Calculus of IT - Episode 32 - 9/17/2024 - "The Pros and Cons of Citizen Developers"

Mike and Nate, along with very special guest Bill Bartlett, parse the pros and cons of citizen developers in the organization.  We discuss the guardrails and risks and the benefits of having employees take the reins of development for their improvements.  It's a lot more complicated than you think, and the answer is not to simply prevent the behavior of citizen innovation and development.  Listen along and pick up some handy tips for working with folks who are apt to make things better (and worse).  We also discuss Nickelback and IT Budgets.  

Transcript

Mike Crispin 00:02 
Okay. 

Nate McBride 00:03 
Hey, look at what we have here. It's almost like Nickelback got together back together. You guys are. 

Mike Crispin 00:12 
I think kind of like pseudo working together again. I just watched a documentary. It was unbelievable. It's like a year. 

Nate McBride 00:22 
Ben, is that actually 

Mike Crispin 00:24 
That's Creed, that's Creed. 

Nate McBride 00:28 
Well, I 

Mike Crispin 00:33 
That's, that's, that's Nickelback. 

Nate McBride 00:37 
Uh, what, what are nickel, what did they call nickel back? Like fan people, uh, nickel army. 

Mike Crispin 00:48 
the Friends of Nickelback. 

Nate McBride 00:50 
Nicolette's. Nicolette's. Nicolette's is a gum. Oh my god, there's my dog. Hey Ginger. Oh my god, you're shaved. Hi. My dog is shaved. All right. We're starting. We're getting going, so. All right. Let us. 

Nate McBride 01:14 
So this is what episode 32? Episode 32 of the calculus of IT podcast. Look at us. This is two weeks in a row for us, Mike. We haven't done two weeks in a row since. 

Speaker 3 01:28 
uh... 

Mike Crispin 01:29 
It really is amazing, this is a good streak we get going here. 

Nate McBride 01:35 
And here we are. We're in New England about the start our third summer. Today was 84 degrees, I think. And we're just gonna skip fall, go right into winter. 

Mike Crispin 01:48 
Python thing. What's that? Isn't that a Monty Python date? Robins, minstrels and all that stuff. You remember the Monty Python, the holy grail, they skipped a lot of the spring. What did he say? They skipped, winter gave a miss and they went directly into spring or something along those lines. 

Mike Crispin 02:11 
You remember that? 

Nate McBride 02:13 
I went to Python and I know the holy grail but you just went way over my head with that obscure reference. A little bit of a deep cut there. 

Bill Bartlett 02:20 
Holy Grail. 

Nate McBride 02:23 
Yes, I know the Holy Grail, like the life of Brian, I know those. I get it. 

Mike Crispin 02:29 
Yeah, I think I remember seeing if I can't. Winter gave spring and summer miss. Remember that? Yeah, I remember it. Like full quote is, like I saw it yesterday. Winter changed into spring, spring changed into summer. 

Mike Crispin 02:49 
Summer changed back into winter and winter gave spring and summer miss and went straight on into autumn. 

Nate McBride 02:57 
Well, that's not really relevant to what I was saying. I was saying we're gonna skip autumn and go right to winter. 

Mike Crispin 03:02 
Yeah, but this is just different, different mixing up the seasons a little bit there on you, but that's the same type of thing, I think. 

Nate McBride 03:10 
Okay, maybe we'll cut that part out. No, you won't. You'll leave it in. So, um, anyway, episode 32 with us is a special guest, Bill Bartlett. Bill. Bill, how are you, man? Good. Thank you. Not yet been subject to this podcast. 

Nate McBride 03:31 
I mean, maybe you've seen it unlikely. Um, hold on. Kevin's texting me. Um, maybe you've seen it or you've even, maybe you've heard of it. The fact that it exists. Yes. Definitely. And you came on, which is somewhat job delimiting in terms of your career. 

Nate McBride 03:53 
I'm just going to put that like things, things can maybe not go so well for you after this. 

Speaker 5 04:00 
Okay. I'll throw over some willing to take. 

Nate McBride 04:02 
But we're glad that you're here, you're, you're aware right now. 

Speaker 5 04:07 
Uh, Everett, my house in Everett. 

Nate McBride 04:10 
Not physically at a company. Oh, MBX, Bioscience. And you're the head of IT. Yeah, I am. Global head of IT. 

Speaker 5 04:20 
Uh, no, yeah, I guess technically, but we don't have a global. 

Nate McBride 04:24 
presence but you could send like an email to somebody in the UK if you want yes you haven't blocked the rest of your system 

Mike Crispin 04:34 
from Japan or something. 

Speaker 5 04:36 
Yeah, I can even email someone on the space station and be universal ICD. Oh, that's true. I don't want to live with myself. 

Nate McBride 04:45 
keep sitting there. I didn't realize I'm not even universal. If I interviewed email, somebody in the space station that it gets to get bounced back. Guys not to love it. That's right. Yeah. We got a real we got a real IT professional here. 

Nate McBride 05:00 
We better watch ourselves Mike. So hey, by the way, before we get started today's happy. Today's it professionals day, professional day. Yep. Did you get your it happy it professionals day cake? I did not. 

Mike Crispin 05:16 
It was a huge celebration in my office. It was? No. 

Nate McBride 05:25 
The, did you actually know it was, it was IT professionals day. 

Mike Crispin 05:29 
I read the script. 

Nate McBride 05:33 
from now on I'm not sharing the scriptures to you you didn't and so no one in your office celebrated it I got it we got tacos sent to us and the time and the appreciation channel on our slack is some are all right HR lead recognize this go lots of tacos I mean not real tacos real tacos would have been something but emoji tacos is pretty close to those but yeah better than no taco leaderboard right yeah I mean I know you guys didn't get any tacos so I feel kind of superior to you in that way 

Mike Crispin 06:09 
Definitely. 

Nate McBride 06:10 
I feel like a little bit more recognized in terms of my IT contributions. I mean, I don't know what you're doing at your companies, but I know at mine, we got it together. And no appreciation. They appreciate the fact that we have one copy machine. 

Nate McBride 06:25 
And I don't fill the trays all the time. 

Speaker 3 06:29 
Thank you. 

Nate McBride 06:30 
It's a 

Mike Crispin 06:30 
Appreciate it. No toner to replace the toner in any of the... I don't rush to replace... 

Nate McBride 06:35 
the toner, it does get replaced. I think people now just replace it themselves because they don't really want to wait for it to be replaced. So it's actually a good thing. I actually should be sending out the happy IT service people day tacos to everybody else in the company because it's backwards. 

Nate McBride 06:54 
Yeah, self -service tacos. self -service tacos. Jesus, that's a brilliant idea. Look at you. A universal IT leader already going out with good ideas. So if you're watching this episode, you probably got here because you Googled, what is the most awesome AF thing on the internet? 

Nate McBride 07:15 
And like number one, through 10 hits on Google. Well, they're all Reddit responses. But number 11 was the calculus of IT podcasts. Or maybe someone told you like, you got to watch these two old dudes embarrass themselves on video. 

Nate McBride 07:33 
And so you wanted to see what it was really like. But either way, welcome to the shit. We're gonna rock your brains tonight with some mind blowing IT leadership reality for you. How about that, Mike? 

Mike Crispin 07:49 
I am excited. The reality is real. It's real real. 

Nate McBride 07:53 
reality. It's real reality. It's not what they were they called a virtual or augmented reality. This is real reality. This is real reality. Yeah, I'm 100%. I'm 100% physical, not digital. Tonight, we're very digital. 

Nate McBride 08:07 
And I am drinking focal banger from the Alchemist. Nice. It's very tasty. I think actually, our new our new tagline, I was thinking about this today, our new tagline for like the show, I think we need like, you know, the home of the sad salad. 

Nate McBride 08:22 
It's awesome. I like AF is awesome. But I was thinking like, how about this? The best podcast on the internet, everything else is shit. Like just, you know, like, that's podcast on the internet, like big bold letters underneath it, slightly smaller. 

Nate McBride 08:42 
Everything else is shit. I put on a shirt. That's 

Mike Crispin 08:48 
The Apple, the Apple thing, the world's best, the world's best podcast. 

Nate McBride 08:56 
world's best podcast ever. Globally, universally, ever. The universe's best podcast. We got to think bigger, Mike. Bill's changed my life to the world, man. It's universal. Is there something? So universe is only our one universe that what's bigger than the universe? 

Nate McBride 09:14 
There's galaxy. Yeah. 

Mike Crispin 09:18 
There's the galaxy. 

Speaker 5 09:21 
I think it's multiverse. 

Mike Crispin 09:23 
All the universes. All the universes. All the universes. I like that. Multiverse. That's a great idea. 

Nate McBride 09:29 
We are the best podcast in the multiverse. Everything else is shit. I like that. I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to wordsmith that a little bit in my brain, but I see a shirt coming out of that. 

Nate McBride 09:39 
I love this multiverse thing. So didn't we have like, we are the nexus of the nether. True. Neverland is Neverland part of the multiverse. 

Mike Crispin 09:52 
It's just one, one of the multiverses technically, I think. 

Nate McBride 09:58 
So I want to be the first to apologize for last week's audio issues. Um, I was drinking too much beer apparently and it got over the microphones. Oh, wait. 

Mike Crispin 10:09 
That's right. We got some beer in the microphone. Those are awesome beers. Those things were huge. Yeah, but that's how we have. 

Nate McBride 10:15 
What happened was we just don't really know what we're doing. 

Mike Crispin 10:19 
The best, the best podcast on the internet. 

Nate McBride 10:23 
best podcast on the internet, because we are alive without a net. We don't have like a fancy set of engineers running around here and get things ready for us. We don't have like the dangly fancy microphones, although actually I do on my table over there where we don't go anymore. 

Nate McBride 10:39 
But we do the fancy headphones too. We actually have a lot of the fancy pieces. We just elected not to use any of them. We just don't use any of that stuff. We just don't use it. We bought it. It's mostly for show. 

Nate McBride 10:50 
Yeah, let's be 

Mike Crispin 10:52 
Like the Twitch trade stuff we've spent that money on that doesn't even work anymore. 

Nate McBride 10:57 
It doesn't even matter because these days in your Tesla tank, SUV, or Tesla, or your Porsche, you know, EV, you have like auto tune anyway. You can just fix all the audio right in your car. You just say, hey Tesla, hey Tesla, you got all the background noise on that podcast. 

Nate McBride 11:19 
Stake it all out automatically. Like when you listen, when you're in your Tesla and you listen to music, does it automatically know what you like and don't like just by virtue of who you are? 

Mike Crispin 11:30 
No. 

Nate McBride 11:30 
No. Like if you said you sat in your car and there was a channel coming up that was going to be about to play Nickelback, it would know not to play it. Or would it know? 

Mike Crispin 11:40 
I love Nickelback. It's great. Name a Nickelback song. I'm not afraid to say it. I love Nickelback. They're great. 

Nate McBride 11:47 
Okay. Name a song. My nipple bag photograph. That's, that's 

Mike Crispin 11:54 
That is a photograph. That is one. Yeah. Uh, this is how you remind me. That's a good one. Also dev leopard. 

Speaker 3 12:02 
No. 

Nate McBride 12:04 
Now, are you Google that you Google them for the podcast? 

Mike Crispin 12:07 
No, I didn't. I watched the documentary a few days ago or a couple of weeks ago, I should say. Okay. It was great. I didn't know much about them. It was like like Nickelback and all this stuff. 

Nate McBride 12:22 
Nickelback discography going all the way back to their humble roots from. 

Mike Crispin 12:27 
Phil Collins now you're on the Nickelback. 

Nate McBride 12:30 
I'm not off of Phil Collins. Oh, that's what he did. But we're just not talking about anymore. Because you know, in these troubled times, you got to focus on the positive Mike. I didn't need a positive, positive message. 

Bill Bartlett 12:47 
We're very positive here. What's more positive than SUSudio? 

Mike Crispin 12:55 
Don't you want to run for that song? 

Nate McBride 12:57 
the number, Ricky lost the number or Billy lost the number at the studio and so felt it laughing in the air tonight. 

Mike Crispin 13:10 
Now, SuSudio is a girl, I think, or a boy, whatever he's thinking about. 

Nate McBride 13:19 
That's an important distinction. I'm so happy. That is best friend in the canoe. 

Mike Crispin 13:27 
There's a girl that's been on my mind for studio. It's a, it's a girl. That's right. Okay. Su Su studio. 

Nate McBride 13:35 
You couldn't take it anymore and sang about it for five minutes. 

Mike Crispin 13:39 
Nickelback. I love Nickelback, but he couldn't take it anymore. You can't take any more. When forget it. I don't care anymore. Is that what you're trying to say? 

Bill Bartlett 13:55 
I can't take it anymore, right? 

Mike Crispin 13:57 
That what you said? 

Nate McBride 14:00 
I'll edit that out and put in the right words after the show. 

Speaker 6 14:05 
Code in the matrix, it's how we play algorithms Crafting the future our way Silicon visions from dusk till dawn We're the wizards of tech where progress is born With every line we're defining the time Creating the world where there are virtual times Shanghai is for winners, sad salads profound Ponies and bubblegum floating around Tech Accord who's bored the calculus of IT With Nate and Mike drown in the nether Or just escape to Neverland 

Speaker 3 15:16 
Thanks for watching! 

Mike Crispin 15:41 
Anyway, I did an episode. 

Nate McBride 15:43 
a feeling. Yes, it'll be welcome to the calculus of IT podcast. Good night. And everything else in the middle. So if you're, if you're looking for our show, and for some reason you can't find it after googling best podcast AF on the internet, you can find all our episodes online where Mike 

Mike Crispin 16:05 
YouTube. And on your favorite podcast. 

Nate McBride 16:10 
And on your favorite podcast website, which is Mike. 

Mike Crispin 16:14 
thecoit .us, which has up to Episode 14. 

Nate McBride 16:19 
Yeah, so last week, the last episode, despite the audio, you probably could have overheard Mike saying he was going to update the website, which he hadn't done in six months. 

Mike Crispin 16:31 
Thank you. Yeah, I got working on that. It's going to take a little bit behind like, like almost like six months behind. 

Nate McBride 16:38 
Yeah. So we have an alternate website, which has all of our episodes on it, which you can link from on the COIG .US website, is that our Buzzsprout website? Right on the front page, you'll see them all there. 

Nate McBride 16:53 
That is accurate. So Mike will get to updating the website before the end of the year. In the meantime, click on the link to the Buzzsprout page, which has all our episodes. You can also find them on the Apple thing, YouTube, what's another one? 

Nate McBride 17:11 
Spotify. Podcast. I mean, YouTube is, I like being able to see all the podcast places. I subscribe to all of them. So it's all over the thing. And just when you listen to it, just give us all the stars. 

Nate McBride 17:25 
So when it says like maximum stars, click the maximum star button. And then write, like when it says Y, you give maximum stars, just write AF. You don't have to write anything else. 

Mike Crispin 17:36 
Episode 24 is the last one that's posted. I just looked. 

Nate McBride 17:41 
You don't remember the last episode you posted. So, but that's good though. We're only eight behind. I was eight off. No, it's actually nine because there was an interstitial. Um, that's right. That's right. 

Nate McBride 17:52 
So if you want to continue the conversations on our shows, uh, you can come to our discord channel. Nobody does, but it's also on our website page and, and people just don't, I don't want to, don't like discord or something or don't want to talk to us. 

Nate McBride 18:03 
But we'd like to say it anyway, in case you did. And if you're lucky enough, one lucky. Taper and discord will get to be on the show. 

Mike Crispin 18:15 
There's a few types out there. 

Nate McBride 18:19 
And if you want to buy us a beer, it's pretty easy. The link is on the website. It is apparently active still. Cause somebody did buy spirits not too long ago. And we would love more beers. This focal banger. 

Nate McBride 18:31 
It's a, it's like $4 a can. So you got to help me out. People can't just be drinking this. All my own money. Okay. 

Mike Crispin 18:44 
I'm looking to the episode here and the chapter 15 on governance was four hours and 30 minutes long. 

Nate McBride 18:53 
That was a scorcher, dude. 

Mike Crispin 18:55 
Four hours and 30 minutes. 

Nate McBride 18:57 
I think you know what that was our best episode ever you know why 

Mike Crispin 19:03 
That's longer than the movie JFK. 

Nate McBride 19:08 
It's longer than a pop -ups now, twice. Um, so, all right. Before we get into anything, I want to just say, you know, it's nearly fall. Yeah. And according to Mike, we might skip it, but on the, against the calendar, it's nearly fall and fall in England means what? 

Nate McBride 19:28 
Thank you. 

Mike Crispin 19:29 
A cover fest? No. Bullage. Halloween. No. 

Speaker 5 19:37 
Uh, pumpkin spice lattes. 

Nate McBride 19:41 
No, no, not even close. It means budget season is starting. 

Mike Crispin 19:47 
Jesus, I was thinking like piles and stuff. 

Nate McBride 19:52 
No, no, no, fuck all that shit. We're talking about budgets, the important stuff, man. The important stuff. Budgets, yeah, get the shit out of it. Yeah, numbers and spreadsheets. What's better than that? 

Nate McBride 20:02 
I mean, you can get your pumpkin spice, latte, apple, best bag, cider thing, and then do your budget. That's right. That's right. So who has started their budget? Raise your hand. 

Mike Crispin 20:15 
I have started a very early version, yeah. 

Nate McBride 20:19 
how early like one big number or some smaller numbers. 

Mike Crispin 20:25 
Um, just basically cut and paste from last year and add bolts to the top for 2025. I'd never said that you call. I changed the font at the top of the budget and made a little bigger and bolded it. 

Nate McBride 20:44 
You know, it's good. You should also shade some of the cells that let's know that you're you looked at the cell like I don't know about this number. It may change. It may not. 

Mike Crispin 20:58 
like a read receipt for each cell that shows up in the cell, not in the audit trail, just like. 

Speaker 3 21:06 
If you want to, if you want to. 

Nate McBride 21:08 
What you do is you go into your budget sheet, you forecast and you say, like you put comments in the comment field, which is this might change, it might not, but if it did change, it would change anywhere from zero to 20%, most likely in the bottom quarter of that. 

Nate McBride 21:26 
And then what you do is you set up a cascade effect across the entire company to compensate for all the variables. And that's actually a terrible thing to do, even though I do do it sometimes, because you just don't know. 

Nate McBride 21:41 
But yeah, budget season has started. And I would ask, I'll ask each of you, what's what's like top of mind for next year? What's the big item that's got all in all the fancy numbers next to it? 

Bill Bartlett 21:55 
It's not so much numbers as much as it is time. And it's what we, the four hour and 30 minute episode. It's to implement it governance. That's a big part of next year. Good budgeting for it governance. 

Bill Bartlett 22:10 
No, not really, not yet, but that's a big part of the goal set for next year. 

Nate McBride 22:17 
an IT strategy. We're gonna get to that next week. I'm talking about budget. 

Bill Bartlett 22:21 
But for budgeting, largely it's any thing we need to do to help facilitate that. So if there's any resources we need for that, uh, and that includes cybersecurity GRC program improvements, um, and then also any data and automation work we'll be doing next year as well. 

Bill Bartlett 22:41 
So it's, uh, the first foundational year now kind of sweeping into need the governance to get automation, right. Need to continue to wrap it up, ratchet up GRC and support any real business application requirements. 

Bill Bartlett 22:56 
I it's, it's a smaller frame of things, but it's time to kind of go to the next level of maturity, so to speak. And then, I don't know if you know, that's why 

Nate McBride 23:09 
own budget earning finance. So I love that you've got the finance pitch down. But like, now you're just talking to Bill and me no one else is listening. What's what's the big ticket item? Big ticket item. 

Bill Bartlett 23:27 
Most of it is investment in cyber security related tools that I just need to enhance and rip out or replace for the most part. And then sort of that integration and data management strategy is sort of some of the related things. 

Bill Bartlett 23:46 
New systems in the R &D functions, some things that might may insource, some things who may outsource, pretty general. But that's why it's not a hard fact. 

Speaker 3 24:03 
Okay. 

Nate McBride 24:04 
Cool. Bill, what about you? 

Speaker 5 24:06 
We have a few, the process I'm in now is meeting with everyone to discuss the function line needs for next year. So I've heard the word you evolved quite a bit from a number of all number of different departments. 

Speaker 5 24:20 
Just those two words, nothing else. So, we're narrowing down what that actually means and figuring out what the functions need as they grow, because we have started in the startup phase right so we're just at 38 people, but going, you know, shooting hit 75 right around there next year. 

Speaker 5 24:40 
Probably the biggest line probably won't be my official budget will be lab build out and corporate office. 

Speaker 3 24:52 
move. 

Speaker 5 24:54 
So those are two big things next year. 

Speaker 3 24:56 
Sorry, I've been. 

Nate McBride 24:57 
moving in the same building or moving to a new 

Speaker 5 25:00 
Both. So we have a smaller footprint for an office headquarters now that we'll be moving and we just got a couple of temporary space to do basic lab build outs this year back in December. So we're only building them out now just our, you know, we have three lab scientists. 

Speaker 5 25:15 
So we're bringing them on, but we'll be doing moving everything into one building, one roof, full build out next year. 

Nate McBride 25:24 
That's a big one. Yeah. Are you the de facto head of facilities? Or do you have facilities for persons? 

Speaker 5 25:29 
We have a office manager who runs the office side, and I picked up some of the lab stuff just because there wasn't anyone who's ever done it before. Got it. So, just some of the lab facility stuff I've been picking up for now, but that will go away once the lab build out starts. 

Nate McBride 25:48 
Well, I was interested in hearing about both of you because mine right now is pretty boring. We're waiting on clinical data at the end of this year, which determines a whole bunch of things. We could go one direction, which is all the things. 

Nate McBride 26:03 
The other direction is none of the things. And there's a little bit of variance in the middle, but for right now, I have 58 machines in my wet lab. I'd like to replace all of them. I'm about to do two that are desperate need, but the other 56 I like to standardize. 

Nate McBride 26:24 
It's not a big cost in terms of like life. It's about 60 grand to do them all for the machine type I would buy. But that would be an awesome thing to do because our wet lab is using machines that are six, seven years old for running high throughput experiments. 

Nate McBride 26:42 
So that would be one big one. And then that would be a short term, but good exercise for us to do. And then if, again, if it's all positive, obviously we'd have to put in probably TMF platform, something along the lines of, and we're using box now for pretty much everything along the validated work stream for document management. 

Nate McBride 27:07 
So we need something kind of at the tail end for submission management and well, box would probably do it. It's not the sort of best candidate out there for that right now. So TBD, everything else will stay the same though. 

Nate McBride 27:22 
Slack box, you know, cross the line, maybe ramp up in some SAS apps, but I don't know, really the big thing would be really hinging upon whether or not we get approval for our data. So, all right, cool. 

Nate McBride 27:41 
Well, just wanted to sort of poke your brains on that. Last week we talked about using AI for basically IT decision -making, strategic decision -making. We kind of noodle around a bit in terms of where does AI fit into any decision -making period, or is it just a sort of clever toy? 

Nate McBride 28:03 
I always sort of go on the side of clever toy with generative AI because it still is. But we did end up with a couple of things that were actually legitimate points about its potential use for helping in decision -making. 

Nate McBride 28:17 
Anyway, the final result, if you were to sum it all up, is that I guess do or do not, you know, either try and use it or don't use it, but I don't think that anyone's going to lose any momentum or anything if they don't use it at all, if they just continue on their path. 

Nate McBride 28:36 
It's not really going to give you all the benefits you think it will right now, maybe a couple of years. We talked about how that sort of rolled into the citizen developer. We talked a little bit too about, and Mike, you mentioned on this a few minutes ago, we talked about automation. 

Nate McBride 28:54 
You know, you're putting that into your budget or at least conceiving of governance around it for next year. And we talked about that too. And that's kind of stuck in my brain. It's been my brain a while. 

Nate McBride 29:04 
I think we talked about this in the podcast, but in fact, I know we did the idea that when I wrote the Calculus of IT book in 2021, I declared there were five domains of governance. That was 2021 coronavirus, myopic thinking about industry. 

Nate McBride 29:23 
I completely overlooked, well, I didn't overlook, but I ignored the gravity of automation as a governance focus. And so now I'm declaring this sixth area of governance. And that got me into thinking about the low code, node code stuff that we were talking about last week, which is why tonight we are not going to once again, talk about the removal of the CIO role. 

Nate McBride 29:49 
We're going to talk about the citizen developer. And the citizen developer, what's that person, right? So a lot of people, like when I was talking to folks today about it, just other colleagues for other reasons about it, a lot of people think it's like the person who is given special powers to do development within the business. 

Nate McBride 30:17 
And that's usually the case. Somebody who's not necessarily an IT, but has given certain rights to create stuff, that's the citizen developer. And so we can talk about that person, but I'm also thinking too about the person who isn't given rights, who on their own, through their own savvy, has figured out how to use low code, no code solutions, or even some basic programming. 

Nate McBride 30:48 
and some free solutions that are out there today to make changes to production processes and production level workflows in your business without your knowledge and or under consent or have done it with your knowledge and consent, but under some sort of guidance or program. 

Nate McBride 31:08 
So that's what we're going to talk about tonight. And before we get started on that point, I'll toss another question out to both of you, which is, and this is the big sort of big question, then we'll kind of drill down in. 

Nate McBride 31:19 
But if you think about your company makeup right now, and I know both of you and the companies you've come from, so you can actually apply the same question to prior companies too. But think about your current, maybe a couple of prior companies and how the citizen developers that you've had and worked with and had to finesse out of stopping doing what they were doing or encouraged to do more of what they were doing. 

Nate McBride 31:44 
Thinking about these people, and you don't have to give me like a certain number, but just give me like kind of the highlights of the challenges and or opportunities slash benefits that you encountered in working with citizen developers. 

Nate McBride 32:02 
And I'll start with Bill. I know I realized you're telling you like you didn't know this was coming, but reflect back. Challenges and opportunities of citizen developers, either presently or in your recent past. 

Speaker 5 32:20 
All right. So I think the opportunity is people who are in the environment, the process day to day, using technology to make it better, right? That's usually the place where I'm looking for advantages, right? 

Speaker 5 32:35 
I can tell you the best technology to do it, but I don't know your best business idea, right? From the scientific side to just the interaction with external people, all of that, someone being able to see something that isn't the best it could be and making it better is almost always a positive to me. 

Speaker 5 32:58 
As long as you're facilitating that environment where they're not doing it in a vacuum, that's where I can see it being a problem. If you are the, this is the way it is, no new stuff, my way, the highway sort of type of attitude, they're going to do it on their own and I'll tell you and then it's going to break and you're not going to know why that the hell broke, right? 

Speaker 5 33:19 
Because you're looking at process A and it's really process B at this point. The drawbacks are on the same flip side of someone sees something, but they don't have the ability to fix it and they do it on their own, right? 

Speaker 5 33:33 
They're working on it and they're just not getting it right. They're head down, not asking for help, not asking for permission, just, you know, going off on their own, working on it and it's not doing what they wanted to do or what it's supposed to do or they build it wrong and it breaks something down the line, right? 

Speaker 5 33:49 
So I think it comes down to having to be a positive is facilitating the environment where people feel they have the ability to do that, right? Take the next step of giving them the tools should they need to, right? 

Speaker 5 34:04 
They come to you and say, hey, I can build this in this, in this free thing and it works really good. I said, well, maybe I can give you this cost thing and make it even better, right? Kind of just going down from that, from a free app to, you know, one of those small paid apps or something like that or something that's a little bit more secure, right? 

Speaker 5 34:20 
That's the other concern is now they're putting data that you work so hard to control out into some free add -on to their Windows environment or whatever it is. And now your data is, you know, sitting out that hole all the time and you don't know it. 

Nate McBride 34:39 
Well, let me ask you. So on that point, you just mentioned, you know, you would come, come along and maybe introduce a different solution, but let's suppose I'm a, I'm Joe developer at your company and I've got, I know I'm using some sort of, you know, a ham handed solution. 

Nate McBride 34:53 
I made myself to solve something. What's the, what's the point where you would say, yes, let's double down on that with a better thing or say, you can't do that. Like what's the, what's the one thing or two things that are going to make you sort of make it, make a decision either way. 

Nate McBride 35:09 
So the two will be. 

Speaker 5 35:11 
security and support, right, right off the bat. If they're using this free system that they're not paying for, that once the data is into it, you no longer own that data. Shut it down, right? You have to go in, you have to block it. 

Speaker 5 35:24 
But if it's set up that way, and it's making things better, you have to take off the piece that doesn't work and replace it with something that does, right? Just because it's a free system doesn't mean I can't go and buy, you know, a pro or business version of that software, or now I can get better terms and control my own data, or find another solution that allows me to control my data. 

Speaker 5 35:46 
You know, that's number one is the security, right? They build it, I want to see what it looks like, you know, hopefully there's enough relationship throughout these people, because you know who they are, right? 

Speaker 5 35:56 
For the most part, you know who these people are in your environment, that they're not building it in secret, not telling you, I'd want them to come and say, hey, check out this cool thing that I did, what and then I can say, this is great. 

Speaker 5 36:08 
But can that that's a concern, right? Or the flip side of it is, they do it. And it's just, they think it's great. All of a sudden, you see all these people that are down the process going, why is this different? 

Speaker 5 36:20 
Why does this look different? Why is this, you know, spam email, how come it's coming from a different email address? Now, what like, you'll start seeing that down the line, if it's not built and communicated up properly. 

Speaker 5 36:29 
So that falls onto the support side of things, right? If it's going to disrupt security or support, at that point, you need to be somewhat involved, even if it's just communication, right? Communication and paying for an app here and there, and they can help facilitate those environments. 

Bill Bartlett 36:48 
Mike to say a lot of benefit from an agility perspective to take some of the business solutioning off of it's plate and be able to build something that's quick and agile and can run right away and can get a business goal done is is valuable but more and more citizen developers are going to come in with some sort of even with the no code solutions some some code and maybe algorithmic type background that are building building applications and I I think one of the things that definitely comes to mind historically is continuity and you kind of talked a little bit about this bill is you know people write a great application or have a great integration built and then they leave the company and nobody knows how it works and they end up either coming to us and saying why I don't you know why this doesn't work and maybe you don't know the resources to support some of these things in a vacuum which is why the transparency is so important but it's not also just about saying no to Bill's point it's about kind of partnering and having the ability into what's being built and what's what's being set up but I also think that the more of these things that get built they're even with governance it's the bill versus buy scenario and a lot of departments will only be building because they haven't talked to you or they don't think that IT has the resources or the ability to help them in time so they go when they they build some of these things on the side now as app year and all these other tools is a lot that can be done then they can be empowered to build applications but again the bill's point like they're working with APIs and data security and moving data around someone centrally needs to be able to look at that and then manage it and understand where data is going point A to point B and be part of the team that's building those applications which kind of comes full circle to IT needs to be there and be involved and if they didn't have time to begin with to help them build or so collect an application to buy there's sort of that middle ground to work out I can go we can talk about SharePoint I think that's one of the biggest SharePoint and it comes 

Nate McBride 39:11 
Just a couple of ones out there, Mike. Hold that one example, because that's a perfect example I want to come back to in just a second. And having both of you one actually will be really good for this one. 

Nate McBride 39:22 
So hold off on that one moment. Oh, sure. OK. But thank you. Thank you both. So I kind of tossed out there. It's kind of a surprise. So Grant Gross at CIO Magazine or cio .com wrote an article last Thursday called AI Coding Assistance, Wave Goodbye to Junior Developers. 

Nate McBride 39:44 
Now that's, you know, fud, fear, the whole thing, right? Like, oh my god, we're all gone. That's how you clickbait people into an article. But I like Grant Gross, and I like what he writes. And so I went and read this article. 

Nate McBride 39:57 
And at the very bottom of it, you have to read sort of the whole thing to get to the sort of meat and potatoes. But what he's talking about is he finally gets down to the point of the using of the tools. 

Nate McBride 40:10 
And the tools he's saying. And so there's a gentleman he interviewed called Marcus Merrill, whose name is Marcus Merrill from Sauce Labs. And what Merrill said, and this is a quote, is what I'm actually seeing is that teams think they will get enormous benefits from these tools, these tools being generative AI type tools. 

Nate McBride 40:30 
So they over -invest in tooling, over -rotate on structural and process changes, or over -do staff reductions they already had planned, based on the gains that they think they'll imagine they'll get from the vendors. 

Nate McBride 40:43 
And he goes on, he says, we're going to spend two to three more years trying to squeeze productivity and magic out of this technology, then be very slow to admit that it was all a shell game. What worries me, and this is the key quote, what worries me is that we'll get hooked on these tools. 

Nate McBride 41:03 
And then those companies that will start to change, sorry, will start to charge the real price that it costs to operate these models. That will be a huge shock to the system. So, I mean, Bill mentioned this, you mentioned this, and this is where I want to sort of jump in. 

Nate McBride 41:22 
I kind of broke down my list of questions into three sort of buckets, right? One is empowering business users, the other is governance and security, and the last is the evolving role of IT, which is what Grant Gross is referring, well, and Marcus Merrill and Grant Gross were referring to there. 

Nate McBride 41:38 
And I want to make sure we touch on what happens when something does become successful in a citizen developer model. Like when that person creates that thing, Bill, and you're like, okay, let me show you something bigger, but then that doesn't necessarily stop them from creating more, it maybe just gives them another alternative, and then you end up with four alternatives, and then it continues to sort of grow from there. 

Nate McBride 42:04 
So, let's hold that thought. But because Mike just left off on SharePoint, I know where he's going, so I want to, instead of starting with empowering business users, let's start with governance and security. 

Nate McBride 42:18 
And I'll ask you both this question, and Mike, you can kick off, and you can use your SharePoint example, but how, and Bill, you mentioned this, so it'll come back to you next, how to establish guardrails? 

Nate McBride 42:32 
I mean, and then the key word is establish guardrails, okay? And now, shadow IT is the only phrase I have, but we all know that's kind of like a past tense at this point, but how to establish guardrails, and make it an environment such that people can do this without fear of IT or recrimination, and do it safely, knowing that IT, quote unquote, endorses the activity to a point. 

Nate McBride 43:04 
How do you establish guardrails? 

Bill Bartlett 43:10 
I, I mean, I think it's, it's difficult to say it kind of depends on how, how much we're talking about real development versus low code development. If it's low code development. 

Nate McBride 43:24 
are either example. 

Bill Bartlett 43:26 
So low code development, I think you can standardize on a sort of tool set and have the appropriate training as to who owns and has access to certain data sets. And you can start with small bits and pieces of access and build sort of an access model on top of that. 

Bill Bartlett 43:46 
So it's training on the capability that these automation tools exist and that the organization's gonna pick away for people to start to build some of their own applications. So to drive a programmer on that is the only way I can think of off the top of my head. 

Nate McBride 44:04 
Is it a program that's focused on enabling like you're going to come out of the gate and say, we love it when you develop. Here's the tools we would like to use 

Bill Bartlett 44:13 
It could be that or it could be also just one other component. I didn't think of this as more. Here's the type of things you can build. Here's the, the type of services you can build. Maybe it's an access. 

Bill Bartlett 44:26 
Maybe it's workflow basic workflow automation. Maybe it's Making sure that before someone builds something there's a use case provided like if there's some sort of committee or hate committee same committee, but like Some sort of intake to say we have this business need. 

Bill Bartlett 44:44 
We have the ability to build it. Let's all just collaborate at least have that transparency that Bill was talking about, but just Being able to come to the table and talk about what we're trying to achieve before you go and just do it on your own. 

Bill Bartlett 45:01 
And that's just kind of capturing the scope and whatnot. Make me if it is like I just go back to Zapier and some of these other tools like there are ways to build templates or ways to build things that you can sort of give Up front, even if we talk about SharePoint giving a lockdown team site with basic workflow capabilities. 

Bill Bartlett 45:22 
People can build things on their own. One area where we I think we do this with very little governance if any governance at all for the last 3040 years 30 years is Excel. You've got since and developers and Excel the last 30 years. 

Bill Bartlett 45:36 
Not a lot has changed, except for that is a lot easier to move from company to company and People instead because it's so easy. They just copy it from the last place to the new place as opposed to running into the business continuity challenges that we talked about. 

Bill Bartlett 45:50 
They just handed over the next company. Well, and Go ahead. I was going to say that that's that's an example where, you know, some can build a financial model and they leave the company and no one knows really what to do it that's they've got to start over and they lose a few months. 

Bill Bartlett 46:09 
So real quick use cases use case review and the discussion having boundaries around kind of what can be built starting small and and maybe an approved tool set. I think those three things, a good place to start from a governance perspective. 

Nate McBride 46:26 
all great things. And I just mentioned the Excel that brought me reminded me of the GitHub repos that are available. There's 1000s of them for VB scripts for Excel for financial accounting, which can be freely downloaded and just simply modified and basic modifications and you don't need to hold degree and VB scripting to do it. 

Nate McBride 46:47 
Sorry, Bill, go ahead. 

Speaker 5 46:49 
add on, you know, from Mike's list there, also a clear path for requesting new systems, right? You have to get to the point where there isn't all that red tape of, let's run this up the chain, let's get, but like, there has to be a way to come in and say, I have this package set that you gave me, I have the training, I understand it all, I'm 90% the way there, I have this last gap. 

Speaker 5 47:13 
There has to be something else, right? And being able to take that and move quickly, right? I think we all see at times that, you know, you can run into that, I'm sure we've all done it, you run into the red tape and you go like, I'm not going to go there because it's going to take me forever to get it, I'm just going to do it myself over here. 

Speaker 5 47:30 
You don't want to be that person, right? You don't want to be the one that goes through that, right? You want to make sure that you're the one, again, enabling and if you help them the first time, nothing is going to be built again without you, right? 

Speaker 5 47:42 
That's my thing. As long as you can show that you're an ally, they're able to go from there. And I think if you can be the one that brings it to them, even at a low level, so, you know, not to get to the point of the Zapier, but when I cover my new high orientation, I take the five minutes and click on that little, you know, nine block thing in Windows and say, look, there's inside of Windows inside of Microsoft 365. 

Speaker 5 48:14 
You have it, it's there, it does it, it's all safe, it's all secure. And I touch upon it. Very briefly, right at what I'm doing, this is where you can get your email online. And I've had one person two months later come back and say, can you show me that again? 

Speaker 5 48:28 
Right? So now you just got there, you know, you planted the seed and let it grow. And then you can take it to the next point of where those tools aren't the best of times, right? Zapier is a better tool to do other things. 

Speaker 5 48:41 
And sometimes you have to dump into a Google Doc to get what you need and pull it back somewhere else. But being able to again, find that control that and if you're the one that's opening the door at the very beginning, they'll come back to you when it's time. 

Bill Bartlett 48:56 
I think there's just a fast amount of people, you know, that would just like what they already have to work. So they're not even going to go looking for something else unless they don't have what they already need. 

Bill Bartlett 49:08 
Yeah, that's where bill like your requirements gathering like you said like having that clear request path. It's huge, because most people don't want more stuff, they don't want more tools, they just want to get their job done. 

Bill Bartlett 49:20 
And so that's, if we can do that for them, then they don't need to build too much now we're talking about data architects and we're talking about commercial data and research and other stuff. That's, that's kind of what I meant by low code versus citizen developers who are doing data work or those type of things is two different stories. 

Nate McBride 49:40 
There's, there's a line drawing line drawing mechanism here that, um, Bill just referenced, which is, okay, Bill, you mentioned the sort of the little nine dots and what they can do and what's available to them, but do you teach them how to do filters in email? 

Nate McBride 49:58 
We offer it again. I mean, but you do, do you cover that in the same way that you recover, say some other time saving technique. 

Speaker 5 50:07 
So not during that session, again, I cover that during our onboarding process when I'm giving my IT offering spiel, right? This is how you get to Office, I'll let Office 365, you can go to this website, you can click in, look at all these things you have. 

Speaker 5 50:20 
Here's a couple of examples of cool things that it can do. We do offer documents and trainings on being able to data structuring and email full of the creation and all of that stuff. We do offer trainings and documents on that. 

Speaker 5 50:39 
We don't offer the in -depth on the other 365 stuff. It's what we're offering training on to more of your functionality of Windows, of Office. 

Nate McBride 50:49 
Okay. So plain devil's advocate and Mike, this is where you can come in with your SharePoint example, plain devil's advocate for a second. You're picking and choosing where employees can do, uh, citizen development based on very specific parameters that aren't necessarily defined. 

Nate McBride 51:07 
Like, so again, I asked the question about filters and rules and sort of, and sort of outlook, right? Small things, but in a way it's a small bit of development. You're actually, you know, defining a workflow for a catalytic event. 

Nate McBride 51:21 
You know, if this comes in equals this and do this thing with it, right? That's like the building block of have any, of any low code, you know, citizen development, like make this stop doing this behavior for me. 

Nate McBride 51:33 
And I want to learn how to do it myself. 

Bill Bartlett 51:36 
There's a fine line between configuration management and development and the mindset that comes with you're not usually tested in our minds. No, it's lower risk to test of the mail filter than to move data from one place to another. 

Bill Bartlett 51:52 
And I mean, yeah, I think there's, you got to figure out where the line is, you know, in terms of, you know, creating a filter based on a Boolean search and a data and moving data from one data source to another with some sort of concatenation or changes that data might be a source data that the whole company needs to use as opposed to your mail filter that's this different levels of like exposure to how that's going to be used. 

Bill Bartlett 52:21 
That's hard. It's hard to determine where you draw the line on configuration management versus development frameworks and those things. 

Nate McBride 52:32 
Right. So, so now we're getting into sort of, um, that fine point, which is if I'm, uh, average Joe citizen developer, and I decide on how to make a rule and email. And then I asked the question to myself, well, could I do something similar with my documents? 

Nate McBride 52:51 
Well, what are, what are, like, how, how can I push this envelope, right? Could I get some extensions for Chrome that will help me sort of manage my interface? All of a sudden I'm finding out that I can go in actually and type and get in my Chrome tags. 

Nate McBride 53:04 
I can type in my Chrome, colon slash slash developer, whatever that, that URL is and I can start hacking Chrome and I can start taking it to next levels. This is all, by the way, outside of anyone's scope at this point, I mean, based on both of what you said, it's not within scope at this point. 

Nate McBride 53:24 
I'm self -enabled self -moving. So, and, but, but just to be made a great point, this is configuration level detail. It doesn't impact us. There's low risk, et cetera. Not really getting into anything serious yet, but it's only like one or two steps away from what happens next. 

Nate McBride 53:48 
And so when you're implementing guardrails, where are you starting? Like, where are you when, like we're doing all doing guardrails, just great. But where are we picking to start the guardrails? Are we saying it has to be something that introduces risk? 

Nate McBride 54:05 
Like if it does that, that's the first thing that would be checking off a guardrail situation. Or is it where does the guardrail begin? I guess is the question I guess we should really be asking. 

Bill Bartlett 54:18 
I would definitely start with risk myself. I think that that's where hopefully your access control is already in place so people only have access to the day they need, but we all know the people who have access to the day they need. 

Bill Bartlett 54:31 
Like you said, Nate, they can manipulate that. They can use a third -party tool to do different work with it. But there's also the piece of it where they own the data and to some extent need to be accountable for it as well. 

Bill Bartlett 54:45 
And I think they're using a tool that helps them to get something done. It should be more about their thinking outside the worlds of what happens when they leave the company or how is that data being used or being in the pharmaceutical industry if someone asks you how did you get that data or a publicly traded company for that matter. 

Bill Bartlett 55:04 
How did you get to that solution? And there's no one there to explain it. From a business context, I think that stops some of the stuff pretty quickly. I keep going back to Excel. When someone can't explain the Excel model, someone gets in trouble. 

Bill Bartlett 55:22 
And that's some complexity to some of that stuff. I guess I'm trying to say is it up to IT if they don't own the data in some of these aspects, right? 

Nate McBride 55:39 
If somebody in your company finds a way to, uh, this is, this is not a great example, but you'll get my point. If someone in the company finds a way that improves how coffee is made in the coffee machine. 

Nate McBride 55:55 
Okay. Again, shitty example, but let's say it's like just that, that corporate hack mentality. I'm tired, waiting for so long for this to happen. So I'm going to go ahead and improve it by doing this. 

Nate McBride 56:06 
No one will care. Right. I'm going to do this thing. Um, it's pervasive, right? And you want to, at least I want to, I want to celebrate that. Like I want to give my high. 

Bill Bartlett 56:19 
The coffee machine, absolutely. 

Nate McBride 56:21 
Also, I also want to say, Hey, listen, you're breaking that fucking thing. Like every time that you go ahead and make your coffee choices as fast, you're also breaking it. 

Speaker 3 56:30 
Yeah. 

Nate McBride 56:32 
Yeah. 

Speaker 3 56:33 
And that's, that's a thing like. 

Bill Bartlett 56:35 
If some of these things that are built produce results quickly, it's difficult to think of the reverse, what happened back, let's be fair now, 15 years ago, like the emergence of SaaS. You had an IT organization saying, we can build you that in SharePoint. 

Bill Bartlett 56:58 
We can do this, we can do that. We've already paid for all this stuff. And what happens? I can go get Viva, built to order. I can go get Gmail, built to order. I can go get these other things without IT needing to be involved at all. 

Bill Bartlett 57:13 
And there's a lot of those today, right? Smartsheet still emails everyone outside of IT. It's like these companies that are not going to go around IT because I can build it quicker. And you can just use it, and it's going to be fine. 

Bill Bartlett 57:26 
And now we're talking about people who want to build. I'm still not seeing that really all that much. Unless it's really in the SharePoint environment, and when you remove the Play -Doh environment, then that gets harder to do. 

Bill Bartlett 57:41 
But having out of the box experiences, I mean, you guys were talking about Viva earlier on the call, potentially, right? Don't configure Viva to death. Don't over develop it. You're going to die on the vine. 

Bill Bartlett 57:55 
The more of these things that come out of the box, in the long term, I think with the business, especially leadership that has to go through a number of employees over the course of years, is going to be happy that you used the out -of -a -box experience. 

Bill Bartlett 58:10 
So citizen developers may build something that are good for the temporary solution, but Nate, you asked the question earlier, like, when do you swoop in and start to say, okay, what's the big picture here? 

Bill Bartlett 58:20 
And what's the end goal? What's the two- or three -year strategy? Without someone who created something awesome, without ripping that out and creating kind of this deep institution culture, you don't want that either. 

Bill Bartlett 58:36 
You want people to be ignited and to be able to build things. That's why it's a great discussion. It's difficult to try to foster the culture of innovation and building things and not being like a gatekeeper, trying to squash out all these great new ideas that could give you a competitive advantage. 

Bill Bartlett 58:57 
But it's these circles and cycles over the years. It feels like we go in. It enables so many things. Workado, for example, is another great example. What a great platform, you know, to do a lot of these different things. 

Nate McBride 59:15 
Well, and Zapier is amazing, but you know what, you don't, I mean, and I believe me, I'm a disciple of Zapier, if ever there was one, but you don't need Zapier because platforms like Notion and Airtable, they have the same automations built in. 

Nate McBride 59:30 
They can do the same calls. And, and like, for instance, Notion and Airtable both have developer communities where they release bots in the apps, very much like Zapier. So people have gone out and built automations already to solve the problem that you're thinking about within an application and there's no way, there's no way in either Notion or Airtable to name two, where I can go in and say, a mic can't use other people's automations. 

Nate McBride 01:00:01 
Yeah. So, so the development communities that pop up around these applications themselves are extraordinarily robust. I mean, My gosh, I've seen some things, man, an Airtable that people have developed that they just give away for free. 

Bill Bartlett 01:00:22 
you encapsulate a citizen developer mindset. I mean, using the Airtable AI, you can just ask it to build you an application and... Exactly. 

Nate McBride 01:00:33 
And then so what do you do? Do you go back up a level and say we're not going to use any platforms in the company that allow or engender custom development? Well, you'd be left with no platforms. 

Bill Bartlett 01:00:46 
And that's, that's the, some of the question to me is when you have AI or some sort of automation building, we're saying building. Is it really just configuration, because at the end of the day it's putting a set template in place, you know that it's determined and AI sort of doing the same thing just at a much more granular level. 

Bill Bartlett 01:01:09 
Are we just talking about a deeper, deeper configuration management model that just it's going to get out of control quick but is that we're not talking about needing to understand the, you know, you know, agile development methodology or building out all this other stuff, you know, like, can we just push a button. 

Nate McBride 01:01:34 
You should reach cao .com and read these articles because they're saying that that it's the end of the developer. It's over for the developers. Buckham just kidding. The developers. Well, Bill, so Bill, a few minutes ago, you mentioned planting the seed, which I love the fact that you said that because 10 years ago, you would have been like, I'm not planting any seeds. 

Nate McBride 01:01:57 
Very good. It's true. I love it. You evolve a man. I love it. So planting the seed. So here's the question and I'll start with you again on this point because you're in the center of my Zoom thingy. So what role should I play in monitoring and managing applications created by non -IT people? 

Speaker 5 01:02:21 
So I try to run mine, my department, when I say my department, it's at this point, it's me. So I try to run myself, um, right. One is your, your, your, it comes down to, uh, maybe it's three. So it's a little bit of leadership from the governance and policies and procedures and bringing the support structure up. 

Speaker 5 01:02:43 
But I focus on making available to, to be, I sell that as an IT consultant for the groups. Right. That's what I try. I make myself available. I meet with the functions. I, you know, what can we do? And a joke around here, sometimes the answer is, sorry, we can't do that. 

Speaker 5 01:03:01 
You gotta suck it up and deal with it. But if I can be that reference, that tool, that sounding board, even if I'm not doing the work, right, and if it's a, Hey, can we grab a coffee? I have a question. 

Speaker 5 01:03:13 
And it's, it's working. I have some people doing it. It gives me the ability. I mean, it's really insight is what I'm looking for, right? I'm looking for the insight of what's going on in the environment to have an understanding of it at a very high level, right? 

Speaker 5 01:03:28 
If they're building something, they're working on it. And even if it's a Zapier or an air table, to me, that's configuration, right? Like I was saying, but the moment you start putting it in line of process, or populating with data, then it starts to be development, right? 

Speaker 5 01:03:49 
From, you know, at least in my mind, right? From, from, from that, that's each side of the line. So if I can get an understanding of this person is doing X, Y, and Z and has some questions on it, and he sees this as a problem, he's trying to make it better, or this is a pain point, you know, I usually see, I have a group of four or five people, three or four of them just want to be left alone and do their stuff and use word on their computer and send an email and that's it. 

Speaker 5 01:04:14 
You have one person in that group. That's like, we can do this so much better, right? If you can get a line with those people and just have an oversight of what they're doing. And if it's falling in, it's, it's unwritten guardrails, right? 

Speaker 5 01:04:29 
You know, it's use applications that I know about. If you have a question and they want to let me know, you know, understand the data needs to be secure. Let them have that, right? Your understanding of it, because you also have the point of, again, we're small enough where so -and -so leaves. 

Speaker 5 01:04:48 
The first thing I'm going to go and say, Hey, before you go, go over this with me, right? I know you built this, right? We're 40 people. When you get to two, three, four, five, six, 700 people, you can't do that anymore, right? 

Speaker 5 01:05:01 
Uh, it's all about getting an understanding of what's going on in your environment and doing your best to, to manage it. With that, you have to ensure that you have the proper training, right? We have our acceptable use policy. 

Speaker 5 01:05:19 
We have the proper guidelines out there that what people can and cannot do. You have to give some trust that they're going to follow it, right? Everyone's an adult here. You know, if you don't trust them and you have to micromanage them, you have to shut it all down, right? 

Speaker 5 01:05:39 
It's just the way it's going to be. You have to be that person. Yeah. You have to be that person, right? That watches their wifi usage and their clicks. If you're not doing that, you have to give them the leeway to do their job, right? 

Speaker 5 01:05:53 
And sometimes doing their job is venturing into IT data and all of that. 

Nate McBride 01:06:02 
All right, so Mike, uh, over to you. What role should I T play in monitoring managing shit that. 

Bill Bartlett 01:06:10 
The biggest to me is risk and cybersecurity. So any of that data needs to be understood. And if it's gonna be put into an application, as long as the business owns the application or the process, then we should be able to work together to build that out. 

Bill Bartlett 01:06:30 
But they're ultimately, they ultimately own the application and the support of it. So if there's a Zapier application that's being built and it doesn't work out, we can help do our best effort to help fix it. 

Bill Bartlett 01:06:44 
But ultimately, if they've built something, it's gonna be more of a reactive situation. Again, I think that is extremely rare, but it's extremely rare. 

Nate McBride 01:06:57 
What's it? So you just, you skipped a port or part that I want to hear about, which is that if they went in and build it, like, I guess if you go ahead and if you went ahead and said, okay, you can build in Zapier, they went ahead and build something and it wasn't working. 

Nate McBride 01:07:13 
And they came to you and said, Mike, this isn't working. Help me fix it. Would you drop what you're doing to help them fix that thing? Or would there be some other mechanism in place? Like, what would you do in that moment? 

Bill Bartlett 01:07:26 
we would have to prioritize when we were going to work with them to fix it, but we would help support them as best we could, especially if it's a platform in which we're endorsing and where we're used as that sort of standardized toolset, we should be on the hook to help as whatever we can. 

Bill Bartlett 01:07:45 
So that's, if we say at Zapier or Workado or anything else, we're gonna hand them over, sort of access to that application, then they're not gonna be able to just go buy it and use it. I think that's the other thing, is if you come up with that standard toolset, then ultimately the IT organization helps to instill that and train on it and build it and put it in place so they can use it. 

Bill Bartlett 01:08:12 
But you've got to have that business requirement of the tools you have today don't do those things that you need to get done. And that's where I am not seeing as much of a need, at least in the GNA space for sort of these citizen developer type mindsets when you don't have SharePoint in place, which drives them all the time. 

Bill Bartlett 01:08:36 
To me, that's the biggest stack of applications that in Excel where you get into trouble. And a lot of other things in the SaaS environment are out of the box experiences that IT can manage. 

Nate McBride 01:08:52 
Well, so we're going to get into LSTLC in a second. And, um, I mean, again, your, your statement there is, is an interesting one in terms of if you give them the tools to do something. I mean, again, we've been talking about this now for the last 20 minutes. 

Nate McBride 01:09:06 
If you give them the tools to do something, then let them go ahead and explore and do those things correctly, created the guardrails for them to work in, but they're going to push those guardrails right to the edge of that, that boundary. 

Nate McBride 01:09:19 
And someone goes ahead and creates, creates a 30 step Zap. It says to you, like, I can't figure out why these 10 aren't working. And you end up spending say 10, 15 hours trying to resolve that Zap. You're kind of on the hook now for resolution, because you've included in the, in the quote unquote toolbox that the, the, uh, inverse of that is, well, I don't like your toolbox. 

Nate McBride 01:09:40 
And I have this other tool over here that I'm going to use. I can go ahead and create my own web hook in Slack and you can't stop me. I know how to do web hooks and make this data come in. So even with guardrails, I think we still have to have this capability of, um, I mean, there's a trust element, right? 

Nate McBride 01:09:56 
Obviously it comes before all of this, which is, Hey, listen, we're going to do good work together. You have to kind of try all that. 

Bill Bartlett 01:10:07 
I think Bill, you mentioned this as well as, I mean, a lot of acceptable use policies, you don't use software that's not approved. Correct. Right. 

Speaker 5 01:10:16 
for to control it with policy and not technology, right? That's the way you go through. You can't block it all, but I can get you fired, right? You really want to go that you really want to do this? Like, you know, in the grand scheme of things, if I go to the leadership team and say this person's doing something that is showing a data risk, exposing us externally, yes, it's going to be shut down one way or the other, 

Speaker 5 01:10:38 
right? Whether I can do a tech from a technology standpoint, or your boss in HR and the CEO take you out, that that's just the way it's going to work, right? You don't want to get to that point. You want to facilitate it and not be that person, but there are times- 

Bill Bartlett 01:10:51 
I think 98% of people when you sit down and say, have you read the acceptable use policy and just explain that it's a risk to the organization. Most people are like, ah, shit, sorry, man. You know, how else can I do this? 

Bill Bartlett 01:11:06 
Can you work with me? And then you've got your opening to help either instill them in existing applications or maybe there's some new project that needs to be put up there. But it's using that policy is that's usually why it's one of the first policies that gets written. 

Speaker 5 01:11:25 
Yeah. Yeah. 

Bill Bartlett 01:11:27 
And then you also read it too, right? A lot of people don't read it. It's a big, long document. And this is, this sometimes is all it takes. It's one little introduction with, uh, you're going to move our clinical data out towards app somewhere, or it's just some third part service. 

Bill Bartlett 01:11:42 
Uh, sometimes it's AI note -taking services. It takes a little. 

Mike Crispin 01:11:47 
Oh, I had no idea that tater was going super rough. 

Speaker 5 01:11:49 
And they do it on, you know, we just had somebody who, an external vendor had it, AI note taking, it was their meeting, they ran it. After it was done, everyone got an email that said, would you like a transcript of the meeting? 

Speaker 5 01:12:02 
And one said, yes. And when you said yes, you had to click that, give access to all of my Microsoft environment. So she signed up, clicked that, and all of a sudden, every meeting she was in, this note taking was there. 

Speaker 5 01:12:19 
But the best part about it, the first meeting she was in, I was in the meeting, I got a message saying, what the hell is this? I said, I found it, disabled it, and I was able to block it from a, you know, a corporate level. 

Speaker 5 01:12:31 
But it's like shooting fish, right? You can't get them all, you can go in and block them at a time. But I also think it comes down to them understanding the data, right? Because if someone can build something, and it checks all the boxes, it makes the process better, you know, even if it's something as simple as a zap of, every time something new is put into this folder, send everybody an email. 

Speaker 5 01:12:53 
And someone comes in and says, that's great, can you add me? And they're not approved to see that data, right? Or, you know, you have your access control policy around your Part 11 data or your financial data, and you're managing it with signatures and approvals to be compliant. 

Speaker 5 01:13:08 
And someone with access is sharing with someone with access, everything's great. It's that moment when that person's like, oh, that's really cool. Can you add me? Right? And all of a sudden they add you, and now you just blew your whole access control policy out of the way, right? 

Speaker 5 01:13:20 
So you have to make sure that, that even not even just the systems are using the data, and the systems are touching, they understand. Thank you. 

Nate McBride 01:13:30 
Well, it's not easy. No, you guys are nailing it, by the way. I love the answers. I do want to get to the STLC element in a moment, but before we do that, just one more last question on sort of the governance side, which is, and this actually will dovetail into STLC. 

Nate McBride 01:13:45 
So let's just let this one go wherever it goes. But what about turnover? What about turnover? What about dependencies on these systems? On these- Yeah, continuity, man. Let's talk about that. So you have an employee, they're a fantastic citizen developer. 

Nate McBride 01:14:01 
They've created a bunch of wonderful say zaps, uh, to speed up the lab process. They leave as a lot of people will do now. 

Speaker 3 01:14:19 
Yeah, a lot of. 

Bill Bartlett 01:14:20 
I hate to say it, a lot of times it's just you throw it all away or you bring someone in to look at it and you try and repair it. But it's knowledge transfers, knowledge transfers like they're hit or miss, no matter how good of an employee they are. 

Bill Bartlett 01:14:35 
You've got to have someone who's going to receive the knowledge transfer and be able to read it and understand it. And that's, that's not always the case. 

Speaker 5 01:14:46 
And it's not always your responsibility. I understand the grand scheme of things. It is because it doesn't work. And if it plugs in, it doesn't work. It's on you. 

Nate McBride 01:14:54 
right within your guardrails. Correct. 

Speaker 5 01:14:58 
Yep. That person employed builds it. I got to assume they're building it with understanding and knowledge of their manager and their department and their teammates, or if they don't, they build it and it's adopted by them. 

Speaker 5 01:15:13 
That should be part of the job turnover. Just like if someone built a SharePoint or a folder structure or managed a shared mailbox in a certain way, right? Just because it's a tool you offer. Doesn't mean you're on the hook to manage it long -term. 

Speaker 5 01:15:29 
Oh, the gap. 

Bill Bartlett 01:15:32 
I think that one quick thing here, I think that the biggest gap sometimes is that the person who's being hired next has no digital skills, has no citizen developer skills. 

Nate McBride 01:15:46 
What a terrible... 

Bill Bartlett 01:15:47 
Terrible situation when that happens and that and they have no idea that the person that they need to hire needs to know How this previous person? Was was building these great tools, right? And they they have no idea what to what to put in the in the job description for the next role And the next person comes in and they go Oh, I use this other tool or I don't even know what this is Throw it away and spend a hundred thousand dollars, 

Bill Bartlett 01:16:12 
you know and I think just fundamentally like we talked with business technologists a while back and Every job description should have a section. That's That just is you know, more modern technology skills and It should just be part of every job 

Nate McBride 01:16:31 
reduce your hiring pool by 80%. What's that name? Sorry. I'm a set. You'd reduce your hiring pool by 80%. If you put in a disclaimer that you must know how to do. Like, I mean, I do this wonderful exercise once a year. 

Nate McBride 01:16:49 
It's part of a funny quiz, little quiz show, but I blank out all the buttons on the Microsoft word ribbons. Except for like the three people. No. I asked them to name any other button on any ribbon. A hundred percent F. 

Nate McBride 01:17:09 
Right. So how could people, how could you make a disclaimer? And I'm just curious. I'm, I'm not, I'm a, I'm for the idea, but how would you make a disclaimer? This new technical acumen that we would so benefit from. 

Bill Bartlett 01:17:25 
I think it's just when even if it's not in the job description when you're interviewing people to ask about the technology background. 

Nate McBride 01:17:32 
We all do, but are you empowering your staff to know the questions to ask, to properly vet a new employee? You're hiring a new vice president of such and such. Are you giving the... 

Bill Bartlett 01:17:45 
Ben, hopefully not citizen developers. I think if you've got a 

Nate McBride 01:17:50 
day and age, man. 

Speaker 5 01:17:52 
Or, I mean, they're also, it doesn't have to be a one -for -one replacement, right? Just because employee A leaves doesn't mean employee A needs to pick it up. Don't hope anymore. This, there also could be employee B who's been working alongside that person for the, right, to be able to, it's not a transfer. 

Speaker 5 01:18:11 
This is how we're doing this. This is, you know, maybe you have to work with them and rebuild it, right? Cause it's all tied to their zaps, their username, and you can't, whatever it comes down to, right? 

Speaker 5 01:18:20 
Their approvals, but it should be part of the onboarding, offboarding, right? I mean, I guess the only time it wouldn't be that if it was a straight up termination and they said, get out and that's the end of it, right? 

Speaker 5 01:18:34 
Then you're kind of at a loss, but if someone is giving the notice and they have two weeks, there should be an understanding of what that person does. 

Bill Bartlett 01:18:43 
Sometimes, you know, even without that knowledge transfer, it's still working. So they let it run for a year, another year, and no one knows how it works even while it's running. And someone, somebody who doesn't work like a year and a half later. 

Bill Bartlett 01:19:00 
And it's like, why do we still have this? No, then no one can fix it. I've seen that happen at least a half dozen times. Just leave it. We don't know. Don't break it. We don't know how it works. 

Speaker 3 01:19:13 
Ha, ha, ha. 

Bill Bartlett 01:19:14 
And. 

Nate McBride 01:19:14 
an ideal world, we would know what every single employee is creating and putting into production for touching any single thing that's important, right in an ideal world. That's nearly impossible to be ideal, we can get pretty close, totally impossible, nearly impossible. 

Nate McBride 01:19:29 
Like we, we had some turnover recently in our finance department. And as I've come to find out, there was a lot of extra net speed workflows that didn't go through change control, I was unaware of that when an employee left, they all broke. 

Nate McBride 01:19:44 
Okay, so I spent a couple hours with with our net sweet firm and I'm doing like I'm a net sweet admin that's certified and I can do these things. But even I was like, holy hell, look at this workflow. 

Nate McBride 01:19:57 
Why does this exist? It goes back for people. And all this time, they've just been kind of hacking away at it. Behind the scenes, never having to put change control in because really, they didn't change the change. 

Nate McBride 01:20:11 
They didn't change the workflow. They just change the people underneath it. They change, they like, fudge their roles so that the workflow would work. And so 

Bill Bartlett 01:20:23 
And to have the correct structure on even something like ERP, that's, that can be like a quarter of an FTE and IT. Like someone who's just, that's just doing the governance around ERP by itself and doing the change control and making sure that this configuration management, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff to prevent those things from happening. 

Bill Bartlett 01:20:46 
And then it's some people might argue the juice isn't worth the squeeze. What's the risk? You know, no, I'm just saying, hiring two more people in IT to manage ERP. 

Nate McBride 01:20:58 
Robert plant. You're talking about. Well, now because based on your earlier obscure reference to money Python, I'm giving you an obscure reference for our plant. Oh, okay. Gotcha. Listen to the lyrics about lemons on what's up on one, two, and three. 

Nate McBride 01:21:13 
And then you'll get my point. Be fair, she's a big fan of the lemon. And it's it's metaphor. Anyway, so you didn't, you didn't get my metaphor, I guess. Or now you do. Now I do. Okay. So, so, so. 

Bill Bartlett 01:21:29 
I guess I say this answers to all this stuff with like if you put through governance and people at it, and then the question is how far does that go, does it actually solve the problem. Or do you still have these issues, even with all that. 

Nate McBride 01:21:43 
folding and clicks. Take a platform like NetSuite and if you're advanced enough of a company and you have a large enough finance team and you're actually using NetSuite the way it's supposed to be used, the chances are really good that you actually have, you don't have these kinds of workflows. 

Nate McBride 01:21:58 
You've got everything traditionally done properly. Everything's under change control. So that's kind of an exception, right? But that's a, maybe that's not the best example, but there are other examples where if somebody has administrative rights to a thing and that thing has particularly like a workflow engine inside of it, you have to establish or at least have insight into the fact that they might be going to that workflow thing, 

Nate McBride 01:22:28 
making modifications and changes, which when they leave, only they know that no happened. And I don't think we can necessarily know those without either violating some serious employee information procedures. 

Nate McBride 01:22:41 
Or truly ruling the roost. 

Bill Bartlett 01:22:47 
I'm only picking on ERP because, you know, when you're kind of the Sarbanes -Oxley world it's like, that stuff's all on the audit trail. And if you miss that, you can get in trouble. So you need to be able to see, even if there's not a change in control, when changes are made and someone's got to be looking at that, and that's what I meant by whether that's someone in finance or you've got like a systems analyst in IT or that that's just their job is to monitor the financial systems and to help implement and run them. 

Bill Bartlett 01:23:21 
It becomes a big role for someone. And I think a lot of companies our size we're all kind of from smaller companies it's like why do you need someone, you know, to do that. And it's, I think it's that the solution is you need someone as an expert in the system and in the business to know what the business rules are and know what the compliance rules are, and to help the business owners the business users stay within the guardrails but that's, 

Bill Bartlett 01:23:53 
if you're using that system every day for financial transactions, that's a job that's someone really being on top of that and being accountable for it, and it's hard to sometimes hard to get it done, which is why more and more of those applications were sort of making sure business technologists have the abilities but if they hire people learn from the technology background. 

Bill Bartlett 01:24:17 
It's leaves us in kind of this gray area. And I know it's getting better but I've seen that happen in the past. 

Nate McBride 01:24:25 
It's true. I mean, so while it brings into the question for SDLC, again, we're younger companies. We don't necessarily need SDLC, so we don't go into great lengths to enforce SDLC. But let's use Zapier as an example. 

Nate McBride 01:24:43 
So employee A goes into Zapier based on the fact that you've made an acceptable platform under your guidelines. Employee A has gone in and decided that they want to make it so that every single time this thing comes in from over here that it goes over into this folder in SharePoint or Box or whatever. 

Nate McBride 01:24:59 
It made that recipe. Is that recipe fall under SDLC? Should that recipe go through QA and be proven that it works before it's approved? How often should it be retested? It's a small example, but let's now apply that to the creator fabric. 

Nate McBride 01:25:22 
So to both of you. 

Bill Bartlett 01:25:27 
The answer is yeah, I mean, it needs to, yeah, if it's, if it's business data, and then we're going to make decisions on that data, then it needs to go through some sort of software development lifecycle process. 

Bill Bartlett 01:25:39 
And that can be not can be driven by policy as well. But often it's, like you said, in smaller companies, I don't think it gets as much attention. And it may actually, it may be it is a good thing because it will divert people from doing it when they're like, Oh, my gosh, you know, this other crap before I can get this to actually use this thing. 

Bill Bartlett 01:26:03 
Okay, now stop them. 

Nate McBride 01:26:05 
Bill, before you answer, Mike, you said it would trigger SDLC, but let's suppose I'm a user and I'm like, oh man, I don't want to trigger SDLC. I'm going to make it really, really small. What's the line? 

Nate McBride 01:26:21 
What's the line that triggers SDLC? 

Bill Bartlett 01:26:25 
business data, that's source of truth data where people are making sort of a decision on on any crucial data that's where the data classification might come in which we don't we probably don't have um but it's you know I think it's a companies our size is probably a case -by -case basis to understand okay this is this is a pretty major thing and again I don't see the the people who want to work with this crucial data with Zapier I'm not seeing the demand unless unless there's something that we can't do for them that we can't provide that we don't have a system that does already um I'm seeing more of that let me build something in Smartsheet or SharePoint or and that's like I'm just doing a workflow with my three people within the company okay that's not that big of a deal but if we're transforming data and we're making decisions on we're creating some formulas and we're actually going to make decisions we're going to put this in a report that goes up to the street or something like that like okay that definitely needs to be QA'd and that's case -by -case 

Nate McBride 01:27:36 
So when you're in a smart, and I'm, I'm a user in a smart sheet and I go ahead and create an automation company. And when you go ahead and terminate my smart sheet account, it doesn't prompt you to transfer my workflows. 

Nate McBride 01:27:50 
It prompts you to transfer data, my sheets. So you're like, yeah, transfer needs sheets over to me. Yeah. All the workflows break. 

Bill Bartlett 01:28:03 
As the owners stay intact, there are ways around it, but yeah. 

Nate McBride 01:28:06 
Okay. Okay. So they, all right. So maybe bad example, but 

Bill Bartlett 01:28:10 
Yeah, but I know what you're saying, like it just means that as an example, that's fine. So when you when you transfer the data breaks. Absolutely. Yeah, that's. And that's not as still saying 

Nate McBride 01:28:24 
Let's take. 

Speaker 3 01:28:25 
Yeah, and. 

Bill Bartlett 01:28:27 
you could you could make the same debate on Excel. I mean, if probably the biggest risk in some companies is Excel and formulas that no one understands are coming up with answers. I'd rather AI decide them just be some respects because nobody knows. 

Bill Bartlett 01:28:45 
You know, if you want to do something fun someday, open an Excel document in an Excel for Mac that doesn't have the VBA plugins and see how many companies these sheets link out to. People have reused macros 100 times over. 

Bill Bartlett 01:29:01 
I mean, like this is a problem. This is kind of we're talking about in the frame of SAS and Zapier. But this is the same thing with this risk of data integrity. If you don't have some way of validating that it works. 

Bill Bartlett 01:29:17 
And what you're asking is how do we decide when to validate I think it's a case by case basis. And you've got to, if it's financial data, yes. If it's GXP data, yes. If it's clinical data, yes. If it's I want, you know, to send a document from here to there and someone gives a stamp and it's not a digital signature, or it is a, it is a DocuSign. 

Bill Bartlett 01:29:43 
Probably not. We trust the application that it works. But we're transforming data. I think that might be the key point is if we're doing any sort of transforming that that absolutely. 

Nate McBride 01:29:55 
even if it's just raw data or not essential data. 

Bill Bartlett 01:29:59 
leaving the data intact is less risk. If I'm actually putting this stuff together with other data, I think we're running into a little more risk. Do those numbers check out? Is that actually correct? 

Bill Bartlett 01:30:11 
Is it going to the right place? Because sometimes the output of that data can determine who gets to see it. So it's tough. It's a tough call, right? I mean, Zappier is a lower concern because a lot of it is pretty much if this then that type stuff for a lot of the basic use cases. 

Bill Bartlett 01:30:32 
If you've got a hardcore Zappier developer, you probably want to QA that. You want someone in IT that understands it because you're just not going to get your arms around everything else. You're going to need some experience within your shop as to what its capabilities are and what its risks are. 

Bill Bartlett 01:30:52 
And you might be left with some of the bag to hold because of that. It's like any other new tool. If you want to standardize on it, that's the risk we run. We do have to own some of it. You might get the credit for introducing it and that it's enabling the business at a much lower cost. 

Bill Bartlett 01:31:15 
And you might be more agile because of it, but you're going to have to take some of the ownership of it on, I think. And IT will use it. I mean, Jesus, it's so powerful to do so many things. There's no reason not to adopt it for a number of IT related tasks and even some business transformation work that if you need to do that, way lower cost. 

Bill Bartlett 01:31:41 
If you're using a million Zapp's, maybe not. 

Nate McBride 01:31:47 
those add up. Well, even at a basic plan, you have unlimited zaps. It's the number of calls. So I think at a basic plan, you have 700 calls per month. 

Bill Bartlett 01:31:57 
It's all your APIs anyway, right? You're going to have rate limits on Box, on Oracle, on NetSuite, on other tools that are going to stop you from going nuts. Or they're going to charge you more on the API side for pulling that stuff in. 

Bill Bartlett 01:32:20 
But it's an awesome discussion because over time, if this applies to AI, because over time, right now we have these great automation tools. And down the line, we're just going to have assistants that are going to do some of these things. 

Bill Bartlett 01:32:35 
And that might be more difficult because you can't pull the curtain back on a lot of these things. 

Nate McBride 01:32:43 
you definitely use the explainability on the code side. Bill, what do you think about that? 

Speaker 5 01:32:48 
Yeah, I mean, I agree on the flip side of it is you don't lose it when someone leaves, right? If AI builds it, AI's not going anywhere from a termination standpoint, right? So you'd hopefully be able to, you know, it may be even, you get this step of after it's built, maybe they can document it too. 

Speaker 5 01:33:10 
Maybe that's a functionality you can ask it to build and document. You can at least get yourself a build sheet or something, right? That, you know, someone's not going to be able to take screenshots of the Zaps or whatever they've created. 

Speaker 5 01:33:20 
But, uh, 

Bill Bartlett 01:33:23 
You may be able to ask AI just to build you a new Zap. Right. The business requirements and it, maybe Zap will have AI and just does it for you down the line. You know, who knows? 

Speaker 5 01:33:33 
tell you you want to do and where to go. Um, yeah, it may, it may help. Right. But the, but then again, you don't have the underlying, you know, you ask it to do X, Y, and Z, maybe it does ABC, but gets the same result, but you didn't realize where it was going just because it found a better way to do it. 

Speaker 5 01:33:51 
And they don't, now again, you're kind of losing where your data is going. If you can't see the underlying. 

Nate McBride 01:33:57 
So you didn't see my script, did you, Bill? But one of the questions I have is what happens if you encounter, uh, a thing that was built for purpose and you determine, and that person is gone. Right. 

Nate McBride 01:34:15 
They're no longer there. It's part of sort of the cannon of your company, but it's been working, but you have no idea how it's built, but it turns out it's got more than one use. It's got other uses now. 

Nate McBride 01:34:24 
It turns out it can be reused for other purposes that weren't part of the original intent. Do you A double down and keep going with it or B build something new that you understand. 

Bill Bartlett 01:34:43 
If you understand it, then you might want to keep it right. 

Speaker 5 01:34:46 
I mean, don't reinvent the wheel, right? I'd rather spend... 

Nate McBride 01:34:49 
But 

Speaker 5 01:34:51 
in five hours rebuilding it. 

Nate McBride 01:34:55 
point. Okay, right. In concept, though, if you don't understand how it actually works, you just know that it works and you can apply it in this other method. 

Speaker 5 01:35:04 
Well, if I don't know how it works, can I stop it? 

Bill Bartlett 01:35:08 
Well, yeah, great, great point as a business, right? 

Speaker 5 01:35:12 
Can I, can I log in, you know, I'll use an example that, like I said, we had that one AI thing being built, I had to get the name, I had to find it. It was one of two things where the user had to log into the website and un -revoke their credentials, or I had to do it from the backend, right? 

Speaker 5 01:35:28 
The fact that I had the name and the make and the model and all that stuff, I figured it out. But if I didn't, or it wasn't very clear just by the app name, what the profile was running in Windows, it would have taken me forever to find it. 

Speaker 5 01:35:41 
So if I don't know how data is getting from A to B, except, you know, Tommy built it five years ago before he left, it didn't, it, it's going to take me a while to figure it out, right? I'm going to dig into logs and interactions. 

Speaker 5 01:35:59 
And at that point, now I have the information for it. Most of the time you need to log into the system and disable it, right? Or block it at a very high level. But to block it at a high level, you're not breaking anything else that potentially could be being used. 

Bill Bartlett 01:36:14 
And what if it's crucial, what if it's something they need to keep running? 

Speaker 3 01:36:18 
Right. 

Bill Bartlett 01:36:19 
Now, how do you you got to have to have the resources to stop it and keep the business running? 

Speaker 5 01:36:24 
Yeah, you stop it on Friday night, stop it on Friday night and hope it's running by Monday morning, right? 

Bill Bartlett 01:36:31 
Yeah, I mean, that's what I mean. That's why I think some of these things keep running is because they they can't stop them because they're crucial to getting some something done within the organization and 

Nate McBride 01:36:44 
And they tried to unplug Whopper and Whopper was like, no, you can't fucking unplug me. I've already built in a foolproof. I can't be unplugged. So we had to beat Whopper with a tic -tac -toe game. So what happens when your company is overrun by Whopper. 

Nate McBride 01:37:04 
And you have to beat it with tic -tac -toe. Are you that good tic -tac -toe? I mean, as long as I can go the middle of it. 

Speaker 5 01:37:11 
time I'm pretty good. All right, so I get middle move. 

Bill Bartlett 01:37:15 
I get nervous and lose. 

Speaker 5 01:37:17 
I think if you can figure out, I mean, you have to a figure out how it's working to stop it. And if you can figure out how it's working, you should be able to figure out how it works. Right. Well, you should be able to back into it. 

Nate McBride 01:37:32 
That's some universal shit right there 

Speaker 5 01:37:34 
That's the way I look at it, right? If I can figure out how to stop it, I should be able to figure out the steps it's taking. I should be able to get into how it's doing what it's doing. 

Nate McBride 01:37:44 
I think you just basically proclaim the edict of the moment right before the robots finally take over. What you just said will be echoed 30 years from now at the moment we all die. Um, I get what you're saying. 

Nate McBride 01:38:03 
No, it's like the thing that doesn't keep me up at night. Like if an employee leaves, like even the one that left and screwed up our network environment for a bit, um, I, I respect the effort to improve. 

Nate McBride 01:38:17 
I respect the effort to create workflow to, to make the business better. Right. I'm not overlooking that key part. And there's almost no way to have documented what happened. I mean, someone could have really taken a thousand screenshots, written it all down, and then I would have read that document and been like, I don't understand what the hell that you just wrote. 

Nate McBride 01:38:35 
And what does this all mean? I mean, it could probably parse after several hours or days, but it was easier just to see it break and then replace it. But at the same time, we're all going to have that moment when we're entrusting our employees to use, uh, tools that are commonly available to make their lives better or the company better. 

Nate McBride 01:38:55 
And those things will break. And we have to determine at that moment in time, what's our responsibility towards fixing that thing. Am I, am I on the hook to fix it because I enabled it? Am I on the hook to fix it because I feel it's the best thing for the company? 

Nate McBride 01:39:14 
Uh, am I on the hook to fix it? Because if I don't have a complete ITS, like, or some combination of all those things. 

Speaker 5 01:39:24 
on what breaks, right? I think that's what it comes down to is what is being right. If it comes down to where someone builds something that moved the data from one folder to another to make everyone's Monday morning way better and it breaks, you know what, suck it up. 

Speaker 5 01:39:38 
You're back to moving your file yourself on Monday morning. That's the way life goes. NetSuite, you know, you need the workflows for approvals. They built something to make it work. It didn't work, all right. 

Speaker 5 01:39:47 
We're going to shut it down. We're going to fix it and build it back right, right. And then there are times where we built this. It's not built in the system. It's turned into a critical point for the company, all right. 

Speaker 5 01:39:59 
We're going to keep it running or rebuild it, right. I think even if it's from scratch or from a different environment, I think you have to take a lot of these on case by case, right. Some things are convenience. 

Speaker 5 01:40:09 
Some things are built into an application and some things are mandatory now, right. Then it'll grow to be mandatory. 

Bill Bartlett 01:40:16 
I think if you have standards in place, if there's like some communicated standard, you're less on the hook. I mean, you're on the hook to try and help. You should be making a best effort. But if you can't fix it, I don't think you're as in, on the hot seat as if you don't have any, you didn't have any answer and you just, it was the wild, wild West and we didn't do anything to try and help people with this in the past. 

Bill Bartlett 01:40:42 
I think Excel, I think Excel is an example. Like when someone's macro breaks, they don't come to Bill, Mike and Nate and go, what the hell are you guys doing? Like Excel is a standard. It's well understood. 

Bill Bartlett 01:40:55 
The business owns the process and the data. Great example. 

Nate McBride 01:40:59 
though, Mike. Why wouldn't they come to IT if Excel broke, if a macro broke? 

Bill Bartlett 01:41:07 
because the business owns that process. Well, why? 

Nate McBride 01:41:10 
Why? Why? Why? And I totally agree. That's exactly what happens. Why hasn't been decided this? 

Bill Bartlett 01:41:19 
because it's a static formula. I think that carries from application to application and it can be recreated. It's painful, but it can be recreated. And Excel is a standard. No one's gonna say, well, you know, Timmy went off on this other expedition on Zapier and built this huge thing and IT allowed it. 

Bill Bartlett 01:41:44 
And they never really said anything because there's no standard for any of this stuff. And IT never said anything about it and said they were concerned or didn't either help them or enable them or support them as building a standard. 

Bill Bartlett 01:41:57 
I think that's why SharePoint sometimes gets under the cover too is because it's just a lot of standardized application. Could be built better, but IT usually has a model where it's like you have a team site, you have an application and you have a website, you can have a service catalog around that. 

Bill Bartlett 01:42:15 
And you've tried your best to have some semblance of governance and you're not gonna get in trouble. But I think when you talk about the world of all this automation and these tools where it's easy just to sign up with your Gmail account, you know, it's a different world and IT should be on top of making sure there's awareness around those things. 

Bill Bartlett 01:42:34 
So it's almost like you, damn if you're doing, damn if you don't, but the same way, if you look at the reverse lens as if you're enabling them through the tool as a standard, yeah, you're on the hook to help them when someone leaves or to fix it. 

Bill Bartlett 01:42:48 
But that's a value proposition you're playing because you're able to enable the organization with better automation and make them go faster and do things better and safer. But you've got to be part of the game. 

Bill Bartlett 01:43:01 
It's, I don't think it's kind of, I hear you, getting completely out of it. But I use some of them because I've seen that 100 ,000 times, let's just say, where it's like, oh my God, it doesn't work anymore. 

Bill Bartlett 01:43:14 
And I don't know why, just copy from another company. We'll find another one. 

Speaker 5 01:43:19 
Well, go ahead, Bill. I also think it's changed over the years from IT being, and I don't know if it's as the business has caught up with technology of IT being the end all be all technology experts in the company, right? 

Speaker 5 01:43:33 
What do you mean you don't know that? I think it's a better feeling of, especially again, small in the smaller groups that we may not have expertise. We definitely don't have expertise in everything, right? 

Speaker 5 01:43:45 
We're brought in for specific functions to lead, to grow the team, to have that help desk person. Maybe it's an apps person, right? But when it gets to it, if you have two or three people and marketing comes and says, I need you to build me a website, and the answer might be, we don't really have that expertise in house, right? 

Speaker 5 01:44:04 
I can go get it for you. It's going to cost me a head or a different body or whatever it's going to be, or I can get a vendor to build it for us. It's now acceptable. So I think when you get to these, hey, our LMS doesn't work, right? 

Speaker 5 01:44:18 
Can you get to the webpage? Yeah, but when I click the button, it doesn't work. The answer is now you go to the HR trainer, right? Or you go to the quality, right? There's the people who are the expertise, the experts in these applications, and it's not so much just an IT issue anymore, right? 

Speaker 5 01:44:32 
I think ours is the pathway to a majority of them. Like I said right now, someone comes to me with an Excel problem. If it's not added in A1 plus B1 equals C1, the answer's got to go, let's go talk to someone in finance. 

Speaker 5 01:44:46 
That's usually my answer. I know I have a good finance person. You know, you go talk to the Sankara, go talk to Jonah, wherever it is, and they'll be able to help you all with this fancy, even if they're not in finance, this fancy Excel thing you're trying to do, because I can't do that, right? 

Speaker 5 01:45:01 
All right. All right. 

Bill Bartlett 01:45:02 
The ownership was with finance right in that scenario, they, they own those numbers being right or wrong, not it. Correct. 

Nate McBride 01:45:11 
I get what you're saying, but we're sort of doubling back on ourselves now. I mean, guardrails are guardrails, right, guys? So we have, we put them in. How precise are we going to be in our guardrails? 

Nate McBride 01:45:24 
Like, in terms of development, there is two sides to that coin. Like, I'm going to enable all of you people to go ahead and create things within these applications. Okay, great. Yeah. So all of myself of being able to support all of the things you create, I'm only going to be able to support these 10 things within that scope that you're going to create. 

Nate McBride 01:45:45 
Like, here's the guardrails, but I can only support a portion of the guardrails. I mean, I think we can say that, right? Yeah. Great. Well, I mean, do you need to tighten your guardrails, or do you leave the guardrails really exposed, because you feel that that other 90% of things you can't resolve. 

Speaker 3 01:46:00 
Thank you. 

Nate McBride 01:46:01 
I mean, I think there's any use case. 

Speaker 5 01:46:03 
I mean, we go out and we use ERP, for example, right? We go out and get an ERP system, finance owns it, finance runs it, they do all this stuff in there. We have guardrails on the data, we have guardrails on the application, we have all that stuff on there. 

Speaker 5 01:46:18 
But we can't support, I mean, I know I can't support ERP from beginning to end on how it works. I can tell you right now, it might take me a week to finish. 

Nate McBride 01:46:26 
talking about that. We're talking about the citizen developer element, and they want to have people look into it directly. 

Speaker 5 01:46:34 
How's it any different of me putting guardrails around an enterprise application that I can't support A to Z and putting in a middleware, open ended, low code, no code solution that I can't support A to Z. 

Nate McBride 01:46:45 
that's exactly the question like how would you put in guardrails around citizen development so that you could in fact conceivably not only control but respond to questions about it. Like that's the original question we asked and okay it's very difficult to answer and I'll tell you for myself I don't know if there's necessarily an answer but when I go ahead and say to my employees hey you're all free to use A, 

Nate McBride 01:47:15 
B, and C. Now I'm only saying that because I know to a degree a high degree that I can support A, B, and C. I wouldn't power D if I can only support D five percent. I would say listen D is if D is available but I can't if you're talking about D like I freaking I'm out I have no clue. 

Nate McBride 01:47:37 
Yeah that's what I say about maths. 

Speaker 5 01:47:40 
You can have a Mac, just don't call me when it breaks. I can tell you right now, it's exactly what I tell you. You want a Mac? Sure. All I can do is open and close the window. That's all I got. So that's what I said, right? 

Speaker 5 01:47:52 
And I've been doing it for years. And I've had people who've had it and they say my Mac, go to the Mac store because I can't help you. Right, so it's kind of the same thing, right? I can give them this application and I guess it comes down to where if I know A, B, and C, I have enough faith in myself to figure it out, right? 

Speaker 5 01:48:12 
I guess that's where it goes. I know how Zappia works. 

Nate McBride 01:48:15 
If they're going to take you know, really, really well, like, you know, a B and C old, right? Let's say you're the godfather of AB and C. So you're willing to include those in your guardrails, but D you're willing to include. 

Nate McBride 01:48:27 
You just don't have the chops for D. So you'll include it, but you have to have some other disclaimer about it. Use it your own risk. 

Speaker 5 01:48:37 
Don't, don't, don't, don't bother Bill. Aster. 

Bill Bartlett 01:48:41 
don't bother though. I think from a data security perspective, you get you got to either be in a position where that's your standard based application. Let's say take Zapier because we're talking about that a lot. 

Bill Bartlett 01:48:51 
You got to get like, like the real license with real support, be able to call someone on the phone, you to spend the money and and get the platform in place and then only apply it where there's a use case. 

Bill Bartlett 01:49:03 
I wouldn't say send an email to the whole company and say, hey, you can use Zapier now and you can do all these great things with it. Oh, right. I've been along the lines of like, here's someone comes to us with a problem and we can use it as a tool in the tool set. 

Bill Bartlett 01:49:19 
And, you know, I don't expect the word will get out and it goes viral because it's, you know, it's not that sexy, but it's just the ability to really specify the use case and to get an enterprise license. 

Bill Bartlett 01:49:32 
Even though it costs more so you can get on the phone and talk to someone who can see your environment and work with you on it. And that's what they're going to use. Like there's no, then you standardize in that if someone has rocato or they're using, if this than that or some other new thing that's submerged, like, yeah, you can't use that anymore. 

Bill Bartlett 01:49:50 
Yeah. The organization's made an investment in this middleware tool set. This is what we're going to use for this specific thing. It's in the acceptable use policy that it's approved software. And, you know, if you go outside of that, you run the risk of being held accountable for that. 

Bill Bartlett 01:50:07 
And that's a data. We can make data security arguments that those vendors haven't been reviewed. We haven't got a SOC 2 report from them. We don't do any sort of background and review. Yeah. If they go outside of that, they're breaking the rules just like as if they took a picture of their screen and sent it to a competitor. 

Bill Bartlett 01:50:23 
I mean, it's the same, same type of, same type of thing. It's hard for us to control it with technology. It's got to be more of a, I think, a process and cultural thing that we've instilled in people across the organization, not just in IT, but from legal, from an HR, you know, across the group. 

Nate McBride 01:50:44 
Listen, this is something that's been going on for, I mean, if I tried to pick a date when I started thinking about this problem, it would be a long, long time ago. I mean, it's a matter of telling employees, you can't improve things without my approval. 

Nate McBride 01:51:03 
And I always hated saying that, like, oh, no, no, you can't do that because it doesn't fall within guidance. It doesn't fall within our controls. We can't support if you want to go ahead and do X, Y, Z. 

Nate McBride 01:51:13 
I fucking hated that, right? So I stopped doing it. But I also found myself in a lot of trouble by saying, go ahead and solve your own problems and then just call me when you need help. And then people coming up with these cockamamie ideas, which were brilliant for the same time, like, holy shit, like, where the hell did you even come up with this? 

Nate McBride 01:51:35 
I got to learn 10 things to solve it. You put that back. The bank, I am very pro citizen developer at the same time, I have struggled for years trying to find a governance framework that fits, that allows them to do what they need to do, protects corporate data, falls within guidelines of acceptable use, is people proof in terms of their termination or turnover, and so on and so forth, right? 

Nate McBride 01:52:04 
It's like you can't get all the checkmarks. And so it's a delicate balance. And so you've got to think about it. 

Bill Bartlett 01:52:12 
Go ahead and say it's, it's sort of what the enterprise architect role was for so long is just the middleware, having print, having principles, having someone going out and, you know, communicating data principles and what tools can be used and how they can be used and full -time job teaching them about that. 

Bill Bartlett 01:52:31 
How is it a full -time job? It's like, well, when you have developers, but developers in each function, especially in research, you need a centralized sort of governance to help drive that. 

Nate McBride 01:52:47 
Well, what's that? It's a way more than full -time job. I mean, if you really truly want to let your people go ahead and explore the limits of their creativity and innovation within, within technology framework, you need a full -time role. 

Nate McBride 01:53:00 
Like if you really truly want to do it, do it right. You go ahead and find, find somebody to go ahead and run that program. Cause it's a program. There's training elements to it. There's like, 

Bill Bartlett 01:53:11 
It's the Enterprise Architecture Pyramid. You get into a company of 10 ,000 people and they have Enterprise Architecture groups that are not always beloved because that's all they have to do. That's all they do. 

Nate McBride 01:53:24 
Oh, because also not everything that you want to design provides value. I can go ahead and create what I believe is an automation. In fact, it's adding two more steps, right? I don't see it because I'm bypassing. 

Nate McBride 01:53:36 
Like for me, I'm able to like shortcut my way out of those, but you could be screwing other people over in your automation by adding more shit to their day. Um, there are many instances where I see people come up with ideas for like, oh my God, I'm going to go into benchling. 

Nate McBride 01:53:52 
And I wrote this workflow. I'm like, do you realize you just screw these people over here? They have like four more, four more forms. They have to fill out before they can enter an entry. So, you know, what works for one, the whole thing. 

Nate McBride 01:54:06 
So I'll, I'll, by the way, this has been awesome, but I, I do recognize that we're closing coming on the two hour mark. I want to just sort of ask you both a question and we could probably go on for quite a while because I think we're just getting into it. 

Nate McBride 01:54:21 
But, um, it's 2024 it's budget season. Um, we are using Zapier and immense effect at my company. We have, I think about 21 recipes that are in production in Zapier that are, that are all what I would consider to be key workflows. 

Nate McBride 01:54:44 
We have a number of automations running out of air table that are considered to be key workflows. We have a number of automations running out of Slack that are key workflows. And we're kind of all in on what I would consider to be the things that make us work as key workflows and they're coming out of three different platforms, right? 

Nate McBride 01:55:04 
Yeah, yeah. Not to mention all the ones that are sort of one tier down in the other SAS platforms. So I think about 2025, 26, like where we're going and that we haven't even talked about gen AI and I don't think it's necessarily a germane point to this, but we have gen AI coming and people being able to go ahead and ask it like, Hey, write me a PowerShell script that will go ahead and blah, blah, 

Nate McBride 01:55:26 
blah. Um, it's all kind of coming right now. Right. So when you think about your respective companies and think about your answer here, but with your respective companies in the next year or two years, like, what are you thinking about in terms of these people? 

Nate McBride 01:55:42 
Are you going to have changes? Are you going to stay status quo? Are you going to go ahead and think of sort of more broadly? Is it going to bubble its way up to a strategic plan element? How are you thinking about gen AI or no, the citizen developer, like what you might do for internal non -IT development in your companies in the next two years. 

Nate McBride 01:56:04 
If anything. 

Bill Bartlett 01:56:08 
It's just for me, it's not high up on the list right now for me, but I think I'm more so wrestling with it than IT to figure out making sure we're not building because we are so small that we're not building too much in the event that we've 

Nate McBride 01:56:28 
What does that mean, though? It's too much. 

Bill Bartlett 01:56:31 
Well, I think there are often tools that you already have that do some of these things already. And you don't need to build a workflow or something on those lines. You just need to use the tools. So we sometimes look and say, do we need to build something? 

Bill Bartlett 01:56:47 
Do we need to build an automation right now for x or y? Because the technical debt will add up over time. And it's just, how much of that do you want to do right now? And what happens if something happens to Zap here? 

Bill Bartlett 01:57:00 
Or Airtable or any of these other companies, and they have some sort of issue just like any other company, we're just not staffed up to do it yet. So start with your building blocks. You mentioned Slack, Airtable, and Zapier right now. 

Bill Bartlett 01:57:16 
Slack, Airtable, Box. I don't want to go too much rather than that. I don't have anything more than that unless I need to. And if we use Zapier to staple some things together, it's a good place to start. 

Bill Bartlett 01:57:33 
But let's keep it with an IT for now. Not introduce it outside the groups at this point, unless there's a real driving business need. And 100% of the requirements both Kate and I are getting don't have required any citizen development at all. 

Bill Bartlett 01:57:50 
So it's lower on the horizon. As we grow, it'll get more important. You certainly want to enable people to do some great things. But right now, it's lower on the list. Bill? 

Speaker 5 01:58:05 
Uh, let's do the same. 

Nate McBride 01:58:06 
I mean, this is on your. 

Speaker 5 01:58:08 
Right. So I'm going to say along the same lines as that. And I think the biggest part about it is, I don't really think it even comes down to available applications or available pain points or need. It's individuals. 

Speaker 5 01:58:22 
Right. So I have one in my company who may do something like this. I have everyone else. There's no one else that's going to do it. Right. I know them all. You know, there's one person who has the ability to build something that is great in pain in my ass at the same time. 

Speaker 3 01:58:42 
Thank you. 

Speaker 5 01:58:43 
I would say it's probably going to be dealt with on an as needed basis, right? If our next hiring kick is, you know, 20 kids are out of school who just want to go out and build, they've been do all of this, we'll have to deal with it sooner than later, but if we stay on our current type of employee, but type of employee that we're hiring and not just here, other places too, even my last company, there's only one or two out of everyone out of the 120 that have the desire to make things new, 

Speaker 5 01:59:11 
everyone else just wants to live in what they have, no new apps. So I think it's going to be more as, take it as it comes, right? If it is a small number, if we are talking two or three people, it's really easy to manage, right? 

Speaker 5 01:59:24 
It's easy enough to build a, you know, a developer team, group meeting, lunch, whatever you want to call it, and sit down and discuss it as a team together, right? The three or four of us and work on building it and documentation and all of that, it's when it becomes more prolific that's going to be a problem, right? 

Speaker 5 01:59:44 
But I can't see it happening the next year or two. 

Bill Bartlett 01:59:49 
It's great to build the skill set within IT, like to do it, to build these automations and those types of things in IT within your needs. I think that's huge because it's inevitable. You will have people that are going to come in the organization that have used tools like this and you want to be at that. 

Bill Bartlett 02:00:08 
Certainly have a background on what they're capable, the tools are capable of. I think it gives IT a lot of character. It's happier that it'll come in with something else. 

Nate McBride 02:00:20 
Yeah, when I, when somebody from the business comes forward and says, I'm, I listen to IT, I'm so sorry, I built something in Zapier and you have someone in IT that's like, okay, cool, let me help you. 

Nate McBride 02:00:31 
That gives IT an immediate sort of bump in the cred scale for shit, this person knows like, like VB or how to work in Zapier. And I was like, Oh, I see a problem right here. Let me go ahead and fix that for you. 

Nate McBride 02:00:45 
And by the way, this is kind of an important thing. So let's get this under SDLC for you. Let's get some controls around this. And that person's like, Oh, I didn't even know like, okay, cool. 

Speaker 5 02:00:56 
And I think you can also, you know, a lot of it comes down to messaging, right? You know, you go through it. Hey, this is really cool. We should document this and get a capture of this because this, you know, and then you make them feel good. 

Speaker 5 02:01:07 
Right? They're like, Oh, this is great. I actually did something. You know what I mean? You can kind of sell it as great job. Let's track this. Don't make, you know, if you're going to do this, other people are going to want to use it. 

Speaker 5 02:01:16 
Let's make sure we're change controlling. This is an IT system now I did it like, because I think a lot of them have that, you know, I'm not IT, but right. I think it's a lot of the information I get a lot in the wording is you can kind of bring them into that IT world and IT partner, you know, technically they're not, you'll get more from them in the long run. 

Nate McBride 02:01:37 
You're hitting on the gamification thing, Bill, and I like that because that's like, hey, listen, oh, wow, this is so great. This thing you built. I want it. Like, I want to tell people about this. Can I do that? 

Nate McBride 02:01:49 
And that gives you... Yeah, you're my zappier guy going forward. 

Speaker 5 02:01:53 
awesome. Right. This is a cool app. You're my guy going, you know, I mean, now they're like, Oh, really? I'm like, so I'm the guy now. Right. And then you can send other people the guy, let him do it all. 

Speaker 5 02:02:01 
And they're, they're happy with it. Yeah. 

Nate McBride 02:02:05 
Any, um, final thoughts on our favorite people, the little hackers that should have been an IT and ended up in clinical or some other terrible rule. 

Bill Bartlett 02:02:23 
and embrace them as much as you can. 

Nate McBride 02:02:26 
Big hugs. 

Speaker 3 02:02:28 
Yeah. 

Bill Bartlett 02:02:29 
Yeah, get close and share ideas. 

Nate McBride 02:02:34 
Yeah, there's a, if you're, if you're not an IT and you're watching this episode, um, you should go to Reddit or GitHub and just completely just screw your IT department over by learning, learning all the things you can do within a lockdown framework. 

Nate McBride 02:02:53 
It's a lot and you can improve your life a lot. Um, you didn't hear that from me, of course. Uh, I'm just simply saying a few words out loud. Bill, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. 

Nate McBride 02:03:07 
It was a good time. Um, will you come back for the episode where we get rid of your job? 

Speaker 3 02:03:14 
Yeah! 

Nate McBride 02:03:15 
Okay. 

Bill Bartlett 02:03:17 
Bill, it was great to talk to you, man. 

Speaker 5 02:03:19 
Yeah, you too. It's been a while since I've seen you. 

Nate McBride 02:03:21 
Definitely. So if you if you enjoyed this episode, of course you did. Because why the hell else would you have gotten this far in it? Give us all the stars on the things. Tell your friends about it. That it's not just two creepy, creepy old dudes is three. 

Nate McBride 02:03:37 
And we have a whole bunch of merchandise on our store you can get from the COIT .us and bias beers. I'm sure Bill could use one after this episode. Don't be a dick. I especially don't be a dick people in it. 

Nate McBride 02:03:53 
We work really hard to make sure that your email flows into our inbox as well as yours. So we can read it all. Don't be a dick to people on the road. There's no reason for you to sprint to work in the morning. 

Nate McBride 02:04:07 
Enjoy the sunrise, grab a coffee, you're gonna get there. And if your boss has got a problem with it, fuck him. Just take it easy. Now getting home is different story, but you should also be safe. Because you know what, if you kill a dog or a person, that would be bad and probably ruin your day. 

Nate McBride 02:04:24 
So don't do it. Get your pet spayed or neutered. Be nice to animals. Be nice to old people. And Billy went anything 

Speaker 5 02:04:34 
Nah, you covered it all, you got all, everything, yeah, bye -bye. Gotta go, see all the pieces. You cut them all. 

Nate McBride 02:04:39 
Okay, we will be back next week with an episode on either eliminating the head of IT role or something else. 

Bill Bartlett 02:04:50 
You never know when that's coming, right? You never know. 

Nate McBride 02:04:53 
I'm just gonna drop it like Like this maybe bill be back maybe he won't we don't know it's a mystery but you gotta tune in to find out 

Bill Bartlett 02:05:04 
It's great to have you on board tonight. Thank you. 

Speaker 5 02:05:08 
Well, that's great to be here. 

Nate McBride 02:05:08 
All right, I'm I'm stopping recording now and it's in the timer, but we can stay on if you want so 

Bill Bartlett 02:05:18 
officially stopping the recording. Yes. 

Nate McBride 02:05:23 
Thanks guys, that was awesome. 

Speaker 7 02:05:27 
Give us five stars because we are awesome Adopt and oppose some we need Frozen Twinkies and Johnny Walker Gold Twinkies, the calculus of IT