, fourteen. Four modem was the way, did a little bit of gaming with that.

Phil Howard: Fourteen. Four.

Devon J. Delano: Yeah, You see this? It's. I've been around. I can model a modem screech, but most people won't like to hear that, and so then I actually went when it was time to go to college, though, I thought I'd, live the dream and be an architect. And, instead of designing buildings, I was, rebuilding people's PCs in my dorm room. So, fit to, come out of school, join a local startup, it shop, get my mcse cert, and then I get into Cisco networking and, get the weird opportunity to become a manager and, then then this just goes downhill from there.

Phil Howard: then we had to learn it. Then we had to talk to people.

Devon J. Delano: Yeah. I mean, managing tech is great. Managing people is not great. And here we are it director at a shop here up in, in Maine.

Phil Howard: So which is perfect if you don't like to talk to people. But, we have on our bullet points to talk about today, working to avoid being sidelined in the decision making process. And let's just talk about that. Like how so? So you mentioned, you kind of alluded to it earlier, which is like, the tech is easy, like making things work is kind of like what we all do naturally. Right. But yeah, but the IT world has progressed so much that that's just you can't do that anymore if you actually want to be successful, unless you want to just stay on the, I guess, stay in some back room in the help desk or whatever, and even help desk.

Devon J. Delano: Under the stairs.

Phil Howard: You can't do that. Really? Yeah. The people under the stairs. Exactly. There's no bars on your window. how do we work to avoid being sidelined in the decision making process? Or. I guess what's better is, is what happens when you are sidelined from the decision making process.

Devon J. Delano: So, and I'm looking at my notes and it is actually really I did actually take some notes. as it would turn out, I think one of the big things is you've got to put yourself out there, you've got to make yourself available to your leadership, and you need to be an active participant and a frequent participant in staying in touch with your leadership team.

Phil Howard: Like to say in on my team, I like to say you need to get up in people's grills. Yeah, in a good way. In a good way or a pleasant you need to be a pleasantly persistent piranha is another way that we've said this before.

Devon J. Delano: I like that, and it's very clear. I mean, and the good news is that you're usually welcome until you're not. and I think the big points are, when you finally break that, you break that ceiling and you get in there. it is best to listen a lot. the first few sessions before you talk, and when you talk, that first and most important time, you better be poignant. You better have some tangible ideas and tangible, responses. And, you got to be prepared. I always it's we go to a bazillion meetings, right? And that most of them we don't need to be in. so when it's your time, be ready.

Phil Howard: it sounds like you've had some experience with this. Like, maybe you've had some times not being ready or you haven't been poignant. or there's some times that you've learned to be poignant. I mean, do you have any good examples or how do we do this?

Devon J. Delano: Yeah, I mean, it's one hundred percent. so I won't divulge what actually happens, but that just happened very recently. We had a system that needed to be upgraded, and, the production floor thought they, okay, well, this is very easy. We know we have product X and we need to put in product Y. Product Y will do it better. So let's go get it. Okay okay. So they didn't talk to anybody. They didn't vet that out in any way. And all the sudden Product Y's on the floor and product Y doesn't work. Well, why doesn't it work? Well, it doesn't talk to the piece of equipment that the old one did.

Phil Howard: How much was product am I allowed to ask how much was product?

Devon J. Delano: Yeah. Well, let's say there was a it was, more than a Nissan Sentra, but less than a Lexus.

Phil Howard: Okay. Painful. I've had some people ask me before, like, how much can you keep in a cash app? How much can you keep in Cash App before you need to move it to like a wallet? And I always put this way how much money that if you lost it would just be so like it would make you like you'd probably pass out and vomit. You know what I mean? Like this type of thing. Not the amount of money where you'd be like that really is bad. No. How much money would make you, like, have a psychological breakdown. It's on the verge of that much money. Yeah, it's kind of like, really? but, I mean, if you have I mean, if you're a big business and you have money, you're kind of like, ah, why? It's not that bad yet. It's not. It's not ransomware attack bad, but go ahead.

Devon J. Delano: No, not that bad. So you know, but in this case, and then what happens is eventually it bleeds its way up to the top and you have the you have the CEO saying, hey, this system doesn't work. And if you can't get it to work, you call up the vendor and you send it back. Well, I wasn't involved. So not only do I have didn't have the skin in the game, I don't have the leverage. I can't go talk to vendor X and say, hey, your stuff doesn't work. He's going to say, who are you? You didn't sign the check. You didn't. sign the scope of work. I don't have to listen to you.

Phil Howard: Yeah.

Devon J. Delano: So what ends up happening is, on the back end of things.

Phil Howard: I'm the janitor.

Devon J. Delano: I gotta go, get the manual. I gotta pull it up. I gotta find out what isn't working. And this story has a happy ending. We did figure it out. and product y now works, and it's working really well. And in this case, because I got tapped on the shoulder by the CEO, he's aware of it. But going forward, like for example, we're going to look at robotics. I'm in that conversation now. It's two years away.

Phil Howard: Something had to break first in order for you to get. I wonder if we can make up some fake breaking things. And Shane, by the way, is agreeing with you. He's saying. Sounds very familiar. He's saying sounds. these are not unfamiliar things. And it's back to kind of why we're, like, our entire purpose and meaning of this podcast and platform, which is to do to it what the iPhone did to the BlackBerry and change this, change this narrative. Right. But there's still ninety four percent, ninety three to ninety four percent of CTOs and CIOs having a seat at the executive roundtable but not being heard.

Devon J. Delano: Well, and it actually goes down to what I have found too, that's been very effective. Is once you're once your IT director or CIO, whatever gets that gets that seat at the table, it's just as important to have the next level down, have the seat at the next level, management down. So if your director is sitting with the executives, your IT manager better be sitting with department managers because you're going to lose the connection downstream if you don't have that. I have a trusted member. He does attend the department management meetings. And now we have a line of sight. Now the executive strategy boils down to the department manager. How does that impact Joe Average on the floor. So that is a that's a bit of advice I could offer That does help a lot. It's not just it's great if I'm aware of it, but if I can't push it down, I'm not succeeding.

Phil Howard: How do we make. And I do mean make. How do we make our selves heard on purpose, right? And it's not I don't mean it to be like, oh, I just want to be heard because I'm like, special or anything I'm saying because it's very, very important for the for the benefit of the business. How do we make, ourselves be heard in a way that people want to listen to us and be like, why is Devin not here? Who did? Who forgot to invite Devin? Like you're fired. Yeah. Like, how do we make people want to have us in those strategic conversations?

Devon J. Delano: It's an injection in the process. So the way what I mean by that is any strategy or any project should have, a clear and defined aspect of the verticals that it touches. So any if it's a production project, in this case, just because it's a production project, every project should have categories that you have to cross off meaningfully if they do not have an impact in that.

Phil Howard: I'm thinking prior to even a project getting on the table.

Devon J. Delano: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Assessment during the during the assessment phase, what is the IT complement of this of this project. Oh well we don't know because Devin's not here.

Phil Howard: Well what words measurements KPIs things can we bring to the table to ask questions to, demonstrate that we are not business illiterate.

Devon J. Delano: I think the easiest one for us really is, we need to ask for and b explain the return on investment. Okay. if our leadership is is easily can easily iterate that we can easily interject what we need from the IT perspective.

Phil Howard: Example.

Devon J. Delano: So specifically, we're going to add a piece of equipment onto the end of a machine. So what is that? What does that mean? Well, that means that this machine can run twenty five percent faster. Okay, great. What does that mean to the profit profitability? if you don't get a clear answer, it's time to back up before we even talk it. Okay. And I've actually asked this question. Okay. What does that do to the overall profitability of the business? And what and how are we reaching that number? In this case it was a pretty good example. But now we have to talk about okay. Well, has anybody talked about the integration cost. Well what do you mean integration cost? Well, I'm guessing that we're not just going to bring that wheel, that machine on the on the floor, plug in a couple, power cords and have it run, right? now we can. Now we're there. Now we're at the table. Now we're talking about integration. We're talking about hours of work. We're talking about labor. We're talking about people. Do we have technicians. Do we have the team that can do that. Is it vendor driven. Do you know what I mean. Like now the conversation.

Phil Howard: Why that machine to begin with. What's the problem with the old machine? What's the problem we're solving to begin with?

Devon J. Delano: Now we've got a blossoming conversation that we sparked and that feels good. And it's not necessarily it wasn't necessarily driven right on the IT aspect of it. So that's to something in your in your bullet points here. you've got to be aware of business alignment.

Phil Howard: You know what's interesting I've seen this before and really kind of getting down to the challenge and the problem. And if it's not involved in the challenge and the problem at the beginning, we might be solving the wrong problem and we might be solving the wrong problem the right way. Right. And it's like, oh, it's successful. And we're twenty five percent production on that machine area. But if we had asked to begin with like, why are we doing this? Well, because we've got all these other orders coming in and it's not producing fast enough, and we're having whatever it is, we're we're backlogged by whatever time. But I've seen real use cases where I teams come in, looked at an entire production floor. And seeing a production process slowed down due to an inability to batch orders accordingly through whatever some ERP software or lack thereof or anything like that. And we're not able to produce these orders fast enough. But the actual problem was a batching problem, because every time that we did a new order, machines have to be broken down. They have to be cleaned. staff has to be brought in for that. the broom is being stored over here when it should be stored here. And then now we're able to turn machines back up and and now produce the next batch of product, whatever it is. It was different. Okay. So in this make believe scenario, it might be well, let's just buy another machine that does it faster. Right. When in reality the problem was a batching problem. Does that make any sense? Like we just did it faster. But if we had actually done all the small orders in this way, and we took our biggest customers and we served them first, and we produced those orders first because there was like a downtime of like an hour and a half or two hours every time they had to clean machines, but they weren't batching appropriately. And the IT director was able to see that just by watching the shop floor. And he was like, why are like, why did everything stop? And why did they have to do all this and clean all of this. And. He was able to reduce one hundred percent of the temp staff. So they're able to take all the temp staff that they were having to hire to, make these, to produce this and eliminate it entirely just by being more efficient on how they produced orders, whereas in reality they didn't need a faster machine, they just needed better human management. They needed a better they needed a better operations like operations like, they need to be able to like whatever the whole, process is. And every company has like an endless list of like, like for us, it's like, why are we using this to produce the transcript. And then over here in step one and step two, all this to just produce to a simple podcast. And, when you have the right integrator or like technical mind that's involved in the process from the beginning to ask like, well, what's what's the problem? And can we go through this in depth real quick before we get to the implementation and solution? And I think that that's a big thing that happens in it is often we're fixing we're really good at at delivering a result, fixing the wrong problem the right way.

Devon J. Delano: So true. And in fact, what's very interesting about that is what I have learned over thirty years is that one of the biggest if you actually sit down, if you sit down, someone and say, this is off the record, you say, what's what's the deal with you not talking to it? Well, you guys slow everything down.

Phil Howard: Mhm.

Devon J. Delano: Okay. What do you mean by that. Well you stop our, process because you want to go back and you want to look at this, this and this and this and this. And just right to your point Phil. Well, yeah, I want to know the problem that you're trying to fix. Because if I don't if we don't understand this problem, then we are implementing a solution without any backdrop. And that's actually happened. I have firsthand experience on that. I won't give any details of the who's and what's, but we implemented an MDM mobile device management. Yeah. And I actually remember another member of the leadership team saying this is a solution to a problem we don't know we have yet. Wow. Now that is boy your crystal ball is better than mine. Now the end of the problem. The actual root cause of the problem was we wanted a clear way to make sure the company email was off of employees phone when they were terminated. That's like a sixty second stop with an ActiveSync wipe. And we literally implemented a whole suite and pulled it off about six months later for that. So if we don't.

Phil Howard: Think of the prioritization of like the projects that it has given on a, I don't know, quarterly basis. I and I was thinking about this earlier, which is how do we prioritize. Well there's two it's two things. What's a healthy mix of keeping the blinking lights on in the everyday activities to, visionary technology projects to learning and development? There's kind of like these different things that we need. We need to stay abreast of the new technology. We need to keep all the blinky lights on and keep the network up and do all that stuff and answer tickets and keep the men's hand dryer working in the men's bathroom, because we get a ticket for that and the HVAC stuff, we need to do all that. And then we also need to have a certain percentage of our time that's delivered to supporting the business and business growth and scalability and all these different things, and meeting with all the different departments and making sure that they're utilizing technology in the best way to grow the business. And there's not a single department that it doesn't touch. There's an argument that one time they paved a parking lot and that didn't involve it, but I know that someone cut a Po somewhere and that went into an ERP system. So I'd even argue that that's not true. And there's fiber running underneath the parking lot as well. So and I spotlighted Shane's, point here, which is business processes and understandings. In my experience, many top level leaders don't fully understand the business processes. And they really have a difficult time understanding ROI and KPIs.

Devon J. Delano: Which is let's I don't want to talk about that right now, but that's going to I'm going to paraphrase that when we meet, if we get to the AI conversation, because that is super poignant.

Phil Howard: Oh, we're talking about AI today. Sweet.

Devon J. Delano: If we get there.

Phil Howard: All right. But, what's the healthy mix? It's just kind of like, sometimes it's weird, like on the podcast, we go through these, like, themes that kind of from quarter to quarter, we end up like highlighting a certain thing. It's just it's something that just kind of comes up naturally, but like, what's the healthy mix and do we even measure that, or do we just show up to work every day and we're like, hey, we gotta take care of this fire today. And I've had people say, Phil, I'm in a forest fire. This is what the CTO role is like. I'm in a forest fire. Okay? There's fires everywhere. It's just. It's. I'm just literally in the middle of this massive forest fire. There's fires everywhere. I don't care about the fire that I can see way over there. I just care about the one that's burning my leg right now. And I was just like, that's your reality. At an enterprise company with. Four hundred and fifty to six hundred locations globally with maybe forty thousand end users. That's a massive company.

Devon J. Delano: Ouch. See? But nobody wants to talk about that, Phil. I mean, you've I've been in organizations where, they look at the new shiny thing and you forget that your backyard's on fire. I mean, I get what that that person is saying and that person's pain point and, and that's not the IT director or CIO's fault. Typically, that is a failure of the business to understand foundational IT support and operation. If you don't have that, you are just nothing but firefighters, and you will constantly be firefighting, and you're going to have conversations at the executive level of why doesn't it deliver strategic results? Well, that's really hard to deliver a strategic result when my leg is on fire. And but executives don't want to hear that. And that's I don't have a magic whistle on that one. I don't I can't just flip a switch and tell you how that, how that happens. But or the answer but it's real and I your that statement you just said hit home so hard because that is, that's just it's.

Phil Howard: Sometimes reality in a larger enterprise too for things that have just been around for so long. When you've got factories everywhere and you've got antiquated stuff and the company's making a crap ton of money and it's like, yeah, I don't care. I mean, I don't care about it. We're doing, like moving on, moving forward as a business.

Devon J. Delano: I've been on a conference call where the global where the global CIO asked, how come? How come we don't have a standard desktop and on everybody's desktop and three four four countries, four hundred employees. Why aren't they all standard?

Phil Howard: Because we have different roles and departments that do different things.

Devon J. Delano: No, but I'm just trying to show that disconnection. And, me and my my.

Phil Howard: Why did you even ask that, though? That's an interesting. The fact that he even asked that is pretty powerful. Why did he ask that?

Devon J. Delano: Well, because.

Phil Howard: He that shows that he has some he thinks he knows what he's talking about. And this is another big problem that we find is the C levels that think they know technology enough. That's dangerous.

Devon J. Delano: He went to a conference and heard the phrase economies of scale, and wondered why it wasn't a proponent of economies of scale. I mean, are you kidding me?

Phil Howard: Why would they not be a proponent of economy, of scale?

Devon J. Delano: But it's nothing to do with it. His whole his whole premise was if we got standardized workstations, then we would be able to get it into the into economies of scale and everything would be okay.

Phil Howard: Then why? Why? I'm just. I'm curious. I'm really curious right now. I just I want to know why he thought that. Well, is it due to deployment? Is it management? Is it security? Is it what is his reason?

Devon J. Delano: The thought was The end user experience would be the same for everyone, so that when they needed to implement new software, it would not be. dramatic and It would never be in disharmony. It would always be the same. So if they wanted to implement.

Phil Howard: Be said about desktop design in the cloud. That's like a conversation we haven't really had yet. But there's a lot to be said about, and it depends on the industry and it depends on what you're doing, for example, healthcare or not. Healthcare. Telehealth. Telehealth, where you might have thousands of doctors all over the world that are all sub technically subcontractors to a telehealth system. And in that case, I can see desktop design being very, very important when you're rolling out a training system or something like that. It just depends on the situation, I guess. Yeah. But in another company you might have people just need different. I mean, like, if it's some kind of, Did you say architecture? You started out architecture.

Devon J. Delano: Well, this company that I worked for was global, and it was. And, you're talking about the difference between business analysts, it techs. Yeah. Straight up, customer service rep salespeople. You know, you run the whole gamut. Like they all use different tools. They all use they all have different expectations.

Phil Howard: I like the idea of standardized desktops, but not one maybe five, maybe like, different categories of, did the sales guys need this? No they don't. They could get by with this. Do the R&D engineers, they get whatever they want whenever they ask and don't care and break all the security rules. That's just a stereotype. and it's just like it's a great.

Devon J. Delano: I like how you call that out. That's just a stereotype.

Phil Howard: That's just like a really interesting. It's just a I that's a that would be a fun that's a good conversation. That's actually an interesting that would be like a good round table discussion like desktop design and standardization of desktops. And where are we moving towards in the future and management of hardware and crap that gets shipped to it? That ends up in a cardboard box in the corner, or a white cabinet with a key on it next to a window.

Devon J. Delano: you get all these fresh ideas for. But it's dependent on your seat at the table. You have to be able to iterate that to your leadership of where you are. I mean, currently, right now where I stand with my, with is that we are fifty fifty right now. we're running the business fifty percent of the time, and we're able to manage we're able to do projects fifty percent of the time. And I am trying to track that, via ticketing and time spent tickets versus time spent projects. it is a fairly large lift. It's worth it, though. It is. worth it if you can get if you can find the metrics, and get them to work in your favor.

Phil Howard: How do you showcase your contributions in, success to the business?

Devon J. Delano: I actually have regular meetings with my staff, so I will meet them at the beginning of the week to talk about the week, and then we will meet at the end of the week to determine, what got done and what we're going to look forward to. That may seem overkill, I find that pace to be good. Then I meet with my executive leadership, twice or twice a month. So every two weeks. Okay. And we have, I call it, we have the running, the running project update list. And on top of that, I actually send my manager a weekly notation that has very high level snapshots of where we are as far as project statuses and current KPIs from the from IT operations. once you establish the template, that is actually really simple to do and extremely helpful because I just had my review and the data is there, it it's there, it's easily established.

Phil Howard: We haven't talked about, mbos in a while, but I was a big fan of anytime, an IT leader or person is willing to put their money where their mouth is or whatever that saying is and say, hey, I will deliver these results. But if I do deliver these results, I want a bonus. If I save the company one million dollars, I would like something. Otherwise, what's in it for me? Yeah, a job you keep your job, guy. Okay, but mbos help drive business revenue. and I just. I don't see it that often. I've, I don't know, do you have have you heard of an MBO? Do you know, have you ever.

Devon J. Delano: I was talking about, what is it? Management, business objectives.

Phil Howard: Yeah. Like, in other words, if you hit certain objectives, you get like a bonus and different things that are tied to performance. And I'm a big,

Devon J. Delano: I don't know if you're looking over my shoulder, but, I mean, that's we've spent the last six months trying to figure that out as an organization, and I'm heavily involved in that conversation as well.

Phil Howard: So I've been accused of being a, a meritocracy. I was like, as opposed to what? Communism.

Devon J. Delano: No, I.

Phil Howard: Mean.

Devon J. Delano: You set your objectives on an annual basis, and you drive to those objectives. And when they change, they change. And as long as you're being clear and consistent with both your leadership and your staff, it isn't really a problem. and it's not a problem for me, but it is a big problem in the industry. That's that's tough.

Phil Howard: so we're going to address Shane's, spotlighted thing here, which is business processes. Understanding. In my experience, many top level leaders don't fully understand, the business processes. As a result, they have a difficult understanding the ROI and KPIs. And you said you had some deep thoughts on that. What's coming to mind?

Devon J. Delano: Well, it was it was kind of about where we are with AI, but touching on this specifically.

Phil Howard: Oh yes. We got to get to AI.

Devon J. Delano: Go ahead. One of the things, one of the things that's paramount for an IT person is you need to understand the widgets, not how to make them, how to fix them, but you need to understand what the widgets are, how they're being made, and what's driving the business objectives around them. And I've spent, you I'm about my third or fourth year in this organization, and it doesn't happen overnight. I mean, but now I have a really good understanding of the business process here and the manage and the manufacturing information system or Mis, even if they say that you don't need to understand it, you do. Don't listen to that. You need to understand it. you need to read some manuals. you need to have a feel of how the modules talk, how they integrated. If you've got one system. Fantastic, right? But I bet you don't. that includes extraneous systems like your shipping modules, your accounting modules, etc.. You don't have to know how to work them. You got to know how they talk and what happens and prioritize system uptime based on those things. So, do the executives understand all that, that I just said to some extent, right. Because they built it or maybe, maybe they built it. In this case, they did. But if you didn't build it, you probably don't understand all that low level stuff, which I think is what Shane is hinting at or what he's saying. If I'm wrong, Shane let me know the.

Phil Howard: Yeah. What you just said is like, if you're telling me that the executives don't know why a folding carton packaging and cardboard boxes or how they're made, or the importance of them and batching all of that, it's how do we make progress in the logistics industry in a meaningful way? I just I mean, you have a very important business right now, considering the number of packages that get delivered to my door every day, let alone everyone else's door. there's got to be some serious strategy and, gaps in leaps and bounds to be made in that industry.

Devon J. Delano: Well, I mean, I'm extremely fortunate. Whereas the leadership here is fully ingrained in the not only the the build out, but the process and the strategy. I don't like to use the word blessed, but I'll use it. they they get it. but I'm kind of hinting at a larger organizations where, if you don't really understand how your role and decision making is actually impact business processes, that's a problem. That's a real problem.

Phil Howard: Yeah. That's a classic, a leadership. I think a lot of leaders just make multiple decisions that are either bad or not timely, or too many decisions too fast. I only know from my own. I'm like, I'm the guy that's always learned everything the hard way. I've learned everything. And I told my kids this, like, just don't be like me. Don't learn everything by mistake, But there's like a lot to be said about that. it's like. Experience. It's kind of like. Like it, like you can't go to college for it and then walk into a business and be successful. You've got to like, have all these weird random things that happen and break, and you've got to be curious and you've got to understand, like, how did that happen? And this weird trace routes and all kinds of stuff that's just like, you learn by doing. the leadership, making bad decisions as leaders. And I think what I've learned is that It's very easy to get excited about, new technology, shiny objects and or ideas, and it can completely derail you off of your main vision and purpose, which would be make boxes and sell boxes to said people and deliver packages and boxes and do more of that better, faster, cheaper, like, whatever it is. Right. And we could completely derail onto an AI project that may or may not be the number one thing that we need to focus on right now, but it sounds really exciting and we end up fixing again the wrong problem, a very, very good way. And I know that we've been derailed with social media projects and other things that we thought would be cool to do in a community, like training programs and stuff. And but at the end of the day, what do we want to do? We want to we want it to be heard by executive management, and we want to move to two podcasts a day, and we want to get more people heard better, faster and increase people's executive brand. It's very, very easy to get derailed a thousand different ways with a bunch of different projects that slow down that main vision. So I think many leaders do that. I think they've got many things that kind of derail them. And we need technology people really well grounded technology business leaders to keep that can know the business, know the vision of the business and keep it focused and say, no, this is not the time for that. This is a bad technology decision or this is going to overload us and take us off of, some scalability path or something.

Devon J. Delano: Mhm.

Phil Howard: so moving on to like these, issues Give me a prediction eighteen months from now that everyone will be talking about that. We didn't expect like people to be talking about.

Devon J. Delano: Okay. First. Well to your point, do you are you a football fan, Phil?

Phil Howard: I grew up in Massachusetts, so I have had the pleasure of being a Tom Brady. having Tom Brady long for many years until he left, but. Well, kind of. I'm not like a, I'm not like one of those guys that's like constantly I'm not doing fantasy football. I'm not like, trading. I'm not that deep.

Devon J. Delano: So one of my favorite coaches is the LA Rams coach Sean McVay.

Phil Howard: Okay.

Devon J. Delano: So what I don't know if you've ever watched him against with whatever team he's playing. There is a gentleman as a member of the organization of the Rams football team whose job it is to keep Sean McVay on the sideline. Mm.

Phil Howard: Exactly.

Devon J. Delano: That's part of his job.

Phil Howard: Perfect example.

Devon J. Delano: So that is who we are as as IT leaderships. When our.

Phil Howard: What happens if he leaves the sideline?

Devon J. Delano: Bad things happen.

Speaker 3: I'm just saying like what happens? Like

Devon J. Delano: He gets right but he's excited and he's into it. And that just happened. And I want to be a part of that. And I'm going to go get it. And he runs out there onto the field. And then you see this guy coming right behind him reaches. And he actually has a little thing on his pants that he can grab. And he pulls him back onto the sideline. And then ten minutes later he does it again now.

Phil Howard: And someone thinking it from the outside would be like, how can he not just control himself? And we're like, you don't understand. It's just built into the DNA. People don't even notice sometimes that they're doing something.

Devon J. Delano: That's right. So and I want that kind of passion in my leadership, but I also want the understanding of, hey, why did Devin just pull me back? What's going on? And I need to have established that trust over time that I gotta listen to this guy, And this is where we're at with AI. AI is shiny, and it's a bubble, and it's amazing. And everybody's excited about it because they can sit down and they don't need to talk to anybody that isn't going to agree with what they say and do exactly what they say and give them all these cool functions and give them these new ideas. And in eighteen months, and I want to be wrong. Phil, in eighteen months, I sense a huge amount of corporate regret as they have lost human capital as they have ditched human capital in lieu of AI solutions.

Phil Howard: Yeah, I agree, except I think coming with that is not going to be any regret. I think coming with that is going to be we dumped human capital. I had a fast gain, fake gain, albeit. And then I said, see ya. I'm going to go somewhere else.

Devon J. Delano: Um.

Phil Howard: So I think it might be. I don't know, because I think people are going to find a way to. kind of like, not have a massive economic recession type of thing or a bubble blow up. I think they're getting really good at kind of morphing into another story and moving investment money here and there and VC money. This is just my thought. But it could be a massive bubble. And then we see the weaknesses of, that it wasn't really an AI gain. It was a fake excuse to lay off people. and like, kind of tell a story because there's a lot of, Kind of like marketing, narrative.

Devon J. Delano: I mean, but in a way, I don't think that they believe it's fake. I honestly believe that leadership will believes there's tangible business savings and productivity increases in AI implementation.

Phil Howard: But if we lay people off and it doesn't work, we just laid people off.

Devon J. Delano: That's right, one hundred percent. I mean, and that's why I think it's going to be in eighteen months. it'll be a regret. They'll be human capital debt. I like to I like to use the word technological debt. There'll be some tech debt as well. and I see it as the reason I am in this is because I experienced this before, and basically I measure this by the number of emails I get per day from companies telling me that they're going to help manage, guide, strategize you into the whatever the latest thing is,

Phil Howard: So what's the big AI theme for you.

Devon J. Delano: Generative AI right now.

Phil Howard: Okay, so generative AI, I get that. But what's the big. So an agent that's going to do what for a box manufacturer.

Devon J. Delano: Well they don't care. They don't care what industry they're in. They're just coming to they want to blow in your doors and they want to say, we're going to use AI to streamline your business processes. We don't know what they are, but that doesn't matter. AI will figure it out. That's that's the sales pitch, Phil. I mean, that is really what I'm experiencing.

Phil Howard: And people have got a niche a lot better than that. Well, yeah, I mean.

Devon J. Delano: That's and I just don't see this as tangible. The other, the other aspect of this. and I just want to hit it on this because we only have nine minutes left. one thing that I am really struggling with is as I round buildings, and I've talked to some of my colleagues who have IT management as well. You can't walk by stations without seeing an AI website up, and you're going to see topics about things as things ever generate a spreadsheet that shows. That gives me a graph of of this. I need to tell my boss that I'm late on my project. How do I do that in a, business, in a positive light? these are the prompts that I'm seeing in the web browsers, right? Yeah. So I'm all for productivity and I'm all for, imaginative ways to use the tools. But where this gets really, really bad is now I'm seeing AI generated resumes and cover letters.

Phil Howard: Yep. And you say, where do you see what we do for you after this episode?

Devon J. Delano: Interview scripting?

Phil Howard: Yeah. Answer questions.

Devon J. Delano: Interview scripting like. Sure. What you know there. What do you think that you're going to get asked at this interview? Okay, well, here's a generative AI answer for you. And I'm just like, I'm not hot. I'm not hiring AI If I want an AI solution, I'm going to go get it from these thousands of vendors that are talking to me. I want to hire you to sit in a machine and do this. I think this is really, really dangerous.

Phil Howard: I'm happy to provide an aggregator and aggregation. we have, just a little shout out to devs. AI who was on the show and my partner company purchased them. App Direct purchased them, who am a partner for. But they provide basically an aggregated dashboard of all of the usual suspects. So, what open AI grok, Claud? Google Gemini. even the the Chinese one. Why am I forgetting that? All housed in private Amazon. Some. Many are housed in private Amazon web servers and with a guaranteed. I think Soc2 compliant or whatever the security levels are. And the reason why that's so important is so that you can a be trust that your data is not being like, Llms are not learning off your data. Second thing that's important is, an ability to dip into if you have clean data, a single source of data, or multiple sources of data, to help your staff, but in your very simple, in use case, it allows it or administrators to see what activity your end users are doing with AI, not only the queries and all of that and see what they're using it for. kind of like just like you might if you guys are Either be wired or you guys provide company provided cell phones, whatever it is. Just like an MDM. Like, I you can when an employee leaves, you have access to their email, you have an ability to wipe their cell phone and everything. So guys, as a company policy, you can use AI in a secure, safe and secure way. And this is will give you access to every single Lem. Here it is. Go have at it. Not only that, you can build you can build agents that would be potentially helpful in your industry. but, yeah, the AI things So eighteen months from now, you're saying there's going to be a lot of regret.

Devon J. Delano: That's what I think it's.

Phil Howard: Going to be. Eighteen month regret marker. We need to name that the eighteen AI regret.

Devon J. Delano: Has anyone predicted AI. his own? I'm sure they have asked AI where they think they'll be in eighteen months.

Phil Howard: So yeah, I mean, I think where we are making leaps and bounds is the the dev space and like, and the coding space, I think that that's where it's we learned AI by using AI and by playing with it. And I think the more you use a tool, the more you use it. Then you find out how people are really using a tool. It's kind of like we delivered this app to the end users, but they're using it for this, not even the intended reason. And then, so with that being said, What is we can do it this way. I'll give you well, let's do these two things. What's the one thing that you wish every. business leader would know about it. Leadership. What's the one thing that if they could hear this one thing, what would that be?

Devon J. Delano: I have an interesting just this is sort of a moniker about it. The one thing that I always find interesting about dealing, being an IT leader is everybody. And I mean everybody outside of it has suggestions on how it can run better, but it is almost never asked on how the other businesses can run better. So that's the one thing that you need to know, is it leaders. We want to have more efficient IT shops. We do, but we want we would prefer to help you run better and we have ideas.

Phil Howard: Maybe we should just offer those up like, hey, I noticed, you could sell three times more things if you just did this.

Devon J. Delano: So

Phil Howard: Well, I'm trying to like, re paraphrase it. So it's the question is like what's the most important idea that you wish every executive would understand about modern it. And it's that everyone thinks it could be doing better. Everyone's like has something to say about the IT department, but the IT department has something to say or something to offer every single one of your departments. And generally.

Devon J. Delano: They don't. Generally they don't want to hear it.

Phil Howard: You should be inviting them to the conversation. Yeah. It's not criticism. it's amplification.

Devon J. Delano: Right. It's cooperation. It's not criticism. It's cooperation. Okay. That was one you said you had two.

Phil Howard: Yeah. Yeah. And so now the opposite the flip is what's one lesson that every CTO or IT leader should should know? We can do it another way too. And and we've talked kind of talked about this throughout the show, but like, what's if you could fix one big challenge in it leadership, tomorrow, like what would it be. And you're not allowed to say, I mean, it's a similar thing, right? It's kind of like what do most CIOs get wrong? That's obvious that you think is obvious.

Devon J. Delano: it's making sure that The right people matter the most. and it you see a lot of people fail up. I'm sure you've heard of that before.

Phil Howard: No, please. Please enlighten me. Please.

Devon J. Delano: I've never heard of fail up.

Phil Howard: I mean, I've heard fail forward.

Devon J. Delano: But when,

Phil Howard: If that if that's what you're talking about, then yes.

Devon J. Delano: Leadership does.

Phil Howard: Not happen.

Devon J. Delano: When leadership does not have a good track record, but they get promoted anyway.

Phil Howard: Oh, okay.

Devon J. Delano: Failing upwards.

Phil Howard: Okay, so why.

Devon J. Delano: Stop doing that?

Phil Howard: Why are you saying stop promoting people that did it the wrong way? Or are you saying like this is the big thing? Like, so who are we promoting that did everything the wrong way.

Devon J. Delano: That's right. this is a big problem in it. we get so fixated on the guy that does it really well and he wants to move up, but we won't let him because we need him to do that. We need him to make this or we need him to to manage that. And we can't move him up. But yet we're going to move other person up who has a notoriously poor record as opposed to this person, because we don't know what to do with them, but we can't fire him because they're not doing bad enough that we gotta fire them. So we can't keep them there. This is a thing.

Phil Howard: This is a real thing.

Devon J. Delano: Oh, yes. There's another podcast for you. Does this happen? Oh, one hundred percent.

Phil Howard: This is definitely going to be a Greg. Take note of this. This is we need to do a survey of this. How many people have seen someone that should have gotten fired but got promoted instead?

Devon J. Delano: I love it.

Phil Howard: That's crazy. That's the wildest thing I've ever heard. I'm just trying to think of how that would happen.

Devon J. Delano: Tell you what. Pulse, some of your participants. And see if they know.

Phil Howard: It's really ironic that you said pulse because we built an app like over a weekend and it's named pulse.

Devon J. Delano: I know that.

Phil Howard: Crazy.

Devon J. Delano: You're researching me. I'm researching you. both ways.

Phil Howard: It's That's really kind of like a mic drop for the end of the show that's never come up. It's really great. You actually silenced me. It doesn't happen that often. I'm really scratching my head on this one. Devin Delano, you've been heard.

Devon J. Delano: Thank you. Phil, it's been my pleasure.

Phil Howard: All right, Have a wonderful day, man.

Devon J. Delano: Okay.

Phil Howard: We'll talk soon. Bye.

Devon J. Delano: Bye bye.